Uncensored CMO

In this episode, I am talking to one of the titans of our industry, someone who I think has had a bigger impact on our industry than perhaps anybody else. He is Sir Martin Sorrell founder of WPP, the biggest holding company in the world.

He has since gone on to set up S4 capital, so now finds himself in the challenger position rather than the dominant player. I wanted to talk to Sir Martin about what he sees as the biggest challenges facing our industry today and what are the disruptions coming down the line that are going to shape our industry in the future?

What's his advice to CMOs? What does CMOs need to care about and what should they be doing? What skills they need to deal with the challenges coming at them in the world today. And because this is a special edition recorded live at the Cannes Lions Festival, I wanted to ask him about AI.

Timestamps

00:00 - Intro
01:11 - Background
07:18 - How do you assess the state of creativity now?
12:02 - what should CMO’s be concerned about?
16:08 - How real a game changer is AI?
18:34 - Do we lose creativity with AI?
26:19 - What skills do marketing teams need to make the most of AI?
29:01 - What will be the biggest disruption to our industry in the next 10 years?
32:08 - What advice would Sir Martin give his younger self?
39:35 - Ethical considerations about how advertising uses our personal data
41:26 - Biggest decision Sir Martin regrets making
43:01 - What was the secret to the growth of WPP?
45:33 - Why start again after exiting WPP?
46:21 - How close is Succession to the Murdochs?
47:34 - Tell me something you’ve never told anyone
48:50 - What would Sir Martin’s fantasy agency look like?

In a special live from MAD//Fest edition of Uncensored CMO, I'm joined by some of the country's top CMO's on a panel about riding the storm in retail. Very’s Jessica Myers, Alex Rogerson from Morrisons, Adam Zavalis (formerly Aldi) and Pete Markey from Boots join me on the panel.

But, ladies and gentlemen, there is more! This is a double header of Uncensored CMO, as I also caught up with some people live on the floor at MAD//Fest, including Heineken CMO Michael Gillane and revealing some new research from System1, JCDecaux and Specsavers.

Enjoy this bonus, bumper edition of Uncensored CMO.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:06 MAD//Fest Live
• 22:46 Break
• 23:06 Michael Gillane
• 30:33 System1, Specsavers & JCDecaux
• 39:55 Outro

In a career that's spanned selling Tea to the British as Marketing Director at Twinings, to now CMO at the largest e-commerce business in Latin America, Sean Summers knows a thing or two about marketing (at all levels). I catch up with him at Cannes to discuss his career, what it's like scaling a business from $300m to $10b in revenue and what he thinks of the latest trends like AI.

Timestamps

00:00 - Intro
01:04 - Why is Sean in Cannes?
02:25 - What creates an award winning campaign?
03:21 - How to make the most out of your agency
06:41 - What is being a CMO actually like?
10:01 - Marketing language / business jargon
11:35 - The awful 360 campaign
14:10 - Sean’s biggest failure
20:16 - A tough time: running marketing teams in the UK
23:25 - What is Mercardo Libre?
26:08 - From $300m to $10b
28:49 - Marketing for Mercado Libre
31:36 - Working with very constrained budgets
34:46 - Managing a multi-faceted company
39:57 - Becoming a media owner
42:08 - Learnings from running a media business
44:19 - The importance of building an online brand offline
46:16 - How the pandemic helped them
48:06 - Sean’s thoughts on AI

Allessandra Bellini is the Chief Customer Officer at Tesco, the largest supermarket in the UK. Previously she's held roles at agencies, before 21 years at Unilever rising up through the ranks to some very senior positions. Tesco are a huge household brand to represent in the UK, and Allessandra and her team have created some exceptional work over the years, including the well received "Food Love Stories" campaign. We talk all about those campaigns, how they scored on the System1 database and what it takes to run such a large brand.

