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Marketing Vanguard
The Power of Creative Constraints: Marketing Innovation with Alex Craddock, CMO of Citi
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- [00:00]
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Alex Craddock
When budgets get cut and things of that nature, everyone's initial reaction is shoulders drop and all. Woe is us. We're not going to be able to do anything. And it's like, just think about it as another constraint and I guarantee you you'll have some really brilliant ideas that will be just as impactful, if not more so, at a lower cost. And I think every time in my career I've had budgets cut, great things have come out of it.
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Jenny Rooney
Hi everyone and welcome to the Marketing Vanguard podcast. I'm Jenny Rooney here at Adweek and I'm thrilled today to be joined by Alex who Craddock. Alex is the Chief Marketing and Content Officer at Citi. Alex, welcome.
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Alex Craddock
Jenny, great to be here. Thank you very much for having me.
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Jenny Rooney
Well, we were just saying that you and I have never actually met in person, which feels wrong that we're writing today.
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Alex Craddock
So definitely I don't know how we haven't met. It's obviously never meant to be until right now. So I'm glad we finally have. It's fantastic to be here.
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Jenny Rooney
Likewise. Well, this is great. Listen, I'm excited to talk to you because obviously you're no stranger to this industry, to, you know, what it means to lead marketing strategy. You were at blackrock before, you're at Citi now. And you know, I would just love for you to start by introducing yourself and telling me a little bit about your journey.
- [02:38]
Alex Craddock
Sure. My journey's been an interesting one and I would say when I started out in my career a long time ago, I never quite expected it to play out the way it has, which I think is often the way with careers. Yeah, I would say I was a marketer by accident. I was a sales guy. I loved sales. That's what I did for the first seven years of my career. And in a sales meeting, I spoke up about the state of the brand and the state of the marketing at the time, as I was adamant that a better brand and better marketing would help me sell more product. And the next day I was thrown into a head of marketing role and I was asked to fix it. This was back in the uk and I would say from that moment on, marketing grabbed me by my heart and my head and I've loved it ever since. And I think I realized very quickly that ability to influence perception and influence behavior at scale was just something that is unique in the world and only marketing really has the potential to do that. And I loved it from the beginning, had some success at the beginning, which validated my belief that it does actually work. And that was it. I've been a marketer ever since and it's taken me across industries from automotive. I went agency side. I'm going to date myself now or age myself at the end of the 90s, building websites. I thought there was something in that thing called the Internet and it might be around to stay. So I learned a lot about digital marketing in the very early days and then ended up in financial services with Visa, which was amazing in London. And I ran marketing for Central Eastern Europe, Russia, Middle east and Africa, which was a really interesting set of markets and complemented nicely the experience I'd had in Europe. And Visa was amazing. It moved me around the world. I ended up in Singapore for nearly three years and then on the west coast of the US in 2000 just as visa was ipoing.
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Jenny Rooney
Did you overlap with Antonio?
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Alex Craddock
I did. Interestingly, I arrived in the US just after Antonio had started. So we met each other in Singapore and he helped me come over to the us. I ran global commercial card marketing for a while, then North America marketing for four or five years. Obviously an amazing time, working very closely with Antonio and just supporting him in the transformation he was driving at Visa at the time. And then, yeah, I spent some time at HP again with Antonio as the global CMO for the PC and mobile device business. And then eight years at BlackRock, initially leading global marketing for iShares franchise and proving very much that marketing can work in the investment management space and can actually drive success. And we were able to do that very successfully in the last few years. Two and a half years before I arrived at Citi, I was global CMO for BlackRock. So that's been my career journey. It's been interesting. I've been multiple industries pretty much every geography around the world. I've worked in and lived in some capacity. So it's fantastic to now be at Citi, which is sort of wonderful, bringing together a lot of my experience, truly global role. And I would add finally has got me living in New York, which I'm loving.
