0:00:12 – Intro
Welcome to Genuine Humans, exploring the stories behind the great marketing leaders of our time and hearing how their journeys have influenced the brands they’ve built. Brought to you by the Social Element, here are our hosts Tamara Littleton, CEO and founder, and Wendy Christie, Chief People Officer.
0:00:44 – Tamara Littleton
Welcome back to the Genuine Humans podcast. I’m here with Wendy Christie, my co-host. Wendy, is everything going alright with you this week?
Wendy Christie
Everything’s going great, thank you. How are you?
Tamara
I’m good. I’m looking forward to you actually coming down from Scotland to London very, very soon, which is happening all this week, which is great.
So, we are here today with Kate Cox, who I would describe as a friend of the agency, a friend of mine, but also Kate has worked with high-growth companies, including GoDaddy and Moneypenny, and is now CMO for BrightBid, which is an ad tech company that uses AI and automation to optimise paid search and Google shopping.
So, Kate is going to tell us all about that, but welcome Kate onto the podcast.
Kate Cox
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
Tamara
So, you’re working with BrightBid, and that’s an exciting Swedish scale-up, and they’re using AI, and I know you’ve got a history of working with startups and scale-ups, so before we get on to BrightBid, would you mind kind of going backwards and just sort of saying, how the hell did you get here?
0:01:50 – Kate
Yes, no problem.
So, I started a very long time ago Tamara, probably about the same time as you did in the media and advertising industry. I actually got a job with a company called IDK Media, first as a TV buyer, and I was really impressed that IDK was a team of like 15 guys who went to the pub a lot at lunchtime and bought the BT account and the Heinz beans account. They bought massive telly accounts, and they went to the pub a lot. I was really impressed that they’d hired me as the first-ever woman until I actually got there, and they were like oh no, Kate, we’ve tried to hire loads of women, but no one’s actually said yes.
So, yeah, yeah, you’re the only one who said yes. So I worked with them. That was really good fun. I learned the basics of TV buying, and then I moved over to planning at Leo Burnett. When Leo Burnett was a full-service media and creative agency, I think we were one of the last. We were the last bastion, and I had an absolute ball working with the creative teams, the account management team. I really learned the sort of big brand advertising at Leo Burnett.
We worked on McDonald’s, and we did some, you know, big brand, beautiful creative. It was at the time that McDonald’s in the UK was leading the creative globally for amazing ads really emotional storytelling. So I worked in the media department there, had a fantastic time, moved around a number of other media agencies.
I worked at BMP. I think my claim to fame at BMP was I worked there during the dot-com boom, and we just pitched every single dot-com startup that came through the door, and they had a really famous ad creative called John Webster. He sadly died, and he used to let me pitch the media plan before he did the creative. And I think that was a first for BMP because it was dot-com, and it was new, and people were trying new things.
And then I moved to Havas for years. So I was at Havas for years, and we bought a little bit of kit out of the dot-com boom that did attribution, really early attribution in the year 2000, and that just supercharged their growth in brand and performance marketing. So we were really good at performance marketing. And then Google launched. So, this is all before Google launched, right?
0:04:14 – Tamara Littleton
Yeah, it’s incredible to think that, isn’t it?
0:04:18 – Kate Cox
Yeah, oh my God, man, and then just totally upended what you can do with marketing, and I think it was it was a revelation for many companies. I think that they could grow through marketing in a really scalable and forecastable way. And so at Havas, I work with big brands like AXA and Camelot, the National Lottery, to really figure out the sort of balance between brand and digital and really thinking about that sort of digital piece and how that could scale.
But I guess my move into sort of tech CMO world happened in 2015 when I was approached to become the CMO of a company called Host Europe Group, which I hadn’t heard of actually. It was a domain registration and web hosting group, and it had a really big UK business called 123 Reg, and it built its entire business on Google search, and I kind of see Google search and Meta when it was performing, they were sort of like the crack cocaine of marketing. They gave companies just really cheap ways of getting new customer acquisition and, what’s more, you paid for, you got the customers, and then you paid the media owner. So it wasn’t like TV, where you had to manage it all and pay upfront, and you know you paid for it afterwards, but you had to book it all in advance, and you were committed, and you couldn’t change anything, and anything went wrong with the product. You had to pay penalties. And you know, it wasn’t as hard as that. You just, you know, spent 500 quid to see if it worked, and if it did, you spent £1000, and then you spent £10,000.
