What you need to know:

• This year’s #1 CMO of the Year, Guzman y Gomez’s Lara Thom, and #6 CMO of the Year, Uber’s Andy Morley, see themselves as the “Bert and Ernie of marketing” given their different marketing leadership styles and beliefs. Yet despite the differences in role and remit, both were recognised for stellar effectiveness in this year’s inaugural CMO Awards.
• And there’s no denying the duo have surprisingly more in common than you’d think.
• Both subscribe to fostering a risktaking culture for example. For Morley, it’s achieved through a combination of celebrating the failures, cross-functional sharing and building psychological safety by recognising marketers for giving it a swing, not just delivering final output metrics. For Thom, it’s about authenticity, accountability and encouraging a “yes” culture that values new channels, new approaches and giving things a go.
• The pair are also backers of brandled strategy, and bold, progressive marketing that grabs attention and strikes the right cultural chord with consumers.
• Taking an offensive position as a marketer is equally crucial if CMOs are to be effective, the duo agreed. For Thom, GyG’s still a challenger to the QSR status quo, with a hunter for fast growth and market share. For Morley, taking an offensive position as a more mature brand is about reframing the category and pursuing the longterm game.
• Listen to the full podcast here.

Guzman y Gomez global CMO, Lara Thom describes her and Uber CMO APAC, Andy Morley as the “Bert and Ernie of marketing”. And certainly, their remits and responsibilities seem poles apart. But the pair share strikingly similar views for all that. Take the importance of a risk-taking culture, CMOs aligning personally to company values if they’re to do their best work, brand-led strategy, and bold, progressive marketing that grabs attention and strikes the right cultural chord as examples.

It’s surprising really. Thom has her hands full with near-term growth, global expansion of a brand still challenging the QSR status quo, but a recent IPO that saw GyG’s market cap soar of $3bn. Morley meanwhile, one of the main orchestrators behind successfully repositioning Uber Eats from its highly effective ‘Tonight I’ll be eating’ platform to a shopfront where you can buy ‘Almost, almost anything’, has his sights set on the longer-term brand horizon and lasting salience of two mature businesses – food and rideshare – for what’s coming next.

Yet these two very different marketing operators were both recognised by this year’s CMO Awards judges for demonstrating marketing effectiveness in spades: Morley came in #6^th in this year’s CMOs of the Year rankings, while Thom was the inaugural CMO Awards #1. What both respected marketers also share is a very timely reminder that the role of marketing has to adapt if it’s to achieve the outcome every CMO is ultimately looking for: Delivering growth and market share through effective marketing. 

Making marketing effective

In the first place, Thom and Morley both firmly believe in a sense of accountability for delivering commercial impact. In Thom’s case, marketing has a share of revenue as its budget and direct throughline responsibility for sales.

“At some stage, marketers got hold of a whole bunch of metrics and were able to kind of put some twinkly stars in the sky and go and say, look, here’s reach, impressions, brand awareness graphs that don't mean anything,” Thom says. “But the real accountability and the real effectiveness of an awesome and great marketer is actually in sales.”

That by no means impinges GyG’s brand and creative aspirations, however. “I've always said and believed that you can build brand and revenue at the same time,” Thom continues. “Anyone that says this is a brand campaign that's not designed to drive sales, is wrong and lying, and it's not working. All brand campaigns should elevate brand awareness, and that equates to sales. End of.”

How marketers maintain an offensive, not defensive, position is another priority for both CMOs when it comes to being effective. “There are a number of brands that have more restaurants than us, so we're still in an offensive position with that hunger and we're striving to get there,” Thom says.  

By contrast, Morley and the Uber team are now in a well-established, market leadership position looking at what comes next. In response to this, Morley’s offensive position has become spying, reframing, then playing out the long-term brand game.

Take the Uber Eats “oh fuck moment” as it expanded from food delivery into all manner of grocery and product delivery from 2022. Knowing the existing brand platform was not going to stretch and stick in this next phase of business, Morley’s team successfully evolved what Uber Eats stands for through the power of its ‘Order almost anything’ brand positioning and creative platform. Results include a tripling of Uber’s grocery business and doubling of its alcohol business, and strong salience across those categories – all while also increasing market leadership in its core food delivery business.

Morley’s next ambition is evolving Uber’s core rideshare business and where it goes next. “I think the reframing of what your category is, is the most important thing for our position,” he says.

“We're not just trying to maintain our share or just defend what we've got within rideshare or through delivery. We're saying actually, what's the bigger picture that we can go on? In the mobility space, it's the private car. We are going harder on how we build more use cases away from the private car. It's generally better for the consumer’s wallet, and that is a much bigger fish for us to go after.

“So there’s a real focus point around where we're heading, and what are the hero metrics we're trying to drive for the business and for the brand as indicators of the longer-term business. That is our North Star, and we do everything we can to achieve that.”

Morley has seen the role of marketing evolve hugely during the nine years he’s been with Uber, and he notes how different a tech marketplace is to his earlier FMCG jobs at Arnott’s and Diageo.

