Paul Wright, Head of EMEA at Uber Advertising, joins Justin Cooke, Chairman of Path7, for a deep dive into the fast-growing world of Uber Ads.
In this episode, Paul shares how Uber Advertising scaled from a simple sponsored listings model to a billion-dollar business in just a few years, spanning over 30 global markets. From the power of “moment marketing” to building a culture of innovation, Paul reflects on lessons learned across his career—from Sky and Apple to startups and Amazon—and how Uber’s unique data and rider moments are reshaping brand engagement across rides and Eats.
If you’re curious about the future of contextual advertising, cultural moments, and what it takes to scale new ad products inside a global tech company, this one’s for you.
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The Business of Marketing podcast is brought to you by Path7 in partnership with Advertising Week. Path7 helps brands scale partner marketing with seamless content distribution, real-time lead data, and consistent brand experiences. Powered by partners, built for performance. So I’m absolutely delighted to welcome to this edition of the Business of Marketing podcast, Paul Wright from Uber. Welcome, Paul. Nice to be here. Thank you for having me. Really excited about this conversation. To kick things off, tell us a little bit about your role at Uber and then tell us a little bit about, you know, specifically kind of what that really means from an Uber perspective. It’s a really interesting position. Yeah, so my role here is to run the international teams in Uber, which is EMEA and APAC. But let me roll back in terms of the story of Uber advertising, because I think that’s where it goes. So we originally started back in 2020 with a very straightforward sponsor listings business, which we built around our Eats platform for our restaurant partners. And then we launched Uber advertising in 2022. That was to accelerate our move into advertising and also launch into advertising within our rides app as much as what we have developed in our Eats app. And that team, uh, I joined that team, uh, December, 2022 to originally set up the UK, which we did and then expanded into this wider regions. And essentially what we do is monetize the app with advertising from, as we said, sponsored listings elements that sit within Uber Eats so that people can see what their closest stores are and all that type of stuff. It’s always got to be ideally beneficial to the consumer as much as it’s beneficial to our restaurant partners. It’s advertising for CPGs or FMCGs, depending on which side of the pond you come from. in terms of how they engage with people in getting their products in basket, either through convenience partners or through restaurant partners, or indeed just want to do brand activations. And then we also have a focus around the brand activation side, which is what we do within the Uber Rides app, which is basically taking placing ads within the Uber app experience, but, you know, adding advertisers within that. So sort of three core propositions. We also have a different proposition in the US called Journey TV, which is basically back of screens on the back of car, back of headrests, which the rider, when they get into the car, can see their map. And then that becomes an engaging screen and there’s advertising opportunities in that as well. But that’s a broad outline of what we do. And give me a sense of the size and scale of the operation. Obviously, I know that there are certain numbers that you may not be able to share with us, but please try and share whatever you can. So we announced in July this year at our last earnings call that the ads business had reached a billion dollar run rate. which is great. And as it, I mean, we set that out as a target for ourselves to achieve by the end of 24, we actually achieved it slightly quicker than we thought, which is good. And obviously it’s a key part of Uber’s business now at that sort of level. You know, it was one of the sort of bets that we were making and we’ve made it and it’s working very well because of all the different ecosystem, I guess we have. We have teams. I think we’re operational in over 30 markets now as Uber ads in that short space of time since we launched. In terms of where we’ve got teams and operations and stuff. And then we have, as you’d expect, traditional sales people in those areas. We have programmatic solutions. We have all the things you’d expect from a fast growth business like this. Everything from performance specialists to programmatic specialists to display specialists. And we continue to grow. So we launched Spain at the beginning of this year. That’s one of the markets we haven’t done until recently. And then we’ve also expanded into other markets across EMEA and APAC as well. So constant growth, but one that’s seemingly capturing sort of demand from advertisers in ways that they haven’t perhaps thought about before. But I think that’s a good thing. And we’re going to dig into that a little bit more, I think, as this conversation progresses. But before we do that, the path of a marketeer is very rarely linear. So give me a sense of kind of the journey that you’ve been on and what have you learned and loved along the way? Well, I’m lucky because my journey has been quite long and fun. I think I’ll start, I think I’ll be made redundant three times. So that’s pretty good going. I think that’s above the national average. But on that, I think there’s an element of risk in it that I took. I mean, I joined Sky when it first launched, which was a crazy, crazy place to work at. And this was in the late 80s, early 90s. In the ad sales team, as it was then, Sky was Sky Channel. It was a pan-European