The Marketing Society podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Episode #131. Today’s episode is a personal understanding topic on finding your ideal role; looking beyond the job title for a role that plays to your strengths and values and is fulfilling for you. 

Joining Abby to discuss ideal roles and shining a light on hiring practices in the marketing is profession is Lauren Spearman. Lauren is a seasoned marketing professional with over 17 years of experience with brands such as Sky, Benefit Cosmetics and MADE.com. Now thriving as a freelance Brand Consultant, Lauren uses her growing platform on TikTok to champion pay transparency and improved recruitment practices in the marketing industry through her candid insights and advocacy efforts. 

In this episode, Lauren shares her definition of an ideal role, green and red flags hiring practices, salary transparency, interview tasks, advice for hiring managers, giving and receiving feedback when job searching. Plus career highs and lows. 

Download your free workbook on how to find your ideal role here Resources and free support - The Whole Marketer 

Host: Abigail (Abby) Dixon FCIM/ICF | LinkedIn

Guest: Lauren Spearman | LinkedIn

This episode is sponsored by House of Performance 

Need to up your game in PPC, Paid Social or Display? 

House of Performance are a team of passionate marketeers growing ambitious brands through paid media. 

For a free mini audit, get in touch with the team at https://houseofperformance.co.uk/wholemarketer 

News and events: 

The Marketing Society Global Conference: Changemakers Impact. November 13th in Central London  

Hear from visionary speakers, gain cutting-edge insights, and connect with fellow changemakers who are reshaping our industry and society.  

Tickets are limited, so secure your place now. Book your ticket here and prepare to ignite your potential.  

The Marketing Society Global Conference: where ideas spark, connections form, and impact begins. See you in London! 

This episode, the fifth in our series on entrepreneurial thinking, and how it can benefit a brand of any size, is about ‘no preconceptions’ or in the words of our guest, Nick Saltarelli- founder of hit Canadian chocolate brand Mid-Day Squares, ‘No one in history has ever done anything great by following how it’s always been done’ 

It’s a fascinating conversation, as Nick talks about entrepreneurship, disrupting a category, lifting the curtain and sharing EVERYTHING and how they ‘act like a band instead of a brand’ to build true brand fans.

Our host - The Marketing Society Member Ruth Fittock

Ruth has almost 20 years experience building brands- from start-up to scale up, launch to acquisition. She’s helped U.S brands (vitaminwater, popchips) launch and scale in the UK and grown brands from scratch here too (Simply Roasted Crisps). Ruth has recently started a new consultancy- Tomorrow Brands, to help the purpose-driven global brands of tomorrow launch in the UK.

Our guest - Nick Saltarelli- founder of hit Canadian chocolate brand Mid-Day Squares,

Nick is an entrepreneur driven by the belief that every company should try to take an unaverage path, a vision that led him to co-found Mid-Day Squares with his wife, Lezlie and brother in-law Jake. Together, they’re redefining the chocolate industry by blending manufacturing innovation with bold, authentic branding. Nick’s mission is simple: marry art and data to build an iconic, rule-breaking brand. Period.

You can read the key takeaways on this think piece too

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Find out about the latest The Marketing Society events here and if you're not a member yet, what are you waiting for? Find out about how to join here.

“There's something like 7.5 million data centers around the world now, and most of them are still powered by coal and gas. One of the easiest things you can do is move your hosting.”

Welcome back to the second part in our mini-series on ‘greening your marketing activities’ and this episode we explored smarter, greener websites with Sepas Seraj, Founder of Pixeled Eggs.

With the amount of activity that takes place online today purpose-driven digital is a must, and it’s not difficult, in fact, it’s super efficient, usable and can dramatically improve your organisations’ performance - (giving it a ‘digital edge’ as Sepas refers to it) - whilst simultaneously supporting your sustainability agendas now and into the future. 

There is a staggering amount of waste when it comes to websites and many of them are woefully inefficient, yet we can start to make changes immediately, improving performance and reducing negative impact. Sepas shares tools, resources and practical advice in abundance, we can’t recommend this episode enough.

Join us on this episode as we talk to Sepas about:

• The impact of digital
• Understanding the opportunities to optimise your website
• Green hosting, videos, images, page weights and variable fonts
• Ways you can make your website greener, more efficient and improve its performance
• The need for more conversations between design teams, developers, Marketers and sustainability teams
• Sustainability driving improved performance time and time again
• Best practice, tools and resources

For more information about Pixeled Eggs - visit https://www.pixeledeggs.com/

And to connect with Sepas via LinkedIn - he’s here https://www.linkedin.com/in/sepasseraj/

Another great episode… and still more to follow in this greening your marketing channels mini-series - so stay tuned.