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Jenny Rooney
So fantastic. Yeah, that's great. Well, I want to talk about Citi in a minute, but I also want to just talk about just marketing and financial services. And I'm sure you get this question all the time, but you know, and frankly, I know a lot of the chief marketers and a lot of the financial services companies, however you define financial services. And there are a lot, but it is such, to me a unique context for driving the priority of brand marketing and performance marketing. It's probably, perhaps, I'm going to guess, more challenged than all than some other contexts. You know, what you're doing is different than no disregard for automobiles or, you know, fast food. But it's a very different type of marketing, of course. But I do, I would say that some of the most innovative marketing we're seeing in strategy is coming from financial services. Talk a little bit about just the category itself in terms of perhaps, you know, how you regard both the challenge and the opportunity.
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Alex Craddock
Look, it's a great question and it's a category that I love. I've done different things from payment marketing to investment management and now to banking with the breadth of Citi has. And I think what I have loved about it is the challenge that it brings. And how I would define that is more often than not, it's global. More often than not, you're serving a spectrum of clients that go from a true consumer retail right the way through the spectrum to a true business decision maker with something like our investment bank or our markets business here at. So you're embracing the world of sort of B2C, B2B2C and B2B marketing, which is Fascinating. And then I think, as you said in your question, you've got this blend of brand and performance marketing and being needing to focus on how you balance that. And it is a balance in the retail world, you can focus purely on performance marketing. And yes, you'll deliver your results, but probably at a much higher CPA than you would if you were being more balanced in terms of building your brand, creating that pull for your products, and then, yes, balancing that with performance marketing. So I think it's fascinating in just its breadth and its depth and its complexity. I think the world we're in now with the technology, the vast amounts of data that we have, I think means that we can be a lot more precise than we've ever been in how we market. But with that comes this need to honestly be a scientist as much as you are a marketer. And I think also what's fascinating about the financial services space, particularly in the last 10 to 15 years, is the level of disruption that is taking place. Yeah. If you think about all of the new companies that have grown up, whether they're neo banks, whether they're in the payment space, whether they're in the robo advisory space, there are a lot of really smart people out there entering financial services to solve some of the problems that many of us as customers and clients have felt. And I think that's forcing the big incumbent brands to be lighter on their feet, to be more entrepreneurial, to be more innovative, to be able to embrace the same technology and data better capabilities that some of these new entrants are embracing and really think very differently about how they're serving existing clients, but importantly how they're attracting new clients as well. And I love that competition. I think that competition forces you to always think harder and ahead of where you are and never get complacent and rest on your laurels. So I think that's what's. That's a nutshell. It's all of those things that I love about this industry.
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Jenny Rooney
Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting. You know, I spend a lot of time, or have spent a lot of time with MBA students, marketing students at universities over the years. And I don't know, I don't have an answer to this. So I, I can't say that I do. But, you know, everybody loves sports marketing. Everybody loves CPG marketing. Like those are the things that probably students who are in a classroom are thinking about when they think marketing. They're thinking, you know, selling sneakers and hamburgers and things like that. I would venture to guess that not many of them are thinking about the uniqueness and opportunity and excitement that comes from marketing financial services. We can change that, though. We can change that narrative.
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Alex Craddock
Absolutely we can. And I think it's interesting what you say, because I've seen it whether Diesel less so. I think Diesel is a marketing machine in many respects and very culturally relevant. Culturally relevant. But I think what I would say really plays to what you're saying is we'd have analyst classes that would join BlackRock. We had analyst classes who come to Citi. And of course they all come with the desire to be a portfolio manager or to be a banker. And then somewhere in their rotation, they suddenly bump into the world of marketing.
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Jenny Rooney
And they're like, interesting.
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Alex Craddock
Yeah, it's really cool. Like, I didn't know this is what you guys did. And I didn't realize it was as complex that it is. I didn't realize it was as enjoyable in terms of that balance between art and science that we now have to embrace. I also didn't realize the business impact that I could drive through marketing. And so what you often find, and I certainly saw it at blackrock at scale, there were people who had come on a rotation and ended up after three months being surprised that after their grad program, they actually wanted to come back to marketing. So I think you're probably pushing and I think it's interesting you're making me think we probably need to do a better job of marketing and financial services.