cable channel, essentially, churning out to like 300,000 homes, Spider-Man repeats, and the World Federation of Wrestling. It was WWF then, it’s now WWE, but it was still, it was a key thing. And then obviously that evolved in very rapidly into pay TV and became the pay TV sort of giant that happened in the late 90s. Um, fascinating place to work very good on learning. Uh, you could, you could grasp lots of different things in that place because it went from, you know, free TV to pay TV, to ads, to sponsor programs, which I got involved with. I helped run the sponsored sponsorship team when it first launched. So there’s a whole load of things I got to learn from that. I’m very, I guess quite an entrepreneurial business in many ways, not, you know, not as it got a lot bigger, but it was pretty entrepreneurial. It had to be because it was very competitive and, you know, it was losing a lot of money. So that was fun. Then I did, then I worked for a startup that raised a hundred million dollars and went bust in two years, which luckily it wasn’t my money, but that was the, that was the flavor of the events back in the late, you know, the boom time, that similar boom time we’re in with AI now to some degree. Money was being thrown at bets, just hoping that one or two of them was going to turn up. We did sports content advertising and to the latter stage, we started playing with online gambling, but that didn’t work out for us and the business went bust. Then I set up a startup with three colleagues of mine and that was good. That went to $7 million turnover in four years, which we sold to Sky. Then I did some other jobs. I did another startup with a colleague which helped sell that one as well. So I think the mid 2000s were very much startup-y time for me. Did a lot of that stuff. Then ultimately we did some stuff at Bauer and they ended up at Omnicom as one of their first digital officers or chief digital officers because they wanted someone with grey hair. to help them navigate what was becoming a much more complex business then for digital marketing, because we’ve gone out of the basics and into social platforms and Facebook was just about to sort of really fly at that stage. They’ve started building their direct platforms and stuff. So that was all fun, did all that. And then I went to Apple to work on Apple’s first ad business, which was called iAd, which is some similarity to what we do at Uber actually now. It was in-app advertising using key data points. That was fun. That business got closed down after four years in 2016 because they were resetting it for Apple search ads, which is what you now see, and it’s a good business for them. Then I did a startup, and then I went to Seismic, which was the ad serving stroke DSP ad tech business to run Europe for them. And then was part of the management team that sold it out of chapter 11 into Amazon, went to Amazon for a few years, um, had fun there mostly in the pandemic and then, um, securitously ended up at Uber in 2022. So that’s the sort of story. Uh, what have I learned? Um, I think probably I have taken quite a few risks. Also, various things thrown at me, which is fun. I’ve learned a lot from those things and I’ve enjoyed it. Met loads of great people along the way, of course. And I still, I guess, still have an enthusiasm for it, despite all of those things. You know, this industry is fun. There’s always a lot of smart people in it. And while sometimes we feel like we’re doing the same conversation all the time, you know, whether it’s about cookies or something else, you know, the cookie one just seems to be, you know, it’s like whack-a-mole that keeps coming back. um it is good that i think there’s enough there’s so much innovation still around and there’s you know a hunger to to try and work out what the next big thing is sometimes we jump too much to the next big thing but that’s always a good thing but um yeah i’ve had a lot of fun um i wouldn’t swap it for the world so it’s been good It’s phenomenal just listening to that. You know, you’ve worked with some of the biggest companies in the world. You’ve done startup. You’ve pretty much, you know, DSPs. You’ve kind of, you know, in terms of perspectives, pretty unique, I suppose, in a sense, in terms of that 360 kind of, kind of view that it gives you. And just going back to the point you were sort of talking about there around Uber, I think, I suppose, in a sense, and 2022, there you come in. What was it that most excited you about Uber and where it was going to kind of take its ad kind of proposition? And what is it that makes it truly unique? I think there’s two things about it. One is obviously the data we have is very useful. It’s not really data a lot of other people have. I think that was one part. Can you give me an example of that? Yeah, give me an example. If you’re going to an airport or you’re going to a concert venue, That gives us a data point that suggests what you’re going to go. I mean, if you’re going to Wembley Stadium and Taylor Swift is playing at Wembley Stadium that night, we sort of know you’re a Taylor Swift fan. We don’t need any other data point than that, do we? Because unless you’re going there for some other reason. So we’ve got pretty accurate data, but we can do it very simply. We don’t need to have lots of data on users. We just need to have a few data points. And I think that’s quite powerful in this world of arguably everyone’s got so excited about data, but they’ve probably almost lost their way because everyone’s just trying to acquire lots of data. But actually, lots of data doesn’t mean a lot necessarily. You know, simple data that can tell you, oh, this person’s going to a concert or this person’s doing