← CMO Confidential
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The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to CMO Confidential,
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the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions and choices that go with being the Head of marketing. Hosted by five time CMO Mike Linton
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Typeface has completely changed the process of large campaign executions. Everyone knows AI can help with images and headlines, but the real impact is making the leap from a creative brief to a live, multichannel large campaign at speed. Typeface just announced its marketing orchestration engine, the first platform built to automate campaign workflows. You can roll out campaigns that used to take months in just a few hours. TypeFace uses Agentic AI to orchestrate the entire process, taking one campaign and instantly orchestrating it into thousands of personalized experiences across ads, email and video. Major brands like Asics and Post holdings are already transforming their marketing with Typeface. See how to move from brief to to personalize campaigns in hours, not months At Typeface AICMO welcome marketers, advertisers and those who love them to Chief Marketing Officer Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy and ebay, Farmers Insurance and Ancestry.com, here today with my guest Michael Treff. Hello hello. Today's topic a mid year update from the B2B front lines. Now Michael is the CEO of Code and Theory, an agency that combines creatives with engineers to bring clients answers at the intersection of technology and creativity. Under his leadership, the company has grown to over 2000 people and has received numerous awards. They were recently recognized in fact, as one of Fast Company's most innovative companies for the second year in a row. That's a huge amount of innovation in my book. Full Disclosure we met at the ANA B2B conference in 2024 where I was really impressed by his business insights across not just the agency business, but also the whole marketplace and he has become a recurring guest. In his first appearance on the show, we learned that he played in a rock and roll band called Baby Teeth, or I guess it was a punk band. And after his second show he agreed to become our B2B correspondent. So buckle. Buckle up for show number three. Welcome back, Michael.
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C
Thank you so much, Mike. It's always a pleasure to be here. I love our conversations. Thanks for having me back.
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Oh, it's so much fun. So let's start, like we always do, with an overview of the B2B marketplace. There's so much political and cultural change. And, you know, I mean, we always talk about. But how are companies dealing with all of the uncertainty and all the rock and roll in the business world?
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C
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. Look, and the answer is that it's all over the place. You know, we see all different flavors and all different variants of how companies are dealing with this. The. It does feel like, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it does feel like the uncertainty train has been with us for quite some time now.
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A
So, you know, permanent train. Yeah. Yeah.
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C
You know, I don't see it slowing down anytime soon. I mean, when you think about it and step back, just in the past, even like five, six years, like, essentially, Covid, you had Covid. Then you had, you know, the economic fallout of that. Then you had the boom coming out of that when everything came back. Then you had a new election cycle. Then you have, you know, international instability and conflict. Then you. Now you have AI and technological revolution. Like, that is a lot of. For anyone to deal with. And whether you're dealing with, you know, end consumer businesses or B2B businesses, that's a huge plate. But in B2B, that's even more, you know, that's even amplified. You know, consumer demand, consumer need goes with the economy. B2B, you're making longer bets. You know, you're betting on the future of your business. You're the future of your products and services, the future of your clients. You're betting on different ways to do business and how your operations work. You're betting on, like, what technology is going to win and not win because it's going to be very disruptive to both how I and my company work or, you know, my clients end up what they need from me. And so this kind of uncertainty we see playing out across the entire landscape. And really, it comes down to, like, a few big questions that people are trying to figure out. Maybe that's a good place to start. Like question one. How is. And we always talk about technology with us, and I promise it won't be the only thing, but, like, how is this technology going to truly change things? And I've, you know what, I've spent a lot of years experimenting and Now I kind of want to see some roi. Like we, we like to say I
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predicted that in the last show you said this is the ROI reckoning. And then lo and behold there was a over thousand point market correction. Really based on, hey, I'm not sure this thing is going to pay out like I thought it might totally.
