under attack. Again, strikes reported across the country. Explosions in all major cities in Ukraine. This Russian invasion has begun according to Ukrainian authorities calling it a full-scale invasion now underway. And the Belarusian troops again joining them from the north. At least now Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, announcing this military operation yesterday and warning other countries. Any attempt to interfere would lead to consequences they've never seen. Putin argued this attack is aimed at protecting civilians in eastern Ukraine. Now as he maintains his harsh rhetoric towards Kiev authorities, here's more from the Russian leader. I have made the decision of a military operation. Dear comrades, your fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight defending our motherland for today's neo-Nazis to seize power in Ukraine. You took an oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people and not to the anti-people junta that robs and harasses its own people. Don't follow its criminal orders. Whoever tries to interfere with us and even more so to create threats for our country, our people should know that Russia's response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences that you have never experienced in your history. On the Ukrainian side, President Zelensky held a phone call in the early morning with US President Biden. Biden attempted to reassure his Ukrainian allies and some upcoming measures to contain an ostensibly punished Russia with efforts to ramp up at the United Nations. But in Kiev and under fire, President Zelensky again spoke to his embattled nations. They braced themselves under this Russian offensive. Here's the latest from the president. I know for sure that we don't need the war. Not a cold war, not a hot war, not a hybrid one. But if we'll be attacked by the enemy troops, if they try to take our country away from us, our freedom, our lives, the lives of our children, we will defend ourselves. Not attack but defend ourselves. And when you'll be attacking us, you'll see our faces, not our backs but our faces. The war is a big disaster and this disaster has a high price. With every meaning of this word, people lose money, reputation, quality of life, they lose freedom. But the main thing is that people lose their loved ones, they lose themselves.  It was not the case in the past, not in the present, it's not going to be in the future. You are demanding security guarantees from NATO, but we also demand security guarantees. Security for Ukraine from you, from Russia, and other guarantees of the Budapest Memorandum. But our main goal is peace in Ukraine and the safety of our people, Ukrainians. For that, we are ready to have talks with anybody, including you in any format on any platform. The war will deprive security guarantees from everybody. Nobody will have guarantees of security anymore. Who will suffer the most from it? The people. Who doesn't want it the most? The people. Who can stop it? The people. But are those people among you? I am sure. Now we go to our defence correspondent, Jonathan Regget, who's on the ground here covering some of the latest now. I believe you're at the Russian Embassy in Tel Aviv here, Jonathan. What's happening there? Yes, so at the Russian Embassy, and maybe David, you can see right behind me a small protest for the moment. This is right outside the Russian Embassy in central Tel Aviv. This protest is expected to grow larger in number later in the day. And one of the protesters, Mikhail Baghani, is here joining us. Mikhail, thank you for joining us. I understand you arrived to Israel from Ukraine a few years ago, actually from the area of Donetsk, which was under partial Russian occupation already. What are you feeling this morning? This morning I read the news, and I thought that I cannot be silent anymore, because I saw that this Russian federation, this fascist Putin's regime, they started the complex war in Ukraine. They started with shellings, with bombings, and I think that the international community is doing not enough. We're doing not enough pressure on Russia. We need to stop this fascist regime, because all they're doing is neocolonialism, and they're just trying to destroy Ukrainian state, the independent, the sovereign state of Ukraine. They're trying to destroy it. They're trying to destroy Ukrainian culture. And I think we need to talk louder about it. Have you been able to contact relatives in Ukraine to hear what's the situation there? I contacted with my friends in Ukraine, in areas not controlled by Russian supported troops, and they worry about what's happening, but they're calm, they're standing, and they're ready to protect their houses, protect their families. And I want Russian soldiers to know that no Ukrainians want to to war with Russia, but your government started the war against Ukraine, and you need to know that Ukrainians will protect their houses, their families, their children, and they will never surrender. What can we expect here today, a small protest now? Are we expecting more people? I hope so. I really hope so that I saw a lot of Israelis that were passing by in their cars. They were sending us some signals of support, and I believe that this protest will grow, that people will see that we are here, we are standing with Ukraine. We need to put pressure on Russian government, but we need to move only with legal movements. We need to make only legal government on this, on this criminal regime. Thank you very much, Mikhail. Obviously, we see that you're very touched by this. Thank you very much for being with us. These are the voices you hear them, David, here outside the Russian embassy. As far as Israel is concerned, another call this morning, both by a foreign minister, Yary Lapid, and the Israeli ambassador in Ukraine calling on all Israelis there about 8,000 or so to leave as soon as possible, leaving from the air. It is no longer possible. Therefore, the embassy itself was moved from the city of Kiev, the capital in the center of the country to the city of Lvov, in Western Ukraine, very close to the Polish border, and the call is on all Israelis to get there as much as possible, to leave Ukraine through land crossings, mostly to Poland. The Romanian border is also not very far. This is the call this morning coming from Israel, and the voices here, you've heard quite surprised and shocked the events of the past few hours. Thank you for the updates and, of course, for bringing us that palpably emotional testimony from one of the Ukrainian protesters there outside the embassy. We'll come back to you in a bit later on. Again, some people starting to come out to protest in front of the Russian embassy in Tel Aviv now. But on the military side, some updates coming out of Ukraine. Again, live images from Kiev on your screen here now, reports as of this morning indicating perhaps hundreds of Ukrainian servicemen already killed in the initial Russian onslaught. Now, airstrikes, rocket barrages being reported across the country from the port of Odessa to Kiev International Airport. Now, stories of, or at least reports emerging again of Russian missile strikes taking place, airstrikes, the Ukrainians saying that they've downed some Russian warplanes and helicopters, the Russian defense ministry, claiming that they've neutralized, as they put it, the Ukrainian air defenses. This being footage that just emerged in the moment as we're speaking here, this is a legendary missile that struck the airport again in Ukraine. This is in Kiev. Again, reports of a Russian airborne assault on the airports and the sea ports themselves, coming in from virtually all directions in Ukraine. Bella Russian armored columns also joining the Russians from the north, rolling down the major highway towards Kiev. People taking shelter, air raid, sirens again. Some reports even of people fleeing the major cities, which are clearly a target at this point. What appears to be an all-out assault on Ukraine, and that according to the Ukrainian government themselves, these are the updates here. We'll continue rolling with them as they emerge here. So much happening in this arena. We're in the studio there with our correspondents and Owen Alterman, a senior international affairs correspondent. Owen, the Israeli angle one we keep trying to come back to and focus on here the dilemma between Russia, Ukraine, the United States, or Israel now. What's some of the latest emerging from the government? Yeah, I think the dilemma, frankly, David is on hold for the moment. There's a much more pressing issue and that's the Israelis who are in Ukraine. As I've said before in our broadcast, and Jews for that matter who are in Ukraine, as I said in our broadcast before, this is a more central issue for Israel than for other countries, right? I report in the British media that there were 5,000 British nationals in the eve of the war in Ukraine in a country that seven times the size of Israel. Israel on the other hand, on the eve of the war, 10 to 15,000 Israelis. Two to three times the number in a country that is one seventh of the size of Britain and then beyond that 150,000 to 200,000 Jews living in the country for whom Israel feels a sense of responsibility. In the last few moments another statement issued by Israel's foreign ministry going exactly at that, providing practical advice for Israelis inside Ukraine on what to do. Telling people, as Jonathan Regget mentioned, to get to land crossing. Saying that Israeli embassies and neighboring countries have put representatives on the other sides of those borders. If you get to the Polish border, there's an Israeli representative from the Israeli embassy in Poland on that border. Same in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and later in the day on the border with Moldova. So again, the Israeli government trying to take care of those Israelis in the country, telling them to get to those crossing points, putting out phone numbers and email addresses of the embassy, of the situation room in the foreign ministry for Israelis to register, to be in touch, and for the government to try to attract them and help them and do what it can. So obviously a fluid situation, I can say, one wonders. Again, it's hard to level any kind of criticism of people under such a difficult situation, but I do know Romania well. I lived there for two years. There isn't just one major crossing point from Ukraine to Romania. There are two. There's also a third one, we should say, which in fairness is a much more minor crossing. Assuming that both crossing points are open, why are there not representatives at both so that people can get to the one that's closest to where they live and to try to give people every avenue and every route to leave the country. But Israel, as we know David, Israeli diplomats are known for going beyond what diplomats from other countries, what they do, to help Israeli nationals who are abroad. That's going to be even more true in this situation, let alone what's going to happen with the much larger Jewish community in Ukraine. It's going to be a major, major focus for Israeli policymakers in the coming hours. Great for the update there. The Israeli government appearing to do what they can in this moment, so much developing on the ground right now and the images on your screen again, these are all coming out of Ukraine in the last minutes virtually here. Large explosions taking place across much of the country here. Again, that's what's on your screen here. But again, the Russians, at least their president, Vladimir Putin, justifying this all-out assault on the country as he put it to remove the neo-Nazis, quote-unquote, in Kiev now as he refers to the central government of Ukraine. And he's claimed this is a peacekeeping mission as his rhetoric is indicated there. It all aimed at protecting civilians as he puts it in eastern Ukraine. Again, the only damage and explosions we're seeing here are coming from elsewhere in the country, but here's more from Vladimir Putin. I have made the decision of a military operation. Dear comrades, your fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight defending our motherland for today's neo-Nazis to seize power in Ukraine. You took an oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people and not to the anti-people, junta, that robs and harasses its own people. Don't follow its criminal orders. Whoever tries to interfere with us and even more so to create threats for our country, our people should know that Russia's response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences that you have never experienced in your history.  