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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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C
Thank you Michael. It's great to be back again on the show. Thank you again.
A
Of course. You're always provocative and insightful so I know you won't let us down. First question Just tell us your view of what's happening in the marketplace. Writ large Publicist just recently celebrated their 100th birthday. Omnicom and IPG finalized their merger and AI, of course, is in the news everywhere. What's happening in the overall marketing ecosystem from your perspective?
C
So I will basically start broadly and then go a little bit more narrowly. Broadly. I believe that the marketing ecosystem is understanding that the future is about marketing and it's not about advertising or communication or sales or promotion or CRM. The reason is an AI agent does not understand those divisions. An AI agent does not understand those departments. An AI agent basically works across all of them to drive an outcome. And one of the most amazing things now that companies are beginning to realize is they've been organized in silos in a world where agentic workforces don't understand silos, they just understand outcomes. So in effect, we are going to actually have marketers have to decide whether they're in the marketing business or they're in the advertising, communication, promotion, sales, pr.
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You know, I want to go back to this because a bunch of those people will say, I am driving an outcome. I'm on the efficient frontier. And.
C
Yeah, you're in the efficient frontier. Yeah, but why do you have all those divisions? You don't need all those divisions anymore.
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Yeah, tell me how the models are ripping those apart.
C
Because the models basically are looking at, they are transverse. They eat all information and all data across the board. And then they basically say, what is the outcome? The outcome tends to usually be make a sale, create a relationship, increase something, and then they go and pick from everywhere. So they don't basically say, well, most people say, here is how CRM contributed to this year. Is the sales thing. You go into any organization and sales fights with marketing, fights with CRM fights, fights with whatever, Right? So the reality of it, this thing doesn't recognize it. So I believe it's going to be for that reason. I think people are going to increasingly understand that it's marketing, which is, I think, a great industry. Second is, I believe marketing is going to be the industry that's going to thrive primarily because it's one of the only big areas of expertise that is a combination of mathematics and the messiness of people. Right. I call that it's a business that is little bit data and lots of noise and emotion. And we're trying to make it all a data business, which it is not. Okay. It's basically a data and emotion business. And interestingly, because of the messiness of both emotion and people, it's a business where humans will still be needed much more than a pure accounting business or a pure finance business or a pure coding business. So the more Your business is completely math driven. It more will be algorithmized in AI away more. Your business is a combination of the two. You'll actually benefit through AI because you're basically able to combine that machine part of it with the sort of magic part of not just creativity, but ideas and connecting with people. So I.
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One of the things.
C
Go ahead.
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One of the things that, you know, just for all our listeners that might not be marketers. When you say marketing, it's sometimes hard for people to understand what that actually means. Like sales. I know what it means. Finance, I know what it means. When you say marketing in your head, what are you telling people that aren't in marketing that marketing is about?
C
I believe that marketing is about understanding and meeting customer requirements in a way that drives financial results for the company that does so.
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Got it.
C
So it basically starts with a customer, consumer person. Understand their requirements, meet them and do it in a way that makes money for the company that is understanding and meeting them.
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And so those measures to me sound like I'm going to drive sales profitably and retain those customers. So the financial health of the company is really great in the long run. And I'm going to use every tool available to me to do.
C
Yes. Including, by the way, the way to drive sales might be to completely create new products and services. Yeah, right. And to also in effect, truly reimagine my business. Because the reality is of the top businesses in the world tend to reimagine businesses. And the big thing with marketing is it reimagines. You can't reimagine accounting. You could go to jail if you reimagine accounting.
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People have tried.
C
They've tried. Right. You can't reimagine accounting. You can't reimagine the laws of physics. You can reimagine marketing.
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Got it. So since we're talking about AI, the CEO of Anthropic published an article focused on the AI risks. Give us the Cliff notes and tell us what the average company should be thinking about when they think about those risks.
C
So right now there are lots of people who've published the three big things have published on risk. The CEO of Anthropic has published. Then somebody from I think Citrini Research did a science fiction 2028 looking at.
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Yeah. That calls this Saspocalypse. Yeah.
