What’s the future of creativity in advertising—can AI replace the human touch in building memorable brands?

In this episode of the Conquer Local Podcast, we’re joined by James Hurman, a leading figure in advertising and brand strategy. Throughout his career, James has won more than 50 awards for advertising effectiveness and was named the world’s number-one strategic planning director in 2013.

He’s co-founded and scaled global brands like Tracksuit and AF Drinks, and founded the venture studio Previously Unavailable, helping startups create innovative products and scale successfully.

James is also an accomplished author, with his latest book, Future Demand, offering insights into how startups can move beyond early adopters. He’s the mastermind behind multiple marketing effectiveness studies, including The Effectiveness Code and The B2B Effectiveness Code.

Tune in as James shares his wealth of experience and wisdom on brand building, creative strategy, and how to succeed in today’s competitive market! 

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Why Your Short-Term Wins Might Be Hurting Your Long-Term Goals

Introduction 

I’m Jeff Tomlin and on this episode, we’re pleased to welcome James Hurman.

James is a true advertising titan experienced in advertising, branding and business growth. With over 50 awards for advertising effectiveness under his belt, including being named the world’s top strategic planning director in 2013, James has proven his ability to create impactful campaigns. 

James has co-founded and scaled multiple global brands and is the mastermind behind Previously Unavailable, a venture studio helping startups thrive. 

His expertise is backed by his insightful books, including “Future Demand,” and groundbreaking studies like “The Effectiveness Code.” 

Get ready Conquerors for James Hurman coming up next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local Podcast.

James Hurman Transitioned from IT to Advertising, Emphasizing Effectiveness.

Jeff Tomlin: James Hurman, welcome. All the way coming to us from New Zealand. I appreciate you taking some time to join us in the podcast. How are you doing today, sir?

James Hurman: I’m doing great, man. Yeah, it’s 8:30. I’m looking outside. It’s a bit of a gray day here, but we are in the middle of winter, so that’s to be expected. But it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Jeff Tomlin: And we are just at the tail end of our day over here in Canada. Yeah, it’s amazing having you on the show, and I was looking forward to this chat for some time. You’ve got an incredibly distinguished career and a long track record in advertising. I wanted to jump in here and just ask you to give us a nickel tour of how’d you get started. Was this always a passion for you, or is it something that you just got into? What did the path of your career look like?

James Hurman: I had a pretty circuitous route into advertising, so I actually dropped out of high school, didn’t go to university, ended up working in a office job, got employed by the IT manager who taught me how to fix computers, and I did that for the first seven years of my career. I fixed computers and ended up fixing computers in an ad agency and figured out that what they were doing was a whole lot more interesting than what I was doing. And then, kind of conned my way into advertising and started as a strategic planner. Spent a little bit of time as a creative along the way, but most of my time in advertising was spent in planning. And along the way, became really interested in advertising effectiveness, particularly the connection between creativity and effectiveness.

And so, really the last, I guess, 10 or 15 years of my life, a big part of it has been studying advertising and marketing effectiveness and then taking that into the stuff that I do now, where I actually don’t work in advertising anymore. My company works with startups and venture capital firms and helps those sorts of early-stage, high-growth companies create their brands and market themselves and hopefully become big successful global companies.

James Hurman Teaches Evidence-based Advertising Principles for Campaign Effectiveness.

Jeff Tomlin: You probably need more than one wall to house all of the awards that you’ve won for the campaigns that you’ve done over the years. And so, I’d be remiss, I love any opportunity that we have to pass on tactical strategies and knowledge onto our listener base. And so, one thing I wanted talk about is you’ve got a list of principles that you sort of follow when you’re thinking about creating an effective campaign. I was wondering if you could maybe walk us through your thought process and what those principles are.