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Jenny Rooney
I agree.
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Alex Craddock
Which I think is a great challenge for us all to embrace.
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Jenny Rooney
Yeah, I actually that's a conversation for another day for sure. I think there's a there there, you know, because what you're telling me is people might come into financial services like it. They're coming in through the lens of, oh, I'm going to go work for financial services companies in vastly different roles. Then they discover through serendipity, the magic of marketing as opposed to generalist marketing students or people who come up in this industry, you know, and then coming to financial services. So I don't know. There's an interesting there there that, you know, because we always talk more broadly about marketing has a marketing problem. You know, the ANA has done a lot of work, but there are specific categories where a lot of the. Like to this point where the innovation's happening, where the opportunity is happening, and where the chance to actually make an impact exists. And so that's sort of. That is that notch down of narrative that it would be interesting to figure out how we tell that story.
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Alex Craddock
And I Think in the financial services world, particularly in the more B2B space, so the high end of wealth, institutional space. I think marketing has evolved over the last five to 10 years from being more of a sales enablement type of marketing to now being true strategic marketing. People are really seeing the value that marketing can bring. Working in partnership with sales to build brand awareness, drive acquisition, enable a transaction over the line as you pass seamlessly back and forth between sales and marketing as you go through the incision journey. And then once they're a client, how do you deepen that relationship? And I think people are seeing the value that marketing can bring now, and it's way more than just sales support, which I think is how it was probably five to 10 years ago. So I think that's a story that needs to be told. Probably a little better. To your point.
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Jenny Rooney
Yeah. So now let's talk about Citi, because, you know, Citi obviously has been on its own journey. I mean, it's got an iconic brand. It also has done a lot in the cultural space, in brand partnerships, you know, in entertainment, you know, and brand partnerships is a whole nother line of conversation, of course. But where would you say Citi is in its journey and where are you sort of jumping in, if you will, in that journey?
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Alex Craddock
The short answer is the business has gone through a lot of transformation over the last three to four years under Jane Fraser's leadership.
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Jenny Rooney
Sure. Yep.
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Alex Craddock
Which I think has made it an incredibly exciting organization to be a part of. It was a lot of what appealed to me when I first was contacted about the role, because I think the decisions that have been made are really getting Citi in the best shape it possibly can be to serve the needs of the clients that we have. And many of those clients are clients that are working cross border. We only have a retail bank now in the US and it's a big retail bank. And our car business is phenomenal. It's one of the top three car businesses in the country. But the majority of our footprint now is wealth and services and banking and markets in the rest of the world. And we have this incredible footprint of 95 offices around the world which no one else can match. And I therefore think probably who we are today and who we are in people's minds today are probably slightly different. I think a lot of people probably still think of us as an inherently retail bank. Well, that's our center of gravity. I would say our center of gravity is now quite different. So I think as a marketer and a marketing leader, what a Fantastic opportunity to come into a firm the scale of Citi, one that has got real clarity around its business strategy, has gone through the transformation to restructure its business, and then said, right, we see a massive opportunity now for a marketing organization that is unified and integrated, adds significant value and accelerating our growth going forwards around the world. And we need to pull on all the usual levers that we have in marketing to be able to do that. But we're not going to be able to do it if marketing remains fragmented, which is basically how it was before. So one of the big changes that's happened for this role when I stepped in was bringing marketing teams that are supporting our individual businesses together with those enterprise marketing teams as brand and sponsorship, actually bringing them together to make sure that we can harness the collective brilliance of marketing. We can help connect the dots across a really large organization and make sure that we're really going to market with a client first lens rather than a business first or a product first lens. So I think that's a really big shift and I think it's a massive opportunity for marketing to add a lot of value and really help accelerate the growth that we're already seeing happening as a result of the transformation. So it's a really exciting place to be from that perspective.
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Jenny Rooney
What from your BlackRock experience are you bringing over, at least against that backdrop?
