What'cha Drinkin'? with Ben Page
Editor's note: Automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity.
Stewart Tippler:
Hi, welcome to another edition of What’cha Drinkin’? My name is Stewart Tippler and I'm the European representative for Quirk’s Media. Today I am very fortunate to be speaking to the wonderful Mr.Ben Page. For those of you who don't know Ben graduated from Oxford University in 1986 and exactly one year later he joined Ipsos MORI, where he's still today, and he became the chief executive back in 2009. He has been named as one of the 100 most influential people in the public sector by the Guardian. GQ named him as one of the most connected men in Britain in 2015, and he has also won the Market Research Society Medal back in 2005. So without further ado, welcome Mr.Ben Page. What’cha Drinking’?
Ben Page:
Cheers. I'm drinking Japanese whiskey, which I strongly like and I strongly endorse this product. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Stewart Tippler:
Are you a keen follower of whiskey? Do you have a big collection?
Ben Page:
Well, I lived in Scotland for a year in the early 1990s when I was sent up there to run a very large random probability survey when I was 26. I got a taste for whiskey when I was living in Edinburgh. Petey Whiskeys from Ile and I like Japanese whiskeys, which are generally very smooth. But yeah, the main thing in lockdown is not to drink too much whiskey. But yeah.
Stewart Tippler:
I know. And just so for the people out there, have a guess, I am drinking a gin and tonic. Shock horror this one branded glass, so the perfect serve. But today I am drinking Neil Rhubarb and Ginger, one of my favorites. You can actually see the picture behind me. My wife's favorite Silent Paul and mine is the ginger. So Ben, what's been happening, we’re three months now into lockdown, the pandemic, been doing much in the last three months?
Ben Page:
Actually growing as a business, which is certainly unusual I think, for the industry, but it's partly because of the diversity of what we do. So no, like most businesses, you've got a sudden massive drop off in demand and lots of things. We do 45 million a year of face-to-face interviewing in Britain, which of course became impossible quite quickly. And our work for airlines, I work for hotels, I work for car manufacturers like Jaguar, Land Rover, that just stopped. So, parts of the business are very dramatic.
We've had to furlough, we've been able to furlough people. We've also been able to use the furlough scheme to actually furlough over a thousand interviewers who are obviously people who are normally paid on a daily basis for whatever work they do. And so that's actually been a huge help. But on the upside, if there is any upside, we are working for the government with Imperial College on random testing of literally millions of literally millions of people both for the antigen and the antibodies.
So antigen means you've got it right now and the antibodies means you've had COVID-19, which is vital to understand the prevalence of the disease as we come out of lockdown. And so that has made a big difference to our work. But yeah, it's been tough. It has been for everybody. I think also from most people on this call will have, if you're a business of any size, you'll have had masses of cancellations. So you've got all that work that you thought you were going to do and then you are not doing it anymore. We haven't made anybody redundant yet. Hopefully it'll be pretty minor, but it is, it's a pretty dramatic time for business.
The difficulty is of course, that we're only in the foothills of understanding the impact of this on the economy because if you look at 2008, it goes down and it doesn't get back even in terms of the actual GDP for several years. I fear that this will be the same, that we will go down this year and it will take us, we won't just bounce back next year. You've got people like British Airways saying it will be 2023 by the time we return to 2019 volumes. I fear that for the research industry that may also be true. So it's going to be tough. But then if you've been in this business for a long time, which I'm now, I must admit have if I've been there for 33 years, in a sense, we've been here before.
Stewart Tippler:
And obviously that's very much U.K. centric in terms of some of that data and where you're thinking, what do you think the global impact this pandemic has had?
Ben Page:
It's going to shrink the industry because you've got large parts of, I mean even Google is suffering who is our largest client. Even Google is suffering in this environment. So globally you are having all, a large part of the economy has just stopped just like that and has no money. On the other hand, FMCG is still going. Financial services, people still going. I mean it's changing, but media, people are consuming media in lockdown. But no, I mean I think the overall economy is going to be depressed. The industry is going to go backwards rather than forwards.
As always in these situations, it won't be the biggest necessarily that do best. It won't be the cleverest, even as Darwin likes to put it, will be the most adaptable who survive. But many of the research people who buy research will have less money. Advertisers, there's much less advertising money around. It knocks through the food chain. And so yeah, it's going to be tough, I think, and it'll be tough for people. I think one challenge is it'll be tough for people entering the industry and I hope the industry doesn't do what it normally does of not recruiting anybody during the downturn. And then of course there will be a massive shortage of talent in three or four years time. But if you are under pressure, one of the things to cut is new hires. Of course we, we'll try not to do that, but it's a big challenge.
Stewart Tippler:
And I mean obviously there's lots of various different things that are impacting the world. I mean if you look at what's happened on the news over the last few weeks, obviously with what happened over in the States and the Black Lives Matter campaign that's been going on, have Ipsos been doing some kind of research regarding that as well?