Host Europe Group was entirely built on Google search, and they bought me in because they’d reached that limit that does happen in performance marketing, where you get a bit toppy, and you can’t grow anymore, and they needed to grow more. So they needed to think of new ways of growing, and they also had bought loads of businesses, and we needed to do a big, really a really big customer insight project to figure out how to grow faster. You know, align all the websites, point them at the target audience, do a big brand piece. You know, it was still all the websites were hand-coded. If anyone works in a tech business and knows the pain of working with a tech team who are hand coding your website and trying to get any marketing changes through building products, we’ll know that that’s terrible.
0:06:44 – Tamara Littleton
In a different world. I was at one point hand-coding websites for the BBC in the middle of the night. So yeah, very different industry, but yeah, I know the pain
0:06:49 – Kate Cox
Move it to a CMS as soon as you can and let marketing just go and test stuff and make all that stuff happen. And then, you know, test new ways of growing. And we eventually sold to Go Daddy, and that was quite a big deal it was. I think we sold for 1.8 billion. It was the second biggest tech exit in 2016. We were just behind Sky Scanner, and Sky Scanner got all the press because it was a consumer brand and we were more B2B, and we had quite, we had a multiple brand, so we didn’t get loads of press about that. But they only won because they bought in Chinese currency, and there was a good exchange rate, I think. But we were like 50,000 less than their exit, and I worked for Go Daddy for years, and that was brilliant.
You know we were the boots on the ground. They were very US company before they bought us, and we were their European boots on the ground. I think they had five people in London running 50 markets, and then they expanded to 1500 when they bought us, and that was an absolutely brilliant experience on figuring out some, you know, really good branding. You know I love their branding. Yeah, you know they have. They have such an emotional storytelling at the heart of the Go Daddy brand, you know, want to move the world economy to small business. I mean, that’s just, yeah, that’s just such a powerful, sticky idea. And then my role was just bringing that to life across marketing in, you know, 150 markets. We didn’t do it in 150 markets, we did it in about six really important big markets.
0:08:30 – Tamara Littleton
But a hugely successful growth, absolutely.
0:08:32 – Kate Cox
Hugely successful. And then, after that, I moved to Moneypenny, you know, call, answering for small businesses and enterprises and that, I think, was my real opened my eyes into the power of AI and how I could really start transforming. So I moved there in 2019, and we were experimenting with voice-to-text and then using AI to figure out how AI could, you know, give insights back to customers. You know, if you’re answering loads of people’s calls, what’s, what’s the useful thing you could give back to them and you know how many people.
Is it a lead? Is it a sales lead? Is it, you know, a customer complaint? How do we, how do we use AI to do that? And at the time, in 2019, it was hard because the tools were very expensive. You were going to Microsoft, you’re going to Amazon, and you’re getting very expensive tools. The cost has really come down in that whole area. So, it’s making a lot of these business concepts much more affordable.
Like, how do you embed AI into the product to make it better? And we always had this saying that it had to be better than a person, right? No one wanted to be that provide customer service like banks do. Still, you’re still 40 minutes on the phone in a queue. You know you have to. You have to be transparent. You know, would you like this query answered? We’ll try and answer it with AI quicker. Or you can wait 40 minutes for a person, but there’s now tools that you can use in that whole space where you can give order numbers, and it links it to your customer database and your knowledge base, and you can find out when your sofa is going to get delivered, and you can make changes, and you can do it all over voice, and that’s just over the last couple of years.
And so then I moved to BrightBid because they were using AI to make Google search work better. So I’d already seen how crack cocainey Google search was the scaleup, and then they offered this sort of, and we can make it even better with AI. You know we can, we can scan your competitor’s websites and turn that into a keyword list. We can test. You know, put a million tests, live in a month and test out 100,000 keywords and tell you what’s working. We can, we can. No one needs to write paid search copy anymore. We’ll use AI generators.
Tamara
So it’s like your two worlds coming together.
Kate
So, two worlds coming together really, which is, you know, how the importance of performance marketing for scale-ups and then how you can make that better through AI was just a bit too good to turn down to turn down, really. And it you know it launched in April or September 2020. So, it’s a three-year-old startup. So you know the energy of a startup is quite it’s quite a fun place to be.
