The Cambridge Marketing Review Show

Voiceover (00:01):As we start a new year on the Cambridge Marketing Podcast this week, we look at the world of careers. Anne Bailey (Form the Future) (00:07):We do a lot of work with people of all ages to help them know themselves, consider their options, and get the support they need to move into a good job. And a good job is a completely subjective term. It means what's right for you. Voiceover (00:23):You are listening to the Cambridge Marketing podcast from Cambridge Marketing College. Kiran Kapur (Host) (00:27):Hello and welcome. This week we are in the area of careers, particularly starting careers and I'm delighted to welcome Anne Bailey, who is co-founder and CEO of Form The Future. Form The Future is a not-for-profit careers and employment company. And welcome, lovely to have you on the show. Could you explain Form the Future's mission? Anne Bailey (Form the Future) (00:50):Sure. And first of all, thank you for having me. Form the Future is really about helping young people navigate their next steps, whether that be into further education and training or into employment. We want to see everyone find and secure a good job, not just their first job, but basically to have developed career management skills that will serve them for life. Kiran Kapur (Host) (01:18):And career management is so important, isn't it? Because gone are the days when you went into a career and you stayed in it. Anne Bailey (Form the Future) (01:26):Absolutely. And really this the whole area of how the world of work is changing, the future of work, the opportunities that are available to people, that's what drives us. That's why we think what we do is so important because in the old days, yes, you could have essentially signed up for a job at 16, 18 or 22 and stuck with it for the rest of your working life. Those days have gone, our working world changes rapidly. Technology is changing the ways we work and no one should feel stuck. You need to be constantly horizon scanning, thinking about where your skills are, where they need to be and what opportunities you want to pursue. Kiran Kapur (Host) (02:17):You say young people, so what sort of age range do you normally deal with? Anne Bailey (Form the Future) (02:21):So we actually set this work up originally to go into schools in order to inspire young people about their future career options. So that might mean helping them make more informed decisions around which GCSEs to pursue. That's their sort of first set of choices they get to make. Then thinking about what to do after GCSEs. So should they go down the A level route or other vocational qualifications or can they go into employment perhaps through an apprenticeship? But if you are going to go down a university route that isn't an outcome in itself, that is still a stepping stone to longer term choices and decisions that you're going to need to make. So we wanted to make sure that young people as they progress through education, have opportunities to get information, experiences, insights and support so that they can feel confident about their decision making throughout that journey. (03:25):We do also work with adults. We work with people who've left school and still need that support to think through their next steps. We work with a lot of adults in job centres who may have lost their jobs or moved to this country and are trying to see how their qualifications that they've acquired elsewhere can help them slot in. So we do a lot of work with people of all ages to help them know themselves, consider their options and get the support they need to move into a good job. And a good job is a completely subjective term. It means what's right for you. Kiran Kapur (Host) (04:07):I think the biggest problem people have is where do they start with this? So what do you need to do to even think about planning out a career or where do you tell people to start? Anne Bailey (Form the Future) (04:19):Yeah. Well, we actually like to start with the self-awareness piece. Really knowing yourself, the worst thing you can do is try to choose a job that's going to be right for somebody else. You are the one who's going to do it. The work you do takes up a huge amount of your life. So it's really important that you know yourself and what's important to you. So we would often talk about that as being values and your students who will all be knowing about brand values can actually deploy that for themselves. What are your brand values? What matters to you? What are your motivators? What drives you? Is it more important to be saving the world or making a lot of money? Sometimes you can do both, but sometimes you have to choose, do you want to be in a collaborative environment or are you a deep thinker, an innovator, someone who needs to be in a darkened room doing your great work? All of these things, all of these factors are available to people, but different roles, different environments and different companies will present those opportunities in different ways. So really starting to have your list of what's important to you, where you think you will do your best work and where you want to go to whatever extent that might mean in terms of a career is a journey and the first job or the next job isn't going to be the last job. It's probably a stepping stone to something else in the, Kiran Kapur (Host) (05:58):We often tell people to self-assess, I'd never know what you're supposed to do to do that. I can sit and sort of stare into space and try and reflect, but I never really know what I'm supposed to do. Anne Bailey (Form the Future) (06:11):I mean, I always find frameworks help. So just the really simple one that we would use every time we debrief an activity, we've done what went well, even better if, what will I do next time? You can use that same approach to reflecting on your own work. I actually use a daily tracker, a daily, I have a daily planner. It's from a guy called Cal Newport who I follow and essentially I set out my day on one column and then I do my record, my actuals in the other. What did I plan to do? What did I actually do? And then my reflection, what went well, what did I learn and what will I do differently tomorrow? That