C
And then another gentleman whose name I forgot wrote a very interesting blog post called Something Big is Happening. I'm going to actually take all those three because all those three need to be looked at at one time. Versus sort of separately. And I think the big thing that I truly believe that is happening is that we are living in a world of humans, along with aliens, along with replicants. And no one has learned how to learn to work that way. What do I mean by that? Humans are humans. That's you and me. I call artificial intelligence alien intelligence. And the reason I call it alien intelligence is the top three customer or consumer uses of AI is not to God. I make some Taylor Swift sitting on Barack Obama's lap at the All Star game and putting it on Meta so you can get your engagement up. Like Meta is basically a bunch of AI bullshit. If you don't click on friends, everything else is totally AI bullshit. Okay? That's not what most human beings do. That's like losers. What real human beings are doing is they're basically using it for healthcare information, they're using it for therapy, they're using it for relationship information. So they actually believe that this alien, that this thing is not a machine. They talk to it like a human, but it's not a human. So I call it an alien. So it's alien. Similarly, agents are basically, they take something that a human does or a. A task we do, and it finds a way to do it the same way, but better. So I call them replicants.
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Okay?
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Okay. So we're living in a business world of humans, agents and replicants, or humans, aliens and replicants. And so from a business perspective, the first thing to think about if you're a business person or even a marketer, is how do you basically run a marketing department or run a company which will have these three types of people in it when you've actually been only talking to humans, how do you also then market where you'll have all these three people in it? When we were segmenting, we were only segmenting humans, right?
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And that was hard enough.
C
That was hard enough. So now you've got human segments. Human, you got alien segments, which include, for instance, the rise of answering, which is what I call ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini versus search engines, right? And then you have these replicants which are agents. So let's look at McKinsey. McKinsey today used to have 45,000 employees. Today it has about 39,000 employees and it has 15,000 agents. And the managing partner of McKinsey says in the next couple of years, they left 30,000 employees and 30,000 agents. Okay? So this is for real. So in effect, the first big thing is your workforce is changing and the people that you are quote Unquote, marketing to. You've got two new species that you're marketing to and you got two new species in your workforce. Right. So one of the things I find really fun when I go to some of these organizations to speak, they say, don't talk about the future of work where you're questioning why people are forcing everybody back to the office. It's something that we are very sensitive about. I said, okay, be sensitive about it. But I said, going back to 2019 and then saying you want to be AI friendly is the biggest bullshit I've heard in your corporation. Fastest growing companies are talent everywhere. AI first. And you guys are going back to 2019 and thinking it's cool. Okay. And so to a great extent, what AI is doing is it's forcing a company to rethink three things. A, its workforce, B, who it's marketing to. But most importantly, what business is it in? In. And. And that is. And that those are the three very big things that are happening now.
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And if you get that wrong, you. You could blow up your business.
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You could blow up your business. And what I'm finding, and one of the reasons I'm on planes is because now I'm talking to people and they say, how come no one told us this? I said, because what I'm about to tell you, I don't have the answers for. So I have nothing to sell you.
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Yeah.
C
So I usually people only tell you stuff where they already have something to sell you. Right. I don't have anything to sell you right now. You can buy my book. I'll get $3. But I'll give you a way to think about it that will make you realize that you have to think differently. I don't have the answer. I'm not smart enough to have the answer. But I'll give you sort of the example. I give the example. I give in. I'm going to give it from two other errors because I don't have a current example because this era just started.
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Yeah. There's no playbook and there's no playbooks,
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but it says, let's look at analogies from previous eras. So the first era was, which began about 50 years ago, was when. A little bit more than that, maybe when there was the invention of the container. So you might say, what do you mean, the container? So until the container, which is the way things get shipped now, they ship containers. People basically would ship random size packages, like just whatever, here's lots of tomatoes, here's a truck, here's a whatever. Right. And that required a lot of time, but it also required a incredible amount of labor. And as a result, people that had lots of cheap labor and did very well. And so Liverpool became a huge shipping center. When the container was formed, you needed things like cranes and other kinds of stuff. And that's why Singapore overtook Liverpool. Okay. But once you had the container, something else happened. People said, why is the container only on the ship? So the railroad lines and the truck lines got together, decided to make the intermodal container. When the intermodal container, everybody was in the go down and storage business, they went out of business because things was moving fast. You didn't need to all the storage.