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C
And that's like a very important thing because if I'm trying to figure out what to do in the B2B world, like understanding how the investments in technology to do better product development, to do better services, to market better with my customers, to shorten the funnel on purchase decisions, to do more personalization, like I made all these bets and now I want to see it happen and maybe I'm not seeing it happen yet. So there's a lot of uncertainty around that. There's a lot of uncertainty around, you know, like how customers are going to behave, what, what are their buying habits going to be, how are those cycles changing? What are the touch points that are changing? You know, we've seen more than, more than ever in our research, our primary research and also you know, anecdotally with our clients that the old distribution points for the relationship, email and events and you know, paid media and like what used to be ABM marketing, like it's not necessarily paying off as much as it used to because the whole journey has been so disrupted by AI, by agents, by chat environments, you know, by the GPT environments, et cetera, by the models that so much of that journey has changed. And then the third piece of uncertainty that I see a lot of our clients dealing with is the decision makers are changing not just for their clients, but for within their own organizations. You know, I, I think I've mentioned this on the last one of the last episodes, but like the role of the cfo, the cto, the CIO and the CMO used to be very different. It used to be very siloed. They worked kind of independently and like, yes, they came together in executive meetings and big decisions, but in the day to day operations of running a marketing organization in B2B, they didn't necessarily all come together. Now they kind of all come together. Like I can't do what I want to do as the CMO without the right data. So I need my CIO and I can't make that operational without my CTO who's going to make sure that the technology enables us to do it. And then I have my CFO here who wants to see back to the ROI point in on everything. And so all of A sudden, I have a totally different set of daily collaborators. And that's like an uncertainty for me.
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And there's no roadmap for what you're supposed to do. Because what I would say is all the old roadmaps, and we've talked about this, but you can see it more clearly every month, that there is no roadmap, and there's not even that many good book examples. So you're making it up as you go. And the people that are making up as they go, how are they, you know, what advice would you give them? And then how are the agencies managing in this space of uncertainty? Because sometimes you bring your agency in and some people just shut their agencies out. Tell me about all those dynamics.
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C
Oh, these are great questions. Okay, so let's take the first one on how do you navigate when there's no chart? Like, there's no map. You gotta rip it up. You gotta pivot. Like, to me, that is a very simple answer and almost impossible to execute. The simple answer is you have to change your culture. Your culture has to be one about acceptance, to live in the gray, about being okay to pivot. When the pivot is called for, really believing in something today, and then tomorrow you uncover new information or the world changes a little bit, you gotta be okay to pivot that. And that is a cultural call, that
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whitewater being comfortable in the white water and not ever thinking that the river was not gonna be white water.
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C
That is an excellent metaphor, one that I just should point out to the listeners, one that is very apropos given how you spent your last weekend on a boat in a regatta. Just saying.
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C
But that is true. That's exactly right. And Most organizations, especially B2B organizations that have been so focused for so long on like a traditionalism of how things
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are done, like a noted understanding clear, crisp structure. Now there's no structure. And so if you. And the thing is, if you get paralyzed in Whitewater, you get swamped.
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C
Exactly. And so the answer is that it's. You have to change your culture to be okay with gray and pivot and whitewater and all these metaphors. For sure, doing that is really hard. It requires new people. It requires like, acceptance of failure. Then you're going to make mistakes. And that's just not normal for a lot of organizations. So the execution piece of that is really hard. How it translates to agencies. For your second question, I believe this is like the era of the reckoning for the services business.
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A
Sounds like a deep movie. The grudge reckoning.