practise of self-reflecting on a daily level, on a quarterly basis, on an annual level, you can apply the exact same approach to reviewing your levels of personal satisfaction. (07:11):Am I making the progress I want to be making towards the goals that I think I have? Now, of course, if you don't have clearly defined goals, that's okay. As long as you're a reflective learner, you can be learning from every encounter, every experience, every job that you do, you'll be learning a bit more about things that you like and that you do well. You'll be learning about where you felt you were stretched and challenged in a positive way and where you went beyond that stretch zone into a space that wasn't right for you. And you just learning these are the situations where I can really grow and thrive and these are the situations I need to be careful about because it's not playing to my strengths. And that's okay. Kiran Kapur (Host) (07:58):That's really interesting. I have to say the idea of doing a daily what I plan to do and what I actually did absolutely terrifies me. Anne Bailey (Form the Future) (08:05):Well, I mean I only do this because I need it. This didn't come because I was perfect at sticking to my plans. I need these frameworks, I need these tools, and I need the scaffolding to keep me on track. I know my weaknesses as well as my strengths. Kiran Kapur (Host) (08:23):I think the other thing that always intrigues me about goals and reflections is it's very easy to be looking at your day-to-day. And as I said, your day-to-day idea already terrifies me, but then it's very easy to lose the longer term. So how do you balance that, keeping the micro going and somebody coming to you that could be, I've got to study for my GCSEs versus I've also got to think about what I want to do next. Anne Bailey (Form the Future) (08:48):Yeah, I mean that is so difficult. We are always most preoccupied with the urgent, aren't we? The thing that's right in front of our noses. And so part of this daily planner also has a weekly reflection period, which I do on a Friday afternoon from four 30 to five ideally. And then you should be doing it also monthly, quarterly, annually, and scheduling that time. But if you think about the person who's thinking, I've got to study for my GCSEs, I don't have time and space or bandwidth to even be thinking about what I want to do next. I guess my advice to that person is make the time. And that doesn't mean being disciplined, being rigorous about, but take the time to go for a walk, go for a chat with somebody who you like and who inspires you. Find the opportunity to reach out and ask questions of others except that you don't have any of the answers and get curious about what's going on out there. (09:48):I really think there is. I worry about these students who want to study 22 hours a day because we know our brains can't take all that information in. The best advice is always build in breaks into your study schedule. You need that time to digest it, reflect on it, consolidate it, and I would say taking time out from the sort of here and now to give yourself time to explore your future is a way of also consolidating where you are now and building stronger foundations for that future. So it really is important to give yourself time and space just to be brave to think ahead, not in a stressful anxiety provoking way, but hopefully in an exciting, getting curious about those possibilities way. Kiran Kapur (Host) (10:40):Okay. What sort of mistakes do you see people making? You've already said we've, particularly if you're trying to be good and you convince yourself that I'm going to reach my goals by working harder and harder and harder, and therefore I'm going to keep studying. What other mistakes do

The College has created a toolkit to provide practical support and help to learners with dyslexia. Described by the Cambridge Independent as "It's part affirmation, part information and part solution-finder" it was created because our Learning Styles Researcher, himself proudly dyslexic, was frustrated at the lack of information for adult learners. His passionate argument is that dyslexia is not something to 'cure' but to be celebrated. The ebook toolkit includes tips varying from 'What to do if you are overwhelmed' to 'How to break down a written task'. You can hear the author, Julian Berridge, explaining the toolkit on Cambridge105.   Podcast Summary The Cambridge Marketing College has released a "dyslexia toolkit" to provide practical support and help to learners with dyslexia, as well as their tutors and employers. The toolkit is designed as a resource that users can refer to as needed, rather than a comprehensive guide to be read cover-to-cover. It aims to address the different perspective and problem-solving approach that individuals with dyslexia often possess, which can be valuable in certain fields like security and aerospace. The toolkit is being well-received, and the college plans to develop versions specifically for tutors and employers to help foster more inclusive workplaces. The toolkit is available for free download on the college's website.   Transcript  Cambridge 105 Voice-over (00:02):Glen Jones Glen Jones, Cambridge 105 (00:03):  My name's Glen Jones. Dunno if you've seen this in this week's Cambridge Independent newspaper. Page 20, this initiative by the Cambridge Marketing College, A CMC to provide practical support and help to learners with dyslexia as well as their tutors and employers as well. It's a fascinating article, so I thought I'd get the man behind it on Zoom. Hello, Julian Berridge. Julian Berridge, author Dyslexia Toolkit (00:40):Hello. Glen Jones, Cambridge 105 (00:41):Good to speak to you. So you've created this dyslexia toolkit. What exactly is that? Julian Berridge, author Dyslexia Toolkit (00:46):It's called a toolkit because it's designed for you to dip into it to find the solution to a particular problem. So if you are struggling as a dyslexic student, if you are struggling to say, write a large piece of writing a report or an essay, then you can go to the section on writing a report or an essay for advice. Glen Jones, Cambridge 105 (01:05):So it's not something that you've got to