James Hurman: Sure. I mean, I’ll speak to the principles that I teach on my online program, which is called the Master of Advertising Effectiveness, and I’ve been teaching that for a little over three years. And on the program, I bring together all of the evidence-based principles of advertising effectiveness. So what I mean by that is the principles that have been, it’s not my experience of what works in advertising, it’s not anecdotal examples, it’s the principles that have been drawn from major data studies of marketing and advertising data. Researchers have looked into that, run statistical analyses, found patterns in that data, and helped us understand what works and how we can make it work better when we’re advertising. And so, some of those principles, they range from budgeting and how we set budgets appropriately in relation to our competitors so we’re set up for growth, targeting and how we target markets in the right way, managing our short-term performance marketing versus our long-term brand building. And then, the use of things like distinctive assets to build mental availability, the use of emotion and how emotion works to bond people with brands and reduce price sensitivity. And then, creativity and the link between creativity and effectiveness and how we can use campaign award-winning qualities like originality and engaging ideas and great craft execution. And then, media principles, how to optimize the budget, the length of time and market, the number of media channels that our campaign runs across. So all of those different things that I’ve just described are kind of like ingredients in an effectiveness cake that you’re trying to bake when you’re an appetizer, and it’s about getting all of those things in the right measure. It’s not about just doing one or two of them well. If you bake a cake, and you leave out the sugar or you leave out the flour, but you get everything else right, it’s not a great cake. So effectiveness is a bit like baking a cake. It’s about getting all of those different variables right to ensure that what we put out into the world ends up driving a commercial result that we’re looking for.

Brand-Building and Performance Ads Succeed Separately, not Combined.

Jeff Tomlin: You mentioned there long-term brand building campaigns versus performance campaigns. And one of the things I wanted to touch on was, are the two mutually exclusive? Are Attention-grabbing creativity, is it mutually exclusive to performance-driven, conversion-optimized campaigns, or can you have your cake and eat it too?

James Hurman: Yeah, it’s a really interesting question that’s been going around for some time now is, can we do it all with one ad? And that seems to be some kind of holy grail in the industry. Can we make one ad that both builds a brand over the long term and drives sales lift in the short term? To speak to that, it’s not about doing one or other of these things, it’s about doing both of them, of course. And what I wrote about in my most recent book, which is called Future Demand, is this really simple concept that in any market there are two types of demand. There’s what I call existing demand, the demand that exists in the market, the people that are in the category, and they’re ready to buy today. And there’s what I call future demand, which is people who are going to come into the category at some point in the future, but they’re not in it right now. Now, the thing that I do with audiences that I talk to, it doesn’t work very well with an audience of just you in front of me, but we’ll try it anyway. Are you right now looking for a new mobile phone, a new smartphone handset?

Jeff Tomlin: I’m not right now, but will be.

James Hurman: Yeah, yeah. Do you think you will over the next 18 months at some point?

Jeff Tomlin: Yes.

James Hurman: Yeah, yeah. So I asked this to audiences. So say I’m with an audience of a couple of hundred people, I’ll ask people to put up their hand if they’re buying a new mobile phone right now or they have done in the past sort of week, and one or two hands go up. And then, I say, “Who thinks they’ll buy a new mobile phone in the next 18 months?” And everyone puts their hand up. And that’s what I used to illustrate the fact that, in markets, there’s always a small group of people that are in the market and ready to buy right now and a much larger group of people who aren’t ready to buy right now, but they’re going to come into the market at some point. When we build brand, really what we are doing is we are trying to build up a sense of familiarity of our brand among the people who will come into the market later. So those people, they’re not interested in the rational information about the mobile phone. They’re not interested in the features and benefits and star ratings and where they can get it and how much it costs. All of that information is totally irrelevant to them because they’re not in the market yet. They just block that stuff out. But that sort of information is highly relevant to those people who are in the market. They will naturally gravitate towards that information. They will look at it, read it, pour over it, remember it because it’s relevant to them. They’re trying to make a decision, and they want to make a good one. So these are two really different styles of advertising that do two really different jobs. One is a bit more rational, a bit less creative but more informational, a bit more call to action driven, targeted as much as we can at the people that are in the market today. The other form of advertising is much more broadly targeted to that big group of people that’ll come into the market later. It needs to be more creative, more emotional. It’s not about delivering features and benefits. It’s about doing something that will make we that we are remembered, and we’re remembered in a positive way. And so, if you think about those two jobs, they’re really easy to do in two different executions. They could be within the same campaign, so they could have the same tagline at the end or the same visual design and all that kind of stuff. But you’re really trying to do two separate jobs, and it’s really easy to do both of those jobs with just two different executions, one that’s a bit more emotional and creative and targeted broadly, one that’s a bit more informational and targeted tightly. Now, because it’s so easy to do those two jobs separately, it’s so easy, there’s no need to try and put those two jobs together into one ad. That’s kind of futile. We sort of look for this as if it’s this kind of holy grail, “I want to just make one ad to do everything.” It’s highly, highly unlikely, and the research plays this out. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll do both of those jobs well with one ad, but it’s highly likely that you’ll do both of those jobs well with two different ads run in two different ways. So I think the question of, can we do the whole thing in one ad, it’s a pointless question. We don’t need to do it all in one ad. It’s really easy to do it in two. You should just do that because your chances of success are much, much higher.