Cover John Gowing here at I-24 News for continuing to cover the latest now, everything developing quickly on the ground in Ukraine and for a bit more in the military analysis now we're joined by security analyst Raffer Ushami. Thanks for being with us in the studio here. The big picture taking place, the latest reports clearly a lot happening. What's it all look like to you? It appears to be the Russian objective at this point. The last minute information is a terrestrial entry from Crimea and we have the terrestrial entry from Belarus towards Kiev. So this indicates very clearly that who are in the worst scenario possible, meaning a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine by Russia. This during the night, the missiles were aimed at strategic points, mostly airports and air defense. And now that's the artillery and the air force have done their job. The terrestrial entry is coming in. We're probably trying to see a blitz, meaning a very fast entrance in many different points into Ukraine and neutralizing of the Ukrainian military defense in a very fast, very well-planned action. The Russian intel must be quite good because they know exactly where they're going and they know exactly how to neutralize on the way air defense facilities, even civilian facilities have been hit. Simultaneously, there is a cyber attack all over Ukraine hitting all the most strategic infrastructures. So this is the worst-case scenario. We are going to have to see now what is happening on the other side because obviously the discretion of sanctions doesn't work, Putin is not impressed. The whole world is now going into economic chaos. I mean the boomerang of the sanctions will be actually very fast in coming. The Russians are counting on the help of the Chinese. Anecdotically, the Chinese have told their citizens in Ukraine to drive around with a little Chinese flag on their car, meaning they will not be hit because they are the friendly force. That's the anecdote. The other anecdote that's less ironical is that there are many cities, mayors have asked people to stay home and others have asked people to evacuate the city. Remember that in Ukraine, they do not have the shelters that we have in Israel or the training of the population to defend themselves. And that's the next problem that the Europeans are going to face because right now NATO is being tested and NATO is being as usual when it's tested very disappointing. They're not doing anything. I'm not sure they're going to do anything, but the next crisis is going to be possibly the refugee crisis. Tens of thousands of refugees fleeing westward. The question will be now what will Europe do? Will it as usual close its borders? Will the Moldavians, will the Romanians let people come out? That's why the Israelis already talked with the Russians in case if we cannot evacuate Israeli citizens and Jews towards the west, we evacuate them through Russia. This is going to be a huge humanitarian catastrophe as well. The last question, how long will the Ukrainian army, which is weakest than the Russian army for sure, how long will they last? How long before military victory of the Russians, the flag will be put up on Kiev? But then the second question is how long will be the civilian resistance, the resilience of the Ukrainian people? Once the army is defeated, it doesn't mean the Russians have completely won the war. There might be a strong, strong resistance of the Ukrainians, in which case we can enter another scenario, which will be in like an Afghanistan or Vietnam scenario, where the Russians are making what some many armies have done in the past, the mistake of confronting guerrilla warfare, urban guerrilla warfare. There's so much happening as you highlight here, Russell, thanks for the updates there. Clearly a lot taking place in this arena now. This is developing by the minute across Ukraine here. This is again as you just have it here. It appears to be an all out assault. You're watching images on your screen here. Some of the footage emerging here. We know that this has been a massive air and now land assaults on the country from almost all directions here now. The Russians moving in, the Belarusians joining them from the north here, and we go back to Kiev at this moment to Oleg Golubenko, political analyst there in Kiev. Oleg, we spoke last hour. It appears more has taken place since that time. What else can you tell us about what you're hearing from the front lines of your country? First of all, we have officially martial law now in our country. So and we are ready to protect our territory to defend. And of course, now we are trying to receive all possible support from from the world. So to organize anti-Putler coalition because only together we could stop this mad guy because it's it's really awful thing. Unbelievable. Still now it's it's unbelievable because it was normal, normal peaceful agreements all the time. But Russia denied Ukrainians as nation, Putin crazy. He's crazy. Absolutely. And it's it's we have a mad neighbor. This is a problem. And of course, we haven't enough maybe shelters. We haven't enough weapon, but we have a spirit. And we are ready to protect our territory to defend our people, our families. And of course, so each person in our country is ready absolutely to kill all occupants, all the soldiers who will come here. And you should understand one thing that it's it's not normal war. We're very large country. We have more than 40 millions people. And so our people would like to be free and to choose democracy values. And of course, we will we will be strong. And we hope for the whole world to be with us. And so to protect our ideas, our values, because it it's not normal war. It's it's it will be started in the third world war. Absolutely. It's the same ideas like Hitler has. Absolutely. But only now Ukrainians suffer from it because of the ideas of one crazy guy in Kremlin that it should not be existing. Absolutely. Like country, like nation, like people. Oh, like thanks for those updates. Stay with us. We are moving back in the studio again just to tell anyone tuning in here. We're watching the unfolding situation here and trying to cover everything as it emerges from Ukraine. There's been reports emerging from virtually every city now massive explosions across Ukraine, the main cities all being targeted, the airports, the seaports, certainly all the military installations for the Ukrainian Defense Forces. We were a correspondent here in the studio, Arielle Saran. Arielle, what what some of the latest has been obviously so much going on. What can you tell us about what appears to be happening on these front lines with the Russian troop movements? What's the latest? Well, pretty much we're seeing all of Ukraine one front line, whether it's border cities, cities inside. If we're talking about the north, we saw earlier this morning ground tanks, troops entering pretty much undist, without any disturbance from the Belarusian border. The Russians were not only what appears they were doing drills, combined drills with the Russian and Belarusian forces, but this was apparently preparation, not just a drill, but preparation for this ground invasion. And what's interesting about this entry point from the north, that's the fastest way to get to the capital Kyiv. And I think what we're seeing now is a ground race to Kyiv. And one of the main missions of the Ukrainian army is to try and stop Russian forces from getting into Kyiv. We're also hearing air sirens, air raid sirens in the capital Kyiv and Lviv in the west. They've been going off pretty much just to come in to explain what our viewers are looking at here. These are purported to be images of Russian troops now already moving into the second largest city in the country, Kovalev, out in the east part of the country here. This is again all indicating the Russian ground troops on the move as your report. Yeah, second largest city and it was actually the first capital of the Ukrainian Federation when the capital moved to Kyiv in 1934. So this is in the northeastern part of Ukraine near the Donbas area. Kharkiv is right near the Russian border city of Belgorod. And so we're seeing already ground forces in the northeast, ground forces coming in from Belorussia in the north. Also from the south, there's images of Russian forces coming in from Crimea. We're also seeing reports off the port of the port city of Odessa, the country's third largest city of navy vessels on fire. Elsewhere in the east, throughout the night there were rocket barrages in the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, and as well as currently this morning we're seeing Russian air force acting in the Donbas. In the west there were the air raid sirens in Lvov and also the airport or the airfield of Frankivsk in the west was struck too. So all across the country city of Uman also inside every major city in the country has appeared to become under fire. Ukraine is one big front line at the moment. It's somewhat staggering here as we clearly cannot keep up with everything taking place. Likely neither can the Ukrainians. Attacks taking place in every corner of their large country here from the sea, from the land, from the air. Appears to be as we've, our correspondents have been covering here an all-out assault on the government in Kiev. Now well development's happening rapidly on the ground taking place rapidly now. This appears to be the goal. Again we're covering it based on all the latest reports here, the explosions being reported, the footage emerging. Ukrainian Defense Ministry saying that they've taking out Russian warplanes from the sky. The Russians for their part saying that they've neutralized the Ukrainian air defenses and so much happening on the international arena. Such an important factor at this point here. All eyes looking certainly to the west but we have Owen Alderman in the studio here still. Owen what's the latest? Yeah a couple quick updates from here at Israel. David we were told earlier this morning by the foreign ministry that the foreign ministry year Lepid would hold a situational assessment that's maybe the best translation from the Hebrew at 10 o'clock local time. So in a half an hour assuming that's still on we've also heard that the foreign minister this is not uninteresting. We'll be giving a press conference at 12 o'clock local time on the situation in