← Marketing Beyond with Alan B. Hart
Marketing Beyond with Alan B. Hart
35: Marketing as entertainment, built to perform: Insights from Chime Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, Vineet Mehra
00:45:36
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- [00:00]
A
On today's show, I've got Vineet Mehra. He's the Chief Marketing Officer at Chime. We talk about how he got his start in his career in cpg, how that led to other jobs in retail technology and back in the financial services technology space with Chime, we talk about Chime becoming the number one bank brand by Time magazine, how JD Powers has also recently recognized them as the number one brand that people are switching to within the bank space. And we talk about how he's approaching marketing, how they're punching above their weight, the types of things that they think about, how attention and the attention economy plays into the type of content that they're building. We talk a lot about AI and how they're approaching it and how they're actually driving meaningful and real results across a whole host of jobs to be done inside the company and how that impacts talent. That and much more. With the Neet Mira, are you ready to go beyond the basics of marketing? I'm Alan Hart and this is Marketing beyond, where I chat with the world's leading chief marketing officers and business innovators to share ideas that spark change and inspire you to challenge the status quo. Join us as we explore the future of marketing and its endless potential. Well, Vineet, welcome to the show.
- [01:30]
B
Thanks. Thanks for having me. Alan, We've been wanting to do this for a while.
- [01:34]
A
I know, I know it took a little longer than normal, but we're here, we're here. We're going to make the best of it. Before we get into the business side of the conversation and talking about your career, what is this that I hear about you being a professionally trained pizza maker?
- [01:51]
B
All right, you did your research. So. So look, I'm, I'm a CMO by day, but I'm actually a pretty simple dude by night. You know, things that make me happy are, are things like a really good cup of coffee, you know, grind, like a nice grind, a nice brewery, and of course, pizza. So at one point in my career I lived out in Switzerland and took some pretty serious pizza making sort of courses and it was life changing for me. I think in the end, if you ask me, one day I'm just going to start up pizzeria on a beach and chill out. That would like be my dream kind of endpoint here in my career.
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A
I love you've already got your second career figured out.
- [02:39]
B
Or maybe this is my second career and that's my first career. I'm not sure.
- [02:43]
A
Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. But those are good skills to be able to Fall back on. I mean, you can always feed yourself, right?
- [02:49]
B
Yeah, exactly. No, I love it. You know, I just, I just have this appreciation for anyone who perfects their craft and you know, I think that's, that's what it's all about, getting into details, making things great. And really, if you love something, get really focused on it and be great at it.
- [03:08]
A
I love it. Well, when you're not making pizza, how did you get into marketing and how did you become. You're now the chief marketing officer at Chime. Where'd you get your start and kind of. What was the path along the way for you?
- [03:22]
B
Yeah, you know, without going into the whole life story, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm just a kid. I grew up in a small town in Canada which is a town called Oshawa. It's like a blue collar General Motors town. Didn't even know what marketing was. I was born in India, I was a first generation immigrant. I don't think my parents knew what marketing was. Really Never got exposed to Silicon Valley or any of the world that I'm in now. But as life goes on, you know, luck plays a big role and you have mentors that sort of enter your life and if you're willing to listen and be open minded, interesting things happen in your life. So I happened to have a grade 11 school teacher. He was actually, he taught, funnily enough my, my little high school had a marketing class in it which is really weird for a, for a, for you know, a small town school like I went to. And he was actually an ex PNG guy, my teacher and he, after the course he thought I had something in me. I really seemed to enjoy the content and he essentially told me all about this company called P and G. I started reading books and learning more about it and long story short, I picked a, I picked my university based on the school that P and G. Most recruits from this small school in Canada called Wilford Laurier. And I happened to find my way into P and G as an intern and you know, the rest is history. You know, I started at P and G. They moved me all around the world and that began the first chapter of my career, which was a CPG chapter and I think back in the late 90s. Now I'm dating myself. When you started your career, that was where you went. You know those, that was the school of marketing and I'm really thankful for that start.
- [05:08]
A
I love it. I love it. Well, and you've had a couple CMO jobs along the Way as well in various industries. Right. Like retail now kind of fintech, financial services and banking. Any takeaways from like switching industries across the, across the spectrum?