Stay Ahead through Research, Experimentation, and Constant Learning.

Jeff Tomlin: Well, that settles that. Thank you for sorting that out in my head. This is a changing space, and I’ve talked about this with a lot of our guests. What are the things that you do to stay ahead of the curve?

James Hurman: Ahead of the curve? It’s interesting because I can look at that in a few different ways. So from an advertising effectiveness point of view, what I do to stay ahead of the curve, I guess, is I do a lot of research myself. I read a lot and stay abreast of what’s happening in the effectiveness world. There’s a small group of us effectiveness nerds around the world who geek out on this stuff and publish research around it. We all know each other pretty well, and so we follow each other’s stuff. When it comes to creativity and how to stay ahead in that, and in our company in New Zealand, we’re working with companies that are predominantly at the forefront of their industry. So these are startups that are creating novel technologies and taking them to market, and we have this belief in our company that the best way to predict the future is to create it. And so, we’re trying to stay ahead through experimentation, through creating new things, putting them into the world, seeing what works, and doubling down on what does and learning from what doesn’t. And so, I think the way that I keep ahead is through constant experimentation, constantly trying new things, creating an environment in our company that is very experimental and rewards experimentation. I think it’s very hard to predict the future, and determine what’s going to be effective or the right thing. You’ve just got to get out and start trying, start experimenting, and let the results lead you.

Jeff Tomlin: Sometimes in my past, I’ve struggled with experimentation because I always wanted everything to hit. And if you’re really doing experimenting right, you’re going to stretch in some different directions to figure out what works. I never wanted to see anything fail, but you take 10 ideas, and one or two of them are going to really nail it.

James Hurman: That’s right.

Cheaper, Quicker Research Enables More Experimentation and Learning.

Jeff Tomlin: And sometimes that’s hard for a perfectionist to accept.

James Hurman: It’s really hard. And the way sometimes that our industry is structured is it sort of incentivizes us. It rewards us when we get things right, and it doesn’t reward us so much when we get things wrong. It’s really interesting. One of our companies that we’ve created out of Previously Unavailable is called Ideally and Ideally is a rapid research platform. So you can do quantitative research with real humans that would normally be thousands of dollars and take you a few weeks, and you can do that for more like hundreds of dollars and in a 24-hour period. And I was having a conversation about this the other day with someone, and the traditional research process, it incentivizes us to really want to get the thing right. If we’re going to put something into research, we’re going to spend all of that money, we’re going to take all of that time, the stakes are high. We agonize over getting it right. We really want to put something into that research that’s going to be bang on and going to get a green light from consumers and allow us to go ahead. And if we don’t get anything positive out of that research, then it feels like there’s a huge sunk cost, and we’ve done the wrong thing, and we’re bummed out. When you make research much, much cheaper and much quicker, you allow people to do several different little experiments over a series of days. And it doesn’t matter if some of those don’t work out and some of them do, right? That’s really good. And so, that allows you to put things into research that might be at the edges of stuff, might really kind of push an idea in a certain direction that you don’t necessarily expect to fully hit the mark, but you know you’re going to learn a bunch from that you can take into your next iteration. And so, I find this really fascinating how we break down the barriers that prevent us from experimenting and how we sort create things that allow us to do so in a much sort of safer, more flexible, speedy, open way because we need to be on our journey of experimentation, of figuring out what works. We need to have low stakes along the way. We need to be able to mess up. We need to be able to get stuff wrong. We need to be able learn from what doesn’t work as much as what does.

Standout Brands Balance Unique Design, Positioning, and Long-Term Consistency.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, I think you’re bang on when you say you’ve got to have this environment where people are free to experiment, and they’re free to make mistakes. But it’s the only way that you discover amazing things and an amazing way to do things. And boy does it ever stand out when you see someone that’s really hit the nail on the head, especially brands. When people have really figured out their brand identity, it really stands out, the companies that really have a great identity and they’re long-lasting, versus ones that are more or less not memorable. Maybe you could comment a little bit on that. In your mind, what are the things that really make a long-lasting, enduring brand?

James Hurman: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I mean, you mentioned brands that don’t stand out so much. We’ve definitely been through, particularly over the last 10 years or so, and particularly through that direct-to-consumer era where all of the brands started to all look like Casper and Warby Parker. As marketers, we often fall into the trap of believing that, if a competitor or someone else looked a certain way and feels a certain way, we should look and feel that way too because they must have cracked the code for, that’s how you need to look and feel to be successful in this category. When in actual fact, the research proves the exact opposite. The last thing you want to do is look and feel like the others in your category. You really, really want to stand out.