And you know it was a very sales-led organisation, lots of outbound calling, and my role was my role is to push inbound marketing and figure out ways of getting more engaged customers to the website, talk to people at events, produce content, do PR, do social and just educate that audience, because trust and credibility is super important when you’re talking to CMOs and marketing directors, and you need those sorts of channels to drive trust and credibility. You just can’t. You actually can’t do, you can’t sell a performance marketing solution just on performance marketing. Yet.
0:11:55 – Tamara Littleton
And not just through the power of AI. Yet.
0:12:03 – Wendy Christie
So, thank you for that, Kate. It’s been a really interesting journey so far, by the sounds of it, and if you don’t mind, can we go even further back in your journey and talk about what you were like as a kid and see if there’s any was any clues from your childhood as to you know how you’ve ended up where you are now? So what were you like?
0:12:21 – Kate Cox
Oh goodness, I’m a middle child. I’ve got two sisters, elder sister who’s 18 months older and a younger sister five years older. My position in my family is a pretty big driver of my personality. I think my poor elder sister, I was snapping at her heels from a young age. I was taller than her, you know, I’m six foot tall, and she, you know, and I grew really quickly, and I was snapping at her heels. You know, I feel for her. I feel for her, but relatively introverted as a kid, you know, I would.
You know, reading books, I was very shy, and people who know me now would not really get that impression. In fact, when I was, I asked a friend of mine, and she was like, yeah, you’ve managed to transform yourself into an extrovert, and I think, I think that’s through working and advertising.
Wendy
Do you think that was a conscious thing?
Kate
Absolutely. I mean, I was so in awe when I got into advertising, of the sort of the high energy sort of salesman, saleswoman type personality, you know, that big thinking, that high energy, the resilience, the you know, and I really wanted to be more like that.
So I just pushed myself into loads of situations that scared the crap out of me. You know, really scared me, like speaking at conferences, pushing myself forward for PR interviews, going on TV, and it never ceases to make me anxious. But it’s, it’s that sort of good anxious. I think that spurs you forward, and keeping it on that side of good anxious.
0:14:05 – Tamara
It’s funny actually, I feel like in our industry. I remember I put a recent LinkedIn post about being an ambivert, which is, you know, some people call it sort of extroverted, introvert and needing to have that balance, and it was almost like I sort of outed myself as an ambivert and lots of people were adding to the comments. I think there’s more of us in this industry than you’d imagine, but perhaps lots of people have been masking that and sort of just thinking that you need to be more extrovert in our industry.
0:14:33 – Kate
Yeah, no, I think you’re absolutely right, and you just have to be able to be a research or a data scientist to work in advertising.
0:14:40 – Wendy
And when you were little, did you have any sense of knowing what you wanted to be? When you grew up?
0:14:45 – Kate
None, none. I wanted to be a punk, and I think that’s, there’s something about me that wants to be cooler than I am. Like I was about five when I wanted to be a punk. I just wanted a really cool mohican and like some studs on my forehead. Yeah, I just think I wanted to be cooler. And you know, there’s something about the ad industry, isn’t there, about it being very cool on a marketing, just being, you know, the cool kids on the block and you know
0:15:06 – Wendy
Were there people that you, that you looked up to, I guess, both as a child and now actually anyone who’s sort of given you that support or influence in your career?
0:15:21 – Kate Cox
Oh, loads of people. So firstly, my, my father, who you know, he gave me the hardworking ethic, but he’s also a very kind man, so he also valued people. He never fired anyone, and he, you know, it really hurt him to do anything like that. So he was very kind of, very hardworking. So I think I get some of that from him.
My mother’s very good at pulling people together, and I get my impish sense of humour from my grandmother because she was an imp. She was fabulous, born century too, too early. I think she’d been amazing in today’s world.
And then throughout my career, I’ve had amazing support from so many people for them. You know people who stand out, Marie Oldham, who was my boss for many years at Leo Burnett and Havas. She was just very supportive of me. You know she understood. She understood the emotion versus, you know, the drive and the emotion piece probably better than I did, and she was very helpful and supportive in that.