this or this person is a tourist in the UK or a tourist in the US. is very, very important and very relatively easy for us to achieve. So I think simplicity of the data plus the simplicity. And the other thing I think which is really important is this thing about capturing people in a moment. The problem with a lot of digital marketing is you tend to go, let’s splurge people and hope that we capture them when they might be interested in purchasing my product. And you’ll use loads of data points to hope you hone that down. The reality with us is we know, I mean, you know, 60% of people who go into Uber Eats don’t know what they’re going to eat. So therefore there is, you know, it’s like walking into a mall of restaurants. You can then encourage people to go to your restaurant rather than someone else’s in that environment. But the decision has been made. The intent is there. It doesn’t matter what’s happened on social media before that or whatever else happens to be. It’s like, how do you guide people in that sort of thing and the same is true in the rides thing as well in the sense of knowing that moment what is that moment a lot of moments the cultural moments or their social moments like you’re going to see your friends or you’re going to a restaurant with your family those types of things i think are quite powerful and then if you do a simple message which we do with all of our our products is that there’s no we don’t interrupt the user experience in an irritating way. There isn’t a desire for that within the business. We don’t want to do that. We want ads to fit nicely within our user experience generally. Then it becomes easy, I guess. I mean, we’re not a, you know, we’re not a publisher. We don’t have a lot of clutter, ad clutter everywhere. So capture people in the moment with less ad clutter and great data is seemingly was, was pretty attractive. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a challenge with it as well. There’s always challenges with it, but that was, that was the appeal. Phenomenal. This moment marketing thing I think is really fascinating. And particularly when you think about, as you said, the different types of moments that we all have in our lives, right? You know, sometimes we’re in business moment mode and how that kind of influences our sort of intent and all the kind of products and services that we’re interested in at that moment in time. And I love the kind of link also between your experience at Apple when you were talking about sort of iAds and the data that Apple have versus the data that Amazon have and then the data that sort of Uber has. It’s a kind of fascinating thread. Looking broader, you talk a lot about data then. I think that’s sort of really keen to kind of unpack that a bit more if you like, but like for you, What are your fundamental concepts and approaches to marketing? And how do you navigate the challenge of the noise out there in today’s landscape? Well, when we talk to advertisers who advertise with us, I think… I think our approach is very much, look, simplify things and you can reach your audiences. And I think that’s something we can do because of the nature of what we do. But I do think generally, as I said earlier, I think this complexity thing is, I don’t know, it creates a lot of things. I think there’s a lot of, obviously, there’s a lot of debate going on about how can you build brands without without using reach as a proposition. Because obviously a lot of what we see in media now, particularly digital media increasingly, is going to four or five key partners, whether it’s Meta, TikTok, Google, you know, a few others, Snap and whatever. So there’s a sort of aggregation around big reach players. And I think that’s fine. but there’s a debate about whether that’s what that works because it goes back to context broad point, you know, just because you get, you can get loads of eyeballs on meta doesn’t matter because of all those people are actually in the right moment at that time. Um, so I think we just, I just talk a lot about, I think simplicity, I think with all book of marketing simplicity works well, uh, good contextual messaging, right place, right time, right people, essentially. I mean, it’s always, always been that. And I think a lot of, My career, I’ve done a lot of things about right time, even when I was working in sport. One of the things about sport was there is that moment where someone is watching a game or following it online and they’re really engaged. And that real engagement is a very powerful thing from a brand perspective. So I think there’s a lot of those things that I’ve done in my career where I think I’ve done a lot around those sort of cultural moments bit. Um, and therefore I think when we talk to customers, that’s what we’re, we’re, we’re focusing on. Um, but that doesn’t mean say, obviously there’s a lot of other things out there. I mean, performance marketing relies on high volume, all that type of stuff, but we do that anyway with our, our offering. So again, but again, even our performance marketing is contextual because it’s, you know, someone wants to go on their grits, right? So, um, I think that answers it. It’s just sort of, you know, I’m always into… I’m genuinely into these with marketeers who want to… I mean, I think I’m always keen with people who want to experiment and learn and really understand customers rather than just churning out the same old things. I always remember when I was at Omnicom, there was one time I was looking, apparently one of our clients needed a bit of a digital update and I went into the meeting and I was just getting a brief. And they said, I said, when did we… how long have we been running this media plan? And they