Ben Page:
Yeah. So as you know, we've been tracking people's attitudes to COVID-19 since early February all over the planet. And that is, the big message from that is once humanity spotted the problem, they've got it. And now of course they're very anxious about coming out of lockdown, which is having a big impact on the economy in terms of Black Lives Matter.
We track every month what people see as the biggest problems facing Britain or any number of countries. And we've just had this month the highest ever level of spontaneous anxiety about race relations in Britain. And for Black and Asian and minority ethnic people, that figure is even higher. So I mean, it's in, and I think, again, I'm a white guy, so what do I know? But what's interesting I think is just the level of suppressed frustration and anger that this has somehow crystallized.
And you know, you might think, well what's that about? That the guy was murdered by the police in America, not here. But it just shows that sort of repressed frustration and anger. So no, you see it everywhere. It's inside my company as well and it's very difficult to come up with a response that makes everybody happy actually on that. But no, we will keep tracking that. I think the positive thing, if there is a positive thing out of all of this is again, a bit like some of the debates about gender in the Me Too arguments of a few years ago started looking at the gender pay gap. What gets measured gets done. So we're now measuring the gender pay gap, that's something that government has forced on large companies. But it's a good thing.
I think perhaps one positive that comes out of Black Lives Matter is we'll just go back to, I mean we've had a diversity and inclusion group, we've got groups covering race, covering ethnicity, covering LGBT, covering even European nationals in Ipsos MORI, where we've got all of these groups represented and they all have networks. But I think it's a reminder to go back and actually have some metrics. Let's see how many Black, Asian, minority ethnic people we've got applying, how many do we promote? How many do we appoint and are we going to actually make a difference? And if everybody does that, we will make some progress. So it's a positive thing, but there's a lot of underlying, I think what perhaps surprises some people is the level of underlying anger and frustration that was sort of present that has been crystallized by what they've seen on the news.
Stewart Tippler:
Yeah, no, completely agree. So it's normally about this time of the interview where we pick out a question out the hat. So let me do that and yeah, you have a drop. Might need it with this question by the looks of it. So if you were a ghost and you could possess one person, who would it be and what would you make them do?
Ben Page:
Is it somebody who's still alive or somebody who's dead or what are the conditions?
Stewart Tippler:
However you want to take it.
Ben Page:
Oh, okay. I would go and possess Dominic Cummings in number 10 Downing Street and I would get him to make Boris to do a green reset for the economy in Britain. And maybe, I don't know, I suppose nobody really has planetary puzzle. No, I probably should go and possess Donald Trump and get him to do something sane, but hopefully sorry, I shouldn't say hopefully cause I'm politically neutral, but maybe the election will, the electorate and America will fix that, given that the election in Britain is some time away.
I would go and possess Boris Johnson and make him invest in looking hard at the social contract, looking hard at stimulus for our economy that involves green energy digital infrastructure which is how we responded to the crisis and the slump of the 2008, to invest in things that we need to do in the economy, decarbonizing the economy in skills, training, digital infrastructure to get Britain ready for how it needs to be. And I'd probably look at why the people we really depend on in Britain earn so little money but that, hey, there's my ghost possessing Dominic, probably Dominic Cummings rather than Boris Johnson, actually. Yeah.
Stewart Tippler:
You think he's got slightly more influence than the Prime Minister?
Ben Page:
I have a feeling that he's the reason they're hanging onto him so strongly and why he gets his own press conference in the Rose Garden in number 10. I mean for foreign viewers who are not following the minutia of British politics, Dominic Cummings may be a mystery figure, but he's basically the Bengali that is doing everything behind the scenes. And so it's interesting that he's allowed, under lockdown, he's allowed to drive his family around wherever he likes and sort of go driving to test his eyesight. Well, if your eyesight's a bit dodgy as you've had COVID-19, the main thing you should do is go for a 60 mile drive just with your family in the back just to check that your eyesight's okay. And after this I'll have a, I'll go and test my eyesight a little bit more.
But it is, in all seriousness, we need, I think what I hope, I would hope for West, for the Western democracies is that rather than austerity, which is what happened after 2008, we've all, and we've had many consequences of that. We seem to be in a situation where governments are able to run deficits. In other words, sad. Well necessarily in the short term spend more than their income in order to stimulate the economy. We've already got a situation in many countries where the government is literally paying people's wages. And I hope that we don't do that rather than massive cuts to spending massive unemployment, which is what I remember from my youth of the 1980s. Because we're going to probably, even with the best intentions in the world, we're going to have that. And instead we need to stimulate the economy but spend the money on constructive and positive things, not probably on tax cuts for wealthy people. I hope so.
Stewart Tippler:
Thank you. I could talk to you for ages. Unfortunately we have to keep this quite short. So just to finish off, a big thank you to Mr.Ben Page. look forward to catching up with you soon and hopefully look forward to you being part of the Quirk’s Virtual event next month.
Ben Page:
Always, always enjoy Quirk’s. Thank you. Brilliant.
Stewart Tippler:
Thanks Ben.
Ben Page:
Alright, take care.