You know, I mean, I’ve had some brilliant bosses. Mark Palmer at BMP was fabulous about expanding my thinking. You know I had a great boss at Host Europe group, Patrick Pulvermueller, who was fantastic at German. He was just fantastic at the, you know, he was so good at running businesses and building value and doing it in a way and very inclusive, wonderful way. So, I’ve learned so much from so many people.
0:17:02 – Tamara
And just thinking about our industry. I know because Kate, you and I have sort of talked about this before, but I know you’ve got some strong opinions on our industry and how marketing can be a bit of a scapegoat. Do you want to tell me a little bit more about that and share that with the listeners?
0:17:20 – Kate
So I’m in a group called the CMO Marketing and Directors Forum, and one of the guys put a post on LinkedIn of him riding a unicorn shitting rainbows, and he said this is what it’s like to be in marketing and startups at the moment like the pressure of you know, let’s bring in marketing and everything is going to work better. But yeah, let’s not look at product, let’s not look at customer service, let’s not look at sales, let’s just wave the magic one that is marketing, and it’ll fix everything. And I think I see that across the board, and that isn’t that I think marketing should be in a corner. So, I’m definitely of the belief that marketing drives revenue. It’s a value driver of the business, but it isn’t the only unicorn in town, and it works best as an integrated system.
So, actually, the quickest thing if you work in a B2B organisation, the quickest way marketing can make a difference is make sure the leads are managed properly with sales. So it’s an absolutely integrated process between sales. I’ve seen pricing drive, you know, conversion rates from 5% to 15% in some online subscription brands, not naming any names, right?
So you can play with so many different things, but you have to play with the four Ps, right, and I think, I think what’s happened in marketing is it’s got so complex with the rise of digital systems. So you’re like, oh my God, I’ve got to learn TikTok and figure out how that fits in and all Meta. I was really good at it, and it wasn’t great, but now it’s amazing. I’ve got to refocus on Meta, and now I’ve got to figure out backlinks and building backlinks and blah, blah, blah. So it’s got very fragmented and very expert that people have forgotten the sort of four Ps of actually, it’s a system, right, you’ve got to have a product that people want.
Someone once told me that the best way to kill a bad product is amazing marketing because you get a lot of interest, and you can kill a bad product. So you’ve got to have a product that people want. You’ve got to price it right, you’ve got to have it easily accessible in places where people are buying, and then you promote it. And I think we’ve just got caught up in some of the promotional aspects of it and are expecting a little bit too much from some of the marketing leaders. That sort of the thinking behind it, you know, can be a bit of a scapegoat. It can be amazing. It can be a real boost. You can really superpower and supercharge your growth. But it needs to be part of the system.
0:20:02 – Tamara
And I think it is. You know. This is why people like Mark Ritson and everyone gets very excited about listening to him because it brings everyone back to the, you know, the basics as well, and I think it’s almost like there is a bit of a blame culture of you know. If things are not going as planned, you know which department do we blame. But you’re right, it is about having an integrated approach and all working together.
0:20:25 – Kate
Yeah, absolutely. I saw Mark Ritson last week at the Festival of Marketing, I thought that was, yeah, he had some really interesting things to say. I love his honesty, yeah, but he had some really practical things to say about modern marketing.
0:20:40 – Tamara
Yeah, and so what is the biggest challenge? You know you’re the CMO of a scale-up. How does it differ? You know what’s your biggest challenge.
0:20:50 – Kate
So, I think that the biggest challenge is twofold. So there’s so many things you could do, there’s so many things in marketing that you could choose to do, and there’s so many people in an organisation who love and love telling you a good idea. I’ll tell you what, Kate, if we do X, I think this will turn our fortunes around. Or if we do Y, you know, I think you should really put some focus on …you do need to put plate spinning, you do need to test a lot of things, but I think that the real challenge is not over not putting too many plates in the air at the same time that some of them. So even if some of them crash, you can’t see it. You’ve just lost it. They’re behind you, right? You can’t see the crash.
So, it’s having a more measured approach to what you are testing. You know, and if you are doing a pricing test, do a proper pricing test and let it run for a month. If you are changing the homepage copy, make sure that it’s not doing anything worse than your current homepage. So be really precise about the changes you make and put in place a measurement plan so you can track everything through to what the business value is about, and you know, in scale-up and startups, it’s going to be new revenue.