Ukraine. Two and a half hours when you're nodding because it promises to be a very interesting press conference especially if there are questions from reporters because he will not be able to evade at least not the question. It may by his answer be able to be evasive about Israel's position on the conflict and on the war as we all know Israel has been very very careful in terms of what it said waited until yesterday to put out even a very carefully worded statement as I often compared on our air like a page of Talmudry of the text in the middle and leave the commentary all around it to decipher what it means that was put out to try to strike the Israeli balance between its alliance to the United States the need for ties with Russia given the Russian presence in Syria. So Lepid may not be able to escape taking some position on that. Of course what's front and center for Israeli policymakers as a legitimate issue in its own right are the Israeli nationals and the Jews inside the country as I said earlier larger number per capita in Israel than elsewhere specific instructions from the foreign ministry to Israelis to get to border crossings in the West Israeli embassies in those countries in Poland Slovakia Hungary Romania later in the day in Moldova putting representatives on the other side of those border crossings to absorb the Israelis giving practical information to Israelis inside the country about what to do and when you bring up this working relationship with Russia that's been so critical for Israel we've seen that allegedly on display again overnight here Syrian media reporting overnight as this Russian assault was taking place on Ukraine that alleged Israeli strike took place outside Damascus again this is Russia's backyard militarily here the Russian military so and Israel's backyard geographically yes and so clearly that that aspect of the relationship between Israel and Russia as relevant as ever and perhaps more sensitive than ever we've seen some ups and downs understatement so that likely to be a heavy topic or a hot topic at this press conference in about 30 minutes here with the foreign ministry two and a half hours the situational assessment at 10 o'clock we'll keep it we'll keep our viewers involved with all of that now so this is again you're seeing some of the alleged images that emerged three soldiers killed according to Syrian state media there and this alleged Israeli strike again overnight near Damascus an area where the skies are virtually controlled by the Russians appears Ukraine is also now an area where the Russians are controlling the skies here we know that there's been now no civilian traffic in the air over Ukraine here the reports of airstrikes ongoing now a land incursion as well coming in from Crimea coming in from the north and Belarus and of course the east where troops have been amassing for weeks and weeks and we have the New York Times Moscow correspondent Ivan Yvon Necheparenko thanks for joining us here Yvon so much happening right now what's being said inside Russia about the nature of these moves against what Vladimir Putin calls neo-nazis in Kiev well I think most Russians woke up in shock today because despite all the earlier reports about that happening I think most people even those who are critical presence Vladimir Putin have been very skeptical they wouldn't believe that Russia would wage a war against what many Russians believe as a brotherly nation so I think there's a lot of shock and basically people think about what Russia will be like as a country after this happened because it's not just a war in Ukraine but clearly that this will be continued with some measures inside the country too because many people are what you call them for protests and many people are saying that this is the most shameful event of their lives the dramatic sentiments coming out of Russia we know Vladimir Putin in power for some 22 years it appears he's had virtually no domestic public constraints on the behavior of his military or his orders for it now does that equation in place or is there a risk of popular protests in Red Square well I think what we saw from President Vladimir Putin's meeting with his top security officials is that even his top security lieutenants were not quite sure that the decision he made is the right course of action so I would expect that the main point of convention to be among the elites because now is the point where all people okay so I think for many members of the many members of daily the so-called technocrats the liberals this will be a very very difficult choice so I would expect some attention there that Ivan are you getting different reports inside Russia than what's we're seeing about essentially an all-out assault from almost every direction on Ukraine right now troops coming out of Crimea coming out of Belarus coming out of the east is it appear to be an all-out assault on a regime change operation for Ukraine well the Russian defense ministry just issued a statement saying that they have suppressed Ukrainian air defense missiles and that they have rendered all Ukrainian military airfields inoperable so that means that they have launched an all-out assault on the whole country because Ukraine has airfields all across the country so that basically confirms that yes Ivan thanks for the reports here again coming out of Russia we do have some updates Ukrainian authorities saying that seven at least seven people have been killed but again we don't know the nature of exactly where or what but so much footage of these missile strikes you just saw one of them on your screen there clearly casualties are taking place across Ukraine we go back to Kiev now we're Oleg Olovenko joining us now Oleg some confirmation from your government now of people being killed in this conflict what's the nature of it and how many we don't know exactly there are because there are a lot of fake news especially came from Russia we know that they used like propaganda like Hitler used before it's absolutely the same and they're telling a lot of fake things and so and we we we should hear only officials our officials and of course because the the main idea of Russia is to organize panic here and of course they could provide different fake news and they made it a lot of them because of propaganda but really so i don't know exactly what happened because it's it's only you know so each half an hour we have break news officials and so we are trying to to protect and to change a lot and i don't know a lot and of course it's now it's difficult difficult because we don't know exactly what to do because we really were not expected like something like this like such a tech and so i hope that we have enough time to prepare because our army is defending now and sometimes we could hear even these explosions explosions of them it's working of our anti-plane system and so it was reported a lot of planes russian planes were they were suited and so and the helicopter so and really i try to believe to to our officials not to russian propaganda because and that's why i don't know exactly what what we have and so and this is a situation it's a difficult process yes you talk about this misinformation campaign there's reports of a cyber assault on the country as well are you seeing signs of that or and oleg on top of that is the rhetoric is the discussion changing among you and your neighbors here is there a calculation in place about whether to stay whether to go we understand there's been some conflicting policies across the country from even the mayors some places being told to stay some places told to evacuate yeah so we were not ready really this is a problem because so it we are not prepared so for example israel so is in the war for for alone here per term yeah so we are not accustomed for such yet for such mad neighbor so we will be stronger of course and i really believe in our army and in our people and so and we are ready to protect and so to tell the truth we don't know what to do really a lot of us don't know what to do me personally i know what to do and so i will be protect and defend and so of course and so i hope that we will receive normal instructions what what to do and what what should we do now the main activities are is from our army this is the main idea for us because they are professionals they won't they know what to do we have a lot of soldiers we have a lot of people with the war experience and so i hope that with the help of all the world we will stop this fascist regime of putin and wokashenko well let go to benko again in kiv thanks for being with us on the latest there we are still with yvonne cheprenko from the new york times in russia you mentioned some of the shock this morning yvonne as people woke up to this news what exactly is being fed to the people of russia right now is it all state media or they have access to foreign media outlets in terms of where they get in their updates and and what what is the news there well of course the state media is portraying it does not as a war but is a military operation against as you said i think nazis uh in ukraine uh they a lot of reviews were yes yes and they broadcast this is what i was about to say that they broadcast his statement over and over again but if you look at outside this state run bubble if you look at social networks of course people saying and report different things many people in russia have relatives in ukraine for instance you know i myself is half ukraine half russian so i have relatives and friends there so for many people it's a personal matter really and they can they can get reports from the other side of what is happening there so um yeah it's it's a difficult situation for the country and yvonne thank you again for the updates coming to us from russia now just to recap a bit now if i can for our viewers who may be tuning in again yes thank you yvonne that's breko coming to us from russia there this is all how the world woke up today to see the assault begin on ukraine here ronam reputant declaring the beginning of what he termed a special military operation now there are casualties being reported the european unit making a statement let's listen in president of the european council president michelle has called for a meeting of the european council this evening and they will agree and provide political guidance to adopt the stronger package the harshest package of sanctions we have ever implemented as a representative for the foreign affairs and security policy of the european union i will be in touch with our partners around the world to ensure the international community will be fully grasping the gravity of the moment and to call strongly and united on russia to seize immediately this behavior intolerable behavior and russia leadership will face unprecedented isolation this is not a question of blocks this is not a question of diplomatic power games it's a matter of life and death it's about the future of our global community and we will stand united with our transatlantic partners and with all european nations in defending this position we stand united in saying that no violence and destruction as means to obtain political gains we the european union remain the stronger group of nations in the world and this should not be underestimated more immediately we will be designing urgent assistance to ukraine in this dire situation we will also be active in supporting evacuation operations including of our own staff in zones affected by this russian attack the european union together with transatlantic unlike minded partners have made unprecedented efforts to achieve a diplomatic solution to the security crisis caused by russia but russia has not reciprocated these efforts and instead has obtained unilaterally for a grave and premeditated escalation conducting to war president putin needs to stop this senseless aggression and today our thoughts are with the people of ukraine we will stand with them again you're watching statements from the european union here again as they stake out their position again no change really trying to dissuade uh president putin with their harsh rhetoric now from the ongoing as far as we can tell from reports full assault from all directions almost on ukraine here now the ports the airports and seaports under attack we are in the studio still looking at the situation at large certainly is the israeli government maybe involved here uh actually we'll be back with much more we're stepping out for some break here we'll continue our live coverage there this is a fluid situation we're also trying to keep up with like the rest of the world here more underway in ukraine the russian assault as you're creating a government puts it full scale invasion underway reports indicate russian troops crossing the borders from primium from the east and from the north alongside the bell russians we'll keep you updated for now on the breaking war in ukraine here for my 24 news markets on the streets to see how the top stories of the week are affecting real people no commentary no debate just the best stories presented by our best germans