said, oh, about 10 years. So the same plan had been run for this client for 10 years, regardless of the fact that at that stage, and this was 2012 or something, we’d had 10 years or more of the web by then. So there is a little bit of that within, I think, marketing generally. There’s a little bit of a reluctance to do stuff. And again, I don’t know whether you experienced this in your agency world, but we used to joke about that we would go out for lunch with people to discourage them from spending more money on a big platform like Google, because it was easy to do so. And it still is easy to do so. There’s nothing wrong with Google, but it’s easier to perhaps put money that way than it is to try and come up with a new innovative strategy. I completely agree. I think there’s just that sense of kind of, you know, you’re never going to get fired by buying media from and that familiarity that you have. Right. And it’s just how I think that’s a great kind of point, really, I suppose, in a sense. It’s like because, you know, you’ve been you’ve been you’ve been across all of these different kind of businesses. You’ve been every side of the table, effectively, including setting up your own businesses. How do you sort of foster and tackle that challenge of inertia and sort of familiarity? How do you embed that culture of innovation, experimentation and change? Because you’ve ridden already with 2024 now, right? What you’ve achieved to hit that billion is phenomenal here. So the assumption is that from the outside, Uber is very much that type of organization. So how do you foster that in your teams? i think i think it comes down to people i mean it’s very people driven i mean when we hired all the ads people globally and my colleagues across the world i mean they’re all they all have great experience but they also um i think are passionate about doing this because it’s slightly different um and You know, you have to just try it. I mean, we are literally going out, there’s often Twitter advertisers about formats that they’ve never seen before. So that takes a certain style of person. And when we were doing the hiring, I remember all of us who’ve done hiring, a lot of us have done a lot of hiring here. just getting those people who can deal with ambiguity and dealing with a situation where you’re not selling a standardized format that is easily bought on a DSP and all that type of stuff, it is a bit different, has been, I think, one of the key parts of our success as a business. And the good thing with, I think, Uber culturally, we also are used to embracing new businesses in a way that, I think, Other businesses I’ve seen, it’s not really quite the same. Everyone sort of says, you know this, and you’ve seen this in your experience, I’m sure, everyone talks about innovation. but innovation is something that people would like to do, but rather than they have to do, I think with us, we do it all the time. It’s part of our DNA as a business. Um, and that’s why, I mean, it’s interesting. I was chatting to someone today and they’re saying, you know, Uber in the UK launched in 2012 with rides. It was 2012, it was only 12 years ago. And that was when we first did the rides business and that was just before the Olympics. So since then it’s gone with Eats and now with the ads team. So that’s very, very fast innovation, I think. So you have an internal culture that works, you bring in the right people, And I also think, you know, it helps when you have a brand like ours, which people engage with anyway, because they can understand it. I mean, it’s not like trying to convince a 30, 40 year old about how Snap works or how some other platform works that they don’t necessarily, you know, use as in the same way. So I think that’s been the way we kept it. And we have people who are really passionate about it. I think passion is also the other thing. It’s this sort of subtle, Do we hire people with who are passionate? I think we probably do. I don’t think that’s something you can identify necessarily, but they are pretty passionate about what they do. This is really fascinating. And I’m going to ask you to try and sort of make it real for me in some way. So think about something you’re able to kind of share around, you know, this sort of like the innovation in practice, like, you know, a day, a week, take me through kind of how it actually gets done. Because I think there’s probably marketeers and leaders listening to this going, okay, this all sounds great in theory, but like, what’s the practice? Because, you know, as you said, you know, there’s this concept of innovation, you know, it’s sort of, you know, oh yeah, that’s done by someone else. But I think anyone listening to this conversation, I think it’s going to like, okay, well, look, make this real for us, please. Well, I think we take the journey as product because of the one in the right of the system, right? I think, you know, when I joined, I was literally one person on my own. Most of our country lead at the time, we just start off on our own. It was fine. My colleague Greg in Paris was the same and Rodrigo who runs a Spanish office as well. So you start off on your own. So I think your first thing is obviously to understand the business and all the other stuff. But in terms of getting customer engagement is finding that one or two advertisers who are prepared to do the innovation. And we went out and just met with people And I remember with a couple of brands, it sort of clicked because they were looking for innovation. And I mean, it was a lot of, I mean, it’s a lot of shoe leather, but that’s the way it goes. And you build those. And then the first thing, I always think with innovation, one of the things is just to get