Now, marketing isn’t just about customer acquisition. It can play a role in customer retention, it can play a role in managing the churn, but you need to be really purposeful about where it’s playing a role and how you can position marketing as a value driver. So it’s that, really. It’s being choiceful, and being choiceful means measurement, and measurement involves lots of getting under the bonnet with a spanner, and you know, if you’re in B2B, it’s playing in the CRM system. If you’re B2C, it’s really understanding your Google Analytics and your conversion path. It’s getting in with the spanner and fixing stuff and rolling your sleeves up.
0:22:51 – Tamara
And is that what drives you? The kind of like the data, the detail. You know what is your sweet spot?
0:22:58 – Kate Cox
My sweet spot? It’s actually not, it’s the narrative. I think my sweet spot is really understanding the narrative about what drives a company’s growth and understanding why customers buy, and thinking about that narrative in all different formats, be that a press release or a social. I do gravitate towards PR because I think it’s a very wonderful channel for exploring narratives. But you know, you can’t just play your narratives alone in a scale-up. You have to link it to the results and measurement and how that plays out on the on new revenue one or the bottom line. So you do have to, you know, work across the piece. But yeah, I think my energy comes from storytelling and figuring that piece of the puzzle out.
0:23:53 – Tamara
Yeah, yeah, I can definitely imagine that. And are you able to share with us some of the things that you’re working on within BrightBid or kind of the future because you’re in the, you know, mention AI, you’re just like in the hot area. So, is there anything that you can share with us?
0:24:10 – Kate
Yeah, well, so we both use AI in our tool, so we have an AI engine that makes Google search and Google shopping work better. So, that means we’re using the large language models to file lots of tests. We’ve got an unsupervised machine learning model that fires AB tests that bid optimisation, so you can adjust your bids based on different customer segments. We use all the data that Google and Bing have and just apply more tests. So it gives a bit more transparency for a lot of customers. You hand over, if you use some of the platform tools like Google’s and Bing’s, you hand over a lot of your control, and that’s great if it’s going right, but if it starts going wrong, you don’t know how to change things because you’ve given up. You know, and Google do tend to say just spend more or give it six months. So those are two things. When you’re at the sharp end of a marketing team, spending more on something that isn’t working or just waiting six months is very hard. So we give people a bit more explainability, and we’ve just launched this really interesting new product that links Google shopping to Amazon listings. So you can’t do that anywhere else at the moment. We have our AI automation engine that will say hey, do you know what? Do a test, see if moving it to Amazon listings versus your direct-to-consumer shop is better. What’s the better ROI on your ad spend and start testing it. So that’s kind of a fun thing.
And then, in terms of what we do, so I run a small marketing team across four markets we’re in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the UK, and we’re using all the AI tools to really empower our output. So I tend to find so there’s an amazing case study that came out last week, two weeks ago, where Boston Consulting Group gave to their consultants AI tools. Just ChatGPT, and said come back. They found 25% efficiency savings, and I don’t think we’d think that’s. I don’t think that’s a surprise, but it’s 45% quality improvement that they were all surprised about. And I think that’s because the AI stuff gets the grunt work, the non gets the sort of non-human stuff out the way, and then humans can spend finessing getting it so much better.
So you’re 80% of the way there, and then 20% you’re finessing it. But if Boston Consultancy can make it work, then marketing teams have to find a way forward. So we use it. You know, we’ve written our homepage on it, we link and tested what it came out with. We link, we use a design tool called Figma, and we link all the Google Translation so you could write it in English, and then it translates it to Swedish and, Norwegian and Danish automatically.
I was getting some T-shirts for an event last week, and we’d bought loads of Viking hats because we thought it’d be fun. It was a London event, and I wanted some T-shirt slogans. I put into ChatGPT, give me a good T-shirt slogan, and they came up with Conquer PPC like an AI Viking, and that was. You know, that’s a pretty good slogan, saved me loads of time thinking it through. We use it for we don’t write the finished article, and, I’ll be honest, I am getting a bit allergic to B2B emails that I receive in my inbox written by ChatGPT. If it says unleash or transform, I don’t open it because ChatGPT has written unleashed when transformed.
Tamara
Or reimagine.
