Laura Jones: 00:10
Have you ever heard that you can't measure creativity? There's this inherent tension between art and science. On one hand, creativity and the creative process is this magical mythical thing. It defies logic and expectation. And then when it comes to the world of marketing, there's so many stats and analytics and facts and figures.

Laura Jones: 00:32
And these two worlds oftentimes are in direct competition. But what if everything we thought we knew about measurement was wrong? What if there is a way to bridge the gap, not just between measurement and creativity, but in between creativity in sales? Today, I'm so excited for Manjiry Tamhane, global CEO of Game Theory, to join us today. And she is going to talk all about how we can overcome this myth and some actionable strategies to getting creativity more effective.

Laura Jones: 01:08
I'm Laura Jones, and this is Opinion Party, the podcast where we dispel the most pervasive myths in marketing today. Welcome to the party, Manjiry.

Manjiry Tamhane: 01:17
Thank you, Laura. It's wonderful to be here.

Laura Jones: 01:20
So, since this is a party and I know you love wine, I wanted to warm up for a little game. So, we're going do a quiz. Is that Okay?

Manjiry Tamhane: 01:28
That sounds fantastic. Okay. So, I've got

Laura Jones: 01:32
three questions prepared for you. It'll be a lightning round. I'll give you two choices, and you just yell out your choice. Okay. Ready?

Laura Jones: 01:39
Here we go. Let's go. Old world or new world? Old world for me. Red or white?

Laura Jones: 01:45
Red for me. Bubbles or no bubbles?

Manjiry Tamhane: 01:48
Oh, I love bubbles.

Laura Jones: 01:51
Me too. So, let's get right into the heart of the myth that you can't measure creativity, and you can't tie it to sales. What are marketers missing when it comes to this today?

Manjiry Tamhane: 02:01
Well, we've been able to measure the impact of activities, brand, and marketing activities for decades now. And we've always known it's about how we get the right message to the right person through the right channel at the right time. Now historically, a lot of that measurement has really been about the media. When we model, we're modeling the impression, so we really get a sense of how the media is actually performed. But creativity is inherently part of that impression.

Manjiry Tamhane: 02:32
It's just that we've not really been able to tease that out until now. And the challenge has been the quality of the data around creative. But now we're able to and it's quite boring. It's quite dull, the concept of taxonomy. But taxonomy is critical to creative measurement.

Manjiry Tamhane: 02:53
And so, at game theory, with the advances in AI, what we've now been able to do is actually codify creative. So, you and I could look at a piece of creative and we'd describe it probably slightly differently. But if you try to do that over thousands and thousands of creative, it's really hard to do that manually. And so now with advances in AI, we're able to kind of codify that and actually create data that allows us to measure.

Laura Jones: 03:25
Manjiry, you are one of the smartest people I know, and I love when we get, like, right into the geeky stuff. But for the audience out there that isn't quite sure what taxonomy is, can you just give us a little bit of primer on that?

Manjiry Tamhane: 03:37
Yeah. Absolutely. Taxonomy gives data context. It just gives you an understanding of, I could say 20, but am I talking about 20 centimeters, 20 meters? What am I actually referring to?

Manjiry Tamhane: 03:51
So, taxonomy is really about giving data context. So, when we start to measure a model, we understand from the insight what's that referring to and then we can make a more confident decision off of that data.

Laura Jones: 04:05
Excellent. And gain theory has been, you mentioned AI, gain theory has been at the forefront of using AI for decades, really. I think most people were just thinking of AI in terms of the Terminator in the movies. And you were already applying it for practical business application. It is such a broad term.

Laura Jones: 04:22
We are going to hear so much of it, only increasingly more. Can you define when we're talking about AI here in the context of marketing, marketing analytics, what we're talking about?

Manjiry Tamhane: 04:33
Yeah. Look, I think everybody feels as though what's happened over the last two, three years is this sudden explosion of AI. And that's just not the case. I mean, AI has been around for decades. I mean, it started back in the 1950s with concepts like the Turing test, which sort of gave us the ability to look at machines from a point of view of how close are they to simulating human like intelligence.

Manjiry Tamhane: 05:00
And that really laid the groundwork for what we know as AI today. Fast forward to the 1980s, and then we had concepts like machine learning, supervised, unsupervised reinforcement learning. And that allowed us to take structured data and do rules-based algorithms, which in marketing gave rise to things that we know and familiar with, like customer segmentation, basket analysis, fraud detection, direct marketing. All of that came about as a result of the machine learning capability. Then by the time we got to the 2000s, we actually had neural networks, deep learning.

Manjiry Tamhane: 05:40
And that's a lot of the foundation to what we have today. But that deep learning, that coincided with the sort of the .com boom. And so, we were able to do social listening, we were able to do image recognition, we were able to do those first sort of chatbots that you saw back in the February. And in fact, I built my first neural network back in 02/2004. Very rudimentary.

