‘The tipping point in behavioural change has really happened now’

The Media Leader Interview

Total Media CEO Tom Laranjo explains why the behaviours that don’t change in media are as important as the ones that do.

Tom Laranjo, CEO of Total Media, says he would rather have the people in his teams featured in a piece than a solo piece about him.

Hearing him speak about these people, working across everything from insight to strategy, shouting out people by name from Ella the ethnographic researcher to Sasha who leads the data and tech team, his self-effacing nature comes through and he lights up with pride about his employees, describing them as “ridiculously talented”.

At the time of the interview, it was only four weeks into his chief executive position which he laughs off as “a risky move” by his bosses.

Laranjo confesses he did not have “a laser focus” on the media or advertising industry when he started his career.

He has always been drawn to consumer, customer and cultural insight and was initially a researcher at NFP, now GFK, with an academic background in anthropology.

However, he did not find life in research as “invigorating” as he thought, and instead wanted to be at “the executional end” where you could apply insight and not just generate it.

Laranjo applied and got a job at agency UBM’s international team before joining Total Media in 2006.

He was managing director from 2011 until this year, when he was promoted to CEO ahead of the agency’s 40th birthday.

What is behavioural planning?

Total Media now markets itself as “the behavioural planning agency”, but what does that mean in practice?

Laranjo explains: “About five years ago now, my founders gave me the opportunity to pivot the agency from where we were which was a very successful long-standing agency focus on the arts and ents sector and publishing with a very strong story around launch and growth agency.”

He adds: “I’d had a long frustration with a lack of real genuine insight into behaviour, and what really motivated and influenced people, an enormous amount of hyperbole in the industry about what any media channel can do, what any creative can do, or any advertising can do, and so we created the behavioural planning focus.”

This focus hinges on work in insight, technology and strategy, and people across Laranjo’s teams have specialities in psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, data, and behavioural change.

They work together to understand what drives behaviour, what can be done to change habits, reduce the intention-action gap, challenge negative or positive perceptions, then capture, segment, augment and activate the data so these insights can be “weaponised”.

“The combination of strategy, technology and behavioural insight allow us to do stuff that I think others can’t,” he comments.

Looking forward expanding Total Media’s consulting arm and international business are two big focusses for Laranjo.

He reveals Total Media’s consultancy already accounts for more than 10% of the agency’s total revenue after only starting operations last year.

The ‘tipping point’ of human behaviour

One could argue there has never been a more interesting time to look at human behaviour than over the last few years of the Covid pandemic. What “new normal” behaviours have stuck and what has not changed?

Laranjo comments: “The tipping point in terms of behaviour of audience, how people are engaging with media has really happened now. All the behaviours we’ve been citing for so long have actually happened- the world has turned now and we’re all now actually delivering on those behaviours.”

He says this has opened up a whole new conversation about how to communicate with people effectively when they are fragmented and dissipated across so many areas and channels.

Some of the behaviours that Laranjo sees as having “tipped” are the reduction of viewing of linear TV and shift to streaming, alongside the prominence of Amazon as the “vehicle” for consumers to buy everything.

The “massive change” in consumer behaviour is not just down to the pandemic but digital transformation, and provides an opportunity to engage and build a sense of brand with audiences differently up to this end point, he adds.

But it’s not just what new behaviours have stuck, or the latest in the Metaverse or NFTs, that is of interest.

“We’re equally as interested in the things that don’t change as we are things that do. I think that’s one of our great strengths as an agency is understanding that we’re creatures of habit and that we often don’t do the things that we say we’re going to do even with the best intentions in the world”, Laranjo says.

He adds: “Changing someone’s perception isn’t as simple as moving from A to B. If you’ve always had Apple, just because I show you a number of Samsung ads in a row across different channels doesn’t suddenly change your perception of them as a brand or your choices about them.”

One example of these behaviours not changing goes back to a theory evolutionary scientist Robin Dunbar that Laranjo studied at university about the total number of meaningful social connections anyone could manage at one time.

Dunbar estimated this was 150 for men and about 175 for women, and even with the widespread adoption of social media and digital technology making it easier to communicate across the world than ever before, Facebook recently found that Dunbar’s number held pretty consistently.

