What you need to know:

• CMOs needs to keep the creative out of the boardroom and sink their teeth in the things that addressed the heightened risk organisations and boards are facing and thereby minimise the ability for businesses to grow, according to a panel speaking at the CMO Awards launch event in Sydney last week.
• According to UN Women Australia chair and nonexecutive director, Georgina Williams, today’s boards are consumed with risk, making it imperative for marketing leaders to respond accordingly through brand positioning and differentiation, service and delivery proposition and bold choices that drive market cut through and effectiveness. Per Williams: “I need marketers to start to protect my brand, plus absolutely do the essentials around where should I spend my money for best benefit, so I can keep them at the table and we can grow.”
• In a decidedly glass half-full approach, both Uber’s Andy Morley and Guzman y Gomez's Lara Thom believe the additional economic challenges, tailwinds and rapid-fire changes surrounding marketing teams are all an opportunity to spur innovation and growth. As Thom put it: “In FMCG, there’s always someone doing better than you, so go chase them. And if you're doing the best, go harder. For us, we're very much glass half-full, everything's an opportunity... If you create an environment in a team and in an industry where it’s about catching us, it's incredibly powerful.”
• All this is why Morley won’t compromise on bold creative choices. “You're not going to be successful in marketing and brand marketing unless you're doing different things that get noticed. That's way harder than it was 10 years ago,” he continued. “So often when budgets get trimmed, people start to move into safe spaces or tight channels that look like they're more valuable in a plan, but actually, in reality, might not have the same level of impact. They pull back on the creative because they want to get the right kind of mix of not working and working. But actually what that means is they create work that just doesn't even break or cut through.”

Risky business

Brand proposition, differentiation and protection, delivery and service development, growth outcomes and business impact – that’s what boards need marketing leaders to bring to the boardroom table, not campaign creative.

That was the view of a duo of marketing luminaries and one non-executive director speaking on a panel at last week’s official launch of the CMO Awards, powered by Mi3, in Sydney. Attended by more than 50 of the industry’s finest CMOs, former CMO50 alumni and business executives, the afternoon event reflected the aims and ambitions of the new recognition program with a panel discussing the modern marketing remit and what it takes to elevate the stature of CMOs in organisations.

As a non-executive director for businesses including Australian Retirement Trust and People’s Choice Credit Union, Georgina Williams has seen a significant shift in highly regulated industries over the last four years and said it’s bringing marketing to the table around risk. She’s also chair of UN Women Australia and council at Deakin University.

“Risk is the number one thing we do at the table now. Where we used to spend an hour and a half on risk, we might spend six hours just on risk and have a separate day. Where it used to be grow and protect, for a lot of boards, especially those in highly regulated industries, it’s all protect, protect, protect,” Williams told attendees.

“So when you’re talking about growth, it’s absolutely imperative marketers start to bring that to the table. We used to talk about marketing and product, or marketing and sales. That's just not there anymore. There's just no room at the table for just marketing – marketing is an ‘and’.

“I need marketers to start to protect my brand, plus absolutely do the essentials around where should I spend my money for best benefit, so I can keep them at the table and we can grow.”

While conversations around risk can sound gloomy, Williams saw this as an opportunity for marketers to once again step up their business credentials and adapt to the needs of the business and customers in a way that manifests growth.

Achieving this also means doubling down on brand and the differentiators of your brand. “Which are the most important things for your brand that will protect it in market? Which are the things that are going to enable you to keep growing if the world comes to an end? You can see some brands are already doing that, and marketers have led that company through continued growth, despite what they might be saying,” Williams said.

Opportunity knocks

Reacting to growing risks and threats isn’t the only thing on the CMO’s plate, as many are well aware. As AMI CPM Marketer of the Year, Paper + Spark’s Paul Everson told Mi3 last month, there’s a miasma of uncertainty and short-termism in decision making stretching across marketing leadership in the face of too much data and persistently dour economic conditions. At the same time, relentless transformation across organisations thanks to macro-economic trends, changes in consumer behaviour, digital, technology and now AI disruption, plus ever-more pressure to prove marketing’s worth and the quest for quantifiable effectiveness are all things CMOs are trying to navigate. And it can feel like many don’t have enough control of what’s happening to them while they look to execute the craft of marketing itself with excellence.

Reflecting a decidedly glass half-full attitude towards what’s confronting them, Guzman y Gomez global CMO, Lara Thom, and Uber director of marketing APAC, Andy Morley, said they’re approaching the market conditions as an opportunity.

“We have no excuses, ever. To quote our incredible but crazy founder, ‘people still gotta eat Lara’, and it's amazing how many times people like, well, the footy is on or it's a public holiday, and ultimately, people do still need to eat,” Thom said.

“In FMCG, there’s always someone doing better than you, so go chase them. And if you're doing the best, go harder. For us, we're very much glass half-full, everything's an opportunity. I understand the market is not always like that, but... If you create an environment in a team and in an industry where it’s about catching us, it's incredibly powerful.”

Morley, meanwhile, cited an experience which proved transformational when he was working at Diageo in the spirits category.

“Every macro-economic force was against you. People were drinking less, you had all these micro competitors coming into the market, retailers were getting much more powerful. Overall, as we faced a bit of economic downturn, it just got more and more challenging,” he recalled. “I remember a new CEO joining about five months into the financial year, when we were about 15 per cent behind plan. It was looking completely dire. He played this exercise trying to learn where everyone was at and how people were feeling.