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Alex Craddock
Yeah, I think it was interesting at BlackRock, I'd say marketing when I went into BlackRock was more of a sales enablement function. It was quite fragmented across multiple businesses. And I think over time, as we started to move from being sales enablement to being strategic marketing, being able to be accountable and demonstrate measurable impact. We started to get fans and advocates for what marketing can do. And no surprise as you do that other people in other businesses go, hey, I want some of that. And so we grew. I think this organic marketing function, which suddenly started become more integrated and unified and you could start to actually go to market through the lens of a client rather than through the lens of your product or your organizational structure. So I think there's some great learnings there in terms of how to drive that transformation, how to build a culture, how to build a set of behaviors that allow a team to become a single team rather than a sum of its parts. And that's a journey that we're on. It's going to take time, but I think we were very successful at that at BlackRock. I think the other pieces that I learned at BlackRock is the power of disruption. I think of the iShares business, which I had the pleasure of leading for four and a half, five years of my time at BlackRock at a time when ETFs were taking off. When I joined iShares and BlackRock, initially, we had about a trillion dollars in assets. When I left, we had something like 3.6 trillion. It became a highly competitive place in terms of players. When I started, There were probably 10 to 15 major players in the world. When I left, you were into high double digits of players around the world. And it was truly global and truly competitive. And it was evident when we were thinking about our brand and our marketing strategy that there was this sort of sea of sameness in terms of how a lot of brands were talking to potential clients and customers. And we really need to step out and do something a little different. And I will always be very grateful for my partners across the iShares business who are willing to take some risks and willing to be brave and come with me on a journey that I think really put a stake in the ground for a different way of marketing ETFs and really helped accelerate the growth of iShares around the world. And I think we have that opportunity here. I think there's a lot of people, I think if you went out there and asked them what differentiates one bank from another, probably a lot of people go, well, they're all the same, they're all great. They all have the similar offering. But actually, when you think about it, we all do things slightly differently. And I think we have a fantastic opportunity here at Citi with some real tangible proof points of how we can add significant value in a very different way around the world through our expertise, through our global footprint, through the businesses that we have and how we can connect those businesses to actually serve the needs of our clients in a way that no one else probably can at the same scale. I think we have a fantastic opportunity to tell that story. But to get noticed, we've got to tell that story in a different way. We've got to be disruptive and we've got to be distinct and we've got to probably push ourselves a little bit beyond what we would regard as the conventions of the industry. And I think that's something we did at blackrock, and it was fun to do. And it comes with excitement and anxiety because you never go how it's going to work, but when it's successful, it's really successful. And I think we're already starting to talk about that here on some things that we're working on too. So those are some of the learnings that I'll be bringing to this role.
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Jenny Rooney
I would love for you to share some of those examples of doing disruptive things, doing unexpected things coming from a financial services brand, either something you did at BlackRock or something you've done at Citi or planning to do, which would be fun to hear too.
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Alex Craddock
Yeah. So I think the big thing we did at Blackrock with iShares was we completely reimagined the brand, not just in terms of what it stood for and making it a lot more client centric and therefore not about our products, but actually about how our products can serve the needs that you have. But then we were highly disruptive and how we took it to market. And I think what you tended to find was happening, where are we now? Probably nine, 10 years ago, trying to go back in my life. A lot of the marketing was about individual tickers. Even iShares were doing it. It was like, this is a ticker for this exposure, please buy this ticker. Click here. And what you realized is the vast majority of people tickers didn't really mean anything. It was like an internal language. If there was any language on a piece of communication, it tended to be in what I would call investment speak, the language that we as humans generally talk to each other in. And what we did when we redesigned the brand was create a whole new visual identity which didn't just look different, it was bold and very colorful and got away from the standard colors of the industry convention, which tended to be blue and green, got us into a very bright palette of colors. We spoke in very simple, very direct language and we barely talked about a ticker. We talked about what you're trying to achieve and how we help you. And we talked about the range of expertise that we had. And then once you engage with us and went into the digital experience that we built, that was not a, an electronic brochure, but actually a true experience where you could come with a question and in a few clicks actually answer that question around why, what products should I actually buy and how can I buy them? That's when we started to see some real success. So one be very distinct and very different in the marketplace. So it was really flipping it on its head. And it was going from product to being client centric. It was speaking to clients in a way that they understand. And particularly as you were thinking about the change in the audience from being 45 plus year old investors who had some experience to being this sort of new millennial audience who were coming in. They wanted to be engaged in an equal way. They didn't want to be engaged by somebody who was speaking a weird and wonderful language that no one really speaks. And I think that was a lot of why we had so much success. And some of the great partnerships that we forged with brands like Acorns came out of that approach. They saw us as fitting with their approach to market, not just how we looked, but how we spoke and from a tonality perspective. And we were able to forge a fantastic partnership with them. Back to that.