What should you do differently?

It is not just coming out with insights, but getting to the bottom of what clients should do as a consequence, Laranjo explains.

Some of these consequences may sound counter-intuitive to media agency readers.

An example of some of the Total Media’s biggest successes in the last six months, he reveals, was telling clients not to spend money at all until they improved their operating footprint, managed customer churn and retention challenges.

“The last thing you should do right now is pour good money after bad,” he remarked, explaining that Total Media had done some “really exciting work” that did not lead to media or advertising output.

He gives an example of TikTok three years ago trying to attract 18- 34 year-olds to the platform complaining they had a “digital media buying problem”.

Laranjo said: “We said no, no, you don’t have a digital media buying problem. Your content is grossly inappropriate for 18- to 34-year-olds who you want to attract to your platform. If you want these people on your platform, you are going to have to change the nature of the partnerships you have, the influencers you bring on, the content creators, because at the moment, if I go onto that platform, I feel like oh my god, I don’t want to be on here. This is terrible. Why do you feel you have a media problem?”

It was a similar situation with digital wallet clients globally who wanted to spend money growing the brand even though they did not have a presence in enough places to support new customers.

“We want to spend more money growing our brand and we said, ‘why’? Because if I can’t use you and you don’t have a big enough operator footprint, you’ll have high levels of churn. There’s no point spending money drawing customers in when they can’t use it. Let’s solve that problem first, and then we’ll deal with media,” he explained.

‘I want to work for an organisation that gives a shit’

Laranjo describes Total Media as the only independent agency in the UK with B-Corp status and highlights it has had Investors in People Platinum status for the last 10 years. The agency is already carbon neutral and offers its clients the opportunity to trade carbon neutrally as well.

While this may seem like a humble brag, Laranjo insists: “I’m saying all these things because I think that’s a tangible manifestations of what otherwise ends up being a bunch of sentences, but we are fully accredited and audited as being really delivering impact in those places and it’s really important that we build a business that way.

“I want to work for an organisation that gives a shit. I want to work for an organisation that tangibly gives a shit and doesn’t just say that they do, but I feel it when I come in.”

This ties in to curating the best relationships with teams and clients by communicating honestly and authentically, which he acknowledges sounds like buzzwords, but helps people feel like they can be themselves at work.

“Everyone’s happier when they’re able to be their authentic self at work,” he says.

‘Troubling headwinds’

Laranjo says the challenges for his agency are going to be similar for everyone.

He explains: “The combination of almost certain recession, insane inflationary pressure, compounded by Covid, the war in Ukraine and Brexit, has created some really troubling headwinds that are going to build up steam by Q3 and Q4. It’s going to be a very different landscape than it is at the moment.”

He warns these macro-economic and geo-political are going to translate into real-world problems.

“People will have less money, people will have more worries, people will have less confidence, people will be scared about using the little savings that they have when energy prices are going through the roof, when the inflation on price is going through the roof and that’s going to materially impact consumer confidence which will impact client customer and client confidence which will have an impact on budget,” he says.

While he describes Total Media as “very well-positioned to handle turbulence”, he says there’s only “a certain amount” anyone can insulate against these pressures.

Building a great team and getting out of the way as quickly as possible

Aside from his background in academia, insight and media, Laranjo describes himself as “one of the increasingly rare people” who comes into the office every day.

This is to avoid it feeling like living at work rather than working from home, and he enjoys the office environment, albeit with “ridiculous amounts of coffee” (he has at least four a day but he says luckily DeLonghi is a client so they are well-stocked on the caffeine front).

Laranjo is also a “bit of a sci-fi nerd amongst other things”. A new Star Trek: Picard series particularly struck a chord with him where Jean-Luc Picard talks about a trait of a leader that he likes, namely building a great team, giving them a direction that they buy into and then getting out of their way as quickly as possible.

Laranjo finds himself genuinely doing this more and more and concludes: “We’ve got some really good people who just need the space, the trust, the investment, the competence to back themselves and then I just get out of their way.”