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You’ll find the Podcast on all the usual pod platforms - and also on The Global Player and via The Marketing Society. If you love it, do share it and spread the word. Talking about climate change and the role we play is one of the most important things we can do. So join the conversation. We’re all in this together.

Our podcasts are recorded purely via online conferencing platforms, we apologise for any minor sound quality issues.

Slow design is the future of marketing, according to Rebecca McCowan, Design Lead at the Coca-Cola Company and our latest guest on the Shiny New Object Podcast.

Find out why brands go too fast and re-brand too much, as well as the merits of letting people engage with brands in a way that lets them learn along the way, rather than giving them all the information from the very beginning. Rebecca also shares the secrets behind the Coca-Cola Christmas and tells us why so many design briefs get things wrong - and how to fix it.

The Shiny New Object podcast is a production of Automated Creative, a creative effectiveness platform that turns brands' media impressions into marketing intelligence. Find out more at www.automatedcreative.net

Welcome to In Conversation With a new mini-series podcast from The Marketing Society. With Rachel Letham Head of Content and Communications, “in conversation with” Allyson Stewart-Allen, Marketing Society Member and CEO of International Marketing Partners, a consulting firm helping companies successfully internationalise. We will delve into both the global and local perspectives when it comes to branding.

We’ve seen over the years that one size does not fit all when going global. Companies often make incorrect assumptions that other markets are just like their home market. This can lead to expensive mistakes. 

In this episode:

Allyson shares her background and how living in Germany as a child sparked her passion for international marketing. 

Key challenges in global branding include finding the right balance between global consistency and local relevance. Businesses tend to swing between fully global or fully local approaches, when success requires an integrated approach.

Cultural intelligence is critical for global marketing success. Leaders need to actively listen to and learn from local teams to understand what will resonate in each market.

Allyson shares examples of companies that do this well to adapt their product offerings for different markets. 

In the next episode, Allyson will share examples from her "cabinet of curiosities" - case studies of successful and unsuccessful cross-cultural marketing campaigns.

You can watch the recording of this podcast here: https://youtu.be/Pr9UkDrIAQ8

Biography: Allyson Stewart-Allen

Allyson Stewart-Allen is a renowned advisor, author, speaker, broadcaster and Non-Executive Director focused on helping leaders and their companies to successfully internationalise. You’ve probably seen or heard her on Sky News, BBC News, France 24, DW News, CNBC, LBC or watched one of her 5 seasons of The Apprentice – or maybe attended one of the many leadership courses she runs for Oxford University’s Said Business School.

Originally from Los Angeles and based in London for over 30 years, Allyson applies her extensive international consulting experience, MBA education with Dr. Peter Drucker and French and German languages to the company she founded, International Marketing Partners.

Having advised over 260 organisations across 27 countries, Allyson helps leaders successfully and profitably span international and functional boundaries. She is the creator of the LinkedIn learning course Leading International Growth, as well as author of both editions of the best-selling book Working with Americans.

Learn more from Allyson in The Marketing Society Insiders Programme where she is holding two powerhours covering this topic - find out more here

“There’s really no way you can say you don’t know this is a dangerous activity at this point”

Making a return to the podcast, we caught up with Duncan Meisel, founder of Clean Creatives, so we could talk about the newly published F-List.

For anyone unfamiliar, Clean Creatives, is a movement of advertisers, PR professionals, and their clients cutting ties with fossil fuels.The F-List is a body of research and report which documents agencies who choose to continue working with fossil fuel organisations despite the scientific consensus that what they do is destroying the planet. It really doesn’t get much clearer than that.

We dive straight into this conversation finding out what has been happening with the Clean Creative campaign, its progress and of course, that infamous F-List.

Duncan reveals that over 800 agencies have now taken the pledge including their first large agency (over a 1000 employees). When looking at the agencies who have made the bold commitment no to work with fossil fuel organisations vs, those who are on the F-List, Duncan points out, “there’s really no way you can say you don’t know this is a dangerous activity at this point” – the F-list is just highlighting to people those agencies who are choosing to ignore all the warnings.

The F-List has evolved over the last 3 years, with more focus on the data, the sources and as Duncan explains, they were able to do both a global and multilingual search this time. They also had a much shorter reporting timeframe, “this year we tried to be really precise and look for agencies that were doing work right now in 2022 and 2023, the hottest years in human history.”