- [05:28]
B
Well, you know, I tend to look at careers and chapters and I tend to chase experiences. You know, there's nothing wrong with folks who want to get really deep in like one industry and do that really well. What gets me going is a constant state of curiosity and learning. So you know, I, my first chapter was really a CPG career. I was in CPG up until about maybe 12, 13 years ago. I was a, I think I was like a president at the age of 29 or 30 at JJ Consumer, which is now Ken View, and I ran worldwide marketing there. Had a $4 billion budget. I was managing at around 30 years old. And I started to realize that the world was changing and that's when I moved to Silicon Valley and had my first sort of private equity backed job. My first exit. I learned the power of like how this world was sort of totally transforming and sort of chasing the change was something that I was really fascinated by. So you know, the chapters were cpg, then onto Silicon Valley. We brought consumer genetics and genomics into the world. I don't know if you remember that whole big push around consumer DNA created a movement around that, which I thought was fascinating. And yeah, from there moved to Walgreens Boots for, for just over three years. And you know, it was my first experience in retail. But I also thought that I didn't know Covid would be hitting us. So I ended up running that business during COVID you know, going to the office every day, even in the scariest days as our pharmacists in the UK and the US were out supporting their communities and then back to the valley here at Chime. So it's been a really fun set of chapters, but I've always wanted to chase the learning, the disruption, try something really hard and go for it. And that's really how I've kind of built my career.
- [07:21]
A
Awesome. Well, Chime was recently named number one banking brand by Time magazine. So you are disrupting a legacy industry. And how, how has Chime been so successful in that?
- [07:37]
B
Yeah, well, actually what's interesting, number one banking brand. And actually a couple of weeks ago JD Power released data that more people are switching their bank account to Chime than any bank in America. So we're actually number one on that front as well. And so we're really proud of that. You know, to know Chime, maybe it's worth going back just into why we were created and where Chime came from. So let's start by sharing what Chime is and who we serve. So at its very core, we're not a bank. Chime is a financial technology company that's focused on delivering easy to use products that meet the needs of everyday Americans. You know, 200 million people in America live sort of paycheck to paycheck, which doesn't mean you're unbanked or that you're poor. It means you're making probably, you know, 70, 80, 90, $100,000. And as we know, that can be paycheck to paycheck in a lot of America nowadays. And the truth is that most banks are not built to serve these 200 million people. The vast majority of Americans, most banks are built to serve customers with large deposits and sort of high credit scores. And so basically those that they can lend to profitably and make money off that net interest margin. But the truth is three fourths of Americans are in our sort of demographic making up to a hundred thousand dollars a year. And most of those people don't carry large account balances. So what happens is people like you and I, and many of your listeners, I'm sure, get the free rewards cards and, you know, pay no minimum balance fees on their accounts. While the vast majority of Americans, if they can't keep a minimum balance, they're paying a fee. If they have a tough week because their air conditioner broke, they're paying overdraft fees, right? If they need their credit card to like just cover something and they can't quite get that payment through, they're they're paying interest, right? So what we did at Chime is we built a fee free model. We do fee free banking, there's no minimum balance requirements. Then we moved into fee free overdraft and we really transformed the industry on that. We've taken out tens of billions of dollars in overdraft fees over the years. We then launched something called Credit Builder, which is essentially builds your credit like a credit card, but with zero risk of like getting into trouble with credit. I don't know if you know this, but the vast majority of Americans still pay with a debit card, not a credit card because of the fear they have of these debit cards. And then we continued to launch innovations. We launched my Pay a couple of years ago, which was essentially a way to get your paycheck when you want. Like you did the work, why wait two to four weeks for your pay? If you need the money, just pull it for free. From Chime and we'll pay you two days early or you can use my pay and get paid when you say. And so we are sort of innovating on core elements, liquidity, credit building and also fee free banking for everyday Americans. And it's resonated amazingly well. It's a product that's clearly been in need and you know, over the last four years we've built a brand that is loved, has very high awareness and is now the number one place for everyday Americans to switch their bank accounts.
- [10:50]
A
Yeah, I mean you the, all of those product features and the core fundamentals, if you will, I mean they, they're moving the industry because many of you know, people in the industry are now adopting those types of features into their, to their core banking platforms themselves. You're also in my opinion, like the marketing that you guys are doing is really punching above your weight in terms of like what I'm, I'm assuming what you spend versus what maybe the competition is spending. So like how, how do you think about, you know, layering on top of a great product marketing and what is, what does marketing need to accomplish at that point in time?
