Dino Myers-Lamptey, Founder, The Barber Shop - transcript
Rory
So I'm delighted to be joined today by one of the doyen of the media, planning and strategy world, in the shape of Dino Myers-Lamptey. You previously been at, I think it was, Mullen Lowe. Media Lab. I think that’s right on Media Hub. Media hub? Absolutely. Pitch rocket. I hear you were head of strategy there. And you've now found it. I'm going to I'm going to go off-piste a bit here. You're now the founder of called the Barber Shop.
Dino
That's right.
Rory
And I've got to ask why the name.
Dino
The name has many reasons. Clearly not because I have hair. But, it's, there's a few different reasons. I mean, when you name anything, as you be aware, you just become very aware of everything you see. And every name a company. Considering as to whether it's a good enough name to be a company name. And I kept on seeing lots of barbershops popping up, lots of beautiful little places popping up everywhere. And then I read this article that said the barber shops were the fastest growing businesses in 2018. Yes, I thought that's quite a good omen.
Rory
So you've been basically a bit of a lifetime advocate, I suppose. Not just of the mail medium, but also just media neutrality in general, which is that, I mean, I think there's a fundamental worry I have in terms of how some digitisation actually distorts strategy, by which I mean people start to define their target audience, not as the number of people we can have a profitable relationship with, but the people who are prepared to interact with us in low cost channels. Yeah. Which isn't the same thing. And so generally, I think if you have a kind of media hierarchy in your head, yeah, you're making a mistake to begin with.
Dino
Yes. There's lots of, you know, not very creative options that are available to get your message out digitally because everyone has the tool. Everyone has the same. You know, AI tool, which is great, but you do need that human intervention to raise above the what everyone's got and in that needs someone to have a bit of intuition, have a bit of faith, have a bit of, I'm deliberately looking to do something different because I know that the distinction is what is going to stand out.
Rory
So it occurs to me that actually one of the ways in which you might want to humanize AI outputs is by making interactions slower rather than faster, because there are lots of human decisions, which we take kind of iteratively. And we have the statistic recently that an open piece of direct mail, on average, is visited 4.4 times, and now the assumption of the digital age is that you know what you want and that you find a very efficient means to narrow it down and then get it. Okay. But there's an awful lot of human decision. Make that awful lot of purchase decisions, as I said, like re carpeting your front room or building extension, okay, which aren't remotely undertaken like that, but they might involve multiple decision making units. So you may want to pass something on to somebody else. They may involve, you know, repeated kind of interactions where you refine what you want by the act of exploration and so forth. And it strikes me that digital media, by effectively, trying to condense the time scale of everything, has missed something. I mean, I think, I mean, the attention rates of direct mail are fantastically slow. So it's two minutes and 16 seconds for an open piece. Is the average attention span. I mean, one thing that actually worries me is that if you have a massive shift into digital media, okay, then impulsive behaviors of which probably the most extreme might be gambling, okay, disproportionately do well out of this medium. Whereas measured behaviors like, you know, planning a holiday or moving home, you know, effectively have to take a back, you know, effect to take get put on the back burner. And so that's again, a kind of, you know, a direct mail or at least a catalog or magazine form, much more than it is perhaps a digital form, I think. Would you agree?
Dino
Yeah, I agree, I mean, you know, catalogs, you know, incredible ways to show range and that have been powerful ways to show range. And, really works were available for retailers. You know, I've, I've worked in retailers like Courts who used to rely on it, you know, that we call count right shoulder range Iceland Foods, you know, all the rest of it. We did a great campaign, a great direct mail campaign where we partner with The Week, you know, which is a is a publication that largely gets delivered through people's doors.
Rory
Yeah.
Dino
And people subscribed to it very successful. But what we loved about The Week was because it shows to perspectives and it deliberately shows that that, that the case for both sides. And so we did a special issue of the week, which was just focused on for argument or for Dave showing how, you know, the comedians to argue about lots of different things and subjects, you know, added a dose of comedy in it to, to to advertise the concept of the show and land the proposition for that. So, you know, something that we knew that will have a high kind of dwell time, allow people to sit down, have a coffee and and really understand the full that the full extent of what the show has to offer.