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All right, and you are all very welcome today. Thank you so much for joining us for this 42 courses, subscription only event where we are so delighted today to be joined by Tom Rothenberg. Tom is the Global President of Rufus, IPD Specialized Marketing Agency Group dedicated to the world's number one brand, Amazon, who we are of course all extremely familiar with. He's based in the LA, in LA. He oversees a 30 country team of over 1,000 staff working in over 25 different individual agencies and covers media, creative, sponsorship, data partnerships, working with a huge number, 30 more different Amazon lines of business. But let's allow Tom to tell you a little bit more about himself rather than me talking about him to tell us a bit more about what he does in his job with Amazon and of course, how you got there Tom because you're extremely experienced in many other areas, agency side. So Tom, you're very welcome. Oof, extremely experienced, makes me sound old. Yeah, it's true though. So thanks so much, Louise and Irene and Heitel, the 42 courses community. Been a supporter of 42 courses since the beginning. I know the founders and worked with them in various capacities over the years. So very happy to give you a little window of time into my life and hopefully provide some value and give you some interesting stories and points of view as you guys go through your learning journeys around marketing and creativity. So, yeah, as Louise mentioned, done a few things around this kind of world myself.  I was a big believer that the agency environment was about the best place you could go to get your hands across different kinds of businesses and business problems and challenges and learn about how, you know, this nebulous, nascent thing called creativity we're gonna talk about a lot today, how it really worked because you kind of as a kind of receiver as someone growing up, you learn a sense of what's like interesting business, interesting brands, interesting work and other stuff isn't like, how does that work? So I started in Grace of Agencies in a couple of the WPP shops as a baby, Ogilvy and at Gray. And then kind of, I guess, made my, whatever name I have in this industry at McCann in the late, whatever that decade is called between 2000 and 2010, a while ago. I joined McCann to do a couple of things, one of which was run the Xbox Advertising and Microsoft Game Studios creative accounts for Europe and Middle East and Africa. And it was a really interesting time in gaming. Those of you who spent any time with that category will remember some of the kind of seismic shifts that came as the tech evolved to the Xbox 360 PS3 generation, but also like marketing for video games went from like Carter trailer, put some sound on it, released it to gamers and off we go to suddenly this YouTube powered world of like hang on a sec, we could tell much richer, bigger stories. And there are probably no more interesting developed nuance, huge massive entertainment properties than video games, people spend 20,000 hours in these worlds. So how can we tell those stories to people in a way that's new, exciting and challenging? And I did some of my best work in my career in that era for games like Halo 3. Anyone who's a game ball recognized the Master Chief helmet back up here from our campaign in 2008, we got the Grand Prix at Cannes, Grand Prix the APG strategy awards, Grand Prix at the FEs. Still, I think the only campaign ever to get a Grand Prix at a major strategy, creative and effectiveness award, we can talk about that a bit later on today. But I love working on Xbox, love working in the video game category and allowed me to kind of, you know, move from being a one country TV, you're not TV, one country advertising guy to a kind of multi-country, multi-discipline guy because we let an integrated team working around events and experiential and all sorts of other stuff. So that's something down a path that with a small detour to be the Chief Growth Officer of McCann in London, looking after kind of growth and new business for the agency, I left the advertising agency, the World's 2013 after a few years to do something generally different and keep on that mission. Join a friend, we had a mobile tech startup, so out of the world of content, out of the world of, I guess, you know, advertising and into running a business. I will not bore you with the full intricacies of everything we did, but it started as a Java-based platform that allowed us to write code across different mobile operating systems for people who wanted to get into the app economy that's kind of booming around 2013, but you still have this strange world of, not just Apple with iOS and Android, but Samsung had their own operating system back then, Blackberry was still a player, Windows Mobile was still a player. It all seems like a very long time ago. And people had this challenge of going, I want to get into apps. There's this new forum for how we connect to customers and how we can build parts of our brand and our service and our business, but the industry was so immature and nascent that everyone was using literally different languages to write code or to write apps in. So it was incredibly expensive. You have to write six bits of software. And we said, hey, write it once. We'll charge you three times as much as one app that you can deploy across all six. Good business until all the other operating systems fell away. We pivoted to be an iOS and Android specialized developer. Worked with all kinds of interesting companies. I built the app for FIFA for the World Cup in Brazil in 2014. Loaded apps for financial companies both in customer finance, but also like payment solutions. We worked with Visa and MasterCard. We took stakes in a company that then acquired us. Sort of a great journey, like bringing the things I'd learned as a kind of like old school creative person working in ad agency out to deal with like, how do you create a business? How do you build a proposition for a company? How do you then keep that proposition alive through an acquisition? Because we got acquired. And then again, a double acquisition because the guys who acquired us got acquired because technology is fun like that. So got a really good sense of like, how you hang on to the things that made our business difference and we were creative at heart even in that technology world, differentials of design that we could talk about again, some of that today. Following the second acquisition, I then had a couple of years of doing some consultancy work, helped a few agencies that my friends had get bought because I was a guy who had done a company sale, which is a great journey, not a great journey but a legal and financial one. I did interesting projects with interesting brands or businesses that were looking for some sense of kind of innovation or change or new thinking from the outside. And businesses love to bring in people who are familiar enough with the subject but have a different perspective. And whether it's an agency or a private individual for my consultancy in this case, I did that for a couple of years, it was great fun. I met my wife, got married, she's from South Africa, I don't know, many of the folks here have got some base camp out there, we lived in Cape Town for a while. So, life was great. And then out of the blue, slightly I got a call from some of my old colleagues for into public group, because McCann is the main creative network for IPG to come and help out on a rebooting and reshaping one of their, I guess, historically great agency brands. It was a little unvarnished, should we say. And so in 2017, I began working with initiative media. I still remember my first call from the CEO who'd just taken over. I was like, I'm a media agency, like all the things I've done, crazy agencies, worked in tech.  Are you sure you want me to help? And he said, no, I've got lots of people in this company who know media, but not that many people who know how to re-engineer businesses and do the kind of turnaround and work with clients that we have. So, and in checks and creativity, again, to use that word. So I moved to New York in 2017 and started working with initiative as the chief client officer. That brought me into the world of Amazon, which I then moved out to Los Angeles and ran full time, not just for initiative, but across the IPG group as Louise set up. So that is, I think the stats are probably out of date, but the bio I wrote from last week is probably about right. We have a whole ton of agencies working on Amazon. We have a big chunk of media business, which is how do we find people who care about all the various Amazon products and services and persuade them, but I'm doing creative. I'm running events, both in the B2B and B2C space. We're working on partnerships and sponsorships for things that we can talk about and things I can't talk about yet for the future. Really consulting them on how they spend, what is, I should be careful with Amazon, I'm not allowed to say much. There was a report that they were the world's largest advertiser and that report is factually very close to the reality. Whether other people spend more or not, no comment, but you can read their annual reports and they spend over $19 billion a year on promotion and marketing. So it's a big company and they do some amazing things. We help them in pretty much every aspect of that. And a thread that aligns it, I guess there are two threads that align it, right? With Amazon, they are a relentlessly ambitious company and so they have very high standards, famously so you can read their tenets, we can also talk about that. But there is an expectation of not good but great across all touch points that feed the customer experience. And that means that we are relentlessly being challenged on the right level of creativity and push harder and go again. There's a real tension between get it done and