- [11:27]
B
Yeah, well, you said it. First and foremost, it starts with a great product. Right. The days of putting sort of lipstick on a pig are over in market marketing. You know, I think we've all, many of your listeners, I have too worked on brands and products where you know, the marketing can add sort of the, the vibe right to the product, but the product may not be quite as differentiated or as superior as, as you know, one may like. So yeah, Chime has been about. We built this brand essentially through social media. That was the beginnings of us telling our story. We started to use social media to talk to everyday Americans that the mainstream of America in ways that, you know, they could really understand and relate to financial concepts. And so we started to talk to America in memes. We talked to America in you know, episodic programming franchises in social like Mama I Made it, which is stories of moms and their celebrity kids talking about how they like started to get their financial footing in order after they found some success. We have episodic series like Ballin on a Budget which is sort of like you take NBA Tunnel Fit and you essentially show everyday Americans how they can get that, that look but on a budget, you know. So we started to just kind of work social media to tell our story. We worked in these deep subcultures like fashion or sports or you know, gaming and we started to tell stories of how to make Financial progress, how to get more literate on your kind of financial goals and the outcomes you're looking for. And that really started to resonate. We have a bigger social following than the three big banks combined. And they've been around a hundred years, which is pretty amazing. And that really started to get us the traction. We track things like brand love, where we're, you know, love just like a liquid death or a Reddit, you know, we're a bank brand that's like right in that cultural zeitgeist. Zeitgeist. And that's really how we cut through. That's how we made our, our, our first mark. And social media is where our, a lot of our sort of brand storytelling happens. And then of course, we have direct response and other elements of our engine that we have honed and are very, very good at. But ultimately social media is where we've told our story and related to everyday Americans and cut through in a channel that the traditional and the incumbents were not able to really take advantage of.
- [13:56]
A
Yeah, I mean, what the things you're talking about to this, their, their edutainment, their branded entertainment, they're, they're, they're not necessarily ads, they're something else. Like how, how are you thinking about like the content that you're creating? Like I curious about like your, your approach to it. What do you hope that it's trying to achieve? Because it's working obviously. But I'm curious what the objective is.
- [14:23]
B
Yeah, well, look, I think advertising and direct response and all those things play a role. Right. It's not that TV ads are going to go away, but they play a very specific role. But the honest truth is, is that everyday Americans, most people in America are not sitting there waiting for that 30 second ad break, you know? Right. It's not something that cuts through. Now if you put enough like impressions behind it and can kind of be super clear with your messaging, it can create sort of an understanding of the functional and emotional benefits of your product. But ultimately the way to cut through and the ultimate currency today is attention. Right. To get that attention. It's entertainment based. And I like to think of brand building and brand managers or anyone who's owning the storytelling of a brand. You're essentially like the owner of a streaming platform. Right. You're essentially an editor of a magazine. Think of it that way. And your job is to constantly put hits out in the world. Right. Entertainment out in the world. And so we created about three, four years ago something called in the Green Studios, which is Chime sort of branded entertainment kind of studio area and we create episodic series, you know, and these series have really captured the attention of America. They're a big part of, part of what our social feeds are. And we're also working more and more with Hollywood and film studios on kind of creating entertainment content around financial services and financial progress that everyday Americans want to consume. So modern marketing really is this sort of mosaic of many different capabilities that you need to have in an organization and branded entertainment and this sort of appointment based viewing and if brands can get into that habit, is absolutely a huge part of how any brand needs to tell their story nowadays. Advertising alone is just not going to do it.
- [16:19]
A
Right. Well, and I know I've heard you talk about like your unique way you think about like this isn't just storytelling, it's storytelling that performs. Yeah. I think you call it something like performance storytelling when you mash up, you know, the brand and the performance itself. So like on the outset, like what? I guess maybe if you think about performance storytelling, what advice would you give other CMOs that are thinking about trying to do something in the direction you're talking about, but obviously they're going to face that resistance of well, this sounds like it's just brand.