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Yeah, you just unload them with the crane
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for the truck. It goes to wherever it goes. Right. Similarly, people like Toyota said, why we have all this inventory? We can now do things much faster. So they created just in time inventory, which basically cleaned the clocks of Detroit companies. And then it gave rise to global shipping and the globalization. So a simple thing like the container changed everything. So if you only began by saying, the container helps me save labor, which is what people are now doing about efficiency and effectiveness, you didn't realize that entire supply chains would be done, entire business models would be undone. So now let's go to 2010, 2011. Internet's become big. Internet's been around since 1993. Broadband's taken off. It's about 18, 20 years. And a lot of magazines and newspapers are in trouble. Are starting to look at what's happening. Almost every newspaper company is now trying to figure out how to use the Internet to sell newspapers, how to use the Internet to make their printing presses work faster, their truck lines, you know, digital technology to make their trucks work better. And a little company called the New York Times has a thing called the Innovation Project over a couple of years. And they basically come up and decide, even though they've got a lot of trauma, a lot of drama, a lot of I was part of the Innovation project. They basically decide that maybe what this is is not about how do we make the trucks faster, the printing press faster, and how do we sell more newspapers. It might be that the future of the New York Times is not a newspaper.
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Right.
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That the future of the New York Times is not news. The future of New York Times is not New York City. So Today, out of 12.5 million subscribers, 11.5 million are digital. No print.
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Right. It was one of the few success stories, but why?
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Because they got out of their business.
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I'm with you.
C
The New York Times is Basically a lifestyle business with some news.
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Yes, the brand carried through, but they redid the whole month.
C
And what are people doing? How do we make what we currently do more efficient and effective? Which is okay, that's great, but it's not a competitive advantage because it's like basically saying, I'm going to use electricity to be more competitive than my competitor. Your competitors using electricity. Two fools.
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There you go. We had Tom Goodwin talk about this too, which is design the plan around electricity. Don't make the machines work faster, because otherwise.
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Exactly. And so what basically happens is that is basically, that's that. And then the other thing, you know, to a great extent is the challenge that's currently happening is I've always basically believed that up to now, every technology expanded and extended the human brain. Okay, so fire allowed us to cook our food, so our brains got better. Wheels allowed us to see more. Right. Printing press allowed us to print and learn more. The Internet allowed us to share more. All that nonsense. Right?
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Right.
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I believe AI is no longer about extending the human brain. I believe the AI is a new brain.
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Wow.
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Okay, so AI is a new brain. And so I feel like I'm about
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to take off on the US enterprise.
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Yeah, it's a new brain that in intelligence far surpasses the human brain. So I don't even call hi, human intelligence. It's bullshit. It's broken, it's gone. Okay, Just look at our current any leadership and you understand the human intelligence where the action is. Okay, so what tends to basically happen is it's going to be about human imagination, human intuition, human interaction.
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Well, let's talk about that because I wish you had some passion on this. By the way, you. You wrote a post what it is to be human in the age of AI. Tell us about it. Why we're on this topic of AI humanness. All this other Stuff, Yes.
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So what basically it is, is that if you assume that these alien things are doing the following three things, they will be far more intelligent, far more knowledge processing, far more data crunching than anybody that we know. That's number one. Second is that they are going to increase in capability. And this is the big insight I had. Not insight is not insight. It's just an observation that Moore's Law used to have doubling of capacity every 18 months. When I wrote my book, the AI was doubling capability every 11 months. By the time my book came out, it was doubling every seven months. Then there was the launch of Agentic. And Agentic is doubling its capability every seven weeks. Okay, so the first interesting thing is right now, technology is moving much faster than human or organizational or government capacity to catch up. And that's where there'll be a lot of space for humans. Because we are humans who are living in this world. We are not basically as some people in Silicon Valley believe. You know, Silicon Valley believes that humans are a silly phase intelligence is going through, that we're not necessary, that intelligence is what we have to optimize for and not humans. If that's true, then we shouldn't be existing.
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Right? We can just let the Terminator run everything right.
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But that's not what it is. But what basically happens is there are three big differences between machines and humans. The first is machines tend to basically think in zeros and ones. Human beings never think in zeros and ones. Human beings think in the following answer. If I ask my daughters a question, never, rarely will I get yes or no. What I'll get is maybe, could be, depends on my mood, or they avoid the question altogether. That's what we humans tend to basically do. Machines don't do that. Second is human beings make most of their decisions using things like storytelling, desire, envy, comparison, history and fear. If that wasn't true, there'd be no marketing. If that wasn't true, no one would have children. The ROI financially on children doesn't make sense.
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It's terrible. We know it's terrible.