So that’s really critical. I mean, we think about it as, when it comes to brand strategy, there’s obviously the positioning job, really figuring out who you are, what your mission is and your purpose is, and translating that into a key message or a core positioning for the brand. And then, designing in a way that, A, really serves that positioning, that message, but does it in a way that’s completely different to anyone else in the category. And I think those two things are really important is this strategic aspect of design, which is, how do we use design to really, really effectively communicate our positioning and our personality, and then the creative aspect of design, which is, how do we do that in a way that feels really different to everyone else around us? So I think those are two really essential sort of basics. And then, in terms of building the brand, it’s about consistency. It’s just about brutal consistency, going out and saying that same thing over and over and over and over again, tons of different ways if you like, but all within the world of your brand and your personality and just being really true to that for a long time. That produces compounding results. And so, that’s probably how I look at it, getting it right strategically, getting it right from a creative and design point of view, and then really sticking to it proudly, going again and again and again as much as you can, putting your brand into everything you do and everywhere your company shows up, and just really, really doubling down on it for a really, really long time. And I mean, years and years and years, and that’s what ends up building great brands.

AI will Automate Performance Marketing, but Assist in Brand Marketing.

Jeff Tomlin: One of the things at the top of everyone’s mind is AI right now. I’m asking all of my guests for their perspective on AI in their areas of specialty, and in every area, I’m sort of finding the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to using AI. How do you see it changing advertising right now for the good, and maybe you’ve got any examples of the ugly?

James Hurman: Sure, yeah. I mean, I think my prediction is AI will automate virtually all of performance marketing and virtually none of brand marketing. And the reason that I say that is that there’s more of a recipe for performance marketing than there is for brand marketing. When you’re performance marketing, there are actually automatable ways of targeting the right people and putting the right kind of functional information in front of them and designing that into something which is in the style of your brand and fits into its guidelines. That can all be automated pretty easily. On the brand side, when you’re really trying to think about, how do we engage that much bigger audience of the future demand in our category? How do we engage them with emotional stories, with things that they’re really going to remember, with things that are really going to stand out from everything else in the market? I don’t think that AI is ever going to do a great job of doing that. I think it’s going to assist us in doing that. It’s going to be able to make sure that we have much better and more frequent stimulus to work with in our creative process, for sure. But it’s not going to do that essential piece of strategic or creative thinking that manages to do that brand building job that advertising needs to do. So yeah, I’m pretty optimistic about AI being an amazing efficiency driver in performance marketing, and just a good tool and helper along the way when we’re doing brand building campaigns. That’s the way that I see it.

James Hurman is Reachable via LinkedIn or jameshurman.com.

Jeff Tomlin: You have an amazing knack for breaking down things, all advertising, branding, and creative, into very relatable terms that I think will be easy for people to remember and take away from. I really want to thank you for taking time out of your busy day to join us and share a little bit of your wisdom that you’ve gained over your many years in this space. If people wanted to reach out to you and continue the conversation, how do they get ahold of you, James?

James Hurman: Yeah, I’m pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can get ahold of me there, or you can go to jameshurman.com and come to my website and connect with me there.

Jeff Tomlin: I’d love to do this again sometime and do a deep dive into any one of the areas that we touched on over the last 20 minutes. It’s a real pleasure chatting with you, getting to know you a little bit on the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us, and I hope to bring you back and have another chat in the future.

James Hurman: Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me on. Have a great day.

Conclusion

Jeff Tomlin: There you have it from a real advertising pro. 

The first takeaway is about Balancing Short-Term and Long-Term Marketing: Effective marketing requires a dual focus on both immediate results such as performance marketing, and building brand awareness, which is future demand. James strongly feels these two objectives should be addressed separately to maximize impact.

The second takeaway is the Power of Creativity and Consistency. While data and strategy are essential, creativity plays a crucial role in differentiating brands. Consistent execution of a strong brand strategy, combined with a culture of experimentation, is key to long-term success.

If you’ve enjoyed James’s episode discussing Advertising Effectiveness and Brand Building, keep the conversation going and revisit some of our older episodes from the archives: Check out Episode 713: Keep Your Customers: How to Stop Churn and Grow Your Business with Ali Cudby or Episode 703: How to Build a High Performing In-House Agency with Kasper Sierslev

Until next time, I’m Jeff Tomlin. Get out there and be awesome!