- [16:51]
B
Yeah. Well, let's get into the genesis of performance storytelling and where that came from. The whole theory of that was if you go back 10, 15 years into like the evolution of like modern marketing, right? And actually we're going through another platform shift now that I'm sure we'll get to in a second with AI.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But CPG essentially built their, built the whole practice of brand management, right. And brand marketing. And essentially it was very hard to break into kind of consumer brand territory for, for a long time because you had these upfront media costs that were barriers to entry. You had retail distribution that was a barrier to entry for many small brands. And essentially you would sort of have this sort of upfront, sort of set it and forget it sort of media model that was building brands then about 10, 12, 13 years ago, which is when I just stopped CBG and moved to Silicon Valley. You had the rise of performance marketing, right? And I hate that term because I think all marketing performs and I call it direct response and I'll probably call it that from now on in this, in this conversation. But you had this rise of, you know, direct response marketing, which was essentially pay per click marketing that companies like Meta, then Facebook and Google invented. Right? Which is you only pay for the advertising if you get sort of the click or a reaction from the ads, which then gave rise to direct to consumer brands, right? Because you essentially took out the upfront barriers to entry on media and essentially created a pay per click model where little startup brands could start going into the media world, getting a ton of impressions, but only paying when there was an outcome that they wanted. Well, that also gave rise to the venture capital world. And the venture capital world, right, operates in series A, B, C, D, E, F. You can go all the way to the end of the Alphabet these days as companies stay private longer. And essentially what happened was that these VCs came in and started funding these direct to consumer brands and you could literally spend money and get customer acquisition costs like direct CAC based outcomes that then led you to your next, next fundraise and your next fundraise. So essentially, you know, in this sort of transformation iteration of marketing, you had the rise of direct response. What happened is there was a west coast, east coast thing going on in marketing. You had west coast marketers which were like sort of direct response, and you had east coast marketers or CPG marketers which were much more like brand building. And if you tried to cross that, if you brought up brand building in most tech companies in the Valley, you know, 12, 13, 14 years ago, especially kind of privately backed tech companies, I mean, it was like you'd be thrown out of the room, right? And on the flip side, the CPG brands had a really hard time with direct response because they didn't have a direct relationship with the consumer. They were gated by retailers, right? And so then that gave rise to retail media, right? And all these media networks where consumers can kind of operate like direct response marketers. That gave rise to sort of the direct response marketing gave rise to the Adobes and the salesforces of the world because once you acquire them, you want to have CRM and lifetime value to make that payback work, right? This is a brief history of marketing that we're going through right now.
- [20:15]
A
I love it.
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B
But you had that happen. And so I started to realize, man, like actually the big advertisers know something that these direct to consumer marketers don't, which is that brand building and building future customers is really important. But at the same time, the Dr. Advertisers understand that there's a lot of intent in the market right now that you can sweep up with direct response marketing. The problem with these smaller advertisers was, I call it the CAC Valley of death. The, the industry is littered with direct to Consumer companies that sort of did great on the direct response side, and we're capturing intent. But if they weren't building brand storytelling and future interest, eventually the number of people you can bid on that have current intent starts to go down and those costs start to go up and essentially your cat gets to an unsustainable place. You start pulling down marketing and these companies stall out. I can talk to you about 1520 direct to consumer brands that had a really hot moment and then died because they weren't building future intent. So my vision was with performance storytelling was like, bring the best of east and west together. The most modern CMOs and the most modern marketing organizations now understand that you need to build brand, differentiate, tell your story. None of that has changed. You need to build future intent and future customers, and then you need a really powerful direct response engine to then capture that intent and pull it in as efficiently as humanly possible. And then the really good marketers and organizations know that once you capture them, you want to increase the lifetime value of that customer, which was the rise of like recurring revenue and SaaS businesses, subscription businesses, so that you can justify the payback of that upfront sort of acquisition cost. Right. So performance storytelling, sort of brand building with direct response with sort of building lifetime value of a customer, puts that all together and kind of creates an organization around sort of a strategy that recognizes performance marketing and brand, or brand and direct response belong together. And that's what I call like a performance storytelling approach to marketing.