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So in effect, humans, first, are basically not computing engines. Humans do not make decisions on zeros and ones. And third is humans to a very, very great extent. And this is the other thing to sort of recognize are resurrection engines. So people have given up humans, like all these things. Everybody says machines will do this and humans are just going to sit around and what, we're gonna watch tv? Like, what are you talking about? Every day? And I remind people every day you wake up, it's A new day. We are resurrection engines. Everybody has careers where they have Good Fridays where they think they've been crucified, and then they have Easter Sundays where they rise. So human beings are gonna adapt and they're gonna compliment and they're gonna embrace these engines. They're not just gonna be taken over by these engines. And so there's gonna be an age and the way they're gonna complement them is they're going to say, okay, human intelligence, we can't do against these things, but human intuition, human interaction, human imagination, you know, that we will do. And as long as there are humans that we are marketing to, that will be important. If it's all going to be about machine to machine marketing. Right. Then it won't be important, but it won't even be machine to machine marketing. I'll tell you why, why you put an agent out there. Like, I mean, when people tell me my whole thing is like, what are you thinking? Are you just reading the latest like buzzfeed post and telling me what's going on? Like, will you think for a second think of your own, the way you live. Okay, here's the stuff. You unleash an agent to go basically make a, to make a decision on getting you a cheap flight to Las Vegas.
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Okay.
C
Okay. It'll come launching back with a cheap flight to Las Vegas on spirit Airlines at 5:00am yeah. And you'll say, I hate that, I hate that. Okay. But so you'll then say, I actually don't want to go at 5amI want to go to 8am, 8am or later, 8am to 5pm I do not want to go on Spirit. I want to go on United or Delta or American. Okay. And please make sure that I get an aisle seat and it goes. And does that. Now explain to me, is that an agent doing it or is it you telling the agent exactly what you want? And you are being completely illogical and the agent is taking your ill logic and just making it pretend it's logical.
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It accepts your logic as truth.
C
Yeah. And so my thing is that's the way the world works. Right. And if, for instance, my job at United and American is to basically prove that I'm better than Sprint. Right. And.
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Or Spirit Airlines did not pay anything.
C
Or Spirit Airlines to basically say why getting up at 5 o' clock in the morning is good for your health or something like that. Right. But it all becomes that. And the reason why I find this really amusing is everybody basically believes that human beings are going to go to sleep and Going to accept anything that anybody tells them. It's never true. And this is one of the other things. Why people like the machines versus the humans. You talk to the machine. The machine basically is very sycophantic. It basically makes you believe you're very cool. Yeah.
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And actually sometimes it says, that's a great question. No matter.
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It's a great question. You're so cool. Now if I go to talk to my wife and daughters, they say, why are you asking such stupid questions? You're an idiot. Go away. Right. The other thing that they do, besides telling me I'm stupid, they say, by the way, go and do this for me. The machine doesn't say, go do this for me. Right. The machine does not have needs. You can't have a relationship with somebody who basically thinks you're cool and they don't have any needs. That's not a relationship. That's basically you're looking at a mirror.
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All right. So I hear the human thing. You've also written an article called the Future Is Determined by folks over 65, which I was glad to read. Tell us about it.
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Sure. So right now I'll give you three numbers that are. And I wrote a piece that had some of this. So right now, globally. First, I'll give you a reference. Globally. If you exclude the continent of Africa, the world's population is starting to decline fast.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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People aren't having kids anyway.
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In fact, right now there are only seven countries in the world whose population is going up. The big four are in Africa, and then I think it's Indonesia, Bangladesh, and one of those in asia. It takes 2.1 children to keep the population the same per woman. That number in the United States is 1.6. The number in EU is 1.3. The number in China is 1.1. The number in Korea is 0.8. First is for most marketers. They always thought the addressable population was growing because population was growing, including in the U.S. not happening. That's one. But now here's the other one. The only group of people who are growing are people who are over 60 or 65.
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Yeah.
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So in the United States, 11,000 plus people turn 65 every day. So in a world of declining population, the population that's growing is over 65 already. For instance, in a country like Japan, 30% of the population is over 65. Okay. Now, but here's the reason why I think 65 is going to run the world or older people are going to run the world.
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I'm hopeful. Yeah.
C
Okay. The reason they're going to run the world and I ran this is older people always tend to have more money than younger people. Okay? But in 1980, the ratio of wealth held by people over 65 compared to the wealth held by people under 35 was 10 to 1. So people over 65 had 10 times the wealth versus those under 30. In 2023, that 10 to 1 has become 47 to 1. Okay? So all the money is with older people. They have all the real estate, they have all the money. Now here's what basically happens is because they have money, they also get world class healthcare. Again, I'm talking broadly, there's obviously no.