Links

• Follow Jon
• Watch UCMO on YouTube

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro
01:13 - Starting out in advertising
03:18 - From creative agency to joining corporate Unilever
05:24 - What do you learn in 21 years at Unilever?
06:32 - Most challenging and most proud moment at Unilever
08:16 - The secret behind uncomfortable conversations
10:06 - What is Allessandra most proud of from her time at Unilever?
11:26 - From Unilever to Tesco
13:28 - How to get close to the customer in such a large organisation
15:51 - What are the changed
18:15 - Downtrading and uptrading
20:44 - The power of Clubcard Data
24:57 - Cost of living crisis: every little helps, right?
27:47 - How to communicate price
30:35 - How much to spend on brand vs activation
32:14 - Doing both long and short term advertising
33:41 - Food love stories
41:11 - Ad 1: Food Love Stories: Eid Mubarak
45:31 - Ad 2: Sue’s Crispy Pork Noodles
49:43 - Ad 3: Helen’s Homecoming Lamb
51:45 - Ad 4: Barbecue
54:40 - Being president of the Ad Association

Tom Rainsford has been named as one of the Top 50 creative minds in the country.  After a surprising start to his career (that still stands him in great creative stead even now), Tom has grown a challenger brand into a household name and now leads the Marketing at one of the coolest brands on the planet – Beavertown Brewery.

What does Tom see as the magic ingredients for successful brand growth, why does he believe culture and fact-based emotion are they key and how is he going to top his show stopping MadFest opener from last year

1. Dancing your way to a top job in marketing
2. Should you do a marketing degree?
3. The first kickstarter brand? David to Goliath on Giff Gaff: 10 years building a genuinely different business model - how to outsmart the big boys
4. Are great brands emotional or rational?
5. The problems with tech marketing are…..
6. Watch your internal language doesn’t end up in your communications
7. Why Tom believes in In-housing: how to nurture creativity within a company
8. Why creativity is not valued in business.
9. The important questions businesses need to ask themselves about why their creative is wrong
10. The importance of Culture: Does pizza on a Wednesday help?
11. Was COVID a blessing for marketeers?
12. Art and advertising reflecting culture: A discussion about Orlando Wood’s Look Out
13. Why pubs can be the answer the growth.
14. Beavertown Neck Oil: Jon and Tom drink at 11am!
15. Has craft beer jumped the shark?
16. Is consistency important in marketing after all?
17. Why Logan (Robert Plants son) founded Beavertown and what’s it like working in Founder led businesses.
18. Why Beavertown innovation works (according to System1)
19. Why Tom wants you to steal his pint glasses.
20. What makes Beavertown stand out?
21. The importance of a stonking product
22. Shifting to Heineken ownership - have things changed?
23. Ensuring innovation succeeds within a titan mothership
24. Madfest: How Tom is planning to top his mobile phone/trust gig
25. How culture delivers brand trust and helps brands ride the storm
26. Can you learn to do what Derren Brown diss in a month?
27. Why being a CMO can be a lonely affair.
28. The importance of making more noise in bad times
29. Do people do good work when they are knackered?
30. Marketing artists vs marketing scientists
31. The biggest failure in Tom’s career (and what he learnt)
32. The reward of messing up
33. Why the more senior you get the less you know.
34. “To do” lists vs “to think” lists
35. What everyone’s next big business question needs to be……

Live from Cannes, third time returning guest Rory Sutherland gives us his views on just how good this year’s Festival of Creativity is, what should be awarded, AI vs AI, what we should be looking for as marketeers in current trends and the value that behavioural science brings to creativity.

He also talks about what he is looking forward to on the road to another great festival – Madfest, and why he is doing his Mad Masters course.

What we covered in this episode:

• Why Rory thinks this Cannes Lions Festival is the most wonderful ever.
• The backbone that Rory thinks System1 and WARC bring
• The Campaign for a new Behavioural Science Award
• Festival of creativity or advertising?
• The brilliance of ABInbev brewers for bread campaign
• Rory on re-writing the advertising rules
• Jon’s 5 most creative moments
• What excites Rory about behavioural science
• Rory’s definition of creativity
• The story at the heart of Crocs growth
• Should there be a Cannes Lion for zero budget campaigns?
• Fashions in psychology
• The problem with chat GPT is……
• Outlier vs average impact on creativity
• The value Artificial Inquisitiveness and Interestingly wrong
• People’s value in business vs automation
• System1’s learnings on AI creativity and innovation
• Why brand partnerships should be awarded.
• Encouraging people to think more widely about what they should be testing.
• Does Rory think the world needs Apple Vision?
• Should Google have persisted with Google Glass?
• Why all Europeans report to distain automatic cars.
• Rory’s ideas for the tech world innovation
• When are people happy being happy cut off from fellow men?
• The most important economic thing about Zoom meetings.
• How Rory is plotting to get more cash for creative people
• Why Rory keeps coming back on The Uncensored CMO
• The value of “crap creativity” – why the obvious solution could sometimes be better
• Rory’s Road to Madfest  - what he is looking forward to and why he is doing Mad Masters

