Why the Best Agencies Won’t Be Replaced by AI…They’ll Be Rebuilt Around It with Simon Billington, Part 1

[00:00:00] Simon: Being able to dictate our future for me has always been something that is really important. And I think it's something that Team Lewis has always been very strong in, which is to punch beyond the weight of what you are as an organization, to be naive in your belief that you can do something genuinely different and you don't need to be held back by the traditional overthinking and underact.
[00:00:23] Mike: My name's Mike Lander, and you are listening to Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast, where we bring you actionable insights about sales, RFPs, negotiations, and difficult procurement discussions from sales leaders, brand leaders, and procurement leaders. Please subscribe to get updates when new episodes are released.
Bilbo. Thanks ever so much for being a guest on Higgle, the B2B sales for podcast Pleasure. Great to have you.
[00:00:53] Simon: Lovely to be,
[00:00:53] Mike: and for being in your amazing studio. I've never done this before. I've not shot one live, so this will be a new experience for me. Probably not for you. I expect
[00:01:02] Simon: I've done one or two. Um, we'll find out whether this is more successful, less successful than those ones, but
[00:01:06] Mike: we'll find out.
[00:01:07] Simon: It's good.
[00:01:07] Mike: So for the audience, basically, who are you, what do you do, and what's your favorite song and why?
[00:01:13] Simon: Oh my goodness. My name is Simon Billington. I'm the executive creative director here. At Team Lewis, I've been a creative for 25, 30 years. Started at print and now find myself working heavily with AI and, and the AI program for Team Lewis.
And my nickname, which please call me, is Bilbo. It's a boring story. Walked into a company 20 years ago, there were already two Simon Bs, and so the owner decided Bilbo was a fit. I think the, and it
[00:01:36] Mike: stuck.
[00:01:37] Simon: I'm a hobbit basically, and it kind of feels right. It, it, it's sort of, not quite Ronaldo, but it's something, it's definitely messy.
No, it's, uh, I, I love it actually because it's, it's, it just. I don't know. It's
[00:01:49] Mike: stuck with me. You're affectionately known as that. 'cause whenever I call people here,
[00:01:52] Simon: yeah,
[00:01:52] Mike: they always say, I'll go and get ware for you. So favorite song and why?
[00:01:55] Simon: This is a really difficult question for me because I think it could be influenced by a million different things.
But Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics is now the one that is jumped to the front of my head
[00:02:05] Mike: because
[00:02:06] Simon: it is a song that I've heard over the years. I think they were geniuses in terms of musician, uh, musicians. And I also love the film Tron.
[00:02:15] Mike: So print industry. So we're gonna go off script before we get on the script.
[00:02:19] Simon: Yeah. Cool.
[00:02:19] Mike: I was also in the print industry, bizarrely. Oh
[00:02:22] Simon: really?
[00:02:22] Mike: Uh, I used to work for a company called Crossfield Electronics.
[00:02:25] Simon: Right.
[00:02:26] Mike: We designed Reprographic systems. I designed hardware accelerators for graphic systems.
[00:02:31] Simon: Really
[00:02:31] Mike: unbeknownst to my audience. What were you doing in the print industry?
[00:02:33] Simon: I was avoiding going to college and university.
[00:02:36] Mike: Excellent.
[00:02:37] Simon: I needed to make some money. University was an option for me and I basically got a job, uh, sweeping the floors. Yeah, I think I was probably 14, 15 when I started doing that. They let me use a folding machine. I worked my way through the entire printing factory, ran Gestetner 1250s and GTOs printing machines.
I nearly lost my fingers in a Gestetner 1250 and I went.
[00:02:57] Mike: Don't fucking like that.
[00:02:58] Simon: Um, wandered into the repo graphics department. There's a guy called Mike there sitting on a, on a, on a, on a Mac, Mac two I think it was. And I said, can I have a job in here? It's rewarming it. And so
[00:03:08] Mike: it's not dangerous.
[00:03:08] Simon: No, I mean, it, it's, well, actually he found the most dangerous job in there, so I was shooting negatives to plate using dev and fix to, to, to do that.
And I did that for about six months. And then he said, do you wanna go on the computer? And off we went,
[00:03:22] Mike: and off we went. Yeah. On this journey, which we'll cover in bits as we go through the podcast, we're going to do this probably in two parts. So part one is all about AI as a disruptor, control points and agency value.