- [22:31]
A
Yeah, no, it makes perfect sense. And you gotta have both. You gotta have both, I think. And that's, that's the story of, of performance storytelling too. So I know we mentioned, you mentioned AI a little bit ago. Like you almost can't have a conversation anymore with a marketing leader and not talk about AI. But the thing that stands out to me in terms of what you're doing at CHIME is that it feels like you're one of the actual companies that's driving real systemic change inside the organization. And I'd love to unpack like how you started that AI journey and kind of where you guys are today.
- [23:09]
B
Yeah, well, look, for 40, 50 years, marketing was done sort of the same way. Then you had the rise of direct response and then you had the rise of like the CRM and the LCM life cycle companies. Right. All the market cap growth of companies like Amazon, you know, and their media network, which is a huge part of their market cap growth. Adobe Salesforce, meta Google. Guess who the buyer was? The buyer were CMOs and CMOs became the folks, the team, the C suite leaders that leaned into this technology shift more than anyone else in the C suite. It's actually a pretty amazing thing from kind of enterprise CIO driven valuations in old companies like Oracle. You know, you remember all these companies. Although Oracle's now making a comeback with companies like the next evolution of stock market and valuation growth came from cmos. And I think something very similar is going to happen with AI. I think AI is going to make that old shift feel like nothing compared to what we're about to see. In my personal opinion, the key with AI is not to get lost by the shiny objects and the tooling and all of that. The answer is not, hey, I need to try out a tool. Nothing has really changed in that core modern marketing functions have certain jobs to be done internally, right? Whether that's sort of, you know, creating content to feed that sort of attention economy that's out there, it is so content hungry. Whether it's sort of driving conversion on your website when people are coming and you need to like drive that purchase conversion, it can be all the way through to personalization and the actual experience of your app, you know, and it can be all the way to customer service. So the key is to map AI to the biggest jobs to be done for your marketing, right? And that's really how we looked at it. So we didn't start with the tools, we actually started with, well, what are the horizontal sort of solution sets that we want to come up with to help all the work we need to do get done faster, cheaper and better, not just equivalent. So we started to map kind of tools into these use cases. And it's been a huge evolution for us. On the customer service side. We have, you know, obviously being a bank, we're dealing with people's money. A lot of people are calling us to ask, hey, did my paycheck come in? Is it, you know, you know, I was supposed to come two days early. Did it come in or a fraudulent transaction or something like that? We now have 70% of all of our customer service calls and sort of chats are coming in through an AI agent now. So we literally have AI agents handling 70% of our calls. We've reduced costs by 60% and increased MPS scores. So an example of, you know, cheaper and better at the same time really reinventing a workflow that we used to have. On the creative side, you know, we no longer have a creative agency on retainer. We actually eliminated that about 12 months ago. And our in House team is now getting staffed up and it's getting filled with tools that are unbelievable. Right. The storyboards these teams are showing me for advertising, the AI generated soundtracks from companies like eleven Labs. You know, my head of creative is doing some great work right now is like geeking out on these tools and you know, we're about to launch our first sort of fully AI enabled piece of like kind of classic 30 second advertising probably in the first quarter of next year. It has been an unbelievable transformation going from creative agencies to an in house agency that pretty much in six months has the same capabilities without adding all the headcount that sort of the creative agency has had. We can keep geeking out even further onto the e commerce side. Right. Like conversion funnels. The biggest barrier to running experiments for growth teams was like a B testing. Right. Because you can only run so much traffic through experiments. So things like reinforcement learning, which is an AI sort of concept where the machine is learning at the micro level on every conversion event and optimizing based on what they know about the person is changing conversion funnel based experimentation. And it's even now getting all the way to things like consumer research. I'm sure you're starting to hear about the rise of synthetic panels. Synthetic consumer research, where the AI is actually trained on decades of consumer research that any brand has done. Quantitative studies, qualitative studies, segmentation studies, usage and attitude studies. And it essentially responds like your consumer. So you're chatting with a synthetic version of your consumer with tools like Simile, et cetera. So we are, we're kind of breaking down all the jobs that we have and we're applying AI applications to these. And the key is where it's hard to pick a winner. Right. The industry is moving so fast that you have to allow people to take lots of shots on goals with the different tools. Because just when you think a tool is great, two weeks later a new tool comes out and you're like, that's even better. Right, Right. So you have to allow your teams to first not get attracted by the shiny object or the name of the tool, but by the jobs map, sort of what you think are the best application layers of this AI against those jobs. Shoot lots of shots on goals with tools. Be very open minded about what's going on out there. And lastly, don't settle on one tool. Try to create some internal, some competition between vendors for each of those jobs. Like I want two or three of the vendors in at the same time because then you get influence on their product roadmaps. The product's getting better constantly and you don't get sort of stuck with just one company's product roadmap in a world that is still in its very first innings of innovation and application. So there's a lot of a playbook here, but we are just taking lots of shots and goals. We've mapped the jobs to be done and we're creating a tremendous amount of AI literacy internally through training and sort of hands on application with our marketers.