0:27:39 – Kate
Reimagine yeah. I am guilty of reimagining. I like reimagining.
We do test it. It can be a bit verbose, and then we cut that down. We use AI for all our sales meetings, so we can send coaching tips for the sales guys in the meeting, you know. So we are sort of quite advanced users of it, and there’s, you know, amazing things you can do in e-commerce and creative when you know you can take an awful lot of cost out of the business by. You know, product descriptions with AI and product pictures and imagery.
I mean, I did spend, I did waste an hour of my life trying to get a picture on MidJourney of a camel and a unicorn in a desert.
Wendy
Did you find one in the end?
Kate
It was either two camels or two unicorns or like a mix of, like a uni camel A ‘camelacorn’.
I was like, oh my god, I’m going to get quicker like, could I have got a picture in Photoshop? Maybe it genuinely took me. Now, I did find Dali 2, I think, is better than mid-journey for me at the moment because mid-journey just and if you’ve ever played doing creative imagery with some of these tools, they’re terrible on text, and they’re terrible at taking, like, really specific instructions, even if you use a prompt generator tool. But anyway, yeah, I did get it in the end it’s unbelievable, fabulous.
0:29:09 – Wendy
So we’re going to move on to the final section of the podcast now, Kate, where we ask some more general quick-fire questions to help our listeners to get to know you a bit better. So I’ll start with a nice, easy one what’s your idea of a perfect weekend?
0:29:26 – Kate
Oh, do you know what? Forcing my kids to spend time with me and my family, shared food and board games like they all buy me board games for presents. But I love forcing a, you know, a game of Risk, actually not Risk and not Monopoly, a game of 221b on everyone. But yeah, shared food, shared friends, family and friends.
0:29:51 – Tamara
Yeah, Risk and Monopoly is a guaranteed argument, really, isn’t it? It is a bit.
0:29:55 – Kate
Yeah, Risk man not with two teenage boys.
0:30:01 – Wendy
If you were stuck on a desert island and you could only listen to one song for the rest of your life, what would that song be?
0:30:08 – Kate
Oh, my god. So I was thinking about this. So I’ve got my funeral playlist already set up on my husband’s Spotify, just in case, right? And Jerusalem always makes it on there, so I’m never bored of that song and it always sends shivers down my spine, but it always makes me sad. So I’m not entirely sure that’s a good desert island one, but you know, it’s definitely one that I never tire of listening to. Which version is it? Oh, I don’t mind which version, right, okay.
0:30:35 – Tamara
So I love that attention to detail, that actually of having your Spotify. Funeral playlist
0:30:39 – Kate
Oh yeah, it includes quite a lot of Cher and house music, so we’re planning quite a fun one. Nice.
0:30:47 – Tamara
I feel like that’s a whole other conversation that maybe won’t have on the podcast. What’s one of your bucket list travel destinations?
0:30:55 – Kate
Oh, so I’ve been to Japan on my own, for I did an MBA through the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, and we went to Japan, and it was eye-opening. It’s such a different culture, and I want to take the kids there and my husband because it’s just a wonderful different place to go. It’s so, you know, it’s odd, it’s just very odd for British people or Europeans to go to Japan, and it’s so interesting.
0:31:22 – Tamara
Yeah. Now next question is one that Wendy and I tend to fight over. I won this time. It was my favourite question: how would you fare in a zombie apocalypse?
0:31:35 – Kate
This is the same as the desert island. Do you ever need a marketing strategist in a zombie apocalypse or on a desert island? Or do you want an ambulance driver or an ambulance or a doctor? Really badly, and whenever I watch them, I’m like, oh God, just go quick, right, just be the one who’s the first to be cut down and your head chopped off and just make it. Don’t, don’t string it out because you’re going to die anyway. So you might as well go quick, happily in the early, in the early stages.
0:32:08 – Tamara
But unfortunately, now you’ve put that into my head of, like, how would a marketer do is? I’m now thinking of like how you can kind of change the narrative, have like a zombie fest and get people to go and not actually try and kill. So, how do you stop zombies killing people? Sorry, I’ll stop now and let Wendy ask a question.
0:32:28 – Wendy
How would your friends describe you?
