Sleeping Barber - A Marketing Podcast

Send us Fan Mail Marc and V compare notes from two marketing conferences, The Gathering in Banff and ANA Masters in Orlando, and reach the same verdict: almost every “breakthrough” on stage was a marketing fundamental wearing a 2026 outfit. This week: The Gathering (Banff). Marc reports back from Canada’s biggest brand festival, where the Effies and the effectiveness crowd shared the main stage wi...

Send us Fan Mail Marc and Vassilis debrief their foresight conversation with Jo Lepore: why foresight isn’t futurism, how backcasting reshapes brand planning, and why brand, like foresight, doesn’t get a free pass. Marc and V went into the interview as skeptics (“what is this voodoo magic?”) and came out convinced foresight is one of the most practical disciplines they’ve covered all year. In the...

Marketing science says buyer behaviour barely moves. Futurists sell the opposite: change, disruption, the thing nobody saw coming. Can both be true? Marc and Vassilis brought in someone who can referee it. Jo Lepore built the foresight function inside Mars Wrigley and then McDonald’s, co-founded a network for people doing that work at some of the world’s biggest companies, and now leads foresight...

Marketing runs on comfort blankets. The Sharp Cut cuts them up to see what’s inside. This week, with Black Friday five weeks out and someone already writing the 40% off email: the idea that a discount wins you new business. Here’s the spine. A discount rents you this week’s sales, mostly from your own customers. When the price goes back up, the rental’s over. So every promotion has to pay for itse...

Marc and V are back with the Barber’s Brief: the good, the bad, and the overhyped from the last couple of weeks, with data, a few opinions, and Great Creative getting the last word. This week: → Apple built itself a kill switch for ad tech. iOS 26’s Safari can quietly block hundreds of identity and data vendors, the list lives in a private repo, and only Apple knows the rules. Everyone’s calling i...

Everybody in this industry is arguing about what AI does to an agency. Almost all of it is agencies talking to themselves about their own cost structure. Clients are asking something else entirely. So Marc and V put the real question to two of the people growing Canada’s agency business while the ground moves under it: if you are not selling hours, what are you selling? Mélanie Dunn is President o...

Marketing runs on comfort blankets. The Sharp Cut cuts them up to see what's inside. This week: brand love. Start with motorcycles. In 2015, the happiest owners in the entire category rode Victory, ahead of Harley. Two years later, Polaris shut Victory down. The happiest customers in the category could not keep the brand alive. That should bother anyone who spent a career being told marketing's jo...

Marc and V are back with the Barber's Brief: the good, the bad, and the overhyped, with data, a few opinions, and Great Creative getting the last word. This week: Your marketing team already got smaller. Nearly half of B2B teams have shrunk because of AI, almost none of it through layoffs (Wynter). Meanwhile most execs who cut roles for AI now regret it (Orgvue) and plenty are quietly rehiring (Ro...

Fresh off the Omar Roubi interview, Marc and Vassilis sit down for the PostPod to work through what stuck. The uncomfortable one: when the business is broken, whose job is it to stop advertising? Target Canada ran full advertising cycles, back to school, holiday, the works, while shelves sat empty and the experience fell apart. So the spend did not just fail to help. It amplified a promise the bus...

Target is a company people love. More than 1,700 stores, a brand with real pull. Then it came to Canada, lost billions, and walked away inside four years. This is a story about Big and Little marketing. Little is the advertising. Big is everything else: product, price, place, and how the whole business organizes around the customer. Roger Martin says a promise has to be memorable, valuable, and de...

Marketing runs on comfort blankets. The Sharp Cut cuts them up to see what's inside. This week, we did it as a murder mystery. The victim: the click. Once upon a time a click was one honest fact, a machine noting that a file left a building. Over eleven years it got poisoned, dose by dose, until it was taking credit for sales it never caused. The body: in 2012, eBay turned off roughly $51M in paid...

Marc and V are back with the Barber's Brief: the good, the bad, and the overhyped from the last couple of weeks, with data, a few strong opinions, and Great Creative getting the last word. This week: "My CEO doesn't get brand." Nearly half of B2B marketers say they can't get brand budget signed off. But 40% admit brand isn't seen as delivering ROI inside their own company. V's take: that's not an...