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Jenny Rooney
So, building off of the other question I asked before and just listening to you, what do you think makes for a successful financial services CMO as opposed to a CMO of any other company? So it's sort of the question I asked before, but asked from a different vantage point.
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Alex Craddock
The first thing I'm going to say is you've got to understand the business and you've got to be able to speak the business. And I say that knowing that everybody goes, well, yes, you're a CMO in any industry, you've got to understand the business. But this business has a level of breadth and complexity that I think is probably second to none. And therefore it's what I learned in my very early days of Visa and it was reinforced when I went to blackrock and now I'm here at Citi. You got to do your homework. You can't just expect it to soak in through osmosis in meetings, because it doesn't. There's a sort of a level of complexity that you've got to get comfortable with so you actually know what you're marketing. You then have to understand the broad spectrum of clients. And as I said, you've got retail clients on one end and you've got the corporate decision makers on the other end and everybody else in between. You've got to have a deep understanding of who they are, how they make their decisions, and the role that the financial services company has in helping them fulfill on their ambitions. We know a lot about our clients in terms of the data that we have. The data tells you a lot, but there's an awful lot that you don't know. And I think actually finding ways to go and truly understand how are you making decisions? What is the emotional component of the decision making that makes a difference? And I think that's a big thing in financial services. Often the belief is it's a very rational decision because we sell very rational products. And yes, there is an element of rationality, but as is often the way with us as human beings, decision is more often than not made emotionally. And I think what we have to do as marketers and as CMOs in this industry is prove to our partners that being emotional and being able to engage someone emotionally will actually lead to the right business outcome. And I think that's a tough one because often it doesn't intuitively feel like it's the right way. That's one set of complexity. I think the other complexity is just the highly regulated environment we all.
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Jenny Rooney
Yeah, absolutely.
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Alex Craddock
And I think anyone who works in a regulated industry, whether it's financial services, pharma, will relate to this. It forces you to think a little harder than you might do if you were able to do whatever came to mind. And we have to work in very narrow boundaries for all the right reasons. But I think it forces us as marketers to probably think a little harder and think a little differently and probably have a little bit more of a problem solving mindset that we might do otherwise because we've got to make it work. And I think it's interesting when you sit with your agency partners and they bring a brilliant idea to you and you're like, I really want to do that, but the first thing you see is risk everywhere. And you go, right, But I'm not going to give up on this. We're going to work as a team with our agency partners and we're going to find a way to make this happen.
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Jenny Rooney
Because you're still a creative thinker and you're still an innovator completely.
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Alex Craddock
And you know what? I learned more so at blackrock probably than a Visa, where you started to feel the sort of regulations being a little bit more constricting was how valuable your partnership is with compliance and legal. They become your best friends. And it's like, right, I'm not going to have this great idea with the agency and the team and then bring it to you at the last minute and go, I need approval. It's like, oh, I'm going to get you in the room on day one when we think there's a germ of something really exciting here. And together we're going to figure out how we can do this, but be aligned with what we have to be aligned with in terms of regulations and compliance. So it's a different way of thinking, it's a different way of approaching marketing, but it forces you to think a little differently, challenge you, which I actually love.