Manjiry Tamhane: 06:06
We're talking over twenty years ago now.

Laura Jones: 06:08
I told you she was the smartest person I knew.

Manjiry Tamhane: 06:11
But this is a journey that we've been on for an incredibly long time. And now today, we have these multimodal models that we're all using, and that's laying the groundwork now to things like agents. And I'm sure, Laura, you have created an agent. And now we're able to get agents to talk to each other. And we're now sort of in the era of agentic AI.

Laura Jones: 06:37
Let's roll up. Let's roll back. Okay. What's an agent? What's

Manjiry Tamhane: 06:40
an Agents are Gen AIs that you create yourself. So, you feed it with some data, and then you give it some instructions. So, for example, with you for BAV group, you could give it some BAV group data, whether that's for a particular brand or for a whole category. And then you could start to give that context some instructions. So, you could say, I'm a v BAV group consultant.

Manjiry Tamhane: 07:07
I'm female. I, I have my expertise in this. And so. you give it instructions and then you can start to query the agent in the same way that you would with, any of the large language models whether that's ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini. So, you're effectively creating your own large language model to then query. So, it's just giving it context.

Manjiry Tamhane: 07:30
So, in the world of gain theory, I could create a gain theory data agent that is an expert on understanding data. I could create an analytical agent that's an expert on analyzing the data. I could then get those two agents to start to converse with each other. And that takes us towards Agentic AI. So Agentic AI is now where agents are actually making decisions for themselves with limited human intervention.

Manjiry Tamhane: 08:00
And that's a really exciting development in this world.

Laura Jones: 08:03
And that unlock with AI has now enabled creativity to be part of the measurement equation.

Manjiry Tamhane: 08:09
How did that come about? Well, I mentioned about taxonomy and how data is absolutely critical. And the thing that we've struggled with up until now is the amount of volume of data that comes with a creative. So, if you go to describe an ad, you'll have an incredibly long narrative. And the way, as I said, you would describe the ad would be different to the way I would describe the ad.

Manjiry Tamhane: 08:35
But now that we've got that taxonomy, there's so much that we can do with it. When we talk about effectiveness, we talk about e equals m c squared. And you'll know e equals m c squared from the physics world. But in my marketing world, the e stands for effectiveness, the m is media, the c is the central creative idea, and the final c is creative execution. So, when I talk about the central creative idea, I'm talking about the thing that a consumer would recognize as being part of your brand.

Manjiry Tamhane: 09:10
So, if you think about Snickers, you're not you when you're hungry. When you think about Dove, you think real beauty. So that's what the central creative idea is. Creative execution is then how you bring that creative idea to life through the hundreds and thousands of pieces of content that you deploy through the media. And that's where AI has really been an unlock, which is the c squared bit, particularly that creative execution.

Manjiry Tamhane: 09:40
E equals m c squared. I love that. It is so creative. Don't mind the pun.

Laura Jones: 09:48
And can you give me an example of what looks this looks like for a client in action? You mentioned hundreds of thousands of pieces of creative. I imagine manually that would be literally impossible to define in the same way. What is this process that AI now makes possible where once humans was out of the realm of possibility?

Manjiry Tamhane: 10:09
Well, so I'll give an example. One of our clients last year, they produced over 300,000 pieces of content. Now to manually go and codify that just but it just wouldn't be possible. But with AI, we can take all of those hundreds of thousands of ads and actually create a super-rich narrative describing the ad in real detail, what type of car is in the ad, what's the color of the car, is it daytime, is it nighttime, is there a dog. So really, really rich super narrative.

Manjiry Tamhane: 10:45
From those super rich narratives, we can then start to extract the keywords. What are those keywords within the ad? From those keywords, we can start to and I'm getting a bit geeky here. We can start to create like a multidimensional vector that then is part forms part of that taxonomy. But we can take that and then sort of plot it in two-dimensional space.

Manjiry Tamhane: 11:09
So now if you can imagine, every single ad that you've created over the last six months, you can now start to see the creative territories that you're a part of. So, if you're in, say, financial services and you're a credit card, you know, you talk about luxury, you talk about travel, you talk about your brand. And so, you can start to see which territories do you occupy and also start to understand which territories your competitors start to occupy. So, it really starts to bring all of this to life. And it's really empowering marketers to understand and creatives to understand what territories do I own strategically, what territories could I start to go after.

Manjiry Tamhane: 11:51
You can start to look at which features work best, which are some of the boosting features that, improve the effectiveness of your ad. It really is a tool for creatives to put value on their work and sort of be able to demonstrate in the same way that media has the importance of it. I mean, creativity is about 49% according to the IPA of the uplift in sales. So, it's really a crucial part and it's great that we're now being able to not just measure it but tie it back to sales.

