Sleeping Barber - A Marketing Podcast

Most companies treat effectiveness like a scoreboard. Traci Alford, Global CEO of Effies Worldwide, sees the entries from 130 countries, and she says that is exactly where it goes wrong. Measuring the crop does not grow it. In this conversation recorded in Cannes, Traci lays out the 4 things behind every winning case: understand the business problem find a real insight rather than a statement of f...

Brand awareness is one of the most reported metrics in marketing. It's in almost every board deck. Almost every brand tracker. Almost every agency review. But what if it's measuring the wrong thing? In this Sharp Cut, Marc and V explore why mental availability matters more than awareness, why Category Entry Points (CEPs) outperform personas as a planning framework, and why marketers should stop as...

What actually mattered at Cannes? More importantly... What should marketers do differently because of it? In this special collaboration between The Sleeping Barber , That's What I Call Marketing , and System1 , we unpack the biggest lessons from Cannes Lions and turn them into practical advice for the second half of the year. Topics include: Mark Ritson & Byron Sharp's rare appearance together...

Ty Heath has a way of making complex marketing ideas feel deceptively simple. After our latest conversation with the former LinkedIn B2B Institute leader, we sat down to unpack the biggest ideas that stayed with us—from why B2B is simply "marketing on hard mode," to why confidence may be the true outcome of great B2B marketing. Along the way we explore: Why the same marketing principles apply acro...

B2B marketing isn't playing a different game. It's playing the same game on hard mode. In this episode, we're joined by Ty Heath, Global Director of Thought Leadership Go-to-Market at LinkedIn and co-founder of the B2B Institute. Fresh off serving as Jury President for the Creative B2B Lions at Cannes, Ty shares what separated the best work from the rest—and why B2B creativity is entering a new er...

What if almost everything we've been taught about advertising is built on a sales model from 1904? In this Sharp Cut, we unpack six of marketing's most persistent myths—from "digital has no waste" to "last-click attribution tells us what works"—before rebuilding a simpler, evidence-based explanation of how advertising actually works. Rather than relying on theory, we challenge these ideas using ou...

What do Netflix, Reddit, AI, M&M's and Lyft have in common? More than you might think. In this episode of The Barber's Brief, Marc Binkley and Vassilis Douros unpack one of the biggest strategic lessons in modern marketing: competitive advantages don't last forever. From Netflix reconsidering binge watching, to Reddit fighting AI generated spam, to the explosion of Martech tools and one of the...

What if marketing's biggest challenge isn't proving its value—but explaining it? Following our conversation with James Hurman, we reflect on one of the most practical frameworks we've encountered in years: Future Demand. Rather than revisiting every topic from the interview, this Post-Pod explores what the ideas actually mean for marketers trying to influence leadership, defend budgets, and build...

Advertising doesn't work by persuading people to buy. It works by creating future demand. James Hurman returns to unpack his new book: why the funnel is the wrong model, how the biggest group of buyers isn't in the market yet, why green dashboards can hide a dying brand, and how to make the case for brand spend to a CFO who only sees this year. There are two types of demand in any market: the smal...

Byron Sharp — Professor of Marketing Science, Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of Adelaide, and author of How Brands Grow — joins us at Cannes fresh off his sold-out Bassey Theatre session with Mark Ritson (a thousand people queued to get in). We dig into the five fundamentals he and Ritson agreed on and, more usefully, where the industry keeps getting them wrong. Byron e...

After five days, dozens of interviews, countless presentations, and conversations with some of marketing's brightest minds, one thing became clear: The future of marketing isn't about more technology. It's about better thinking. Throughout Cannes Lions 2026, we spoke with leaders from System1, WARC, Ehrenberg-Bass, Amazon Ads, Pinterest, and many of the industry's leading creative and effectivenes...

Day 4 on the Croisette, and the Cannes Festival of Creativity is in full swing. The Cannes Cut series is proudly presented by System1. Vanessa Chin, VP Marketing at System1, opens with a live field dispatch: which campaigns are actually scoring at Cannes, what the new Creator Effectiveness Playbook says about briefing for emotional impact, and why Dunkin' took gold while Kit Kat posted one of the...

Day three at Cannes Lions revealed something unexpected. Coming into the festival, many predicted AI would dominate every conversation. Instead, another topic has quietly taken centre stage: Creators. Not creator hype. Not influencer marketing. Creator effectiveness. Presented by System1 , today's Cannes Cut explores one of the biggest conversations happening across the Croisette. Marc and Vassili...