one person to do it and then prove it to others. I think sometimes… Everyone comes up at this and I do some, I discuss this with other people in terms of too many business strategies rely on everybody hitting everybody at the same time. Suddenly you get 10 advertisers doing something. It doesn’t work like that. Never has done. Even in the early days of Sky, we never got 10 advertisers in one go. It was always iterate, get brand on and then take it to their competitors and say, well, this brand’s doing it and all that type of stuff. So I think it’s this proof point. It’s really important. Get some brands on. get their proof points, then use their proof points as you build the business. And then that was massively successful. And that’s what we did. And we still do actually, we still have a lot of brands that are greenfield to us who come on board and do some really cool stuff. Um, and then within that, then we also look at, you know, other things like how do we improve the product from the feedback that we’re getting back from customers? What else do we need? Um, Um, and when we originally launched the journey as product, we didn’t have add an add to wallet feature, which was actually quite critical. It’s been actually pretty successful for us recently because if someone’s going to a place where there is a point of sale, can you then link that journey into a transaction, whether it’s a restaurant, whether it’s a bar, whether it’s a duty free shop or whatever. And then we had to just work out how we’re going to integrate that into our platform and how does that work and all the other stuff that goes with it. And the same was true with video because we knew how to do video, but how do you do video in an environment that doesn’t you know, piss off, not irritate the user in the right way, in the wrong way. So I think the, yeah, it’s, it’s, I mean, always think business strategy is always about endurance. I mean, you just have to, you know, be practical and have endurance is the thing. And don’t live in a fancy world where everything’s going to be perfect because it’s never going to be. You just have to find those brands, get them on board, and then keep iterating. And that’s what I think all the ads teams across the globe that have worked at Uber have done that for a while. That’s really reassuring to hear, I think, for probably a lot of people. So let’s just think about that relationship between you and the product team in Uber. Getting that video or getting that sort of add to wallet, there’s an insight, a truth that kind of came out of that conversation with the brands and the advertisers. Tell me about how that dynamic works for you. Well, we have. We talk to the product team a lot in terms of where they think things are going and where we think things are going. We work out what the biggest priorities are in terms of what’s going to make the difference. So, yeah, very collaborative. I think they understand the increasing nuances. As we get more international, it gets more complex because what works in one market may not work in every market, depending on that market. So, yeah, we talk to them regularly and then work out a plan and then, you know, work out a go to market from there in terms of whether it’s a beta or it’s a test or whatever else happens to be. And, you know, I think that’s always a good thing for us in terms of we have to keep that connectivity. But we also, I think, are importantly respectful that just because we can, should we do it. And that’s a slightly different model than maybe a publisher would have. where maybe because we’re not the only revenue stream, we can’t just demand we want something because we want something. It has to be right. And also we’ve taken our own decisions as well. So, for example, we don’t serve any ads going to hospitals. We could, but we decided that’s not the wrong thing to do because, you know, where would you draw the line on that and all the other things that go with it? And, you know, we’re able, we want to do the right thing. So that doesn’t make sense to us. Um, but I think if you were a more traditional publisher and advertising was a revenue, your core revenue stream, you might’ve taken a different decision. And you may not have the data. Yeah. No, that’s yeah. That’s it. I mean, that’s, that’s really interesting team wise. How do you, how do you like to kind of structure your teams? So essentially across most of the markets we operate in, we have three specialist teams within one team. One of the teams is very much working with the restaurant partners that we have across each market. They’re doing a lot of performance marketing, but they were doing brand marketing and performance marketing, but that’s a specialist team. And then they work with the other Uber teams. Then we have what we call CPG teams who are looking at CPG activations, which are very varied. They can be anything from brand activations to performance, to offers based app activation. So an offer with a partner, a restaurant partner, convenience partner, whatever else happens to be. So that’s another team. And then we have a dedicated team to basically non-endemic advertisers who are the people who predominantly will use the Uber rides app, but may use some other services within the Uber app generally. So that could be anything from technology companies through to auto companies, to luxury brands, to, you know, entertainment brands, whatever. So there’s a lot of variation there. So we have a very varied marketplace, I guess, of brands that we engage with. And it’s a wonderful thing because I think, you know, sometimes you can go from, you can go for a meeting with a luxury brand straight into a meeting with a, QSR restaurant in the same