read from cover to cover. It's sort of a manual that you can dip into as in when you need help with a particular issue. Julian Berridge, author Dyslexia Toolkit (01:14):Yes, it's a list of suggestions rather than a series of instructions. Glen Jones, Cambridge 105 (01:19):I was fascinated reading about this because I imagine it's really difficult to provide help to someone with dyslexia, for instance, because it would be really easy to be condescending and to assume that people need help that they don't actually need. Do you find that's often the case? Julian Berridge, author Dyslexia Toolkit (01:39):That can be the case. One of the main issues is actually just a complete difference in perspective. As a dyslexic, I see things in one particular way, which is very different to the way of non dyslexics. So there's a lot of just problem with translation you could say. Glen Jones, Cambridge 105 (01:56):And it's fascinating that people aren't taking more advantage of this difference. I'm fascinated with people who think differently. I don't think like your average man on the street, I'm pretty sure about that, but I see that as an advantage. Do you see your dyslexia as an advantage in your role? Julian Berridge, author Dyslexia Toolkit (02:14):I certainly do. If I wasn't dyslexia, I wouldn't be able to write this. I certainly wouldn't have had the passion for it or the drive to do so, and there are places which do look positively on it. I believe I actually mentioned in the toolkits, I'm not sure if it's in the article, that GCHQ, the British Security has been actively recruiting dyslexics and half of NASA's employees are dyslexic. Being dyslexic means a increase in 3D visualisation and holistic thinking. So if you are trying to build a rocket and map out how that's going to go into space, being able to visualise things in three dimensions is incredibly helpful. The holistic thinking is what GCHQ is after the ability to see patterns that aren't always as obvious and to connect seemingly random pieces of data. Glen Jones, Cambridge 105 (03:09):It's fascinating because I see my creativity as coming from my obsessive compulsive disorder. It makes me think in a different way to everyone else, but I don't see it as a barrier. I see it as an opportunity. How is the toolkit being received at the CMC Julian Berridge, author Dyslexia Toolkit (03:28):At the moment? It's only recently been released. However, I have to say all the response I have so far received has been incredibly positive, even from people I didn't expect to see it. Glen Jones, Cambridge 105 (03:39):How do you see people using this? Do you see it going beyond the walls of CMC at any point? Julian Berridge, author Dyslexia Toolkit (03:46):It already is. It is completely free. We're not charging for it. We are happy for anyone to use it as long as we have our name on it. We are a marketing college. I will confess. I have actually sent a copy to the learning support team at my old school in Ely as a thank you for all their hard years of work. Glen Jones, Cambridge 105 (04:04):For any employers that are listening to this at the moment, what would you say to encourage people to take on someone who thinks a bit differently? How can this help people's companies? Julian Berridge, author Dyslexia Toolkit (04:15):When can a brand new perspective ever hurt? Speaking of employers, as is mentioned in the article, I'm currently working on a second toolkit, which is being sent off to be designed so it's not just a rather bland word, documents for tutors, and after that, I will then begin working on one for employers on how to get the most out of their dyslexic employees. Glen Jones, Cambridge 105 (04:39):That's fascinating. Do you think that employers can sometimes see obstacles that aren't actually there when it comes to conditions like dyslexia? Julian Berridge, author Dyslexia Toolkit (04:48):I'm not going to say that there aren't obstacles with dyslexia. It does have its downsides. However, there is a certain stigma in many areas to do with it. The word dyslexia itself is actually translates to word blindness, I believe, and a lot of people can only see it as a affliction because that's actually what you're taught to see. Glen Jones, Cambridge 105 (05:14):Yeah. It surprises me that in this day and age, there's still this attitude about, but in your experience, it still exists. Julian Berridge, author Dyslexia Toolkit (05:22):It does. It's not necessarily a conscious thing. You are just taught that if you hear the word dyslexia, you only ever see when you're young, a child needing additional support, additional help. It's hardly mentioned when you're older and you just have that view of, oh, it's that person who needed additional help, so therefore it must be a disability. It must hold them back. It must mean they're stupid. I can clearly state it doesn't. It is scientifically proven that it has no interaction with your intelligence at all. It just inhibits certain ways of expressing your Glen Jones, Cambridge 105 (05:58):Absolutely. So what would your advice be to coworkers then? Let's say maybe I had a colleague who has dyslexia. How would I support them without coming across as condescending and insulting to their intelligence? Julian Berridge, author Dyslexia Toolkit (06:12):Well, every person's dyslexia is incredibly unique to them. The main quote amongst any area I found during my research was, the only thing consistent about dyslexic is their inconsistency. Glen Jones, Cambridge 105 (06:24):Yes. Julian Berridge, author Dyslexia Toolkit (06:25):So I'd suggest talking to them a little about it if they're willing to talk, hearing about it, being a little more open-minded in how you receive things from them. There's a classic thing in the workplace where you will just ask someone to write something up for you or write 'em a report. Now the word write sets alarm mails off in my mind. I dunno about others, but I believe it to be. So making it a little more clearer that it can be, that you can have things in a more diverse range. As the old saying goes, A picture can be worth a thousand words. I don't quite believe it's worth a thousand, but with a bit of context, it can be used for a few hundred