0:32:30 – Kate
Oh, this was my. So I spent Sunday morning with the coffee and the papers WhatsApping my friends going, “I’m on a podcast, tell me”. So, this was what they came up with. And it was like, oh, one of them even went. Oh, it’s a bit cringe. You’re sure you’re going to say that. So I don’t know.
So, it ranges from fiercely clever and hardworking fun, but I’m the memory of an elephant, and I actually can remember so many things from you know. The people are like, oh, did I go out with that guy? And I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you totally did it lasted about three weeks.
What else have I got? Yeah, I think fun-loving appeared quite high. You know, I do have party wings, and they still come out occasionally, but adaptable, enthusiastic. I think it’s another, it’s another choice I made, which was always to be positive and always to be enthusiastic and always try to see the best in the situations. I don’t always live up to it, but I try, because I think there are choices in life aren’t there and that one’s just so much easier to make than the other one, which is a negative one. Yeah, so much more fun, so much more fun to live with yourself if you’re focused on the positive and then a couple of ones I liked which, you know, left field, kind and intuitive. I will always try to be kind, and, again, maybe I haven’t lived up to that all the time, but it’s. It’s a good value to hold and to manage. This was a good one from someone I used to work with simultaneously tough but soft, and actually, my kids will say the same tough but soft. I’m actually a bit marshmallowy when it comes, comes down to it.
0:34:14 – Tamara
I love that. I would suspect that you’ve got your grandmother’s impish nature as well impish humour as well.
0:34:21 – Kate
Yeah, you’ve not seen this Tamara, but also expressive dancer came out.
0:34:26 – Tamara Littleton
Fantastic, fantastic. Okay, well, we need to see that another time. And what is your favourite restaurant or food experience?
0:34:37 – Kate
I went to an amazing restaurant. So Havass was headquartered in Barcelona for part of when I worked for it, and they knew that all the best restaurants in Barcelona, and we went to one that didn’t have a. It was about 10 of us, my husband was with us, 10 global strategists from all over the world and we went to this restaurant without a name, and it was a fish restaurant, and they just bought loads of Cava and different fish dishes, and it lasted about four hours, and it was genius. And I didn’t get the name of it, because every time I go back to Barcelona, I’m like, that was the best restaurant I ever went to.
0:35:12 – Tamara
Oh God, I can’t believe that. You don’t know. I feel like we should try and hunt that restaurant down, though I know sort of near the dock somewhere, but it wasn’t quite on the dock, so it’s amazing. You need to find your super memory needs to come in here working out exactly where you were, and someone will tell you, I know maybe someone in this podcast knows. So we’ve got the expressive dance, but what is your karaoke go to song?
0:35:37 – Kate
Oh, to be fair, it does link to my expressive dance. It’s Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush Amazing. Yeah, there was a set of actions that go with that, and she, she climbs the window, and it’s a good one. So have a little think about that If you if you ever meet me
0:35:52 – Tamara
ee, I can connect with you on that one that I think you know that I sing in this choir, in the natural voices choir, and the choir was part of a huge flash mob. That was done. That was essentially everyone dressed up in a red dress, didn’t matter whether you usually wear dresses or not. Everyone was wearing a red dress and singing and dancing to Wuthering Heights and it was quite a spectacle.
0:36:21 – Kate
Oh, wow, I’ve seen that on YouTube. Actually, there’s an Australian version of that. Lots of um, yeah, all genders, Exactly, it’s just a wonderful wonderful thing. Can you send me? Did you video it? Can you send it to me? I will do!.
0:36:35 – Tamara
So we’ve come to the end of the podcast, so I just wanted to check is there anything.. we’ve covered expressive dance. We’ve covered marketing, the future of marketing, ai. Is there anything that you wish that we had to ask you? Or, if not, I want to give you the opportunity to have the platform and share any closing thoughts.
0:36:55 – Kate
No, I don’t think there’s anything I wish- is there anythingf you wish you asked me. I don’t think there’s anything I wish you asked me. I’m just on the side of. I guess my closing thoughts is don’t put marketing in the corner, don’t put baby in the corner. We all need to have in our mind’s eye why businesses are choosing marketing and always manage to dance that tightrope, because I think you can go a little bit too revenue-focused, it’s not all about revenue, but there again, it’s not all about brand narrative. So it’s dancing that tightrope of where we can really drive business value.
0:37:39 – Outro
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