Rory
As I remember Jeremy Bowman saying, you know, there are some things you can't sell in 15 seconds. It just requires a greater degree of immersion and involvement or sometimes an argument. Funnily enough. You know, to get someone to change their mind.
Dino
You know, we always kind of strive for attention in advertising and, yeah, attention as a really important metric. But I often think as well that, sometimes we optimize towards attention and forget about, you know, post attention, let's say, the lasting, the lasting effects of the attention that you want. Once you've grabbed people's attention.
Rory
So you think you think you have this problem within media agencies, which is if you're fixated with just cost per impression, mail looks ridiculous. And because you don't have a corresponding kind of measure of quality. Consequently, there probably are generations of media buyers and planners who just wouldn't know how to justify the existence of a media schedule of this media. And I suppose there's the quality question. There's also the question of, first of all, there are billion dollar businesses built on this medium, which is there is no way American Express would have reached reasonable scale. Okay. Waiting for people to visit a website and voluntarily sign up. Okay. You could get a certain amount of volume that way, but it would be a tiny fraction of what's possible.
Dino
Funny enough, the beauty of digital media is that you can capture it and share it easily, but you need to create the experience in the first place. And I think that's one of the benefits that direct mail can deliver. I mean, I remember when I used to work on things like Channel 4 and we used to create these beautiful, you know, direct mail packages and things to send out to know to, to really kind of capture the essence of a certain show and give someone the experience within.
Rory
You can't fragment the letterbox. If you send out 10,000 letters, 10,000 people will receive it. Yes. Okay. Now it worries me that if I look at my digital media consumption, I've never really seen an ad for anything from P&G or Unilever. Now they're the largest advertisers in Britain.
Dino
Yeah.
Rory
Now. Okay. You might expect me to see slightly more luxury goods, slightly more B2B messages, slightly fewer. But instead there's a winner takes all effect at the level of the individual household. Yeah. Okay. Whereas in a in in a working economy, roughly speaking, I'd see you will always see more luxury goods ads because that higher margin, you know, you'll see slightly more subscription ads because there's a higher lifetime value. But there's a vague kind of consensus reality between what I see and what I spend my money on now in the digital world. I don't see that in the direct mail world. As I said, you write to a thousand people, a thousand people receive it. Yeah. You don't get that complete distortion. I think I mentioned there's billion dollar businesses which would never have existed without direct mail. So, so media exploration, particularly with eccentric media, is a brilliant way to discover what you're missing, affect the audiences you never anticipated. And the thing I think is always a problem, in in business is that if you've got a very, very sort of powerful finance function, costs are really easy to measure. Opportunity costs are kind of nebulous. Yes. And so you get a business that's focused on reducing the cost of what it's doing now rather than the possibility. And as a byproduct of that, they're reducing the possibly the future possibilities for the next few years.
Dino
Yeah. That's it. And I think that's a really, really important point. You know, we spend a lot of time in a doing the strategic work. We spend a lot of time making the case for marketing. Yes. And and it's a really it's a bit of an odd thing to do really, because actually there's plenty of examples in the world of the case for marketing. You know, the biggest brands in the world are doing it constantly, and it's a bit like we've done remember we talked about earlier on where, you know, if people want to see what's effective, look, what's coming through the door, you know, look who's doing it, look who's using it. You know, that is the people that use it repeat time and time again. That is their econometrics at work. That is the showing the proof of the return, that is showing that we have to do it again because it's working. And I think that there's not enough people that probably, look for insights in it that are out there in the world, you know, in terms of what people are doing. But when you do, you very clearly see that there is a there is a value in, in, in using media in more creative ways, but also not forgetting the things that are that, that have been tried and tested.
Rory
And your future and your growth basically depends on discovering those things. And you’re beautifully placed do to so. Well, you know, thank you very much. We've been speaking to Dino Myers-Lamptey of the barbershop. We've been speaking to you as part of, Mail Unleashed, which is brought to you by Marketreach. And if you've enjoyed this and you'd like to see more, all you need to do is go and visit for the full sequence of podcast appearances.Marketreach.co.uk. It's been a huge pleasure. Dino. Thank you once again and see you next time.