Laura Jones: 12:23
So let me make sure that I've got this right. I'm going to use this vase on the table as an example. So, for those of you listening, there is a disco ball, very on theme for opinion party. We're using it as a vase sitting in the middle of a white table. It's got some pink flowers in it, and it's got some white flowers in it.

Laura Jones: 12:44
And the way I might describe this could be totally different than the way that Manjiry might describe it. Is that right?

Manjiry Tamhane: 12:52
Yeah. Absolutely. And I would describe it potentially in a in a similar but different way. But with the generative AI, it would actually recognize every single plot that's there and be able to name the plants, name the actual kind of tone of the color. It would describe the lighting.

Manjiry Tamhane: 13:13
It would describe whether it's indoors, outdoors, the sort of height of the vase, so it would give a much more rich super narrative description to it. And then if there was a second vase with a second set of flowers, then it would sort of pick out all of those and then it would pull out keywords around the pink versus the purple versus yellow flowers versus white flowers. So, you'll get a much richer description. And then if we would take that and try and link it to sales, you'd start to be able to pull out that the purple works better than the pink in the context of that particular app. I'm not saying that that's the case, but that's how we can start to bring the creative data now to life through measurement and tying it back to sales.

Laura Jones: 14:02
Wow. That consistency that the AI enables is just something that we could never do, even if we all were sat in a room and it defies space and time. That is incredible. When you started talking about the red versus the blue and tying it to sales, I kind of wonder. I just was like, oh, does that taking a little bit of the magic out of it?

Laura Jones: 14:27
And I want to understand, first of all, your view on creativity personally. And then what you might say to people that feel like, oh, are we taking all the fun out of this?

Manjiry Tamhane: 14:38
Actually, I think this is going to bring the fun back into creativity. I mean, creative is so important. Creativity is about storytelling. It's about making that emotional connection. It's about that cultural relevance.

Manjiry Tamhane: 14:51
And I feel so much of the measurement that we've done so far has really been focused on media and channel and less about the creativity. And so, as I said, creativity is about how do you bring something to life. Now, I could have some data. I could have some data on churn. I could be a SaaS provider.

Manjiry Tamhane: 15:11
I've got some churn stats, average churn rate, time to churn. And, you know, that could be presented and everybody's like nodding away. But it's like, so what? What's the relevance of that? But if I told a story, which is what creativity is really about, if I talked a story about Sarah, Sarah's been customer for three years.

Manjiry Tamhane: 15:33
Sarah's been a regular customer and recently she had a problem with the payment system. And so twice it failed to accept her payment and now Sarah hasn't shopped with us for three months. It's like, woah. Okay. I now need to do something about that because we've told a story from the data as opposed to just presenting some facts.

Manjiry Tamhane: 15:57
So, with the creative effectiveness tool, and particularly now with the ability to generate so much content, you've got this wonderful, amazing central creative idea that's then being executed. But you don't know, is that always on brand? You're not always signing off every single post in every single channel. So, this tool now gives you the ability to understand if the execution is in line with your central creative idea but also allows you to start exploring new creative territories. So, for me, this is a real boost, a real tool.

Manjiry Tamhane: 16:33
It's a friend for creatives to help them shine a light on the importance of the work.

Laura Jones: 16:40
That's really fascinating. It sounds like this innovative technology, this use of AI is actually bringing, in a way, some more humanity back to the process. Because now that people that are making the ads and placing the ads and assessing the ads can also view it through the lens of the consumer and have this empathy before. And speaking of humans and empathy, those two philosophies are really core to the principles of the Institute for Real Growth. And so, bringing it back to that, let's talk a little bit about the relationship between measurement and growth and how you see the two combining in a holistic way to contributing to overall value for all stakeholders.

Manjiry Tamhane: 17:28
I mean, these are challenging times for a lot of businesses. And when we talk to organizations, they're suffering from so many sort of different pain points. One of them is around how do I unlock growth when there's so much uncertainty in the world? A second really is around how do I actually prove the value of kind of my investments that I'm making, particularly around marketing? And then also, how do I start to get more actionability from a lot of the complex marketing ecosystems that I've built kind of around me?

Manjiry Tamhane: 18:04
And I think when we go to the first pain point and sort of being able to navigate through like increased competition, increased uncertainty, it's how do I find new sources and levers for growth? And the creative effectiveness product that I talked about, I think that's a way of unlocking more growth out of, the investments that you're already making. But also, a lot of brands are now starting to move into things like sponsorships and doing partnership deals. And we've done a lot of work to help unlock growth from some of those investments as well. So, we're branching out into other areas where those areas can start to unlock growth for businesses.

Manjiry Tamhane: 18:48
So, when it comes to measurement, we measure what we have data on. But now through AI and increases in the amount of data that we've got availability to, but also the computing power that we've got, there’s so much more of the investment that we're making in marketing that we can start to unlock and put value to that. So, I think it's a really exciting time. Absolutely. And pain points for sure are something that game theory pays close attention to.