- [29:20]
A
Well, and I mean, you just mentioned it there at the end, like the training that you're doing with talent, like how are, how are you preparing and how does this impact the talent, both, you know, who you choose to work and bring into Chime internally, but also who you're working with externally. Like, how do you think about balancing the talent impact and unleashing, if you will, the talent, so to speak?
- [29:43]
B
Well, as you know, right, any good, good, good leader will tell you that 80% of development of any, anyone, right, happens with on the job sort of work. And so the number one thing we need to do is to get these tools into the hands of marketers and get them really trying the applications in a way that like really changes their jobs. And it starts from the top, right? It comes from me and my leadership team in every meeting, hey, did he use a, did what tool did he use to get. Constantly asking that question to ensure that, you know, we're not just doing things the old way because of comfort, but that we're getting comfortably uncomfortable with some of the new tools that we want to do. And so it starts by just allowing the tools to get into the hands of the teams, right? That's how folks are really going to not just learn, but also become evangelizers of this platform shift. And that's ultimately what you need, right? You, you want your own team and your talent to become the evangelists of this platform shift. Because as you know, from the top we can set the tone, we can ask the right questions, but no one wants to do something just because their boss said to do that, right? So secondarily then it's also, and much less than the 80%, I think, is application. You know, underneath that though is things like tools like reforge, right, or these online learning sessions where you can literally go on and like self directed learning can take over, right? There are plenty of sort of platforms that are offering some of the best course courses in the world and they're very cheap to implement inside companies and it's self directed learning. So you're really curious folks can go in and kind of do it anytime they want. So we've given our, our marketing team open access to some of the, to two or three of these platforms. And then lastly, it's inspiration, right? It's, we're bringing in founders of AI companies regularly to do lunch and learns and talk to people about where the world's headed so that it doesn't feel scary but more optimistic from the minds of founders. So it's a very intentional plan. We have, we have a whole AI sort of transformational, sort of task force and strategic plan. But importantly, it doesn't start with the AI, it starts with the jobs and then the application and those layers all get built underneath that sort of a framework.
- [32:13]
A
I love it. I love it. Well, I mean you're driving a lot of success at chime. We talked about like how you're doing all these change initiatives, transformations if you will, AI being the latest thing to enter the fray. If I step back from this a little bit and we think about, I know you've also had board experience like public, private, et cetera. How, how do we get more marketing experience on boards? And, and, and what should they be thinking about marketing experience on the board and, and its contribution to the conversations that happen in the boardroom?
- [32:48]
B
Well, look, I think to some degree our industry's done it to ourselves that we were excluded from the boardroom for so many years, right? All these articles that you get reading about CMO tenure and like, you know, the, you know, the depth of brand building or like the rise of performance marketing, like we tend to bifurcate ourselves in our own industry, right? And when an industry does not stand together and united, it becomes very hard to like be in the center stage. And you know, sometimes we become like victims, you know. And so I think it's really important first and foremost to transform the narrative of the role of a cmo, of a marketer in any company. And I think that's going to come as marketers embrace true full stack marketing, right? This idea of performance storytelling, getting very tech literate, getting commercially literate. I always say the number one job of a CMO is to allocate capital for efficient growth, right? That is a CMO's job. And the more you talk the language of business, commercial outcomes, the more, and, and the less we bifurcate ourselves between things like brand and performance, the more I think our industry will stand strong. But look, I think it's changing. You're seeing more and more of my colleagues. I have lots of Good friends that are CMOs that are on boards now. And I think what's happening is, I think boards are starting to realize that not only does a CMO bring sort of this customer obsession into the boardroom, but more and more CMOs, like I said, in the sort of, you know, 2000s technology platform shift, kind of the late 2000s, 2010 platform shift, CMOs actually led that. That sort of technology investment and platform shift. I think AI is going to be very similar. I think more and more boardrooms are starting to realize that the CMOs are becoming the change agents in a lot of their companies. In many ways, CMOs are holding a huge bag of capital in many companies that needs to be deployed in more efficient ways. And the more boards have CMO representation on them, the more that capital gets guided by a board member's sort of oversight and kind of strong hand. The more sort of CMOs go on boards, the more sort of customer focus gets on those boards. And more and more CMOs are stepping into lots of the subcommittees. You know, I myself am on an audit committee. Right. I'm on a compensation committee. Right. More and more, I think CMOs are being seen as broader business leaders as well. So I think we're in the first innings of this. But I've never seen momentum like I've seen in the last couple of years. And I think marketing is finally taking its narrative back. You know, I always used to say marketing needs a marketing campaign and. Which is sort of ironic. And I think CMOs and the industry, thanks to, you know, podcasts like this and so many other publications, I think we're finally taking our narrative back and, and getting that place in the boardroom, in the C suite that we've. That we've always wanted. But it's on us to talk the language of cfo, be commercial, and talk about capital allocation as efficiently as possible.