day, which is obviously very different conversations. But that’s just the nature of the brand. And that’s what we can do. So that’s the that’s the setup. And then we have obviously support teams for all of those in terms of you know, helps and all the other stuff that we need. And when it comes to metrics, there’s kind of two sides that I’d love to kind of get your views on, right? Well, there’s the kind of, how does Uber think about metrics in terms of your proposition to the market? But also, how do you like to measure stuff yourselves and your own kind of team’s kind of performance? Obviously, you’ve already mentioned the billion number, but let’s unpack that a bit more. Yeah. Well, so I think when we talk about measurement for the ads units that we sell to advertisers, we obviously have straightforward ROAS models for those people on the platform. And that works. And we’re always looking to improve those and upgrade them according to what people are looking for. And that’s great, straightforward. And we can track a variety of different metrics within that. When it comes to things like the Journey app proposition, a couple of things. Firstly, where we decided to sell it in a non-cost per thousand way. And there’s a deliberate reason for that because when someone goes into the journey ads experience, one journey is one advertiser. You own the brand, you own the thing. So it’s like, yeah, it’s like a takeover in a sense. You own that person’s right. Now we thought about doing a cost per thousand, but cost per thousand doesn’t really work in that environment because what does it prove? It doesn’t really show you anything. So we came up with cost per trip. So people pay on a cost per trip basis. And that then is then associated with a bunch of metrics that we track and we’re looking at furthering within that. Now, obviously, click rate, fine, you know, normal standard thing. But time in the ad or the amount of time the ad has been seen is something we track. Now, the average on that as we speak now, is running about 100 seconds per ad. So there’s 100 seconds of attention within the thing. Now, if you think about it, you’ve got most journeys involved. There’s a first screen, which is when you get a ride being confirmed. The second screen is when the driver is on his way to you and they’ve got a map, and that’s fine. And then the final one is when you’re in the car with the driver and you’re seeing how you’re getting on your destination. All three of those have ad units. All the same advertisers are slightly different for each unit. But you can see how that can be two minutes because the average journey we have is 20 to 25 minutes, depending on which country you’re in. And you will go back to the app. And if you like, some people want to check whether you’re going to get stuck in traffic or whatever else happens to be. So we’ve used that and actually advertisers really like it, but it’s a different metric to one they used to, obviously, because they would go, well, you know, we define viewability as one pixel, one second in view or whatever it is. Now, our view is obviously, look, here’s you’ve got an engaged audience looking at the ad surely that’s that’s pretty powerful and certainly what we’re seeing from brand lift metrics that we’ve run and mostly surveys we’ve done with kantor is an increase in most key program metrics because of the time spent we think it’s linked to time spent we haven’t proved that yet but we think it is because you’ve got nothing competing right so totally you’re in the moment right the moment that’s the moment thing so you’re in the moment you’ve got nothing competing so that so that’s a newish metric which we’re educating the market with both from a purchasing point of view, but also from a measurement point of view. Now, that being said, we obviously have to provide brand new studies and all the normal metrics to match that. But we do think attention in our space is going to be quite powerful because you have that moment. And what do we do with that? Don’t know yet. But that’s an area that we’re looking at and started talking to agencies and clients about because I think we’re interested to see what they’re thinking. So that’s from the measurement side of the business. And then obviously when we’re running our business, then we measure it in multitudes of ways in terms of campaigns and all the things that we’re running. But we’re running very fast on that and it’s fine. Journey ads is the only one where I think we probably have a slightly different metric set up than a traditional retail media business would have relative to on performance stuff. Fascinating. And I think that captured sort of time that you’ve got. And from a format perspective, I just there must be a wealth of kind of creative you could be applying to that sort of, you know, that attention, as you said. Right. It’s just. Yeah, I mean, some people use games, some people do playable games, which is an obvious one. Benefit to consumer, they might get a discount or an offer or whatever, but they can play a game. It’s dead time. Video is a similar thing. You can play video. Audio, I know some brands globally, we’ve done some audio stuff with them, which is an obvious one as well, if you think about it, because would you… do something you know do you want to plug your headphones in listen to something while you’re on your drive you might do in some cases so i think there’s there’s lots to do with that space because it’s not as you say you’re not competing with anything else um and then more to come and more to come in that area as we as we think it through but we again we come back to our consumers what do our consumers want out of it I’m going to have to get you