This episode has been presented by System1. Everyone talks about the full funnel. Amazon has actually built it. Day 2 of the Sleeping Barber's Cannes Cut takes Marc and V from the Amazon port activation, a full marina-length brand experience housing a cafe, a speakeasy, 30 meeting rooms, and a stage headlined by Shaquille O'Neal and Oprah, to a sit-down interview with Lauren Anderson, US Head of t...

This episode has been presented by System1. What happens when Byron Sharp, Mark Ritson, System1, creators, AI, and Cannes Lions all collide on Day One? In the first edition of our Cannes Cut series, presented by System1, Marc and V unpack the biggest themes emerging from Cannes Lions 2026, including why creativity is increasingly being judged through the lens of effectiveness, why marketers may be...

What if the biggest problem in marketing isn't your message, your targeting, or your budget? What if it's the map you're using? For more than a century, marketers have relied on funnels, customer journeys, and pipeline stages to explain how people buy. The problem? People don't move in straight lines. In this Sharp Cut, Marc and Vassilis unpack why buying behaviour looks far more like a messy sear...

For years, Cannes Lions has been the home of creativity. This year, it feels like effectiveness is taking center stage. In this special Cannes preview edition of The Barber's Brief, Marc and Vassilis discuss what they're most excited to explore at Cannes Lions 2026. From the surprising reunion of Mark Ritson and Byron Sharp, to the growing influence of effectiveness research, creator marketing, AI...

Most marketers think great creative comes from better talent. Karen Pearce made a different case. In this Post Pod discussion, Marc and Vassilis reflect on their conversation with Karen Pearce, Partner at Rethink and one of the leaders behind some of the most awarded creative work in the world. The discussion explores why creativity often dies inside organizations before it ever reaches the market...

Most people assume award-winning creative work is a high-wire act: brilliant, risky, and impossible to repeat. Karen Pearce of Rethink makes the opposite case. Fresh off Ad Age's 2026 Agency of the Year and ADWEEK's 2025 Independent Agency of the Year, and as the most-awarded independent agency in the world last year, Rethink keeps producing famous, business-moving work on purpose. Recorded as a C...

What if the biggest threat to your strategy isn't a competitor, a budget cut, or AI? What if it's busyness? In this Sharp Cut, Marc Binkley and Vassilis Douros tackle one of marketing and leadership's biggest comfort blankets: the belief that activity equals progress. Drawing on the work of Roger Martin, Richard Rumelt, Michael Porter, Henry Mintzberg, and decades of research in strategy, psycholo...

Everyone is talking about AI replacing marketers. But what if the bigger problem isn't AI at all? In this episode of The Barber's Brief, Marc Binkley and Vassilis Douros explore a series of stories that challenge some of marketing's biggest assumptions. They unpack new research showing that most CMOs aren't worried about AI replacing jobs. They're worried about whether their teams have the skills...

Most marketers talk about growth through media, performance, and digital channels. But what happens when growth comes from stores, people, and product instead? In this PostPod discussion, Marc and Vassilis reflect on their conversation with David, exploring the resurgence of iconic Canadian brand Kit and Ace and what modern marketers can learn from retail done properly. The conversation moves beyo...

The Bay closed. Frank and Oak shuttered. Insolvencies have been climbing for years and the narrative everyone's repeating is that retail is in trouble. David Lui has a different read. Retail isn't dying. The operating model is. And the brands going under aren't the ones customers stopped loving, they're the ones whose people, product, and place stopped working. As CEO of Kit & Ace and co-found...

For decades, marketers have debated one question: How much frequency is enough? But what if the industry has been arguing about two completely different things the entire time? In Part 2 of this Sharp Cut series, Marc Binkley and Vassilis Douros revisit the reach vs frequency debate after a wave of listener feedback challenged, refined, and strengthened the original episode. What emerges is a far...

Most podcasts never make it past three episodes. This is episode 200. In this special 200th episode of The Barber’s Brief, Marc Binkley and Vassilis Douros reflect on five years of The Sleeping Barber Podcast while diving into some of the biggest marketing conversations shaping the industry right now. The episode explores why the laws of growth apply even to blood donation behaviour, how brands li...