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C
Okay, yes, it's going to be a scary movie for some and a very good movie for some. We'll see. But like, I really believe that. I believe that there's a new model. And everyone likes to talk about their models, you know, the new agency model and the new services payment models. But really it's very simple. I don't believe there's a future that isn't the combination of selling service for an agency business, selling services, the things you do and the services will change dramatically because of technology. And as we move forward, selling technology and software, I think that's got to be intertwined. And you see that more and more where you're seeing even the RFP landscape. Like, I want to buy services and I expect technology and other technology like software to be a part of that service package. And then also I have a fundamental bet that the idea, and this might be new for some of your listeners, but the idea of a forward deployed team. So it used to be a thing called forward deployed engineers. And that was you take these engineers who are like part consultants, part business strategist, part change management lead, and an engineer by trade, and you put them into a client organization like the software companies do this and the technology companies do this, and they help you get value out of your technology, they help you with your transformation and operations, they help you with understanding use cases and workflows. They can really be like a change agent embedded in your organization. These people called FDEs. And I believe that that's a concept that can go wider. You can really have forward deployed experts of any discipline. I might have a forward deployed creative, a forward deployed engineer, a forward deployed product manager, a forward deployed change management leader. And the idea is that if you take services technology and software and forward deployed embedded teams that are part consultant, part discipline expertise, part change management, part operations, you will win. And so for agencies most Agencies don't
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have all those big order for so many agencies.
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Exactly.
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Most agencies don't have like this is like you have to go completely from basketball to football or something kind of. Yes, you gotta rethink this because it's always been people and cost plus and now yes, it's. It's a totally different roadmap. And then also with the agencies you see like the purchase of Live Ramp and everything else. You know what's going on there and is all that stuff working and, and what is all that designed to do what you just said or is something else? I.
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C
Well, it's all a great question. It's all related. But I think they're more about the Live Ramp acquisition to me is a philosophical one and we can. Let's talk about that for a second.
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We're gonna go deep now everybody. There's a first philosophical B2B discussion we've had.
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C
Unfortunately I was a failed philosopher out of college. But like we'll start right here. I believe there are two ways the world is. There's two choices for how you want to as a service business and Liveramp being part of this. You want to like run your, your holding company or your business way. One is to do what has always happened, which is try to build these walled gardens of data, of technology, of people. These, these very walled gardens. And the acquisition of Liveramp is kind of that. I mean it's really a play to build a walled garden. That gives me a competitive. Not me, but that gives the acquirer. Yeah the competitive advantage because I have all this data set and I can use it the way. And regardless of what these companies say in the press of if it's going to stay open, we'll keep third party clients on. They will separate the data. Like the truth is that was acquired to create a moat in a closed world. I don't believe that is the way of the future. I fundamentally to my core the same way I believe it's services and technology and software and forward deploy teams. I believe this. If you're not open and you're not interoperable, if you're not accepting that there's going to be client data, third party data, you know, agency and hold co created data and all that's going to have to play together. If you don't believe that synthetic data sets are part of it, if you don't believe that clients are going to be on all different types of tools, like what's happening right now in AI and technology is the ability to create and deploy software has been accelerated. And the tools that are going to run marketing operations and CRM and all these other platforms, yes, the traditional players are still going to advance in that they're going to have a huge lead in the enterprise game. But there's going to be disruption in that category. You see it in the market, there's going to be disruption there.
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And never have consumers had as much power as they have to today.
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Correct. So that's the case.
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So much power. And they can, they can get information before the brands can give it to them and they can choose what information they find.
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And yes.
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And so the data, the data game is really interesting. On top of this massive power shift and then B2B, the power shift must be enormous.
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C
Exactly. And so, you know, to the point on these acquisitions and live ramp and this, it's like again, back to philosophy. If you believe in an open world where the tools are going to change, the data sets are going to change, the way data is used is going to change. It needs to be interoperable and clients want it to sit in their martech stack, not in the hold co's martech stack. You I believe that is the future and there's no way around that.
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And do you believe the future is going to be, I don't care where the data comes from. I just need it faster than you or it better than you or is it going to be, I have better data than you and that lets me win.