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And that means they're going to live
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even longer and they're going to live very long, much longer. So this whole idea, the money is going to come down to Gen Z, long time waiting. And the other thing is when it comes down, it's also going to come down through a very silly phase. And this is what people don't realize, you know, who are actually going to be the most powerful people in the world. Women over 65. Okay? And the reason basically is men marry women three years younger than them and women tend to outlast men by about four years. So on average there'll be a seven year phase where the money will go from the man to the woman before it goes to their children. Right? And it's already begun to happen. Here's an interesting fact that nobody actually knows. This is MasterCard data. This is real data. 51% of all new car sales in the US take place to women. And so I keep saying, okay, Gen Z is great. They have no money, my people, all the money is with the older people. But guess what, Go look at any agencies or marketing departments, their ageist, right? The whole thing has got ambigious.
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Now flip us over and tell me, tell our listeners. Between the human stuff, the folks over 65, yo, all we talked about in AI, what should they be thinking about doing other than yes, you got to design around AI instead of just using AI for more efficiency. What should they be doing when they think about their marketing or their structures?
C
So I would basically say that obviously every business is different and every industry and country is different. But generalizing, I would say there are five things that everybody should consider doing now in some cases after considering doing it, they may say it makes no sense for their business, but consider it. So the first thing that they should consider basically doing is they should think about starting with a blank sheet of paper and saying that if they had all the assets of their company and we're living in 2026 with the way both AI is progressing. Talent is what talent wants and they take all the assets in their company where they are in 2026 with no constraints and basically white paper and create a new company to meet the needs of their customers. What would that company look like? And the only constraints they have is whatever they constraint. Whatever they create has to be legal, has to be scientifically possible in 2026. And number three, if they construct it from scratch, it should break even in three years or less. And if they come up with great ideas, they should do it either as a part of their company, like a spinoff or in their company. Because if not, someone's already doing it and will come after them. That's one, number one. Number two, as a leader and all our folks are leaders, I would basically ask a leader to recognize that we have entered a age of unbossing,
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the
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age of what I call debossification. As a leader, it's not just going to be important to learn, but the hardest thing we're going to have to do is unlearn among the things. I will say that in most industries the things we thought mattered, like scale are not going to matter. Okay? And so that's the second. Third is ask themselves, especially if they're brand marketers, are you really building a brand or are you just executing data driven buys to milk your brand while it's dying? Let me ask you why I tell you this. I want to know which major brand company has created a successful new brand in the last 10 to 15 years. All these we are brand building organisms. Show me your brand. Show me, show me, show me, show me. Besides, by taking, okay, I've got it in blue and I'm giving it in blink. Show me what you got new. Okay, the last png, we're going to
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take all the AI models out, but
C
yeah, show me something. Show me you. You guys don't have any brands at all. Guess who's building brands? The people who are building brands are influencers.
A
People are building brands or the tech
C
models or the small organizations. Brand building companies don't build brands. You're bullshitting people.
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Okay, that's three.
C
Four is spend an hour a day learning. Okay? If you're not spending an hour a day learning, you're becoming irrelevant.
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CMO confidential counts as learning.
C
Okay? And then the fifth and the last one is this. And this is very, very true for CMOs, chief media officers, CEOs. And I can Say this because I don't have a job, so I can say this. I think too many senior people have become too full of themselves, okay. Because they're surrounded by people who basically blow smoke up their ass, they actually begin to believe that they're flatulence smells like Chanel 5. And my basic belief is, can you build a case for the exact opposite of what you believe? If you can't, I don't think you're a leader. I just think you're basically being massaged and milked like a cow, thinking you're a cmo.
A
So that Chanel number five cow has to think differently.
C
Has to think differently. Like, hey, you know what? I'm actually farting and maybe I don't know how to eat grass properly. Let me reinvent myself.
A
Okay, before we get to our last question, one prediction for what happens before the end of 2026.
C
So my one prediction that I think happens before 2026 is one or two of what are known as the existing holding companies no longer is in business.
A
Wow.
C
In its current form. Okay. So right now the best way of saying it is the company that I worked for was the best. Was the best. Best house in a bad block.
A
Okay.
C
That's the way I would say it. Okay. Yeah.
A
Dave Penske just said that on the show.
C
So, yeah, we were the best house in a bad block. And we tried. We've been trying very hard to leave the block. But whether that works or not doesn't matter. Here's what's basically happened is our block has significantly gone down. Just give you an idea. In our block, two of our other houses have decided to merge. And they're now in the middle of very ugly reconstruction, which looks pretty tough. That's Omnicom ipg they're reconstructing under Omnicom. So it's a very ugly thing that is happening in the building next to us. That doesn't help us at all. Looking at that ugliness. Another one is on fire. That's called wpp.