and save a lot of work Glen Jones, Cambridge 105 (07:04):The way you've set out this toolkit. I can imagine that just in the bit I've read myself, maybe you aren't particularly keen on writing something up formally, but you might be able to give an absolutely cracking presentation to someone. So maybe suggest that someone comes to you and tells you what they've been working on, rather than write up what you've been working on. I got the right end of a stick there. Julian Berridge, author Dyslexia Toolkit (07:29):Very much so. In fact, the two main areas that it has been said that dyslexics who do not find a academic use for their gifts or are not unable to do so, go into two main areas. Working with the hands and working with the voices salespeople is especially, Glen Jones, Cambridge 105 (07:48):This is absolutely fascinating. I can imagine this toolkit isn't just going to help people who have dyslexia, but as you say, as the new versions come out, it's going to help workplaces and colleagues become more inclusive. Where can people get the hands on it? Julian Berridge, author Dyslexia Toolkit (08:06):Apparently, it can be downloaded from the college website@marketingcollege.com slash dyslexia. We will post the new toolkits as we get them there. Plus I sort

 A fascinating conversation with Dr David Hall - Chief Executive of the Ideas Centre Group.  We talk about the differences between creativity and innovation (spoiler: they're not the same thing) and how to get the best ideas and solutions from your creative meetings.TranscriptMy guest today is Dr. David Hall, who is the chief exec of the Ideas Center group. And David is an expert on creativity and innovation, which are not the same thing. So David, welcome. Thank you for coming on. I heard you speak on this, which is why I asked you to come onto the show. So can we talk about the difference between creativity and innovation?David Hall (00:35):Of course. And it's an absolute pleasure to have the opportunity to get involved with the podcast. Two very simple definitions for me are at the heart of all this. Everyone talks about creativity and innovation, but very few people have an understanding of what they really mean in a very concise way. Creativity is simply the process of generating ideas that are both novel, in other words, hadn't thought of that before, and useful in that you can see how to make that novel idea work. So it's generating ideas. It's the ideation process. And it's all about that combination of novelty and usefulness. Whereas, innovation is the implementation thing. It's the doing thing, is taking that creative idea and implementing it to give you a step function change in the organisational context. So, big difference between the two. Creativity is all about idea generation and innovation is all about implementation.Kiran Kapur (01:28):So I thought, like probably most people coming to this thing, great, we're going to go and be creative. I need to come up with all these wonderfully creative ideas. I'm a marketer, so I can do this. So we'll all go off and have a brainstorm or a thought shower.David Hall (01:43):Yes, that's normally the start point for people, and brainstorming is often quoted... When I ask people, "Have you done creative problem solving techniques before?", everyone pipes up with, "Oh yeah, brainstorming. We do brainstorming on a regular basis," is often quoted as being a creative process, but is seldom, if ever, creative, for a whole bunch of very good reasons. We are naturally preconditioned by the past. So when we brainstorm, what we tend to do is rake over our past and identify what from our past we think is going to be relevant moving forward. So we very quickly generate a whole list of ideas that are entirely consistent with everything we've ever done before, which completely lacks any novelty. Novelty is a fresh connection in the brain effectively. It's relatively slow to form.And actually one of the rules of brainstorming is that you need to eliminate all filtering. We want people to come up with their ideas very quickly thinking that that will add to the creative process. And all it does actually is condemn you to more of the same thinking. We generate long lists of ideas in brainstorms, but they're all variations on what we've done before. So there's nothing new in there whatsoever. It's perfect if what you're looking for is continuous improvement, which is kind of incremental improvement on what you've always had. But if you want novelty, we need to create space to make a new connection in the brain. And that's quite, quite different.Kiran Kapur (03:17):I think the interesting thing there is the idea of timing. So a brainstorm, we say, we set it up, we go to a room, we all get together, we all come up with the ideas and every idea is allowed, et cetera, et cetera. But you're saying for creativity, you actually need a longer process. So how do you do that?David Hall (03:36):It's not necessarily a longer process. It's just that we need more time to generate that novel thought process, that new connection in the brain. So within the space of half an hour, you can readily generate novel ideas provided you understand the mechanisms for generating that novel idea. And we need rules. Rules of the game. Playfulness is one of the key elements. Young children are absolutely fabulous when it comes to generating novel ideas because they're uncluttered in their heads by any preconceived ideas. So everything they're generating is a relatively new idea. They are brilliant when it comes to novelty. They're rubbish when it comes to useful, by the way, but that's another story entirely, because they just don't have the life experience to make it work. But when it comes to novelty, they're brilliant. Adults are rubbish at novel because our brains are cluttered with so much from our past. All our education, all our experience and what have you, builds patterns in our brains that then lock us in more of the same thinking.