The Bottleneck Podcast Rory, Elfried and Max on marketing's next wave
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Oct 20, 2025 Max Osborne, co-founder of This That and an expert in brand lift and influencer marketing, joins Rory Sutherland and Elfried Samba for a deep dive into modern marketing's relationship with creativity and data. They explore the limitations of short-term metrics like ROAS and argue for intuition in brand measurement. Max shares insights on influencer effectiveness across platforms and the importance of community-driven growth. The trio emphasizes the need for brands to embrace uncertainty and long-term thinking for true marketing success.
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Value Of Betting On Uncertain Breakthroughs
- Marketing often succeeds through repeated failure with occasional outsized wins, so staying alive long enough to get lucky matters more than short-term predictability.
- Looking for system bottlenecks improves odds because small interventions at constraints produce disproportionate effects.
Don't Let ROAS Kill Creative Risk
- Avoid letting short-term performance metrics entirely crowd out creative risk-taking and long-term brand investment.
- Reintroduce intuition and tolerate controlled failures to discover high-value marketing breakthroughs.
Influence Returns Lost Advertising Context
- Influencer content restores context by using a messenger, unlike context-free digital ads that appear randomly across the web.
- That messenger context often makes influencer marketing more persuasive than generic programmatic ads.
