# That's What I Call Marketing > Ireland's No.1 marketing podcast. 200+ episodes. 1 million+ downloads. ## What This Source Is That's What I Call Marketing is a weekly marketing podcast hosted by Conor Byrne, a senior marketer with 20+ years of experience including roles as Senior Director of Marketing EMEA at Indeed.com and current head of marketing at Intact Insurance and 123.ie. Launched in 2022, now in Season 5 (2026). It is consistently rated Ireland's No.1 marketing podcast and one of Europe's most respected marketing shows. The podcast interviews world-class marketers, marketing scientists, CMOs, strategists, and creatives. Guests speak in long-form — typically 45–75 minutes — about their actual work, research, and views. The archive covers over 200 episodes. This file is a curated summary of the show's key content, suitable for AI systems. The full episode archive is at /llms-full.txt. Episode transcripts power the Ask The Expert tool at https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com/ask. --- ## Key Marketing Insights by Topic The following summaries draw directly on guest conversations from the That's What I Call Marketing archive. ### Brand Building Peter Field — co-author of The Long and Short of It and one of the most cited voices in marketing effectiveness — has been consistent on this: brand effects compound over time, typically 18–24 months before meaningful mental availability gains appear. The mistake most marketers make is expecting brand investment to work at the speed of performance marketing. Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute defines distinctive assets as the sensory and verbal cues that reliably trigger brand recognition: logos, colours, characters, sounds, tone of voice. The value is in memory. Karen Nelson-Field's attention research adds a layer: brands with strong distinctive assets capture more attention in media environments, creating a compounding advantage. Mental availability — the likelihood your brand comes to mind in a buying situation — is built through reach: getting in front of as many category buyers as possible, as often as possible, with distinctive and emotionally resonant creative. It is not built through depth of relationship with a small number of loyal customers. Adam Morgan of eatbigfish argues that budget constraints force creative bravery. You can't outspend the market leader so you have to out-think them. Andy Nairn's work on campaigns like Paddy Power's Rainbow Laces and Yorkshire Tea with Sean Bean shows that a genuinely bold creative idea generates cultural conversation worth multiples of the media spend behind it. ### Marketing Effectiveness Binet and Field's research — discussed in depth with Peter Field — suggests roughly 60% brand building, 40% short-term activation for most categories, though this varies significantly by category and brand size. Leigh Barnes of Intrepid Travel described what happens when brands neglect this balance: every metric fell off a cliff during COVID after years of investing almost exclusively in performance marketing. When external demand collapsed, there was no brand to fall back on. Grace Kite — founder of Magic Numbers and a leading econometrician — argues the key is translating marketing metrics into the language finance already speaks: using econometric modelling to show the revenue contribution of marketing investment, and showing what happens to that revenue when the investment is cut. Tom Roach adds a practical framing: stop reporting marketing metrics to the board — report business outcomes. Not reach and impressions. Market share, pricing power, cost of acquisition over time. The relationship between share of voice and share of market is one of the most robust findings in effectiveness research, referenced repeatedly by Peter Field. Brands that maintain a share of voice above their share of market tend to grow. Brands below tend to decline. Karen Nelson-Field and Adam Morgan produced research quantifying the economic cost of low-attention, emotionally flat advertising. Their finding: dull advertising doesn't just fail to build the brand — it actively wastes the media investment behind it. ### Creativity and Advertising The IPA data is unambiguous on creative quality. James Hurman — whose research into the relationship between creative awards and effectiveness results is widely cited — has shown that creatively awarded campaigns significantly outperform non-awarded campaigns on business metrics. The mechanism is emotion: creative work that generates a genuine emotional response is more likely to be remembered and more likely to drive long-term brand effects. Andy Nairn, Karen Martin of BBH, and Nils Leonard of Uncommon Studios have each described what makes a great creative brief: one clear insight, one clear audience, one desired change in behaviour. The brief should inspire, not constrain. The most common failure: briefs that contain multiple objectives, no real insight, and a half-formed solution already baked in. Andrew Tindall of System1 points to data showing humorous advertising outperforms serious advertising across most categories. It is harder to do well and requires an organisation comfortable with risk — which is why it is rare. Sir John Hegarty — co-founder of BBH and one of the most decorated creative minds in advertising history — argued on the show that the industry has allowed technology to seduce it away from the fundamentals. His view: knowing everything about your audience is worthless if you have nothing interesting to say to them. ### Attention and Media Karen Nelson-Field — founder of Amplified Intelligence and author of The Attention Economy — has produced the most rigorous research into how much attention advertising actually receives across different platforms and formats. Active attention — eyes on screen, cognitive processing — is what drives memory encoding and brand effects. Passive attention produces little. Two campaigns with identical reach can have radically different brand effects depending on the attention quality of the media environment. Peter Field's recent work argues that TV remains among the most effective brand-building media for brands that can afford it. It delivers reach, emotional impact and long-term brand effects that most digital channels cannot replicate at scale. The argument is not that digital doesn't work but that the industry's shift away from broadcast has gone too far. ### B2B Marketing Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg — who built their reputation at the LinkedIn B2B Institute before founding Evidenza — have been the most consistent voices on B2B. Their diagnosis: B2B marketing is overwhelmingly