(04:39):So if we want to play and generate new ideas, adults need rules of engagement. If you take a small group of children and ask them to go play, no problem whatsoever, they will invent thought processes on the spot. If you tell a group of your colleagues to go play for a short time, they'll look at you as if you've lost the plot, quite frankly, because they have no idea how, in a work context, to go play. When what you actually mean is generate completely novel thought processes. Adults can play, but they need rules of the game. And each of the creativity techniques that we use has a detailed set of rules that the facilitator needs to follow to make sure that everyone's playing the same game, everyone understands what the rules are. Then you can release the novelty. It's not that it takes a long time. It just takes special attention to the thought processes and understanding what's happening inside people's heads. Does that make sense?Kiran Kapur (05:35):Yes. When I heard you speak before, I thought about this idea that, yes, if you tell a group of children to go and play, they just do. But if you told a group of adults, if you have a break time in any session with adults, everybody immediately gets their phones out and starts looking terribly important rather than doing what children do, which is go and find somebody to go and play together with. I thought that was a really, really interesting concept. The other thing I found fascinating was your view of experts. You were saying that you don't always want the experts to be doing the creativity.David Hall (06:10):No, I think in any organisation we develop a world of what is, which is basically the way we do things around here, based on past experience again. So it's always that backward looking perspective. And everyone in the organisation tends to conform to the way we do things around here. That world of what is. The experts are effectively the creators and the guardians of that world. So they have a vested interest in making sure that the rules of the world of what is are maintained, and you end up with more of the same thinking. Experts have a great role to play in taking a novel idea and finding a way of adapting it, to make it useful, to retain that novelty, but adapt it so that it would enhance that world that they were previously trapped in, hopefully giving you a step function change, which is exactly what you want in the innovation process.(07:00):So expose the vital in innovation, but when it comes to escaping from more of the same thinking, naivety is at an absolute premium because naive individuals have no difficulty generating fresh thought processes. And that's where the playfulness comes in. Young children are fabulously naive. So if you're solving a problem within the organisation, getting a group of experts together is fine if what you're looking for is incremental improvement of the same world, but if you want people to break the rules, then you need people who are less experienced in that world of what is, that are more liberated in generating fresh thought processes. And it's that interplay between the experts and the naive that gives you that combination of usefulness and novelty, which is core to the creative process.Kiran Kapur (07:50):So is one of the issues as a company or an organisation you need to actually know, are you trying to do an incremental change? And as you said, that then is the Kaizen principle. That's what you do. You incremental change.David Hall (08:00):Absolutely.Kiran Kapur (08:00):And do you need to know that that's what you're aiming for, or we actually want to be innovative? Do you find companies that think they want to be innovative when what they actually want to be as just the incrementally improved?David Hall (08:13):Absolutely. And key for me is understanding the difference between the two. Kaizen, continuous improvement, Lean Six Sigma, call it what you will, is a fabulous tool for cultural revolution, getting everyone involved in the incremental improvement of the organisation. I am a huge fan of continuous improvement, but it is quite, quite different from the innovation process. And for me, senior management leadership in an organisation need to understand that differentiation between the two because then they can understand the interplay. The two sit beautifully alongside each other, but should not be confused. (08:51):Many is the time I talk to organisations and they talk about innovation strategies and they say, yes, yes, yes, we've got a system for innovation in the organisation. What they then go on to do is to describe what is effectively a continuous improvement suggestion scheme process. What they say is we've told everyone in the organisation to come up with fresh thinking, to generate innovative ideas, and we're just waiting for them to come up with that blockbuster idea that will transform the organisation. You often find that leadership actually sit, wait, and just sit waiting. They don't see themselves as being proactively involved in driving step function change. They devolve it to the culture of the organisation. And of course everyone's trapped in more of the same thinking. So what you generate is continuous improvement, which is not what

College tutor Miriam Shaviv enlightens us all on Email Marketing.  She'll tell us how often you should be doing it (it's more often than you may think) and why it's absolutely worthwhile!TranscriptKiran Kapur:My guest today is Miriam Shaviv, who is the director of Brainstorm Digital. Miriam, Welcome. I know that your main work is in sales funnels and what people want to say online to capture audiences' attention. So, how do we go about doing that?Miriam Shaviv (00:33):First of all, let's talk for a minute about why it's so important to do that really, and to work out what you need to say to people in order to capture their attention. What we find is that very often, when companies go online and start marketing online, they really talk about their products or their services in a way that makes sense to them. But the problem is that, what makes sense to them the way that they would describe their product or service, doesn't necessarily resonate truly strongly with their target market. And, really the key online, is to make sure that everything that you're saying, really does make sense and resonate with the people that you're actually trying to reach. After all, online you don't have very long to capture people's