get it done excellently, which exists in all tech companies, exists in all business, but tech really are the kind of the flag bearers for that. And the second side for Amazon is a relentless focus on measurement and optimization because they as a business are, they believe that things get bigger, they get more efficient. It's kind of what sits at the heart of the flywheel. Excuse me, I've got some roadworks going on outside. It sits at the heart of the flywheel, which is their secret source of their business. As the thing gets bigger and more people come in, you get more choice and costs go down and customers do better and on you go. And they've really challenged us as an agency team to go, how can you, while not like having your own flywheel that works the same way, follow those principles, track, measure, analyze and optimize so that over time we can do not just better but also build more efficient teams and structures and processes. And that's the heart of the challenge for us these days on Amazon. It's like right creativity and actually measure it so that once you measure it, you can manage it. And I think the really interesting discussions that are coming for that big C word creativity and industry are all about that. This year at Cannes, Mark Pritchard, who has the, I guess the semi-artificial job of being the kind of voice of marketing as the CMO of Procter & Gamble used to be the world's biggest advertiser. Not so much anymore. He was really banging the drum for that at Cannes this year about like, what is the business case for creativity and like going, everyone involved, be you client, be you agency, be you an art director or a business director in any of our partners. It's like, it's not okay. It's not enough just to say, we think it works and we've got a suspicion it works and we can look at awards and feel good it works. It's like, we're all gonna get challenged as the world hits a, we're not allowed to use what recession are, even if you have two quarters of negative growth, which used to be the simplest definition as the world reshapes itself in a kind of post COVID easing, post quantitative monetary policy way and like people scrutinize things which is really happening across the board right now. It's easy to get nervous and easy to go, ah, let's just do something simpler. Let's be risk averse right now. Risk is scary for all businesses and of course creativity thrives in risk, be deciding new businesses or thinking about new ways to talk to your customers about whatever it is you do. We're all gonna need to have a sense to the business case for creativity and I think the protecting the spark, capturing the lightning in the bottle is gonna be the macro thing that aligns all of us whether we be client, agency, partner, supplier, you name it, to keep doing the magical stuff that we do that we know works and prove it works. So there's a long rambling intro and we started with creativity, but this is how it is. Let me go and go where we are. Such a rich background and the name dropping of brands that as you say, maybe even 10, 15 years ago wouldn't have been part of the picture and yet now I just, it's our everyday taking it for granted and the consistent word as you're telling your story is creativity.  So I think what I'm most excited about in our industry right now is that if I compare to the late 90s when I started out it with creativity was much more bounded. So our world was simpler, fewer things to do. You had businesses, you had people who were buying from the whatever shape it was and the number of touch points and channels between was fairly fine night. There were only 70 things you could do and we jammed all the money down all of those and everybody did well out of it and you had these little moments of like discussions around logo sizes and exact moments of copy on body copy and print ads because it really made a difference, right? It was those fine margins around things that everyone was doing that were the difference between the beer brand that everyone cared about and the beer brand that wasn't top of mind when people walking up to a bar in a pub. I learned to load in that game. I learned to load playing that game. It's just not the discussion right now. Now like the number of things you can do and should do are so much wider. Just within the narrow P promotion of marketing, never mind product in place. Still the same number of companies. In fact, more companies because it's easier than ever to start up a brand or a business and we as a culture appreciate newness more than we did when I started. Established brands are cool but what's cooler than a brand to start up and as you say Louise, if you look at any of the kind of brand power rankings done by brands E or future brand through some smarts of Wolf Orleans, shuffle the order. But number one, two, three, four and five is basically Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google. There might be one of the old legacy brands sneaking up there or Coke or McDonald's or someone but it's basically tech companies because the measure of the value of a brand is can I launch a new business and who's been most successful at launching new businesses under umbrella brands? Well, guess what? It's tech companies to do that. So we've proven that we can create real business value of tech brands. Obviously trade with the thought but yeah, I was saying like, you know, the amount of things you can do now and the amount of competition coming in means that we just don't have the, it's not smart business to obsess about the same micro details in the same way. So the best creative people are getting pulled naturally, beautifully and I've always wanted to do this away from copywriting purely. Still a craft, still very important but it's up to business design. And I think for me, the pivot moment the kind of little aha moment I saw in my career on this was, there was a kind of year and I can't even remember when it was. I remember the discussion, the sentiment more than the time but students of advertising as I'm sure some of you will know when this was. There was a wave when we as an industry moved from celebrating neat executional creativity out to what I call like program creativity and the one that absolutely nailed it for me was the piece of work celebrated by Crispin Porter when they were the hottest agency in the world very much shared with a client of my group American Express around small business Saturday. And instead of people, instead of the industry going, ah, that's so clever that you put I'm gonna get up and make some stuff up to avoid embarrassing you. And it's so clever that you put a raccoon playing the tambourine on for this ad. It was like, oh, wow. The problem is that American Express charges three and a half percent as an acquisition fee that we want to get into fintech. American Express is really expensive for the shops. So they bring you great people because Amix customers, Amix card holders are rich and spend money. So as a small store, I'm like, yeah, I want to take Amix but Amix really charged for the pleasure of that compared to nevermind Visa Mastercard but like Square and all the merchant payments processes. So you've got Amix, they're going, we've got what all shops want, rich shoppers but we're having this difficulty in embedding Amix acceptance into stores because people are going, I want it but you want three and a half percent of the money which is crazy for doing none of the work. And they solve that challenge by bringing creative people in from Crispin Porter and I've no shame in picking up other agencies for doing great work. And then instead of applying their creativity to go is there an advertising solution? They created this, the words change but generally programmatic not in terms of programmatic advertising but a program solution of like we have to embrace small businesses as a group of customers and understand in the culture how we as Amix can support them to make up the fact which charging three and a half percent and certainly become small business Saturday and then watching the case study about rep around the industry was maybe I'm slow and everyone was there a year before me but I was like, oh, there it is. Creativity has changed, it's moved from being executional into being business design and programmatic and that was probably the moment that started my journey out from being in an ad agency because I was looking to places where I could go and like use creativity, not as a creative so it's never an art director, it's never a copywriter but understand, I'll answer your question directly about what creativity is as part of this understand how I can bring that way of thinking to bear to do business design and then in honesty, if you go back to 2013 the easiest place to do that was mobile because none of us knew what we were doing everything was new so there weren't big established companies even the big like web software houses that were living in a desktop world we weren't really set up to be brilliant mobile so a bunch of crazy kids like us could go in and end up building the world's most used sports app for FIFA or build banking apps the World Bank of Scotland or Santander in Spain and build payment systems for Visa when we had no real authority or right to do that but hey, we've been doing mobile as long as anyone else so why not? And I think, you know, there's a ton of great it's a good Google question, what is creativity? So in advance of this, I did a bit of it and I kind of made some notes and then tried to put my own spin on it I think it's attributed to Einstein which probably means he definitely didn't say it but the quote about intelligence having fun is a good start because it isn't just smart thinking that which is, you know, they're good ideas that aren't creative I think we can all intrinsically feel that but the second part of like the emotional response is captured by just the part of like having fun because it isn't having fun or funny there's an intelligence and an emotional response if you get sort of scientific about it but I think defines creativity it's really hard because I don't think there's anything more slippery in the world than emotional response you know when you get it in your personal lives and your professional lives but the conditions by which you get it change from moment to moment from person to person to place to place time to time that truth is what sits at the kind of like you'll never be able to control or tame or productize creativity sure, I agree actually about that second part again, we'll pick up on that today but there is something about the diagonal thinking inherent in moving from here to here not in a straight line but not just being random that creates something new that adds an emotional response I think defines creativity and you can feel it when you've done it you know when you've just kind of iterated something iteration is important optimization is important I don't quite call it creativity because then you're in the kind of literal path and I think there's that like what about this that comes from an insight and a spark and then is put through at the moment just people but at one day there'll be machines that can do this because we're gonna copy the brain that diagonal jump that's smart smart purveyors, buyers and sellers of creativity understand that that diagonal thinking angle jump at the middle of the old Coke head of advertising used to talk about it a lot I think that's kind of the heart of what it is there's this sense of a