Fresh off the Ian Whittaker interview, Marc and Vassilis sit down for the PostPod to unpack what actually stuck. The through line: marketing keeps losing the budget argument because it treats finance as an obstacle instead of a customer. Ian's framing reframed it. Follow the incentives. Understand what executives are rewarded and punished for. Reframe budget as risk, not just missed opportunity. A...

Marketers have spent years trying to prove marketing works. Better attribution. Better dashboards. Better measurement. More data. And yet marketing still struggles to defend investment when budgets come under pressure. Maybe proof isn't the real problem. In this episode of the Sleeping Barber Podcast, Marc and V sit down with Ian Whitaker, Founder and Managing Partner of Liberty Sky Advisors and a...

AI Won’t Save You. Leadership Will. Companies have spent the last few years buying AI tools, running pilots and training employees. Yet much of that investment still isn't producing the transformation leaders expected. Maybe the problem isn't the technology. In this Sharp Cut, Marc and V examine why AI transformation is ultimately a leadership and organizational design problem. They unpack researc...

Marketing has more data, technology and specialist expertise than ever. But is all that sophistication actually making marketing better? In this edition of The Barber's Brief , Marc and Vassilis unpack five stories that all raise different versions of that question. First, AI assistants are increasingly embedded in how people discover and evaluate products, yet they still rank near the bottom of t...

Everyone wants innovation. But what exactly are we asking for? In this Post-Pod, Marc and Vassilis unpack their conversation with Fiona Stevenson, co-author of Built for Breakthrough , and start with one of the simplest problems: organizations frequently use the word “innovation” without agreeing on what it actually means. Breakthrough? Disruption? A game changer? Incremental growth? A new tactic?...

Why do organizations say innovation is mission-critical, then create conditions that make innovation almost impossible? Fiona Stevenson has spent her career on both sides of that problem. After 12 years at Procter & Gamble, she co-founded The Idea Suite, an innovation consultancy that has worked across hundreds of innovation projects. She is also the co-author of Built for Breakthrough: Why In...

Marketing has never been more measurable. It may also have never been more short-term. If measurement was supposed to solve marketing's credibility problem, why hasn't five years of better data increased CEO confidence in marketing? In this Sharp Cut, Marc and Vassilis unpack what happens when the things marketing can observe quietly become the things organizations value. They trace the progressio...

Are marketers getting better at measuring activity while getting worse at understanding value? In this edition of The Barber’s Brief , Vassilis and Marc unpack four marketing debates that caught their attention. First, the agency industry's truth-in-pricing problem: agencies teach clients to build premium brands while continuing to sell their own expertise through hours and headcount. As AI change...

AI is going to take our jobs. AI will commoditize creativity. AI will make strategy worse. But AI isn't making those decisions. We are. In this PostPod, Marc and V reflect on their conversation with Pats McDonald, Chief Strategy Officer at dentsu, and explore one of the most important ideas emerging from the AI conversation: human agency still matters. They discuss why AI may eliminate barriers wi...

What if the biggest mistake we're making with AI is the way we talk about it? Pats McDonald, Chief Strategy Officer at Dentsu Creative, joins the Sleeping Barber Podcast to challenge one of the dominant narratives surrounding artificial intelligence: that AI itself is determining what comes next. Her argument is simple: AI doesn't make these choices. People do. We explore what that means for marke...

Ask ten marketers to define brand and you get ten answers. Ask them who owns it and you get one: marketing. Marc and V think that second answer is the problem. In this reboot of episode 4, they work through three questions with no guest and no script. What is brand? Marty Neumeier calls it the gut feeling people have about you. Roger Martin calls it generating confidence. Both descriptions point a...

What happens when AI makes marketing more efficient, but every dollar saved gets taken out of the marketing budget? Welcome back to the Barber’s Brief, where we unpack the marketing stories, ideas and creative work that caught our attention. This week, we start with what might be one of the unintended consequences of the AI revolution: the efficiency spiral . As marketers use AI to accomplish more...

What actually makes marketing effective? It's tempting to point to great creative. Or strong media. Or impressive results. But after our conversation with Effie Worldwide CEO Traci Alford , we realized effectiveness is something much bigger. In this Post-Pod we unpack the four-part system behind effective marketing and discuss why leadership, culture and organizational alignment often matter more...