The control points thing is a bit of the common language between the two of us. I've kind of used it from a guy called Sangeet Chowdry wrote a book called Reshuffle who's formalized it. But I've always thought about these control points in systems.
[00:03:45] Simon: Yeah,
[00:03:46] Mike: so we'll talk about that later. Let's, first of all, go back to early 2023.
Lots of agencies saw Gen AI as a faster way to create copy and content and all sorts, bits and pieces. Yeah. I think Team Lewis had a different, much bigger perspective. What was it?
[00:04:02] Simon: We didn't know. It was a big perspective at the time. I think we looked at the situation and thought if everybody's running.
Have you seen World War Z? This will make sense in a bit.
[00:04:11] Mike: No, I haven't Then.
[00:04:11] Simon: Okay, so World War Z is a zombie pockets film. Brad Pitt in a starring role, it wasn't very successful, but I did watch it. The world is being overrun by zombies except one place, Jerusalem. And so Brad Pitt as being, you know, the hero of the story, decides he's gonna go along and find out what was going on, and they had a board of 10 people.
And if nine people agreed it was the job of the 10th person. To do the opposite and to think about things in a completely what if scenario. And one of the things that they basically had discussed was, will there ever be a zombie apocalypse? Nine people said, no, the other one went great. That means a lot of got gotta consider there will be one What?
Wonderful way to introduce ai. Exactly. And so, so we thought the same way, which was everybody was rushing to put their content, their data, and their information into external models. Yep. Um, just to be TATed by either, you know, will Smith with spaghetti or whatever it was at the time. And, and there was another factor to it as well.
I come from a creative background. I love the creative profession. I think the creative people. Uh, one of the, some of the most brilliant people on the planet and the most challenged people on the planet. And I think what they do is really special. And when I was being told AI was going to eat my lunch, and basically AI was going to be the creative force in the future, I said, fuck that.
Sorry, I probably not swear. Um, and, uh, you
[00:05:22] Mike: be yourself,
[00:05:23] Simon: but Oh, don't say that. Um, horrible thought. Uh, so you, so yeah, so we basically looked at it and said, well, what's the antithesis to this? What, what's the way we could go that's different? People were sort of using it for very specific reasons, and we looked at it and said, well.
We wanna build a platform that, number one is secure. I wanna make sure that anything that my client has historically is secured, safe, and able to be available to them at any time. Secondly, I don't wanna give away the historical value I've built up over a long period of time.
[00:05:49] Mike: Yeah.
[00:05:50] Simon: One of the things in the creative, which is really interesting, and I think as a parallel here.
If you go along to a creative agency and you say to them, I'd like a logo, and some creative person comes in, sits down, tell me about what the logo would be. Draw the logo. That's amazing. Perfect. Said what? How much? 40,000 pounds. I'm not paying for that. It took you four minutes. No, it didn't. No,
[00:06:08] Mike: it didn't.
[00:06:08] Simon: It took me 30 years. Correct. That is what we wanted to put into an AI model. Save it, secure it, keep it safe. Make it work for you. That's your secret source. And you know whether I think anybody's really picked up on this yet. Data is the new oil and
[00:06:23] Mike: keep it as a private data set. Yeah. That the foundation models can't use.
Yeah. For its next training run. So that, that's the value piece that gets that it's another control point.
[00:06:34] Simon: Yeah. And, and you know, things with the generative AI models that sort of, even at the first early stage, and still to this day, they do learn, but slowly, and I didn't want that. I wanted to be able to think of it like a kid.
Mm-hmm. And be able to say, I don't want you to be one on day one and then one on day two and one on day three. I want you to grow. Right. And I want you to, to learn and, and develop. And so that's where the principle of psychic started was. Let's find a way, and we, we had a background in experience in, in technical development.
So, you know, we've built, uh, crm, CMSs, market transformation platforms, the full holistic suite of technical deployment across all of marketing. So we inherently understood the infrastructure that goes into the marketing, I suppose. Um, mechanics, really. Yeah. And for me there's also been this other little part, which I feel like I'm gonna be a bit nerdy now, but one of the biggest frustrations for me has always been about how you get access to all that information, how you bring it together, and how you can make meaningful insights or, or data or outputs from that.
And it's always been clunky. You know, we've, we've spent years building platforms and people talked about personalization and websites and it never really happened. It was like, okay, we're gonna go and get Sitecore and I love Sitecore with brilliant platform, but the personalization engineer that people really didn't invest the time in.