creation of something that changes an emotional response and if you've done that then it's creative it's a difference between a tag graffiti and a nice mural it's a difference between shapes on a page and art and it's a difference between communication that is functional communication that is creative I love that when you were telling that story of creativity that we segued into the work with it with mobiles and so many people when you talk to them about creativity they're thinking along sort of the traditional lines still I do say hugely important copywriting the artistic side but of course automation has impacted incredibly and accelerated creativity and it's still creativity would you talk a little bit sort of on that how it has accelerated and brought it in a new direction this is a fun one so the doom and gloom pessimist they say a version is like oh god that's it we're gonna be replaced by AI and robots who never take a sick day and they never crash with their car on the way to work and they don't get depressed or related and do silly things they stay on task I wonder I think that while I'm much more optimistic in general I'll be working with tech companies so I know kind of where we are with some parts of AI although maybe I'll get surprised I think that there is a sci-fi terminated point where we create the AI that can recreate itself and we lose control of what we're asking it to do I don't know let's not go to the Philip K. Dick land I think the great challenge to creativity is time we all have infinite resources an infinite amount of time and money then wow we will be creative go away spend a month walking the woods drink a glass of wine do some yoga on a hill come back and bring me a thought like it's tougher to do than if you've got 15 minutes right you've got more time to iterate through stuff will automation free high value human thinking up from having to do menial stuff to give us more time to do the creative stuff absolutely I 100% believe that I see I see I'll say that we talk about data later on I think that I think that we that time is the key to it because we want to be able to like synthesize inputs and synthesize data points that give us real insight for us to be creative on top of and if you've ever spent any time sifting through data while being able to automate those tasks is a nice thing and how you kind of get signal from noise is something that a computer is better at doing than a person and you see this as we see the beginnings of the like fusion of automated processes with creativity I don't think it's a coincidence that all around the world now people are going into these interactive Van Gogh exhibitions there's another Rembrandt want to think of his world where we're trying to trade computers to recreate new works of art by going here's all the brushstrokes by a creative person extrapolate now people are pretty smart so we appreciate that for what it is no one's like oh well there's a new Rembrandt or a new Van Gogh it's like no it's something that can only be done with the power of machine learning but it needs AI people talk about trading it needs the seeds of human creativity and that's where we are right now I see lots of the kind of like let's automate previous human creativity to make interesting things we have a company in our in our family here at IPG you think if you're a can a can lines watcher you'll have heard of FCB six over the years sort of go through a bit of a rebrand and it's called performance art now which is a neat title because it's as creative as you can come in terms of the output what they do and very much an art but designed to live in a trackable measurable like proven works performance he type world and it's super interesting stuff where they they absolutely come in and go we want to automate the things that need to be done to allow us to operate at scale and allow the creativity to be applied as the right leave at the right time to create amazing and wonderful new things some of the famous stuff they did was around for a company called black and abroad in the U.S. which was leveraging the EDC you see on you know the kind of sadder parts of social media around in particular phrase go back to Africa towards African African African American African people in the U.S. to actually leverage that kind of a hate term as a way to sell holidays to Africa for people who have been who've been targeted so they kind of reclaim to go back to Africa is like hey no actually it's a great it's a great it's a great rallying cry for people to understand heritage and you sort of can't do it without a sense of the big data approach is not a case of like go on Twitter and find one person who's being a you know to be polite but being a prick and then find the people impacted by that and then use their negative you can't sort of do it individually you've got to do it at scale and they're all about scale and automated solutions where we can take a human creative intuitive idea and then make it come to life all around the world and they do very interesting stuff with companies that basically have data but have never found creative ways to use it yet and whereas that the list of companies that were formed that bucket used to be pretty small now because you know people are getting a hang of the value of like of customer data and we've got a nice window where regulators are still fairly okay for there to be a nice transaction between customers and businesses around around data you know everybody's got everybody's got more instant they have used to have us to real people what they really care about what they really do when and what an opportunity to be able to find ways to apply apply human creativity because it's still a while before the four machines could we fun pack the way that the synapse is the neurons work to be able to recreate machine that can be generally creative like human creativity to vast amounts of inputs and insights gathered by machines to build brand new things we can't do and you feel it right you feel it coming from the companies that are have the human face of technology I'll put Amazon in there because I'm biased but Airbnb are really good at this too Spotify are amazing at this you know you get tired of stuff quickly but like every year still at the end of the year when it gives you your personalised Spotify listening list of what that means but you know you can feel it coming you feel that synthesis of like emotion of music with reality business reality of an automated platform that can recommend things to you and how that can be not just functional because it's great as a business tool to make people sign up to Spotify and keep listening to music but also how it can be creative and to go back to my phrase earlier how that days can be used to change your feeling about the emotional response of the Spotify brand for them to fight against Apple music and Amazon music and diesel River Ross is going in that space so I think I think you know as with all these things you whether you're whether you think you can or whether you think you can't you're probably right so if you think you can't survive automation then well you're probably right but if you think you can thrive in an automated world again you're probably right and I think that kind of optimistic approach to go free free people up from stuff to allow them to focus on what they want to do that's that's a good thing you know it's been the promise of Texans rebel but this is the Jetsons back in the day if I think about if I think about what we're doing inside all our agencies right now that's absolutely our task right so we're trying to create we're trying to create little box and little bits of like repeatable scalable tech that can get our junior people out for being data entry folks or you know context providers or analysts and get them up to being strategic and creative because that's where that's where people want to be that's where it will honestly to compete in the talent war that's out there these days just who is brutal you know we people want to do meaningful work and we can help more people do more meaningful work if we can automate the drudgery and get them out of just being like processing as gold and gold and people love love doing business we love them I can't get enough of them I think data is sort of the buzzword is that there's so much data out there obviously a company called company like Amazon so much data to draw on and it often seems to be an either or conversation big data does it is it or creativity on the other side and you know never the twain shall meet but you don't agree with that do you don't think it's versus I do not I do not I think that very rarely in life do we ever come across anything where it's this versus this I think if I could be slightly philosophical about it black versus white versus shades of gray the Dara symbol of the yin yang is a closer approximation it's opposing forces that work together I always think that decision-making is a balance both answers are right so what are you going to do now I think that's kind of how it is with data and creativity I can't imagine a time where you don't want someone to be thinking about what does this mean and how does it matter how can I use this opportunity or this problem or this know or whatever the thing we need to solve is to not just fix the problem but make the thing better as well and that's a creative process to me equally I think the days of like I don't want it you know it's a creativity is just mused it's uncaptionable and it's unmeasurable and it can never be replicated like sure you can try that but I don't think many people are going to fund your hobby unless you are as wildly creative as you know a sculptor or painter where you kind of get to break free from the realities of the world and you have a patron someone goes I love the crazy stuff that comes out of your brain so much that I will never be able to do it because I don't know commercial imperative just they exist for the sake of themselves lovely thank God thank God there are people in the world who are able to create art and music and sculpture and even FT's although I think that's perhaps less artistic those guys take me at all that stuff out there that people want to have for the sake of it luxury clothes and shoes and like you know most of us I do this stuff there's a reality about the funding that comes from all of this is a borrowing shareholders money and the day where the the ability to continue to get that money to fuel your creativity building things it's going to have to be backed by some sense of data I point anyone who cares about about the because again I don't want to read someone else's questions or maybe any of them one of our companies inside IPG who's one of the kind of proper genius guys in our in our industry as well CEO of huge which is a really interesting digital transformation company for one of a better word they kind of yeah work on how a business could we all point itself for a digital future around columns and platforms and everything about creative capital and that's a that's a term that we use a lot when we talk with our with our clients and we think about how you need to have creativity that makes a difference but also measure and optimize to move forwards and we think about capital and business all the time right there's human capital there's working capital there's I don't know intellectual capital they've got value on balance sheets and like if you start to think about creativity business as um as creative