“There’s this extra layer of operational rigour, analytics and machine learning that drives so much of the short-term impact and conversion and outcomes of our business – that is driven by parts of other parts of the business. So marketing becomes more and more around how are we driving the medium and long-term future,” he explains. “How are we using our customer insights to shape the value propositions and the innovations and the products, and how are they going to help us win and grow our customer base in three or five years’ time? That’s what our [marketing] team primarily focus on now: How do we help shape the strategy in that direction, then, most importantly, how are we going to connect customers with it.

“At the end of the day, we want to grow our customer bases, we want to grow our market share, we want to sell more. But for us at Uber, our biggest focus is around that medium and longer term. And that's really liberating. Once we understood our role as marketing and got laser focused on that, it’s enabled us to focus around how we're going to do that in the most impactful way.”

Innovative leadership

Morley and Thom’s interpretations of marketing leadership have nuances as a consequence. Thom’s three key words for her marketing leadership style are: Honest, real and accountable.

“I am honest at all times about myself and in my self-awareness as a leader and my role, but also with my teams and in terms of the way that we market,” she says. “Real and being authentic to who I am, but also most importantly, the brand I work for at the moment, is crucial because GyG is a very real brand. Then accountability is probably the biggest piece for me, because if I'm accountable, I can help my team become accountable and take that on. That’s a very powerful thing: When you're happy to own what you do and you're proud of it.”

Meanwhile, Morley’s word to describe his leadership style are: Coaching, culture building and innovator. Which is also why accountability in Morley’s view isn’t just achieved via a financial lens.

“I hold accountability for individuals in the team around actually delivering on their best execution and making sure we've got a culture that is learning really well from that, and bar raising to execute even better for the next time,” he says.

“That is because so many things externally can impact the actual output metrics. But you want to provide a space where people can feel free to have a swing and try new things, and know that they're only going to be judged on whether they did that to their best ability, rather than whether it was successful or not.”

Culture of learning, experimenting and risk taking

One of the ways Uber is driving this culture of experimentation is by celebrating risk-taking annually on 5May, a date that represents one of the biggest local failures it ever had as a marketing team. Back in 2018, a Facebook Live campaign around Cinco de Mayo went awry, and an original budget of $50,000 for the promo ended up as a $1.4 million giveaway after a capping tool didn’t work out as planned. The program manager, who fessed up, took on the learnings and built from there, was promoted in the next company cycle.

This year’s party saw Morley dressed up as a taco while margaritas and GyG food were consumed. “We talk about campaigns we felt were awesome. We talk about any failures we might have had and why they were good. And it just signposts to the team that risk taking is important,” he says.

Another must for Morley is championing learnings more than results or campaign launches. “We got to a stage where I saw this drifting, where everyone was about all saying right, who could send out the email to the company saying that we've launched this campaign with this celebrity, how cool is it? You’d get all the high fives. But we weren't necessarily going back and being open around whether or not it worked; what worked, what didn't. With every campaign, things could have gone better. There are things can learn from. Socialising and celebrating that can be so valuable for helping you get better in the future,” he says.

Today, Uber champions post-campaign analysis and sends these reports out to the whole business – even when something didn't work.

“Teams aren't just sharing those post-campaign assessments amongst all of the marketing team. They're sharing them across all the business, then the business is mind blown that marketing is sharing all the things that haven't gone that well,” Morley says. “It builds this level of trust, and that’s created momentum for people to lean further in. So I think you've got to set that culture where the learnings are even more valuable than results in the short term, because it gives people comfort to try anything. They know they're only going to be assessed on if they gave it their best execution, and if they captured the learnings in the most objective way possible. That has inspired us do better marketing.”

Risk taking is also evident over at GyG. For Thom, building then enabling “a culture of yes rather than no” from top down has been a critical step in fostering an open mindset and agility to try something new. GyG TV is a recent example of this: An in-house, on-the-ground content team equipped with roaming microphones, branded uniforms, cameras, and a clear mission, to tell the real, unscripted stories of GYG in a way that resonates with how audiences digest content today.

Another one of Thom’s rules of thumb is the team must introduce a new media channel or activation with every campaign.

“We have our standard media buy, and we know what buttons we can push and what's going to provide certain uplift. But with every new campaign, we experiment in a brand new channel, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't,” she says.  “The best part about it is when people come to me and say, well, I think we should be on this gaming platform, and I can go, yeah, did that and it didn't work. I've got these proof points around being able to say yes. Rather than defending constantly why we haven't done something, we actually say, yes, let's give it a go.”

A soon-to-be-released GyG campaign will yet again see a new channel in the mix designed to attract a new audience to the brand. The plan also takes its cues from the highly successful ’60 Stories in 60 days’ campaign, which blended national advertisements with suburb-level local creative, resulting in 600 unique content variants and spurring record sales.

“That was originally designed for Tiktok, yet we ended up changing our billboards every single day. We ended up changing our radio ads every single day. We were in these studios, actually recording 60 separate radio ads, and we ended up storytelling on media as opposed to advertising on media. Not only was that campaign incredibly successful, it fundamentally changed the way we advertise,” says Thom.

The upcoming campaign has at least 57 separate pieces of social content not including organic content, plus seven different executions in out-of-home advertising.