[00:07:48] Mike: Right?
[00:07:48] Simon: And then this little thing came along, this little piece of material, which is important to note. AI is a material, it is not everything. And you put it. And it's like a logic engine with probabilistic outcomes. It can listen to you, it can behave. It's this almost like the logic gates on steroids being able to do something that it couldn't do before.
And so you sat and thought, right. Excellent. And then you looked at the broader business and you said, we like to be a fully integrated agency. Let's make a fully integrated AI platform. And that was when Sidekick was really born.
[00:08:18] Mike: So let's go back to just before you birthed it and you were thinking about it.
What was the driver behind that when you and the board sat down? 'cause this is a big investment. I need to know how much It's a big investment. Yeah. Of both people's time and also money as well. Is it a commercial decision? Is it a technological decision? Was it purely a innovation based decision? What drove the decision to go down this journey, which was going to be expensive with relatively unknown outcomes?
[00:08:49] Simon: That's a really good question. Borderline horrible, but we'll see. We'll see where we see where we go, shall we? We wander through with it truthfully. It was, this is not gonna happen to me. It's not this, this revolution is not gonna kill me and it's not gonna kill everybody in this business for me, I looked across the business and, and I've discussed this at length of the CEO and the CFO, and basically was like, I think we need to start building our own AI platform now.
There was a lot of question marks. It was like, why would we do that? You know, it's not advanced enough yet. It doesn't mean you, we haven't seen what it's gonna be. And I kind of backed my own instinct a little bit on this one and just knew that things were gonna progress really quickly and technology would evolve to at a pace.
Now we knew we couldn't build our own LLMI mean, and we never professed to do that. No, that's, that's, you know, that's the purview of a very few and very, very wealthy individuals. But what we knew was, is that we would be able to leverage the technology as it evolved. And being able to dictate our future for me has always been something that is really important.
And I think it's something that Team Lewis has always been very strong in, which is to, to punch beyond the weight of what you are as an organization, to be naive in your belief that you can do something genuinely different. And you don't need to be held back by the traditional overthinking and underact.
You know, a lot of people think themselves out of an opportunity to do something differently because they rationalize it and say, that just doesn't make any sense. And I have spoken to people that have said like, why are you, why are you doing this? This is stupid. And to be honest, that leap of faith and knowing you're gonna go a long way, and you knew that it was gonna be a long journey.
And like I say, bugger me. It worked. And you know, you kind of like,
[00:10:26] Mike: so let's pull on that thread for a second about the, you talked before, uh, when we were just like chatting before the recording about the buffalo and the cow
[00:10:35] Simon: Yeah.
[00:10:35] Mike: And about running towards something rather than away from it.
[00:10:38] Simon: Yeah.
[00:10:38] Mike: Two questions.
Yeah. What made you believe this was real and this was here to stay as opposed to a blip? And then secondly, talk about the analogy of the cow on the buffalo.
[00:10:48] Simon: So I'll start with the cow on the buffalo. I dunno where I heard it. I think I heard it somewhere. I've, I'm not gonna profess it was my own, I mean, I picked things up along the way and try and take credit for it later on.
Um, the basic counter buffalo, when a storm comes and. For me, the AI was a storm. Mm-hmm. There was fear in the agency and you're thinking like, crikey, what's, what's this mean? Yeah. And I'm looking left and right at people that I care about deeply. As a creative person, you are always caring about 'em and you're thinking, this storm's coming and we're in a field and there's a whole bunch of cows.
This will make sense in a second. This storm, which
[00:11:21] Mike: does carry on. Do not switch off.
[00:11:23] Simon: Do not switch off. Um, I got, you've got something in the
[00:11:26] Mike: background. We aren't going off piece, I promise.
[00:11:28] Simon: When the cows in the field, the storm comes, the cows run and they run away from the storm. That's a big problem because what happens is, is they can't outrun it, but they tire and wither and eventually they stop.
The storm catches them and they have not got much chance of surviving it. Yeah. Now, if you've got a buffalo in the field, watch it. It does something completely different. It turns and it runs at the storm. And the reason for that is because it meets the storm much faster. It has more energy to hit it and is more likely to survive.
That is the very principle of why we did it, and for me, looking across the other people in the organization and sitting there and going like. Now I know your value. I know what you bring to the party. You are the 40,000 pound logo that needs to have a voice in the future, or we are gonna find a way of wrapping our arms of AI around you to give you something to stand on.