back on to talk more about that in the future. So you started off this conversation about the pace of change and the speed with which everything is moving at the moment. What are you personally most excited about when you look at the world of marketing right now? What am I most excited about? Well, I think probably three areas. I think the attention thing I think is really interesting and one that I think we’re going to see a lot more on over the next few years because the volume of messaging we’re putting out to customers it just keeps on exponentially growing and I’m not convinced that necessarily they’re going to be effective for everyone. So I think attention, I think the whole first party commerce media space becomes fascinating. You’re starting to see PayPal doing their ads business with my old colleague Mark and then there’s you know, other, you know, airlines doing ad businesses, all sorts of things. So I think that’s going to get interesting as well. So attention and retail media, obviously the key things, obviously AI comes into this to some degree, of course it does. But I think when you’re talking about consumer behaviors and all that stuff, I think it’s a question of how AI changes consumer behavior and therefore how ads work within that. as opposed to, you know, just because we’ve got AI, we can do stuff. And I think there’s a, you know, there’s a lot of that going on at the moment, which is fine. I mean, you know, I think we’ve got to start, always start with the customer and then work back from there. But I’m genuinely, I mean, I think it’s quite exciting. I think generally it’s quite exciting time because I do think there’s more people coming through now who can compete with the big players. And I think that’s a good thing for the industry. I think the industry is always better when there’s greater competition. And we went through a bit of a phase and it’s still true to some degree. Obviously, the big players are taking disproportionate amounts, but we want some real competition in the marketplace as well, because I think that’s going to help us all. hundred percent agree and it’s giving us room to innovate right because we know we’ve got yeah yeah i love that that’s really interesting to see how that’s going to play out and you know you’re kind of leading the way in many ways you know in that regard so go back to the paul who started life out kind of at the very beginning for a moment um what advice would you give to someone who was entering this industry Well, I think I actually think I think there’s a couple of things. Firstly, I would get yourself a mentor at some stage in your career quite early on, if you can. Because I had a couple of mentors within Sky at the early stages, which was actually quite good for me. I didn’t realize there were mentors. They were sort of my bosses, but they became mentors and that was helpful. But you don’t, not everybody gets that. And it’s also harder these days with work schedules changing and the way that you do things is probably harder. So I’d get yourself a mentor. I would also be a little bit more, I don’t think taking a risk is a problem. I think a lot of people, and I know it’s easy to say, but what is the real risk? I think you need to assess your risks in terms of what they are. So if there’s a big opportunity, I mean, one stage of my career, I actually took a sideways move and dropped salary significantly because I felt I needed to learn something. And I remember saying to my wife, and it’s a bit like being at a startup actually, because as you know, you don’t learn a lot of startups initially. And that was quite a powerful moment because I just wanted to go and learn this thing that I didn’t know. And I said to her, look, I would say it’s probably going to take a couple, it’ll be a couple of years and then I’ll, I’ve learned that thing and then I’ll be much better for the market going forward. And I was, and sure enough, actually I got headhunted after that role, which was even more interesting. So I think a lot of people, and I talk, I do mentor people on this and just don’t, don’t think that some moves can you know take a move where you can if you think you’re going to learn something then what what’s the worst that can happen obviously you know people do get and there’s a lot of people looking for jobs and it’s a tough job market i’m not being flippant about that but i think um having a range of experience is going to be really important there’s this great book i don’t know do you know range by david epstein which talks about… Now? Okay. This is a top tip. It’s being very important in the world. People with lots of experience, to make a comparison between Roger Federer, who was a generous sports player and then became a tennis player, to Tiger Woods, who has just did golf, right? and more of a sort of t-shaped i don’t know whatever that it’s a very interesting theory and there’s a lot of stuff saying that generalists people who’ve got these wide experiences are going to do well in the ai driven world because they’ll be able to adapt to things whereas obviously some specialisms particularly in some some areas are going to get either removed or changed rapidly because of ai So I don’t, you know, so I’ve been lucky in my career to be able to jump from agencies to clients to everything else, but that’s, I wouldn’t have it any other way. And I wouldn’t have it any other way either. I think you have been a great guest and I just want to say thank you so much for joining us on the Business of Marketing today. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for having me. That’s great. The Business of Marketing podcast was brought to you by Path7, powered by Partners, built for performance.