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Jenny Rooney
Yeah, it is definitely an added layer of challenge because never mind the importance of alignment with the CFO and never mind the importance of alignment with the CEO. If you're not aligned with compliance, I mean, that's a big missing piece for you to be successful. So.
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Alex Craddock
But to your point, it shouldn't stop you being highly creative. It shouldn't stop you being highly innovative in terms of what you do. You have to. When you think about the world we are in and the many brands and non brands that our clients are engaging with, we have to be able to cut through that.
- [24:52]
Jenny Rooney
Well, somebody just recently told me I can't take credit for it, but you know, creativity loves constraint.
- [25:00]
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- [26:22]
Jenny Rooney
And if you really get your head around that, I mean, it's so true. And frankly it's being in the most constrained environments often produces the most creative work. So. More constrained than what you're dealing with?
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Alex Craddock
Yeah, but I totally agree. It's what I always say to teams when budgets get cut and things of that nature. Everyone's initial reaction is shoulders drop and all. Woe is us. We're not going to be able to do anything. And it's like, just think about it as another constraint and I guarantee you you'll have some really brilliant ideas that will be just as impactful, if not more so at A lower cost. And I think every time in my career, I've had budgets cut, great things have come out of it because you forced yourself to think a little differently and be very creative about how you actually go away and engage the customers you're trying to engage and drive, the impact you're trying to drive. And constraint is a good thing. I agree.
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Jenny Rooney
So what's new? What's new on the horizon? What are you looking forward to? What should we be looking forward to from Citi as we approach the end of the year? But obviously, we think into 2025, there's.
- [27:19]
Alex Craddock
A lot of exciting things going on. I've been in the role now just over six months. We announced a reorganization six, seven weeks ago, which is going really well. And I think really supporting what I was talking about earlier in terms of unifying and integrating the team, helping us work more collaboratively, really ensuring that we're harnessing the collective brilliance and we're connecting dots through the lens of the client, not just sitting there in our siloed businesses or with our siloed products. So I'm excited about that. It's also helping us scale some great best practices that we have in certain teams that, up until us being a single, unified organization, were locked. So that's super exciting. And I think we've got some big initiatives. We've been doing some great work with our wealth business. And DZ came in probably about a year ahead of me, so he's been here probably just nearly 18 months from Merrill to run our wealth business. And one of the first things that I got eng with was a question from Andy. Look, I've got this fantastic wealth business. I need a proposition. I need a brand. And we need to really put sticky wealth on the map. And I'd love your help with that. So, as you can imagine, that's a fantastic brief, and Nandy's a fantastic partner to work with. We've got some very exciting work that we are literally in the process of rolling out right now. So some people may have seen it already. The big push will be early next year when we start to push new content, new marketing, new experiences into marketing. That's going to, I think, be very exciting for our city wealth business for sure. It'll position us quite distinctly versus many of our competitors. And I think at a time that is so exciting for wealth, I was reading a great stat the other day that it's forecast $100 trillion of new wealth will be created in the next decade with new industries, freer markets, millennial wealth transfer. There's a huge amount of demographic shift. Women investors will be a third of all investors over the next 10 years. You've got all of these dynamics that are making the wealth space really exciting, and I think we can position ourselves well. There's a lot of opportunity, I think, to capture a lot of that wealth that is getting created and to really help our clients manage their money and help with their wealth creation, which is what we're going to be focused on. So there's a lot of exciting things happening there. It also will give a nod to where we hope to go with the brand. So we're looking at the brand and.
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Jenny Rooney
No big super bowl commercial that we're going to see.
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Alex Craddock
No big super bowl commercial. No big super bowl commercial. But, yeah, no, I think we've got some great work to do, as we did on wealth. Take a step back. And as I mentioned, we've been through a lot of change and ask ourselves, what is the Citi brand and what do we want the Citi brand to represent? What is the story we want the brand to tell and how does that compare with the story that people have in their minds today? And I think we're already, through research, seeing a little bit of a gap and seeing some exciting opportunities. So we'll start and do some exciting work on that. So I would hope sometime next year that'll be coming into market now. And then we're also looking at our sponsorships.