Manjiry Tamhane: 19:20
I know you recently developed a white paper in coordination with work that addressed the pain points of marketers today. What are the key findings from that? Well, so, yes, data and measurement techniques can be a pain point, but actually there's a lot more to it. And the foundation to the accelerating growth playbook that we did with Walk is a product that we've got called the marketing impact readiness assessment. And MIRROR, which is our short name for it, looks across seven pillars.

Manjiry Tamhane: 19:56
And these are seven pillars that really could stand in the way for you unlocking growth. And it's everything from the culture within your organization, how KPIs are set, are your personal KPIs aligned with the business KPIs, looking at customer data, looking at the marketing data, looking at culture, looking at innovation. So, it looks across a lot of things. And what we find today is that actually a lot of companies have got quite good quality data and quite mature measurement. But where they're struggling is really the marketing transformation and the culture within their organization and being able to take those insights and activate them for growth.

Manjiry Tamhane: 20:40
And so, at Game Theory, what we're really proud of what we do is about giving unmatched value. So typically, from a program, to enhance, the effectiveness, you'll get about a 20 to 30% uplift. And that's great, but how much of that uplift is actually turned into real growth because people have the confidence to make the decisions that actually activate on that. And so, at Game Theory, we're really keen to ensure that we give that unmatched value and give you the confidence because you've got the transformation, you've got the culture, people's KPIs are aligned alongside the data, the measurement and the insights to unlock growth.

Laura Jones: 21:23
So, it sounds like you talk to a lot of marketers that do know what they're doing, but also maybe some that have no place to go, nowhere to turn, no place to start. It sounds like Mira is an excellent tool. I think it's very clever as well. Mira, seeing meaning, you know, it has a double meaning in different languages. In addition to doing the MIRA measurement framework, what other things can marketers do to create a stronger culture of measurement in their organizations if one doesn't already exist?

Manjiry Tamhane: 21:56
Well, I think it's looking at, well, what are the decisions that you want to make that you can't make today? If you understand the decisions that you could make, how you would implement them and how that could unlock growth, that's a really good starting point. So, understanding the pain points in your own organization, understanding the questions that you want to answer, using things like MIRROR to understand where are you on the journey. So good, better, best. And not every organization wants to be the best at everything.

Manjiry Tamhane: 22:28
But where are you on the journey today? How do you benchmark against other organizations across your industry? And then what's the roadmap to get to where you want to get to? So really starting with your key questions and understanding your pain points has got to be the starting point.

Laura Jones: 22:46
Business fundamentals. In order to get where you're going, you have to know where you are. So, I think we have time for one more question. The party's just about wrapping up, but I want to point out the fact that you are not only the smartest person I know and an incredible measurement executive, but you're also a global CEO running a business. And one of the focuses of the IRG is actually in how the chief marketing officer can interact better with the other members of the c suite and be more effective in the boardroom.

Laura Jones: 23:20
So, from your perch as CEO, what advice would you give to marketers in order to enable and foster better collaboration?

Manjiry Tamhane: 23:29
Yeah. And so, thank you for that, Laura. That's very kind. I think I additionally, with my CEO role at Game Theory, I'm fortunate enough to also sit as a nonexec director of a FTSE one hundred company in the UK. And so, I get to hear the conversations between the CEO, the CFO, the chair, and the rest of my board colleagues.

Manjiry Tamhane: 23:51
And so having really good context about the company, the corporate strategy, what's on the mind of the CEO, what's on the mind of the CFO, what are some of the challenges that they're talking about to investors, to their customers, understanding the strategy within the annual report. Once you understand the strategy and the direction of your company, it's how do you put what you're doing within marketing in context of their world. So, and we all say that marketing is the engine of growth. If for your CFO or CEO, you could say, imagine a world where we could unlock an additional thirty, forty, fifty million dollars worth of growth. $300,000,000 worth of growth.

Manjiry Tamhane: 24:39
And this is how we could go about doing it. I guarantee you, your CEO, CFO is going to go, okay, tell me more. How? And so, your marketing strategy really needs to be geared up around how are we going to drive a short- and long-term growth for the organization through the investments that we're making.

Laura Jones: 24:59
Sounds like speaking their language.

Manjiry Tamhane: 25:02
Absolutely. You have to speak their language.

Laura Jones: 25:05
Well, thank you so much, Manjiry, for joining me today. This has been so incredible. We all got a lot smarter. We learned a lot about measurement, and thanks for joining the party. Thank you, Laura.

Laura Jones: 25:18
Thank you very much for having me here. If you want to learn more about anything you heard in today's episode, we're going to put some links and some research in the show notes, so be sure to check that out. As always, everyone's invited to opinion party, so please hit like, subscribe, and share. See you later.