attention, and if you want to sell to them, you really have to talk about what you do in their terms, rather than yours.Miriam Shaviv (01:30):And lots of companies don't really, pay enough attention to this. So, what we do is we spend a lot of time at the beginning of working with any company, really researching their target market. And you need to understand what you're doing, and the transformation that you're making in people's lives, if that's the kind of product you're offering, in their terms.So, for big companies, that involves first of all real, proper, structured market research, and for midsize companies, we essentially just interview their clients ourselves. And not just their clients by the way, it's also very, very important to talk to non-buyers or to people who maybe were interested in what you offer, but didn't actually buy. Because you need to understand, why they didn't go through with that purchase as well. And the key here, is to really go beyond demographics, again when lots of companies do market research, they're very focused on technical details. "How old are our prospects? What's their income level?" Which is all useful information that you really need to know, but what you really want to get to is the deeper, almost psychological stuff. Why are they interested in your product at a really deep level? What are their objections? What might stop them, going ahead? What's really worrying them? What really attracts them to what you're doing? Why are they ultimately going to prefer you to the competition? And who else is involved in that buying decision?Because they may have their own set of concerns and also hopes, what do they really want to achieve? And what difference is this going to make to their lives? So, you need to understand all these different factors. In order to really be able to market well online and really form a very, very deep picture of the person that you are selling to, and how your product or your service transforms their life. And then once you have that information, you need to be able to shape it, and almost say it back to them, in a way that then resonates with them. And that's really how you capture people's attention, and ultimately are able to persuade them that what you're doing is for them.Kiran Kapur (03:59):Okay. So, in a way, what you're saying is it's not different in the digital world to the physical world. In that, you still need to understand what your customer's problems are?Miriam Shaviv (04:14):But I would say even more so, because online if you don't resonate with people, and you don't capture their attention within seconds, they're going to move on to something else. There's so much choice online, that if you're not speaking to people in a way that makes sense to them, they're just going to switch off and go to your competitor.Kiran Kapur (04:31):Now presumably that's not an argument for not having a distinctive voice, and not worrying about the fact that you're not going to appeal to everybody.Miriam Shaviv (04:37):No, of course not. That's part of the picture. You have to be able to differentiate yourself, to develop your own voice. Because, another part of selling well online, is developing that relationship with people. Developing a relationship is two ways, on the one hand it's understanding the people that you want to sell to, and being able to talk in their language. But on the other hand, you need to be distinctive from your end as well. They need to feel that not only that you know them, but that they know you as well. So, we're very big believers in being personal in your marketing, always having a person fronting the marketing so that people feel that they know someone in your company, and to do that, you have to have some kind of personality or persona as well on your end. So, it really goes both ways.Kiran Kapur (05:33):Does that person have to be one person or can it be a group of people that are representing your company?Miriam Shaviv (05:39):I think it depends on the size of the company. The truth is we prefer one... I prefer doing it for one person because that's really easy for people to identify, and you can think of some enormous companies. For example; Virgin, is very much identified with Richard Branson. They've built an entire company around his personality. There are companies where there's different people involved, where you might want to have more than one person fronting a campaign, and more than one person really representing the company. But you really want to keep it to a minimum. So, that people can really feel that they get to know a small number of people, online and identify with them.Kiran Kapur (06:27):Okay. So, one of the things you also talk about is creating a sales funnel. So, can we talk about what a sales funnel is?Miriam Shaviv (06:34):A sales funnel is basically a system to attract, nurture and convert your leads. So, when you think of the way that lots of companies do digital marketing, it's a little bit random. They're pumping out a lot of content, but there's not necessarily any order or any significance to the order that they're pumping out that content. So, when you think about that again from the point of view of the person, seeing all that content, they are seeing a lot of content from you, but it's not in a series that really makes sense or in an order that really that makes sense. So, there's no process there, but actually when you think about buying, people go through a mental process in order to buy. Especially if you're buying... It's different if you're buying a pencil, right you may wake up in the morning, say. "Hey, I need a pencil." Just go buy it quickly.But if you're buying anything of any real value, no one wakes up in the morning and says. "Hey, I need a new car." And then by the end of that day, they have a car. They go through a mental process. Where, over time, they realize that they need something. Maybe there's a problem with the car that they already have, just to stick to that analogy. They start thinking about getting a new one, they do a little bit of research, "What's out there?" Then they decide. "Okay. I'm serious about this, I'm actually going to buy something." They go test... They narrow it down