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C
Oh, great question. Hard answer. I believe there's a bit of both. So I believe the biggest problem that we've heard in the last, whatever 10 years was I have so much data, but I don't know what to do with it. Like it's not actionable. Like, I keep compiling it, but I'm not really using it. So I don't understand why I keep compiling all of it. And that was kind of true for a long time. Technology has changed now. It's kind of easy for me to aggregate it. It's much easier for me to make it useful than it ever has been. There's still a lot of comple and work in that. But then there's the idea of like synthetic data sets that are, you know, statistically very similar to organic data sets.
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An example of a good synthetic data set that you can talk about.
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C
Yeah, perfect. Okay, great. And I'll give a real, a real example is, you know, we recently built a tool with Adobe. Adobe is a big partner of ours. We build custom technology with them. We call them solutions. The first solution we built was something called Creative Intelligence System. It takes real data and synthetic data and it creates like synthetic audiences and Personas for you to test creative against before you launch it. So it's like, oh, if I get a pre optimized creative, awesome. And we ran a lot of tests against real data sets, transactional data and psychological data, first party data, consumption data, purchase data. And then we ran tests against synthetic data which is AI generated like fake synthetic data sets based on all of those things, but then optimize for what we're trying to do. And they were pretty identical in terms of outcome. And then when you put those things together is where you get real unlock because you know, the ability to constantly optimize the data, constantly create new tests, constantly create new Personas, have data, learn from data, et cetera, gives you a real advantage. So that's the speed part. But the other part of this is like when you're talking about whose data is going to win, I don't know the answer because I don't know how much acceleration there's going to be in the synthetic data world. It's always going to be some combination of actual, factual, first party human data. Yes. But as more and more of the creative decisions and more and more of the media decisions happen agentically, like happen without humans and they happen in real time and they happen based on signals and things like dynamic creative optimization are driving a lot of the work. There's no question that the ability for data to learn from data without humans being involved in that will make it faster and more productive. I just don't know how long it's going to take to reinvent that chain.
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Hey, so let's talk about the clients in this game because all the stuff you just talked about makes perfect sense. And you talked about culture earlier. But one of the things about some clients and some agencies is they're still saying there's a human part of this and a cultural part of this, and this has to be this. And many of our guests have suggested that being a courageous marketer in this space is going to be challenging. Either you're not going to take enough risk or you're going to take too much risk or you're going to take a bunch of risk your company doesn't understand.
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C
Yeah.
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How you advise clients to be thinking about this because let's say I buy everything you said and I actually, I actually do. But then if you're going back to a traditional B2B company in particular and a salesforce that's very traditional, there's A whole bunch of stuff in the way for all the stuff you just said.
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Yeah.
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Tell me about clients and how they are thinking about it.
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Well, it's a whole spectrum again, I know that's like my default answer. But some are really adapting to the
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fact we're on the spectrum today.
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C
Yeah, we're totally on the spectrum today. There's no question that some clients are very traditional and traditional outlooks and like it's very slow to adapt and have a wait and see attitude and the business is fine today and okay, that's their culture, that's their leadership style. Fine. Others are like, you know, we got to move faster. We, this is like modernity is happening. Things are changing. We have to accept that and we have to move faster. And they're trying to push the organization forward. And then some, usually organizations that sit more on the cutting edge of technology, I mean, to be frank, because they're creating the technology that's causing all these disruptions. They've already accepted this. I mean, you see it, you see it in some of the demands that are being put out there for change from executive, highest CEO level executive leadership at huge companies where they want X percentage of the work to be automized by this. They want X percentage of the code to be AI generated code.
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Right.
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C
Like they, there are mandates being put out. What I would say and what I advise our clients on is you got to be realistic about your organization, but you also have to be intellectually honest about where the world is, you know, And I believe just like there will be a reckoning for the service industry in the next, I'm going to get the time wrong one year, three years, but somewhere, you know, five years, there will be the same for normal business. And you will see an acceleration of winners and losers in the business world moving forward if those that adapt to the future and those that don't. And I really believe that. And so it's about being honest about your organization and its culture. It's about being honest on where you are on your change curve. And it's about being honest about how far you can push before you break, but always trying to push.