- [36:04]
A
I love it. And I, I really appreciate. I. I do think we're starting to take the narrative back and I think that's gonna fuel this first innings, to your point, and hopefully gets us to a place where it's a little bit better balanced at the board level. Well, I wanna switch gears. You know, we'd love to get to know you a little bit better. We know you, you like to make a pizza here or there. But my favorite question to ask everybody that comes on the show is, has there been an experience of your past that defines or makes up who you are today?
- [36:33]
B
Yeah, look, you know, for me, it's gotta be sort of this first Generation immigrant experience that I grew up with. Right. I was born in India, but raised in this, like I said, blue collar town in Canada. And so always had to like, live with this sort of dual identity. Right. You're at home trying to be that sort of good sort of Indian first generation son, Right. Whose parents. You know, when my parents left India, a lot of that generation, India sort of froze in time, right? So that's still in. Even though India's moved forward a lot, it's sort of frozen time. So in some ways you go home and you're trying to fit into that ideal, but then you head out into the world especially, you know, not a lot of people look like me. You're in this blue collar town, then you're trying to fit into that world. And I think what that drove in me was this sort of notion of, like, just curiosity and introspection and reflection. You know, like, I'm always thinking about, you know, who's around me, who are my stakeholders, what am I trying to fit into here versus there. It's something that I think has had a deep, deep impact on me if I go, you know, into my past. And I, I'm very thankful for it. Obviously it came with challenges, but I think those challenges are what sort of set you up for the future. And it's one thing I think a lot about with my son, right? It's like, oh, man, like, am I giving him enough? Like, is he in a little bubble? Is he in too much of a bubble? Or, you know, is he actually getting experiences that teach him grit, resilience, and managing adversity to the same degree that I did? But that's really shaped me and really, you know, allowed me to kind of become who I am today.
- [38:15]
A
I love it. I love it. Well, what advice would you give, you know, younger Vineet if you're starting this journey all over again?
- [38:22]
B
Yeah, you know, it's. It's advice that I learned probably late in my career, you know, just. Just trying to make it really hustling. And I think sometimes I forgot this thought that I now say to everyone, which is like, bloom where you're planted. You know, it's this idea of like, although, you know, you'll get to know me and I'm super curious and I'm chasing experiences. What people don't realize is that those opportunities, and a lot of that is luck. By the way, anyone who says that this is not half luck is probably not being real with you. But to really take advantage of luck and really chase these experiences you first have to absolutely kind of dominate or kill what you're doing today, right? So my younger self, I would say if I was in that analyst kind of first year analytical job that I thought was sort of, I don't know, I should already be like, I don't know, the CMO of the company or something, right? Because young hotshot kid, I would have, I would have said to myself, hey, just like Bloom, where you're playing, like, first kill this and all the other opportunities will come your way, right? Do the next thing, all the other opportunities will, will come your way. I think, you know, being younger and sort of ambitious, sometimes impatience gets in the way. But bloom, where you're planted, deliver the results and I promise you the opportunities will come your way. Those opportunities for lucky sort of encounters will grow and you'll be ready to jump into those experiences, you know, when you're ready. I think I did the say yes to new things really well. I think I thought of my career as a chess game versus checkers. Right. I thought I did that pretty well. But I could have been more patient along the way. And Bloom, where you're planted, I think would be the biggest advice I give myself.