“One of the questions was, stand over this side or on the spectrum here, around your confidence levels for us to hit this plan when we're so far behind. I remember the marketing leaders standing over at the very end of positivity, even with the fear of looking naive and just out of control of it. But it was so important for marketing to play that role. If we're not going to be able to think about the opportunity we have to solve these problems, then no one else is going to be. And then the CFO will start taking all the money back and putting in the back pocket because he knows you’re not going to hit the plan if you don't even believe it.”

Diageo hit the plan and found a way, Morley said. “I think part of it was the optimism we brought to that challenge – it gave us the confidence to go and find the things we had to do differently,” he said.

“You build much stronger muscles when you're facing those kinds of headwinds… marketing teams learn actually how to go deeper. They learn how to innovate more. They learn how to take harder risks they need to during tough times. With a tailwind, you can just coast by.”

Go large

Today, what Morley and the Uber team won’t compromise on is taking the bold creative and brand risks he knows it needs to in order to cut through.

“That's so critical now, because you're not going to be successful in marketing and brand marketing unless you're doing different things that get noticed. That's way harder than it was 10 years ago,” Morley continued.

“The things I'm ring-fencing include the pots of money to keep innovating, the money to keep on going big on creative and the strategic direction, and to make sure we’re continuing to show up in high-attention channels to make a big impact.

“So often when budgets get trimmed, people start to move into safe spaces or tight channels that look like they're more valuable in a plan, but actually, in reality, might not have the same level of impact. They pull back on the creative because they want to get the right kind of mix of not working and working. But actually what that means is they create work that just doesn't even break or cut through.

“You're better off making harder choices that actually force the business to also recognise those choices, by cutting off geographies for marketing and seeing how palatable that is for everyone to really drive that conversation, and to unlock your budgets for the future.”

Williams agreed bold choices “are the most efficient spend”. “If you’re making banal choices, it’s not efficient.”

But Williams warned against bringing creative into the boardroom – something she admitted some boards still try and enforce on marketers, to their strategic detriment.

“A lot of the boards I know in those regulated spaces want to see what they go to market with, and want to be all over it. But marketers have got to think about smarter ways to do that outside the boardroom, so it doesn't interfere with your decision-making framework. It's pulling in feedback without overhauling the decision-making framework,” she advised.

What Williams also argued she’s not hearing enough of from marketers is the strategy that went behind the bold choice, “in a way that’s properly explained”.

Thom noted examples where dozens of stakeholders can be signing off one billboard. “That's when you know you work in a business that has too much process, too many stakeholders. That in itself is a risk, because you become clunky and unable to innovate and unable to make bold choices. Everyone's too scared and protecting their own backsides. That's where marketers need to stand up and go, you pay me as an expert. I am an expert. I'll back myself. You've got to trust me.”

Measurement vs. gut

The three panellists also debated the line between too much research, data, measurement and trusting your gut/experience, and whether marketers can be too optimistic about marketing’s consistent strike rate when not every execution or tactic is going to work.

“I think research was started in the absence of data; data is now king. Therefore, if you're hiding behind research, go and check your data, because your data is going to tell you a lot more than the research,” Thom commented, adding A/B testing is a vital part of how GyG gets validation on where executions need to go.

“I’m somewhere in the middle,” Morley followed up. “As much as we have huge data science teams who are constantly analysing to the nth degree, I still don't think we're cracking a tool where we can give the perfect answer around what it's doing. I need the research to complement that. Because I don't think anyone I've met yet has the perfect measurement solution.

“You need to you need to look at a campaign from five different angles to see what you can learn, and then bring the collection of those insights in to explain actually, how well and how confident we are it’s working, and what can we do better for the next level? What I've learned is most of the stakeholders we deal with no longer have the expectations we have a perfect ROI, but what they want to know is that we care as much about every dollar we spend as they do.”

CMOs also can’t just sell a success story every time, Morley agreed. At Uber, he’s started a practice of anyone who does a campaign then doing a post-campaign evaluation.

“But we took the practice further, where they had to share it out to the whole team across APAC, whatever their campaign was, and they had to push to make sure that on the front page were all the things we could have done better,” he explained. “The most inspiring moment for me was when the marketing manager in Japan, who had done the biggest campaign, shared it with the entire Japanese business, a couple of hundred people. In Japan, if you score 95 per cent, then it's a failure. This was such a big leap and so different to what the culture would normally breed.

“They just knew this team cared as much about creating great work and that they could trust them to do the right thing. It’s unlocked so much more potential for them. You've got to do that to build trust.”

What’s helped Thom stay accountable is the fact marketing gets a percentage of revenue in the business directly correlated to sales. During her eight year tenure at GyG, the QSR has gone from under $200 million in sales to nudging a billion dollars and debuted on the Australian Stock Exchange.

“I'm responsible for driving that revenue, and therefore the better I do, the more I get. If I wasn't proving it out, I wouldn't have any money to spend. Therefore there's a real commerciality. I think a lot of marketers now are working towards that, or have put that forward: The commercial understanding of CMOs these days is so much more than it was 10 years ago,” she said. “Maybe there was a bit of mumbo jumbo, a lot of buzz words – omnichannel chucked in. Nowadays, because of the data we have access to, and because of the measurements, and because of just pure accountability of what's happening at a board level and whether it's a traffic light system or something else, boards are now more accountable. And that's coming down [to marketing].

“Great boards are creating great marketers, and great marketers are happy putting their hands up going, 'I've got tenure. I know how to do it. I can disseminate this information'.”