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A
How do you know if you're honestly being honest? Especially when you look at your team and you look at your culture and you say, I want to push to the edge but not break it. How do you, how do you know where the edge is?
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C
Great question. There's a incredible New York hip hop song back in the day from Eric B and Rakim that talks about this, that it played at every Nick game. We'll talk about that later. But the question, the answer is. It's really hard to know. Which might explain why, you know, CMO tenureship is so short.
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CEOs. A lot of CEOs are quitting too.
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C
Exactly. I believe that it is not up to one person and if you act as a singular entity, you will lose. I believe that to find the answer to your question on where is the edge and how far can I push and what can I do? It is a collaborative question and a collaborative answer that requires that C suite to come together. That's what I was talking about earlier.
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There's all these new voices back to your thing of I'm not operating my function anymore. I'm operating a collective group of functions collaboratively to move the company. And if I don't do that, the other functions may just not do anything for me.
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C
Right. Or we'll move boats in different directions. And when it's time to bring it all together, it won't work.
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A
It won't work. And you just presented at the ANA a little bit ago in Chicago. What did you talk about there?
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C
So funny. So I had the honor and the privilege of speaking with Rachel Thornton from Adobe. She's a cmo, specifically on the enterprise side of the business. And we talked about a lot of these questions, actually. We talked about the change in the B2B world and the change in the consumer, like the buyer journey and how we have to think about things like sales enablement completely differently. We talked about organizational change in the world of technology and AI and what that looks like. Obviously, Adobe right at the forefront of
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A
that, there's a takeaways of what they should do from that station.
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C
Well, I think the first thing, I mean, it's similar to what we were talking about. I mean, the first thing is you got to take an honest assessment of where you are and where you need to go. A second thing you got to do is really lean in to cross collaboration across discipline and across the executive suite. The third thing that is really important that everyone forgets is that you really is ultimately, at the end of the day, this is still about customers. And you have to spend a lot of time understanding how to better service your customers. You know, customers today need different things than they did a while ago. A while ago, they needed the meetings, they needed the event, and they needed you to come to the meeting with them. And they needed, like, materials a certain way. And it could be, you know, a static document that took months to prepare. Well, that's not true anymore. They need real time support, they need real time materials, they need to convince a much broader suite of the company who's now part of their collaboration set about a purchase. And so the way that sales and consultative sales are happening are vastly different. But it starts with knowing the customer. And people sometimes, especially today in this world of change, are so focused on like their own organization or their technology.
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A
Yeah, they're inside that, outside in.
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C
Exactly. And like, and you know this, like, what is the best design principles in the world? They start with user centric design.
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A
Yes, by design. So when you look at all the B2B marketing out there, what are the biggest mistakes folks are making? And it's, you know, other than, you know, we've already talked about Adobe, but what are some of the leading companies doing that others could listen to this show and emulate?
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C
You know, it's an excellent question. I think it's a very hard having
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A
you on the show. You're really good. You know, the interviewer, I feel like
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C
I get the really hard questions. Thank you, Mike. Like, I, you know, there's a lot of reasons why things failed. We just covered a few of them. People looking at the wrong thing, people are ignoring reality, people don't want to deal with change. People have the wrong organizational culture. You know, the companies that are winning, the companies that will win. And you know, I believe like, for example, like Adobe's one of them, I believe a lot of our clients are very forward thinking and they have a lot to add here. We're very fortunate for that. So I thank our clients. But I believe, again, and I don't mean to be repetitive, but it comes to a cold, hard look at reality and having the honesty and the courage to say the way things are today are not going to be the way things are tomorrow. And having a culture built around that, I fundamentally believe that. And again, that's true for our clients in the Enterprise and B2B World, and it's true for ourselves as service providers and agencies. I really, really believe that. And so, so much of the work that we do is to give our clients the support to go through these transformations with expertise, with leadership, with collaboration that makes it easier for them to make it work.