And that's as simple as that. AI should be, um, an ocean that raises the boats.
[00:12:22] Mike: They should
[00:12:22] Simon: not drown us.
[00:12:23] Mike: Definitely. So talk about the platform for a second. Yeah. So again, for the listeners, it's not a sponsored show. They're not paying me to ask this, but I want to understand the context of what have you built.
[00:12:33] Simon: Yeah. So I think I've sort of mentioned it a minute ago. Integrated agencies are in a stronger position now than those that are overly niche. We've seen the whole code,
[00:12:44] Mike: I'm gonna come
[00:12:44] Simon: back to that later for sure. Yeah, we're gonna come back to that later. I, that sounds, that, that sounds slightly terrifying.
I what, what I would say is upfront, I think. The diversity in the industry is a wonderful thing. I think it needs specialists and I think it needs generalists. I think there's a place for everybody. I think the specialists are feeling the pinch. Mm-hmm. A wee bit more. And you know, we know why those things are happening.
There's a pressure on reducing budgets and, and trying to find cost efficiencies. And that's because of macroeconomic circumstances, and it's also because of industry perceptive circumstances that AI can come in and it can replace people, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And those things aren't actually true.
The truth is that those are the things that are happening, so you have to sort of take it with a pinch of salt when you do it, and you have to move forward with that, with that mindset. The niche agencies are obviously seen to be slightly more complex because they've got more structure around them, and that's an additional layer that then means it has to interact with another and another, and another niche agency.
Whereas we have always been generalists. You know, we've basically tried to diversify what we do and almost the point of, you know, if you want to go into the garage and you wanna make something, you know, uh, uh, word, a chair, or whatever, it's, you wanna know you've got the tool, whatever it is on, on the bench to be able to pull it and, and, and put it into play.
And the platform that we built, we built in that principle. And this is the part that I think we didn't realize we were doing something quite as good as we were at the beginning, and we have now come to discover that a lot of people did go down a right. I have this particular problem. It could be GEO, it could be whatever.
I'm gonna go and build a platform that does that and does it really deeply and really well. Now I've got a few years under me belt, way too many than I care to mention of watching people buy infrastructure platforms and systems. There are sledgehammers to crack nuts. Mm-hmm. Sometimes if you just crack the surface, you get to oil, you don't need a thousand foot pole.
Exactly. You know, you don't need to go all the way down. And really and truly where we are, the world is moving faster and faster and faster. We just need to make decisions faster. And by doing that, it doesn't make sense to go deep at that point. It makes sense to go wide. Yep. And so we build a platform that enabled data and information to either be gathered or input across a broad spectrum of marketing.
So it was supporting lots of functions, and then in the center of it, when you're adding in API access to your CRM or your CMS marketing automation platforms, you can pull that information together and you can start to have meaningful conversations with the platform about what you should be doing, what's working, what's not working.
Then you can cascade that into the other areas. They're influenced by each other. So you get a more of a holistic kind of approach to with psychic.
[00:15:31] Mike: Perfect. So we're gonna go back to something I'm gonna say next. The, I think in part two.
[00:15:36] Simon: Oh cool.
[00:15:36] Mike: But I've got a theory,
[00:15:37] Simon: a reprisal go on.
[00:15:38] Mike: Theory might be a little of all bullshit or it might be true.
Dunno
[00:15:41] Simon: mate. I'm full of it, so go for it.
[00:15:42] Mike: I think what, what bigger clients need and maybe mid-sized clients, they need an advisor sat by their side.
[00:15:50] Simon: Yeah.
[00:15:51] Mike: Who understands marketing holistically. Mm-hmm. And can help them understand how to more effectively deliver better outcomes from the budgets that they've got.
Yeah. Ultimately,
[00:16:01] Simon: yeah.
[00:16:02] Mike: So you need to be a growth advisor. Where can people find out more about you?
[00:16:06] Simon: You can go to teamlewis.com and you can go find out there, or you can hit me up on LinkedIn. Simon Billington. There's no billboard on it actually. Maybe I'll add that. Maybe there should be. Yeah, exactly.
Thank you indeed.
[00:16:17] Mike: So we've reached the end of part one of the episode with Simon Billington. Um, we're gonna have part two and indeed a part three. So tune in for future episodes. Thanks for listening to Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast series with your host Mike Lander. Please subscribe so that you'll catch all the next episodes.