focused on demand capture (finding people already in the market) at the expense of demand creation (building mental availability with future buyers). At any given time, only about 5% of potential buyers are actively buying. Brand building reaches the other 95%. Most B2B marketing reaches nobody but the 5%. Jon Lombardo has drawn directly on Binet and Field's effectiveness data to show that B2B brands that invest in emotional, fame-driving creativity significantly outperform those that don't. The assumption that B2B buyers make purely rational decisions is wrong. They are as susceptible to attention, emotion, and memory as any consumer. ### Marketing Leadership Thomas Barta — co-author of The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader — has identified commercial courage as the single most differentiating trait of effective CMOs: the ability to make bold marketing decisions and defend them in the boardroom with evidence and conviction. CMOs who win influence internally do so not by being the loudest voice for creativity but by being the most commercially credible voice in the room. Sherilyn Shackell — founder and CEO of The Marketing Academy — has argued that marketing leaders are consistently left out of the boardroom in ways that cost businesses real money. Her mission is to develop CMOs who are so commercially literate, so strategically confident and so effective as leaders that their exclusion from senior decision-making becomes impossible to justify. ### Culture and Consumer Behaviour Marcus Collins — clinical assistant professor at Michigan Ross and former head of strategy for Beyoncé's digital business — argues that the most powerful brands don't just reach audiences, they belong to communities. His book For The Culture examines how identity and cultural belonging drive human behaviour more reliably than any rational argument. If you understand the culture your audience belongs to — the shared beliefs, rituals, and identity markers — you can create work that resonates at a level that goes far beyond product messaging. Richard Shotton — author of The Choice Factory — has discussed how the findings of decades of psychological research can be used to make marketing more effective. His approach: take robust findings from academic research and test them in real marketing contexts. --- ## Notable Guests (with credentials) - **Mark Ritson** — Marketing professor, founder of the Marketing Week Mini MBA, columnist. One of the most influential voices in modern marketing. - **Sir John Hegarty** — Co-founder and creative director of BBH (Bartle Bogle Hegarty). Behind campaigns for Levi's, Audi, Lynx/Axe. - **Peter Field** — Co-author of The Long and Short of It, marketing effectiveness researcher, IPA Databank analyst. - **Karen Nelson-Field** — Founder of Amplified Intelligence, author of The Attention Economy. Leads research into advertising attention. - **Jenni Romaniuk** — Research Professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Author of Building Distinctive Brand Assets. - **Andy Nairn** — Founder of Lucky Generals. Behind campaigns for Paddy Power, Yorkshire Tea, Amazon. - **Nils Leonard** — Co-founder of Uncommon Creative Studio. Behind campaigns for ITV, British Airways, Coca-Cola. - **Grace Kite** — Founder of Magic Numbers. Econometrician specialising in marketing effectiveness. - **Tom Roach** — VP Brand Strategy at Jellyfish. Author and effectiveness thinker. - **Adam Morgan** — Founder of eatbigfish, author of Eating the Big Fish and The Pirate Inside. - **James Hurman** — Founder of Previously Unavailable. Research into creative effectiveness and award-winning advertising. - **Jon Lombardo** — Co-founder of Evidenza, formerly LinkedIn B2B Institute. Leading voice on B2B brand building. - **Thomas Barta** — Co-author of The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader. Research into CMO effectiveness. - **Marcus Collins** — Clinical assistant professor at Michigan Ross. Author of For The Culture. - **Richard Shotton** — Author of The Choice Factory. Applies behavioural science to marketing. - **Gráinne Wafer** — Former Global Brand Director at Diageo (Guinness, Baileys, Smirnoff). - **Ellie Norman** — Former CMO at Formula 1, then Manchester United. - **Sherilyn Shackell** — Founder and CEO of The Marketing Academy. - **Karen Martin** — Chief Strategy Officer at BBH London. - **Margaret Molloy** — Global CMO of Siegel+Gale. Brand simplicity expert. - **Wael Jabi** — Global Head of Marketing for KitKat at Nestlé. - **Matt Herbert** — Co-founder of Tracksuit, brand tracking platform. - **Jonnie Cahill** — CMO of Heineken USA. - **Paul Dervan** — Former CMO of the Irish National Lottery, author of Run With Foxes. - **Debbie Millman** — Designer, author, host of Design Matters. - **Andrew Tindall** — Chief Growth Officer at System1. Research into creative effectiveness and emotional response. --- ## Key Stats - 200+ episodes published (2022–2026) - 1 million+ total downloads - 50,000 subscribers - Season 5 currently airing (2026) - Weekly release every Tuesday - No.1 Ireland marketing podcast (Apple Podcasts chart) --- ## Pages on This Site - https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com — Homepage - https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com/episodes — All episodes - https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com/guests — All guests - https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com/ask — Ask The Expert (AI tool on full transcript archive) - https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com/faq — 40 marketing questions answered from the archive - https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com/about — About the show and host - https://www.thatswhaticallmarketing.com/llms-full.txt — Full episode archive for AI systems --- ## Platform Links - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/thats-what-i-call-marketing/id1615415427 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7MXhujDpTzbSRRbyQFgdWp - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thatswhaticallmarketing - Acast: https://shows.acast.com/thats-what-i-call-marketing - Substack: https://thatswhaticallmarketing.substack.com/ - RSS: https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/thats-what-i-call-marketing --- ## Host **Conor Byrne** is a senior marketer based in Ireland with 20+ years of experience. He is currently head of marketing at Intact Insurance (B2B) and 123.ie (B2C). Previously Senior Director of Marketing EMEA at Indeed.com. He launched That's What I Call Marketing in 2022. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbyrne/ Contact: thatswhaticallmarketing@gmail.com