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A
And that is a big agency order for a lot of agencies because they're going through it too. I have another question along the same lines of this. You know, you judged, you've been to Khan, you judged the fes. You know, one of the things people are saying is AI is killing a lot of the creativity Tell us what you think about this. And you know, we've done a bunch of shows. Why is B2B marketing so bad and what to do about it? Because it's all sales. A lot of it is sales driven marketing or point in time marketing. Tell us about creativity and where it's going in B2B and what are B2B marketers should be thinking about.
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C
I'm so glad you asked a creativity question because if you recall, when we met at that 2024 ANA, I did a presentation on creativity and most of the room had no idea what I was talking about.
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A
That's what intrigued me so much about you. No one understood anything you said.
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C
Seriously, how I win people over. Look, I believe fundamentally in my core that this is a new era for creativity. And I think I've said this before, maybe even on your show. If you are in our industry and you do not believe this is the most exciting time to ever have been in our industry, then you are in the wrong profession. We can do things that we've never done before. We have tools that we've never had before. Remember all those crazy ideas you have?
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A
Here's what you said, you said, which is everyone can be a creative now, and so any idea can make it.
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C
But my.
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A
My question is how do the companies, or who's ever going to put the idea out there, figure out which one to do? And will any of these ideas have the staying power required for the idea to be written large?
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C
Yeah, I mean, that's a really hard question. Again, thank you, everyone.
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A
Because if everyone's a creative in my whole company and I want to have some kind of theme. Yeah, it'd be great to have a thousand creatives doing stuff, but in the end, I need. I may need some consistency across my creative. Tell me about that.
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C
Yeah, so let me try to answer that with two points.
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A
Okay.
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C
Point number one is when I say anyone can be a creative, that's because I. Creativity. Think about it. In your career, creativity in all the teams you oversaw and all the agencies you worked with, most of the definition of creativity was like you had a craft skill.
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A
Yeah, you could.
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C
You could design, you could illustrate, you could write.
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A
Yeah, you are. Yeah.
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C
Yeah. I don't believe that that is the definition of creativity. I believe creativity is a process of solving problems and finding innovative and new ways to solve those problems. And sometimes that's math and sometimes that's technology, and sometimes that's a craft skill. And when all those things come together is when you win. So when I say anyone can be a creative. I mean, there are more tools now for you to show people what you mean by your idea than there ever has been. So the decision making to the second point, how do you decide? No one is saying like that you shouldn't have a brand platform. No one is saying you shouldn't have like, you know, toolkits and guides for how to ensure the brand shows up the way you want it to every time, regardless of where it's showing up. Like no one is saying that. But what people are saying is the canvas used to be the deliverable sheet in a campaign. You're making digital assets and print ads and a TV spot and radio and now it's not. Now there are so many different things you can make and do that can be on brand and useful to the people consuming them.
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A
Okay, I buy that, but are you arguing for an air traffic controller job for some of these ideas so that I don't have just planes landing and taking off all over the place? Yeah. What you're saying the leader becomes.
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C
Yes, I think orchestration is a huge part. I call it. Orchestration is a huge part of it. I mean we're building technology here at Stagwell and code in theory, we're building orchestration OS systems to help ourselves and our agencies and our clients connect all those things together. So you don't have the air traffic control problem. I also recently gave a talk at Adobe Summit where we talked, the only one that wasn't a tech demo, where we talked about the role of the C suite in terms of creativity. And so yes, I do expect technology and systems and leaders to play a role in orchestration or air traffic control. But I also expect C suite and leaders to be idea generators. You have the ability to now and everyone needs to generate ideas in a time of confusion, in a time of change, in a time of uncertainty, be the leader that creates ideas that help chart the future. Don't just sit there approving things, contribute.
- [31:48]
A
Okay, giddy up. Directly from Michael Drift. Giddy up. Any predictions on what we will see by the end of 2026? And I'll already say one, you know, this demand for. I want to see some payout on my investment that will, that will happen. What else will happen by the end of this year?