- [29:55]
Jenny Rooney
That's what I was going to ask. Yeah, the partnerships. I'm curious about that piece as well.
- [30:00]
Alex Craddock
We have some amazing sponsorships and partnerships here in the US and around the world. And I think as we think about our business transformation, the ambitions we have for our businesses, how does that portfolio stack up and support that? How does it help us actually drive the commercial outcomes we need to drive for those businesses with those specific client segments in the key geographies around the world that matters. I think we have some fantastic properties that I think we can actually do more with. So we've had some really exciting conversations with many of them over the last few months. But equally, I think there are some gaps and we've got some opportunities to go and acquire some new properties and really think about our global footprint and how we're supporting our brand presence and engagement of our clients at their passion points in slightly different ways around the world. So expect to see some interesting things happening there over the next sort of 12, 24 months, too. So it's a really exciting time. We've done a lot in Six months. There's a huge amount to do.
- [30:51]
Jenny Rooney
Okay, well, then we'll have to do this again in a year, at least, if not sooner, and see where things are last. Two signature questions I ask of all my guests. One is I use the soccer analogy, or I guess I shouldn't say football, or you're on the pitch as a leader. Are you a striker trying to score the goals in the offensive position? Are you midfield line trying to be that connective tissue between offense and defense? Or are you a defender of the goal making sure that your competitor doesn't score on you at all costs?
- [31:25]
Alex Craddock
Can I choose something else and not be on the pitch?
- [31:27]
Jenny Rooney
Of course.
- [31:28]
Alex Craddock
I would love to be the coach. So how I think about my role, and I think done a lot of reflection on this, my role is to create the environment where the team can grow, do their very best work and achieve ambitious goals that they didn't think were possible and create a space that is safe and where they feel highly respected, highly valued, highly recognized. And I think when I look at football teams and I look at the teams that do it well, yes, you've got great players. There's lots of teams with great players, but it's more often than not the coach that makes the difference because they create that environment where those 11 people on a pitch come together and magic happens.
- [32:05]
Jenny Rooney
Yeah.
- [32:06]
Alex Craddock
And I think that's the responsibility that I think I have to my team. Thousand folks around the world who work in Citi's marketing and content teams. So I would say I'm the coach, and if I'm doing my job properly, I'm creating an environment where they can be brilliant and do amazing things, which you already see every day at Citi, which is fantastic.
- [32:24]
Jenny Rooney
I love that. And then the last quick question is, who's next? Who's somebody that you know very well, who you think is doing extraordinary things? Or is there somebody, you know, leading marketing in a CMO capacity or equivalent role who you haven't met yet but you admire from afar and you think we should have on the podcast, have.
- [32:40]
Alex Craddock
You spoken to Michael Roberts at Matt Life?
- [32:43]
Jenny Rooney
No.
- [32:44]
Alex Craddock
Awesome guy. You should do that. Okay, Fantastic.
- [32:47]
Jenny Rooney
Perfect. Another new person I get to meet.
- [32:50]
Alex Craddock
There you go.
- [32:50]
Jenny Rooney
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
- [32:52]
Alex Craddock
My pleasure.
- [32:52]
Jenny Rooney
Alex. This has been a pleasure. There's so much more. We'll talk again soon, and hopefully, like I said, we'll continue the conversation here, but also elsewhere. So thank you so much.
- [33:02]
Alex Craddock
My pleasure, Jenny. Thank you very much.
- [33:04]
Adweek
Thank you for listening to Marketing Vanguard, part of the Ad Week podcast network. And Acast Creator Network. You can listen and subscribe to all of Adweek's podcasts by visiting adweek.com podcasts stay updated on all things Adweek Podcast Network by following us on Twitter dweek Podcasts. And if you have a question or suggestion for the show, send us an email@podcastadweek.com thanks for listening.
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