We discuss the fact that despite all the evidence, the F-List agencies continue to try and defend their work, and the role the 800+ agencies committed to the Clean Creatives pledge have in telling their stories about change and progress. The more we share our work on the good stuff, the solutions and the opportunities around that the more we can work together to move away from those things that do the most harm.

This conversation is one not to miss, whether you work for an agency or with agencies, it’s important to be aware of the F-List and the work that Clean Creatives are doing.

For more information about Clean Creatives - https://cleancreatives.org/

And if you catch this podcast in time to join Duncan and the Clean Creatives team in London for their Happy Hour on the 31st October - there’s an invitation and more details to that event here.

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You’ll find the Podcast on all the usual pod platforms - and also on The Global Player and via The Marketing Society. If you love it, do share it and spread the word. Talking about climate change and the role we play is one of the most important things we can do. So join the conversation. We’re all in this together.

With the dust having settled on The Marketing Society Awards for 2023, in this podcast we are joined by Chris Dunne, Head of Marketing at Thinkbox and the team at Camelot, to discuss their Christmas campaign which won the award for Best Brand Communication.

In this discussion, Anna McInally (Head of Marketing Communications) and Rachel Moss (Head of Marketing Strategy & Media) talk us through the challenges The National Lottery were facing at the time, the innovative and creative strategy behind the campaign, and ultimately the results which led to its national success.

Find out more about The Marketing Society Awards here https://awards.marketingsociety.com/

H&R Block's Chief Marketing and Experience Officer, Jill Cress, talks to the Shiny New Object Podcast about the importance of knowing your audience for increasing creative effectiveness.

Of course, audiences have always been essential to good marketing. But in today's world full of additional data points, how do advertisers gain from being data-driven and creating personalised experiences? What are the tips to maximise this opportunity?

Find out more on the latest episode.

The Shiny New Object podcast is a production of Automated Creative, a creative effectiveness platform that turns brands' media impressions into marketing intelligence. Find out more at www.automatedcreative.net

Hosted out of the UAE, the sustainability squad was created to bring together a group of members to help drive change around ESG and help curate high-quality content in the UAE’s Year of Sustainability. The squad seeks to put The Marketing Society at the heart of the Sustainability conversation in the build-up to COP28 and lead the conversation for the industry.

Episode 4

In episode 4 of the Marketing Society’s Sustainability Squad podcast series hear from Abdul Rahim Osman (15 years of experience in business and marketing in the financial services industry) and Stewart Morrison (Managing Director of Firm Decisions Middle East and Africa- the audit division of the world’s largest marketing and media performance consultancy Ebiquity PLC ) as they dive into Media Industry perspectives surrounding ESG. Particularly covering Environmental and responsible media issues to start with!

The purpose of the podcast is to educate and inspire the marcomms community to drive change around sustainability and ESG, build case studies of great work marketeers have done in the region around ESG and demonstrate real life problem solving and creativity to influence stakeholder groups around better ESG principles.

The aim of the series is to empower the wider marcomms community to drive change in their organisations.

The series produced by Podcast Now, will cover topics such as: Sustainability and ESG Literacy, Creativity and Storytelling, Behavioural Science and case studies from leading marketeers in the region.

Hosted out of the UAE, the sustainability squad was created to bring together a group of members to help drive change around ESG and help curate high-quality content in the UAE’s Year of Sustainability. The squad seeks to put The Marketing Society at the heart of the Sustainability conversation in the build-up to COP28 and lead the conversation for the industry.

Episode 3

In episode 3 of the Marketing Society’s Sustainability Squad podcast Learn about why The Marketing Society has selected Emirates Nature WWF as the organization to support for this year’s Marketing 4 Good initiative. TMS Board Member Neda Shelton hosts this episode of the Sustainability Squad podcast with Hossam Nasef, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Emirates Nature-WWF about the importance of the role of marketers in raising awareness and understanding of the critical role of nature-based solutions in tackling the climate crisis.

The purpose of the podcast is to educate and inspire the marcomms community to drive change around sustainability and ESG, build case studies of great work marketeers have done in the region around ESG and demonstrate real life problem solving and creativity to influence stakeholder groups around better ESG principles.

The aim of the series is to empower the wider marcomms community to drive change in their organisations.

The series produced by Podcast Now, will cover topics such as: Sustainability and ESG Literacy, Creativity and Storytelling, Behavioural Science and case studies from leading marketeers in the region.