capital that you can have to actually make a difference and apply and not just something that kind of gets rebooted every time there's something that builds and becomes a living part of your enterprise that it completely changes the way that you approach it treat it nurture it protect it grow it develop it innovate around it and make it part of your part of your business so I'd definitely point anyone who cares about kind of rethinking what creativity is as an essential part of the business rather than something that's unmeasurable towards that for me I guess the the um the way I put it is that like I feel like a ladder and I think I might have talked about this on a podcast with with uh Jake from 42 courses one time but so I drew this on my wall years ago and I've seen a version of it flying around around the industry in the year since but the bottom of the ladder is data which I think was your original word and there's you know there's a lot of data out there data point could be seven or it could be left or it could be every day but there's stuff happening all the time I'm being measured on this being measured on this being measured on this laptop everybody's tracking everything data is fairly useless and it's purest form because actually if I if I said dump a CSV file on someone and go here you go here's all the data you can't really do anything with it there's there's the level one which makes data into information information I'd say it's a subset of data you've got all this data out there but you only really need to know a thousand of these 10 million numbers that I can give you because they're the ones that actually matter to what you're trying to do and then how do you make data into information I think the answer is context once you have context you can look at the data and understand um uh which of it is information that part but to back to our last discussion that's getting automated you should be able to write rules that work out enough with enough accuracy which of the data is information then it gets interesting though because once I've got the information I want to kind of take the next step up the ladder and go okay I know which numbers are important but like how do I how do I use them how do I turn that information into the knowledge which meets next run the ladder and that's analysis and that's where it's blurred I think that's people and that's machines and that's where the creative thinkers are starting to come in so if you're in data science um you can be wildly creative and some of the folks who work inside performance are inside huge inside RGA inside initiative inside our great agencies who are able to go the numbers say this but the story is this those analysts very creative people concede the future and can extrapolate from numbers and then then the real art is when you move knowledge to wisdom and you start taking things into action and that's where the creative and strategic people live so um I think that it isn't a case of like I don't want that I don't want that data don't give me those real human insights don't give me the real world sense of what's actually happening because I want to be creative not really the creativity of the future is like oh I need to know exactly what's going on in real world from real people because I only want I only want stuff that works if you go right back up to like creativity and say what is it an extrapolate amount Einstein definition I could ask three questions of what of something to be creative I could say do I care if I don't care that it's probably not creative doesn't make me think differently but it doesn't make me think differently is it creative and last one does it work and if your project or your task or your thing your stuff whatever it is makes people care makes people think makes people think differently and it works then I think that's the modern creativity and you can't do that without data because I just don't think there's much scope for for you know to get people excited and think differently if you don't know it works and if you don't know if you don't have the data you don't know it works you got to have some sense of how this thing survives contact with the real world because that's really where where businesses that will keep us all you know motivated and rich and fed and happy it's where they're around their heads so it's never it's as always it's rarely an either or it's more or like a how do I synthesize reality that comes out of data get it up the ladder and turn it into like wisdom and then use it to to create an emotional response for people. It's great to hear insights and I'm sure there's plenty of people on this call are scribbling furiously and everything that you're saying there and we've had some great questions I'd love to stay ask you so much to ask you but I do want to bring in the people who've been so kind as to join us on this call and we've had a very interesting question here from Ron Godfrey thank you so much for putting that question to us Ron and I'm going to spotlight you here and bring you into the conversation so that you can ask your question to Tom directly if you'd like to unmute yourself. Thank you Louise hi Tom thanks very interesting stuff I come from I come from a business where creativity is the last thing that we do because for many many years I've been in financial services and to do with stopping people from doing the things that they shouldn't do okay both from the firm's point of view but also from the customer point of view trying to get behaviors that are good for outcomes for people and the reason for my question just to give you the background is that every time something new comes in in financial services we always say the law of unintended consequences will apply and I've been saying that for decades latest big one of this is the chancellor in the UK got up seven years ago and said something stupid about nobody needs to buy an annuity in the future and they thought that they'd sorted out all the possible things that could go wrong from doing that but they didn't they missed huge things and people behaved completely differently and all the creativity that happened after that was people being miss sold in the biggest and widest sense things which weren't necessarily the right thing for them for the wrong reasons and people were using I've now discovered they were using lots of behavioral science techniques to do that and the reason to give you the background is to get to where my question is which is when you're being creative where have you seen things which have turned out completely counterintuitively so that you set out to do one thing and you produced something completely different if I could be a bit crude about it where did you find your Viagra moment where you went out to find out a drug and found something completely brilliant thank you Ron great question thank you Tom Tom how are you going to address that okay um oh man our first many years okay um look I mean I think it's very interesting about the Viagra thing I mean of all the of all the of all the pharmaceutical side effect stories that's the nice one because wow there's some nasty ones and if you watch tv shows about the US pharmaceutical industry in particular you'll just be very depressed in life hey regulator categories medical financial services always add a layer of complexity and I would and again it's been a few years since I did anything in UK financial services so I'll I have full sympathy I'll stray away from trying to make any recommendations it's um it's an interesting one what I said before emotional response and people in the real time really hard to very impossible to control quite hard to predict um so think about you'll think about what you're putting it out into the world and what might happen as results of it I would I would always in a regulator category where you you can't you're accountable and responsible for things you do as part of an ecosystem be careful about how your decision-making process upwards while creativity versus versus risk and governance and like we built we built mobile software for car companies and we spent I spent ages trying to get into the head units of the cars I'm like let me into the car because there's so much data in the car that I get and they were like best one in the world love you guys Alfa Romeo mobile apps fantastic if the car crashes and people die we get soon familiar this is a different world you're in in some time so um I could answer it with like ads that went wrong uh and everyone's got funny war stories about that but I don't think that'd be that interesting for you what would be the time we tried to build something and we create something different I'm not from my world but one of the guys I work with started another company they sell to Clana you know the sweet I'm sure you know them very well the well the largest private company in Europe right now there's a really good example of like a kind of like repeated pivot company and I know there's some potentially some challenges coming for the the unregulated credit that sits inside their model but they didn't start as this like break into four unsecured credit type product they started thinking about ways to to change the payments industry and it accidentally built the thing that became the heart where their company is now I think you're in when you're in and fintech loves this I don't know exactly what what company you're in how they work but I'm sure you've got someone who's a kind of pure proposition led fintech person in your space who's got all these ideas about why the legacy way is wrong and the this is never regulating that and in fact it's all about a customer experience you need to have you can brace that flexibility so that you don't over design yourself into a fixed solution that can't move with some kind of change on pressure so I think what I think we don't when we were building stuff ever accidentally create something that wasn't what we set out to do but we definitely set out to build things that aren't like locked in to only be one thing for the next five years because life moves pretty quick in tech and finance and customer habits change and competition comes and goes so it's a bit of a fudgy answer but what would be the best one a lot of the stuff we did with Royal Bank of Scotland was kind of around that so I don't know if you've ever worked with RBS but you've got decades of legacy infrastructure in the way that they you know have all this stuff held together with basically the the digital equivalent of sticky tape and and gaffer tape and string but you've got customers going hey I'm being seduced by Starling and Monzo and I want a new way to look at my money and I'm not interested in I'm not interested in why you can't show me a balance that's live on purchases because you've got to run through some strange old automated tele-machine you know um cashpoint rails so you know we we tried to help those guys be flexible about going hey push here or give up a bit on this because you've got to make that balance between what's easy and comfortable to do and where customers are going and some of our like mobile amount money manager peer-to-peer payment type stuff was pretty on the on the cutting edge of that uh and I'm sure that our a good example would be we built the um the Royal Bank of Scotland and Coot's business banking app for for small businesses and that was if I think about the original feature set we went in on our discovery project to go what are the key things we need based