A
Yeah.
C
And the third one, they keep reducing the price, but no one's buying it, which is Dentsu. Okay. That is horrible for the whole goddamn industry. Right. So even publicist, which is really good, it's like at a 52 week low because people said, what the hell, this one's on fire. This one's got. Nobody's buying it. This one's being reconstructed and throwing everybody out. These guys also suck. Right.
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And so to a certain extent, dangerous on that block. It's dangerous.
C
It's dangerous on the block. And so I basically believe that one of Dentsu or WPP will not be what it's currently like by the end of this year.
A
All right, well, that's a bold prediction. Which brings us right to our last question. You know, it, it's traditional, it's two parter. You can take one or both, but you must take at least one practical advice we haven't discussed yet or funniest story that we haven't talked about before that you can tell on the air.
C
So I would say practical advice that we have not discussed yet. And the practical advice that I would basically give every business person is that I believe that all of us are somewhat fearful about the future and somewhat overwhelmed with what's coming. And that's natural and human. But the practical advice I would give is I believe that the future is going to be much better than the present or the past. So I would build a case for optimism. My practical advice is you cannot lead through fear. You have to lead through optimism. I'm not saying being Pollyannish, but pragmatic, enthusiastic optimism. And there are three reasons I would basically say it is every last advance in technology created more opportunities that it took away. So that's number one. Number two is if you think about the world today, despite all the headlines today, I believe the world is better off today than 30 years ago for almost the majority of people. So think about the fact if you are even a woman of a woman outside of Roe versus Wade, it's better to be a woman. If you're a person of color, it's better today than 30 years ago. I'm not saying anything is perfect, but better than today if you like music or culture, more options today. If you're suffering from cancer, better today. If you want to travel around the world, better today for 2 billion people in Asia, definitely better today. So I basically believe that people make money making us scared. Practical advice is reject being scared.
A
All right, so giddy up, get out there, do some fun stuff and eyes on tomorrow. You know, hopefully the sun is going to be brighter. Thank you, Rashad, and thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential. New shows drop every Tuesday and you can find our entire 160plus show catalog on Spotify, Apple and YouTube, which include Colonel Mustard in the study with the job. How poor design shortens CMO lifespans. A top venture capitalist analyzes the AI landscape marketing at Meta, the View from the Eye of the Storm. And of course, Rashad's earlier shows like the Omnicom IPG Merger what it means and what's next. 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.
Episode: Rishad Tobaccowala | A Futurist Talks About What's Next for Marketers and Agencies
Host: Mike Linton
Date: April 28, 2026
In this episode, host Mike Linton welcomes back futurist, author, and marketing industry thought leader Rishad Tobaccowala for a lively, wide-ranging discussion on the future of marketing and agencies. With the backdrop of historic agency mergers, AI’s rapid transformation of the profession, and shifting demographics, Rishad offers insight into how marketers and organizations must adapt not just to survive, but to thrive in a fast-changing world. This conversation dives into the meaning of marketing, the real implications of AI, the critical importance of reimagining business, the overlooked power of older demographics, and practical advice for future marketing leaders.
Silos are Obsolete
Marketing's Lasting Human Element
Marketing’s Core Purpose
The Power to Reimagine
The AI Landscape & Anthropomorphism
Radical Rethinking Required
Analogies from History
AI as a “New Brain”
Exponential Acceleration
Three Human Superpowers vs. Machines
Limits of Machine “Empathy”
Population Shifts & Wealth Concentration
Agencies Ignoring This Consumer at Their Peril
Agency Shakeout Coming
Lead with Optimism, Not Fear
On human value in marketing:
On AI’s true role:
The "three-in-the-room" rule:
On the change imperative:
Leadership humility:
On optimism:
The conversation is frank, energetic, and frequently humorous, laced with Rishad’s trademark metaphors (“resurrection engines,” “aliens and replicants,” “Chanel No. 5 flatulence”) and Mike’s friendly, probing questions. Rishad oscillates between provocateur and sage, challenging complacency while advocating for the enduring, creative, and emotional traits that make both marketers and marketing indispensable.
Anyone who wants a candid, future-focused take on the marketing profession, the real risks—and opportunities—of AI, why focusing on aging demographics matters, and refreshingly blunt leadership advice fit for an uncertain but opportunity-filled era.