Links

• Follow Jon
• Watch UCMO on YouTube

In this episode I'm joined by three more effectiveness titans in my Cannes special coverage. Karen Nelson-Field, Rob Brittain and fan favourite Orlando Wood join me to talk about the triple opportunity of attention.

Following on from the IPA EffWorks and WARC session on the Terrace Stage in Cannes, I speak to effectiveness legends, Les Binet, Grace Kite and Tom roach to outline the big shifts in advertising effectiveness in the digital era, suggesting that we’re leaving the trough of disillusionment and moving onto the plateau of productivity.

• Register for the IPA webinar: https://ipa.co.uk/events-listing/the-3rd-age-of-effectiveness

Digital once promised so much in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, tracking, and accountability. But the reality didn’t live up to the hype. And now we’re entering a new era - one where the best understanding about things have always worked are being blended with new ways of doing things, and the evidence suggests things are beginning to work better as a result.  They challenge the narrative that creativity is declining and digital is the culprit. On the contrary, analysis of the ARC database shows effectiveness is improving in some places, (less so in others). 

It will also shine a light on brand-building in the platform world, specifically, creativity within the platforms. Tom talks about how clients, agencies and creators are getting to grips with the new environment, showcasing examples of effective creativity from around the world.

Lex Bradshaw-Zanger is the Chief Marketing & Digital Officer for L’Oréal South Asia Pacific, Middle East & North Africa Region. Prior to this role, Lex was the CMO for the UK & Ireland, held roles in the Western Europe Zone and was Chief Digital Officer for the L’Oréal Middle East and Africa Region. Prior to L’Oréal, Lex was with McDonald’s and Facebook. He is a recovered ad-man having spent over 10 years in the agency world, with both WPP and Publicis – his last role was Regional Director for Digital Strategy & Innovation for Leo Burnett MENA.

Work is fundamentally important to the quality of our lives and we are surrounded by more change and choice than ever before. Our careers have become far less predictable and increasingly 'squiggly'. In this episode I have a chat with Helen Tupper, co-founder of Amazing If and co-author of "The Squiggly Career: Ditch the Ladder, Discover Opportunity, Design Your Career".

Subscribe to the podcast on YouTube ->

Find out more about Helen:

• The Squiggly Career Book
• Squiggly Careers Podcast
• Amazing If
• Helen's LinkedIn

What we covered in this episode:

1. How Helen and Sarah started their business on napkin
2. Why the career ladder is not necessarily the path to success
3. 5 years of experimentation to develop the Squiggly business
4. How Helen and Sarah went from starting The Squiggly Careers Podcast to 330 episodes
5. How to create a growth flywheel for your brand or business - making content more useful
6. Why creating something of huge value for free is the key to B2B growth - remaining relevant
7. Trusting in reciprocity - why helping people authentically is so important for growth
8. Why you shouldn't worry about your weaknesses
9. The Squiggly Careers Book - The 5 Key Skills you need
10. The importance of deliberately choosing what you want to be known for
11. Your 2 week energy audit - How to discover your core skills and values
12. Jon and Helen's 12 month career high and why it mattered
13. Building high trust teams and emotional safety
14. Less budget =  happy teams
15. Confidence Gremlins and limiting beliefs
16. Teaching yourself to draw on the positive
17. Learning how to fail.... and that this means for success
18. The pressure pedestal - we are not all Simon Sinek!
19. Jon's advice on presentation skills
20. Networking Events - how to reframe the fear
21. Fired? Redundant? How to get back into employment....fast!
22. Why you should only share what you really care about
23. How curious career conversations will set you up well in you next job
24. Creating a constant flow of future job opportunities
25. How to use your mobile phone contacts to find the perfect role
26. Redefining the definition of progression
27. Helen shares whom Squiggly Careers is for and whom it can help
28. Helen's advice on crafting your best career story

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• LinkedIn
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