- [32:08]
C
Yeah, I think that will. You nailed it. That's number one. It's the year of roi, no doubt. The other thing that will happen is I think you will see more and more of the traditional roles that people fill in client marketing organizations or agency world. You know, Organizations start to sort of melt and bleed into each other. So I believe this along with the year of roi, it's the year of sort of like full stack talent, that's what we call it. Where I might hire someone who I can't place in a department. Like I don't know if you're a designer or a strategist or a technologist, I'm not really sure. But what I know you can do is come up with a great idea and basically take it end to end almost by yourself.
- [32:51]
A
So is this, is this a skill? What you're saying is the ability to organize disparate things and get them to done?
- [32:58]
C
Yeah, I think it's that I'm a
- [32:59]
A
great buyer of search words or I'm a great brand briefer, I'm a great engineer or whatever this is. I am really at my core a manager of projects or outcomes or things. And I have all these other skills, but I use what I need to get to done. Is that what you're saying?
- [33:17]
C
I think it is what I'm saying. And I'm also saying, yeah, I think that's a good articulation. And I also think what I'm saying is what used to be a strategy team hands it to a creative team hands it to a media team. Yeah, it's kind of like a really small team that takes it all the way through and where you can't really tell who the strategist and the designer and the creative and the media person and the analytics person is, they sort of all can bleed across more areas. And that's where organizations get an unlock because they can do so much more with like less people. And that doesn't mean necessarily by definition a lot faster and a lot faster. Yeah, exactly. So I think that you're going to see a lot of that in the second half of this year.
- [33:59]
A
We'll have you back in the back half to talk about this. But before we get to our traditional rest question, which you know well, any updates on the music front we should know about?
- [34:09]
C
No one will care about this, but thank you for asking, but I'm playing my first live show that I've played in 21 years this Saturday and hopefully it will go well.
- [34:19]
A
And it's not baby teeth though, is it?
- [34:21]
C
It is not as a different band called the State Succeeds, which was a iconic Long island hardcore band of the late 90s.
- [34:28]
A
Okay, very good. You heard it here first. I'm sure tickets will be available. So. Which brings us to our traditional last question. Funniest story or a piece of practical advice we haven't discussed yet. You can take one or both of these, but you must take at least
- [34:45]
C
one the practical advice. You only have to take one the practical advice. This is like the most overused practical advice, but it's never been more true than now. And I don't know if I'm allowed to curse on this show, but keep it simple stupid. Yeah, we are in a world where complexity is at its all time high and also where everyone uses the same words. I don't know if you've noticed this, you have a good seat to confirm or deny, but everyone uses the same words. Everyone talks about OS's, everyone talks about orchestration, everyone talks about AI transformation. Everyone uses the same words, but they mean very different things and so don't use the jargon. Keep it simple, keep it basic and you know what, your organization will then understand what you're trying to do and will follow you.
- [35:30]
A
Okay, I think a great way to end the show. Thank you Michael and thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential. If you're enjoying the show, please like share and subscribe. New shows drop every Tuesday and you can find all of our nearly 170 shows on Spotify, Apple and YouTube which you can include. Agency economics in the age of AI what your CIO wants to tell you but won't Marketing at Meta, the view from the Eye of the Storm and of course Michael's first two shows why you don't need an AI strategy and using AI for anticipation versus Reaction. Hey all you marketers, stay safe out there. This is Mike Linton signing off for CMO Confidential. Typeface is changing the way to think about brand marketing at scale. Their marketing Orchestration engine is the first of its kind and built specifically for the enterprise. The Orchestration engine uses shared brand intelligence designed to turn brand guidelines into personalized voice, visuals and messaging delivered in a way that fits the context of your audience. It's how brands like Asics and Post holdings scale what works without sacrificing quality. Start orchestrating your brand at Typeface AICMO.