to a couple of choices, they test drive a car, they figure out where they're going to buy it from. Finally, they make the purchase, and then they may buy. A few months later, they may decide, "Hey, there's a few extra bits and pieces, I wish I had, or maybe I need an MOT." There's bits and pieces they may buy after they've bought the actual thing.So, it's actually going through a process. A lot of it is psychological, right? So, coming to the realization that you have a problem, that you need to do something about it, making certain decisions. And when you build a sales funnel, you're basically taking all your content and you're structuring it in a way, that leads people through that process. So, you're actually helping them make that decision, and you're bringing them towards the buying decision faster, and you're helping them through it. And another analogy that I always use for this is dating. Admittedly, I'm in my forties now and I haven't dated for a long while so, I don't really know how people do it nowadays.But, when I was in my twenties, and I was dating, again you didn't just get up in the morning, and marry someone. At least most people didn't, but you went through a process, right? You hung out in places where you might meet someone likely, you saw someone that you liked, they asked you out, maybe you asked them out, you went on a date, saw if it worked, got into a relationship, got engaged, got married. You had to do things in a certain order to make the relationship deeper, and with the sales funnel, that's literally what you're doing. You are building a system, to meet the right people, attract their attention, get their details. So, the same way in the dating, once upon a time you would've gotten people's number, you literally get people's email address, and then you have to figure out how to follow up, and say the right things to them in order to get them to buy. And then once they're buyers, you usually want them to buy more or to buy again, and that's basically what the sales funnel is.Kiran Kapur (10:02):So, my next question is going to random email marketing campaigns but I suspect you're going to tell me that they should fit alongside the sales funnel. So, I think we all sit in the office, and we go, "Right, we need to do an email campaign." And what's the best way to go about doing that?Miriam Shaviv (10:18):See, I don't really think of emails in terms of campaigns. Because, emails for me are something that is an always-on activity. Really, once

Michael Wells, Founder and MD of "Third Light" explains the ins and outs of what DAM (Digital Asset Management) actually is.  We'll find out how it works, how it can benefit an organisation, how AI helps to classify digital assets, why digital assets are far more than just photographs, and what a company can do if they can't afford a "full blown" system (at 25 mins). Michael also talks about how he has grown his technology business over nearly 20 years and the challenges that brings. TRANSCRIPT Kiran Kapur (00:13):My guest this week is Michael Wells, who is the Founder of Third Light, which is a Cambridge-based software company and they do digital asset management. Now, if your idea of digital assets is having a whole load of things piled onto the computer with no real structure to them, Michael will have the answers. So, Michael, welcome. Can we start with what digital assets actually are?Michael Wells (00:36):Hi, Kiran. It's nice to talk to you again as well. Thanks for inviting me. Digital assets, well, let's just look at what we all know about, which is files that we need for our projects, particularly in marketing. So things like photography, or videos, logos, brochures, promotional, art, everything that you do in marketing creates that kind of content. And so you've got lots of files, but what you don't have in a single store, most of the time is information about the files and we call that metadata. So when you add information, metadata to the files and you organise them in a particular way, maybe using that, then you create digital assets. And the reason we call them digital assets is partly just to recognise that they're usually digital visual content, but also that they are assets. In other words, they do have some value, and that value is from having organised them so that they can be reused.Kiran Kapur (01:33):Okay. So as soon as anyone uses the word meta, I start to panic. So what is metadata? Can you give me an example?Michael Wells (01:40):I can. Yeah, sure. So let me describe to you. Now, we're on a radio-style interview, so I can't show you the photo I have in front of me, but I've got a beautiful picture of a scene not far from here in the West Suffolk alps. And I need to put it into text for you, so I'll describe it as rolling fields with hedge rows. And as I continue to do that, you can see that really I'm describing it to you. So the file might be the JPEG of this photograph and the metadata in this case is me captioning it for you. So I'm storing that text with the image and that's the metadata about the image.Kiran Kapur (02:22):And how detailed would that be? Because you've just done a lovely description of it being a green area with a path that goes through it, et cetera. Would I capture all of that in my metadata?Michael Wells (02:28):Actually I would say you can capture even more than that. That particular caption will be great for a photograph, but if you're working in a project environment around marketing assets, then your metadata could be something much more to do with the project. It could be who took the photograph, who owns the project, the dates when it goes live, maybe website addresses where the content will be stored. So metadata, you can think of as a really broad concept. It's actually any information at all that you'd like to store that relates to something that you've put into a library that's your digital asset.Kiran Kapur (03:04):Okay. So there's various things I want to unpick there, but let's carry on with the data. And then I'll come back to the concept of a library, which is also slightly scary. So I can put in lots and lots and lots of data. Doesn't that just get confusing?Michael Wells (03:17):Well, good point. I