Member Interview with Rohan Lightfoot

We are delighted to bring you a Member Interview with Rohan Lightfoot, Founder of Signal Consulting

What’s your golden rule?

Explain this in terms my mum would understand. My mum is pretty sharp, but if someone can't articulate an idea clearly enough that she would understand, it's probably not a great idea.

Who has been your biggest influence?

I've been really fortunate to have worked in a number of businesses where the founders were still in the business. It was only after I'd been in a role at a plc for a while that I realised how important founder energy was. Obviously a founder brings a level of passion and commitment to a business, but the good ones also build cultures that last. I'm still close friends with colleagues that I worked with more than 20 years ago because those businesses were great cultures as well as great businesses. Often the culture has outlasted the business and that's pretty remarkable.

What is your most hated business expression?

The marketing world does have a bad habit of appropriating language from other domains. Often that language seems to be designed to make us seem smarter than we really are. There is an ever-evolving set of buzzwords de jour that trigger me, but I think it's really interesting that we tend to use expressions that sound like we're in the military or heavy industry. When we talk about targets and systems and processes, the language can be a bit dehumanising. My old creative partner in Isobar, Tim Doherty, always tried to use organic metaphors, rather than the industry standard expressions. He talked about how ideas had to be fed and nurtured and protected and grown and I always liked that. We're messy, complicated, biological beings, not switching boxes on a flowchart. Recently, I was banging on about the idea of a target audience. We all use the term and yet it's a complete misnomer. An actual audience voluntarily turns up to an event they want to watch, like a concert or they make a decision to watch a particular show. There's almost nothing about the people to whom we market that makes them analogous to an entertainment audience.

What’s the smartest business idea you’ve ever had?

We all have a million unexplored business ideas, especially those of us who've used creativity to solve business problems. More than ten years ago I pitched the idea of using AI to create new writing by authors that were no longer with us. The client didn't buy the idea, but AI authorship is obviously exploding at the moment. If only I'd have tried to get it funded instead... I did get further in exploring a business called TruthStarter, which was essentially a crowd-funding model for investigative journalism. I couldn't secure the required backing at the time, but I'd still be more than happy to speak to any potential investors on that one.

Which leader do you admire most and why?

I've worked with a lot of great business leaders but thought leaders tend to have a bigger impact on me. Thinking Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman opened my mind to new ways of understanding how and why humans respond to what we do and Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb inspired me to completely re-engineer how my agency worked. You can learn a lot from great business leadership, but that rarely changes how you see the entire world.

What keeps you up at night as a marketing leader?

I'm a bit obsessed with effectiveness. The whole marketing landscape has completely transformed during my career to date and is going to continue to transform. However, there are well established principles around effectiveness that endure regardless of what the landscape looks like. I see so much work that ignores those principles and that cannot possibley work as a result. As a community, we have all of the information available to guide us on what will and will not work, but there's so much noise in the system that it can be difficult to focus on what good looks like. The reason I called my company Signal Consulting is rooted in the idea of the Signal/Noise ratio. As a community, we need to focus on sending stronger signals out into the world and generate way less (ineffective) noise. Long term I'm optimistic that those of us banging the effectiveness drum will continue to gain traction.

Why is being part of The Marketing Society important for your career?

I joined the Marketing Society during the COVID pandemic and I'll always remember the first in-person event at the Fullerton Hotel in Singapore as we all emerged from our spare rooms, blinking and slightly nervous at the prospect of meeting real human beings again. The Marketing Society has a focus on really useful, high-quality events, but it's the human connection at and around those events that has the most lasting impact on me.

Why does marketing matter to you?

The intersection of business and creativity is a really interesting place to spend your career. What we do in marketing has a profound effect on the businesses for which we work, but also on wider society. Marketing campaigns have an effect at a direct level but also have a second-order effect in terms of how they influence societal norms. There's been a growing appreciation of that effect in recent years that is inspiring. We face global and societal challenges that need governments, businesses and people to effect change. Great marketing can inspire people and governments, as well as businesses, but helping responsible businesses to adapt grow and succeed is a pretty inspiring place to be.

Tell us something that’s not on your CV

I think everyone leaves the most interesting stuff off their CV. When I was in China I was in a movie called The Forbidden Kingdom. It's the only movie in which Jackie Chan and Jet Li starred together. Jackie Chan was a bit of a hero for me, so it was a real thrill to be on set with him for a couple of days. When I was in the US I did some work with a start-up called Stimulation Systems. That work resulted in me appearing in a full-page article in The Sun, in which I was referred to as a "sexpert". I thought I'd got away with it. but my auntie found the article and sent it to my mum. I'll happily share the full story over a beer. I'd love it if everyone had all of the oddly shaped stuff included in their CV.

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Published on 15 August 2024