- [40:09]
A
What are you trying to learn more about yourself right now?
- [40:13]
B
Oh, I mean, I'm obsessed with this platform shift. I mean, I know it's, it's cheesy, but I am like right from the top, playing with tools, digging into everything. I am like a kid in a candy store with the tools that we have. You know, I really believe we are in a new golden age of marketing. I think this will become, when the history books are written, the golden age of marketing. I mean, anyone with an idea can now create content, right? I couldn't draw if my life depended on it, but I can definitely use these tools and create unbelievable content. Anyone with an idea can use tools like lovable and create an app and put it on the app store in a matter of weeks, you know, if not days. And most importantly, today is the worst AI is ever going to be right now. Today it's only going to get better. So it is a, almost like an obsession for me right now. I'm deep into it. I am super curious and I think this is going to be the most important shift for our industry that we've ever seen. And it's never been a better time, I think, to be a marketer.
- [41:22]
A
Well, have you. I mean, you may not have any more time to be curious about any other things, but I was curious if there's any trends or subcultures out there that you follow you, you're taking notice of as well.
- [41:33]
B
Yeah, look, I think there are some real, if you, if you're marketing to mainstream America, right, which is 200 million people. You know, I'm really fascinated by, by how mainstream America is, is, is consuming content now. And I think that is such a interesting trend. Right. Like your algorithm is not my algorithm. These algos are getting more and more hyper personalized and that makes brand building really hard because there's no more monocultures. Right. Everything are these super subcultures and subcultures of subcultures. And I think a major trend is like how much time consumers are spending on these platforms. That's not necessarily new. But just how specific these algorithms have gotten is truly unbelievable and it's fascinating. One day when you have time go through some of your friends feeds and you'll be like, you feel like you're on a different planet. It is an unbelievable place where you know, content and branded entertainment and this whole world is heading to and I think it's going to be multi device, it's going to be multiplatform and it's going to move to a super personalized kind of content feed for all of us across all platforms. And it's a really interesting trend that's going on I think has major implications for how we go to market and just how we consume content.
- [42:59]
A
Personally, I love it. Last question for you. What do you think is the largest opportunity or threat facing marketers today?
- [43:06]
B
You probably expect this, but the largest threat is ourselves. You know, if we don't, I mean it's all here like it's all here for the taking. Right. We can, we can do things, you know, with our phones and with our tools that we were just 18 short months ago were not even possible. The biggest threat is that we stay stuck, that we try to protect the status quo, that we don't get comfortable with discomfort. And you know, I think we have this moment right now to take back the narrative in a major way in the boardroom, in the executive suite and really be at the forefront of this. The biggest threat I see is that we hold on to old habits, try to protect institutions and have like a, the ultimate innovator's dilemma in our industry. And you know, we can't let that happen.
- [43:54]
A
Well, the conversation with you never disappoints. So thank you for coming on the show, sharing your wisdom, sharing what you work, what's working for you guys. I'm sure this will be one of those most listened to episodes going forward. So thank you for coming on.
- [44:08]
B
Really appreciate Alan and thanks for everything you do for our industry. I really mean it. You're doing a lot to move us forward. So thanks for the time.
- [44:15]
A
Thank you. Hi, it's Alan again. Marketing beyond is a Deloitte Digital podcast. It's created and hosted by me, Alan Hart, and produced by Sam Robertson. We have even more cutting edge marketing insights headed your way. Be sure to subscribe to our channel to stay up to date with our latest episodes. I love hearing from listeners. Share your thoughts about the episode, the topic covered, or the show by commenting on this video or emailing me@marketingbeyondeloitte.com if you're interested in more conversations with industry visionaries, we invite you to explore other Deloitte Digital podcasts@deloitte digital.com US podcast. There you'll find the Marketing beyond webpage with complete show notes and links to what we discussed in the episode today. Hi, I'm Alan Hart and this is Marketing Beyond. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts and opinions of Deloitte. The material and information presented here is for general information purposes only and does not imply endorsement or opposition to any specific company, product or service.