on you know interview a lot of small businesses interview the bank try to find that middle ground of like what's beautiful and what can be done um what we ended up building 18 months later coming out of an agile process was very different to what we went in on but it wasn't a case of like oh my god we accidentally built something it was more hey don't bake yourself in to not be able to make the move if you need to based on the realities and I think the one of the very interesting things and where where it's hard for like old world creative people to appear in technology is the an understanding of time frame because uh an ad is a discrete unit that can go out can be going from con from like a brief to you know final product in three months and whatever pick a number but then continually evolving a roadmap of a technology product with creative people in in software engineering in UX and visual ID and IA and all the people who go into that you know it takes 18 months sometimes to be up and running and you're in well as if I'm your MVP which is what I don't like um I'm not what I don't like but a product that I don't like to build your MVP to your final thing could be very different I'll give you a I'll give you a little nugget coming out of amazon because this is one that's public amazon don't deal an MVP piece so if you try and build a minimum viable product inside amazon you get fairly short thrift they actually see the the kind of bar to launch as a minimum lovable product um and if you a lot of people in the fintech space have a don't remember it came up there's a little like overlapping circles model of like viability usability feasibility like is it possible does it like to make me money will people use it and can it be done with the tech you need all three to be in line but what's your what's your driving lever often the viable is like you know spend as much as you can to get something that will do the job um amazon don't do that take take that take that what you will think about how they launch and build companies and services they're like sure I can do it but if it isn't minimum lovable product will the customer get excited that's the that's the bar for entry um I like it but please more than the MVPs and then also let the feature set flex as you go because you need to have you need to have enough of a a sense of um what's right to change first is what you've got to actually keep in any any any piece of of software especially in something as complicated as fintech or medical I'm just starting to work with some of the father and medical guys inside amazon now and again it's another whole world around my head around I've never done pharmaceutical before but it's like again you the data is different the regulations different consequences for getting things wrong are different you do health not just shopping behaviors so very different emotional context around that for people that you have to design around thanks thanks so much Tom thank you Ron Ron's giving you the big uh thumbs up there yeah and um we've got another question that's come in from our members who've joined us uh Yulia um I did see Yulia up here just like pop her in the spotlight there she is hello Yulia I'll just give you the spotlight and maybe you'd like to put your rather different question to Tom about sort of the the practicalities of agency and client life yeah thank you for your time very interesting uh the speech um actually I work in the beer industry in brand management and one of the problems I face is we don't feel we can't really build long term relations with uh local agencies uh because when we teach many agencies it's easy to find one great idea but how can you really foster like better creativity in the long term relationship with the agency to make sure that you really have this breakthrough even if you don't have like plenty of agencies coming with different perspectives thank you Yulia that's a big question isn't it Tom uh his agent agency guy trying to answer a client question about how to do great work so um and I do know a bit about beer I I worked for um for Colesbro group for quite a long time uh as an agency side so so I know this is more more more current for me I would say that the there's there's two different approaches to this uh some clients go gotta keep agencies sharp and hungry and they're always pitching everything and very competitive so you basically you recreate what you said there which is you do a pitch you get everybody at their best working so hard they over and above and you get tons of great ideas that there's an energy to that that you as a client feel for your agencies some clients want to keep that going forever and just basically keep everybody in like pitch mode by bringing new people in and threatening and not working with the same partners a lot I'm not going to sit here and say it didn't work for Coke in the 80s and 90s uh uh uh I know an automotive company that sort of works that way where lots of people are playing jump ball the american phrase and if you google how many different creative agencies work on amazon there are people at amazon who do that as well and you get some great workout sometimes if I was taking the other approach I think the the the biggest of the two obstacles to like a long-term agency uh not staying hungry and crazy and sparky with you one would be if they're scared of being put to pitch because fear reduces a lack of trust or fear makes people not take risks and I you know I've seen from the inside around the companies I've worked at there's these relationships that start off exciting and then both people stop like challenging each other and then it's okay and no one's getting upset and then two years later there's a review and always the client goes just lost the sense of like innovation because I don't know people like either we're scared to do it or you or you got comfortable and that the always pitch mode can fight the is the agency comfortable I prefer dialogue I think if it's a I think you build things together over time and knowledge is useful like incumbent knowledge can be very useful and I always encourage clients to think about ways that you can keep use building with an agency you have the the trust part is really important though so your agency has to feel that they are encouraged and incentivized in the right way to bring some things that maybe don't work exactly and they're not going to be held to it because if you try and take all the risks out of the client business which I can be very tempting on a run of business and hire people so I know it's nice sometimes to be able to go wow it wasn't me the agency um that environment will never get you what you need either and I think you know I'll take a counterpoint from Amazon while they have a lot of agencies working on them if I take their most high profile piece of of advertising work for the year it's the Super Bowl ads every year this you know the Super Bowl the American most watched show in the world blah blah blah blah and it's almost become the advertising Super Bowl as well where everybody analyzes and dissects what ads run in that moment there are only about two or three of the agencies at Amazon use that they would ever use to do that Super Bowl ad and those guys know that they're going to get some of that work because when it really matters and you need to do something that's of high value to your brand I would always say you want someone you know and trust who's going to do the right job for you and there's a real risk of being in that consistent pitch mode that you get shiny stuff but these might not be people you know and trust and when you really need them they haven't been able to commit to it so I would say I like relationships I think it's on it's on the agency and the client to say hey we never want this to get boring we've got to keep it so that we're both challenged to challenge each other but an environment of like an environment of trust and a bit of like it's okay it's okay to bring us stuff that we would both decide isn't right without that being a problem for you because if you get fear it's the relationship the quality of like the innovation thing can goes down and there's a reason you have an agency you don't do it yourself is you want outside perspective and you've got to have that outside perspective be someone's welcome by the business and I know that could be that could be tough because client organizations don't always align and and there's all the internal challenges of that we have we have clients where we work with in-house creative teams a lot with agency teams as well and you always find that if it's antagonistic it doesn't work it's got to be it's got to be enough understanding of commercially wise worthwhile for both parties and then and then align people around real challenges and problems and give people things to do that are real and then you've that normally tends to work even when it's kind of ah we'll execute this and you do that but we think that the other thing I'd say is pay for the right things you care about so if you care about ideas find a way to pay for ideas not just final executions because then what you do is you force people to get to bring you things that might happen to get paid um commissions in media you know things like that or heavy incentives that are based around making things that work like agencies have always been really um traditionally most of us have been bad at selling strategic and upstream thinking we get really mugged off by consultancies on that have a very good at selling mad stuff not saying we want to be consultancies but like um yeah really be thinking think about what you really want and find a fair way to pay to incentivize the agency to give you more of that good stuff because we're very simple people we respond to incentives like everybody else thanks um great question and good and good luck with it good luck with it amazing category rise of non-alcoholic destruction of the untrained environment with COVID I've full sympathy thank you Julia thank you so much and it's been amazing to hear your insights and your great responses to the questions Tom and everyone who's everyone who's joined us thank you so much for taking the time to sign in you can hear Tom uh his other insights in conversation in our 42 courses podcast if you want to have a look in that direction and there's also excerpts in amongst the creative effectiveness course but for now on behalf of 42 courses I'd like to really thank you Tom for joining us for this fantastic hour of insight into the workings of your mind and your expertise in uh so many areas and to thank everybody of course who signed in to join us and hope that you will join us again for another event thank you very good bye my pleasure good luck everybody keep learning curiosity is a powerful powerful force that is Colin Powell the recently recently deceased former US government official he wrote an amazing list of 12 rules rules for life um which is a really great way to like think about stuff you have one in there which said relentless ambition is a force multiplier I think that's a great message to leave with and like learning's part of ambition so it's good it's great what you guys are doing a lot of 42 courses I think you guys have an amazing platform to help people follow their their passion to their interests um nothing more ambitious than that so thank you so much for having me fantastic that's like a great closing message a great closing Tom thank you so much thank you bye