mean, yes, you could argue aren't we just storing lots of stuff in a big heap? And of course that's the whole point of software to prevent that from happening and to make it feel organised and useful. So if I log into our system and I've got lots of photographs of scenery, then maybe I want to find things which are actually in a particular county in the UK. So I might click on a keyword for Cambridgeshire. And when I click it, all of the non-Cambridgeshire content is filtered out automatically. And I would go further and say, actually, I shouldn't have to type in the word Cambridgeshire. It should be presented to me as one of the possible ways of filtering the data. So putting a useful and friendly user interface on front of metadata is a great thing to do. And without it, yes, you can run the risk of producing a glorified spreadsheet.Michael Wells (04:12):The other thing I would say, something that lots of people would find a bit daunting is that there seems like lots of things to type in, and that's true, but lots of content these days can be set by artificial intelligence, particularly photographs. We can scan them and automatically tag them with what they are with pretty good accuracy.Kiran Kapur (04:35):Whoa, hang on. So I can literally sit it in front of some form of computer, the computer scans it and it tells me what's in the photo.Michael Wells (04:42):That's right. And there's a huge market for that of course. It's a massive labor-saving tool. But yeah, if we upload a thousand new photos in less than a minute, we can have them all described in a rich way with particularly keywords. That's a very useful feature of AI tagging these days.Kiran Kapur (05:04):So does the user set the keywords or does the AI work out what those are?Michael Wells (05:09):So the AI will probably do the keywords. It finds the dominant colours and it may even recognise things like if it's an animal, that could tell you the species, the genus, all sorts of really domain-specific knowledge. It's ever so good at this stuff. They'd been trained with a huge amount of knowledge about a huge amount of content types. So they can really do a great job. And if it is too specific and the AI doesn't get it, you can actually train them as well so that they know about something really unique about your business or maybe the actual people who work at your company. You can train them by looking at their faces.Kiran Kapur (05:48):I love the way you're sounding very calm about this. I have to say my head's just exploded that the machines can do this to that extent. Okay. I can understand it on photos because it's an image and it's static. Does that also work on other things?Michael Wells (06:03):Yeah. I mean, there are tools that can do speech to text and they're getting quite good. Actually, stepping out of the world of DAM for a moment. Before we really understood artificial intelligence and machine learning, there were quite sophisticated tools that could do dictation, but you had to be very, very careful about how you speak to them. And they wouldn't be able to keep up with a conversation like we're having.but in the advent of AI, all of that suddenly became incredibly smart and really much more adaptable. And we benefit from that in lots of ways. I mean, if you have a smart speaker and you mumble, "Hey Siri," this, that, and the other, even in an echo-y room, across the room, they understand you now, and the reason they're good at this is because of AI.Michael Wells (06:52):So yep, we can extract dialogue from videos, from television broadcast, for example. Lots of captioning is now possible using software instead of people. And yes, you can extract transcripts from audio files as well,Kiran Kapur (07:08):So having looked at the metadata and possibly using AI to organise that, what then happens with it? So you use the phrase library.Michael Wells (07:17):So the product that we are suggesting is useful here is actually a web-based application, which is important because it means everybody can access it from anywhere. So you're obtaining an application that you can reach through your web browser. And when you log into it, obviously with your own credentials, you get a personalized space inside it where you can store and manage, organise things. And it may be part of it is also access to shared areas of content, which we call spaces. And so you might have a team for marketing, a team for sales, a team for R&D, and they all have their own management ideas about what they'll store and how they'll organise it, but they can share things across between each other.Michael Wells (08:05):And things like the metadata, of course, might reflect their particular needs to do with what they're trying to store. So whether or not something is top secret could be relevant to the R&D team, but whether or not something actually has model rights could be more relevant to the marketing team. So metadata is the supporting structure that makes it valuable as content, because it tells you about the files that you've got. And then the digital asset management system also provides this nice and convenient way of getting in and using the files in a shared place.Kiran Kapur (08:40):And digital assets, we've talked about it being photos and logos of videos, but I noticed one of the case studies you have on your website actually was somebody that was dealing with... It was a university talking about approval forms that they'd had to get and they had to hold all the GDPR forms. So it can be literally anything.Michael Wells (08:58):It can. Yeah. In fact, a kind of metadata is when you relate files to each other. So if you've got a photograph, and it might be the universities and schools is a very good example, you've got pictures of say a sports day, but there are children in the photo and you need to have consent from the parents. So you obviously have some content, the photo, but you also have metadata about that photo, which in this case might be some forms that have been signed and stored alongside them. So it's important to be able to connect content together in that way as well. And these are great examples actually, Kiran. I'm sort of pleased that we can see that in the real world, it's not really qu