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Uncensored CMO
The creative revolution inside the worlds most dull category - Novartis CMO, Gail Horwood
00:49:53
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everyone. Now, if you want to know the secret to more impactful creator ads, then this is good news. Stop obsessing over engagement rates and start pulling the three levers that really make a difference to your brand. Now, what are they? They are creative quality, creator fame and brand fit. And they're revealed in a brand new report From WPP Media, System 1 and TikTok called the Creator Effectiveness Playbook. This is your guide to making fantastic creator advertising that works for your brand. Now, to get a hold of it, all you have to do is go over to system1group.com and download the report today. All right, without further ado, let's get on with the show. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another special edition of the podcast in partnership with bcg. Now, in this episode, we're going to be talking about a Grand Prix winning campaign. Now, not just any campaign, because this was from Novartis in the pharmaceutical category, which is, we know from System 1 data, one of the world's dullest. How did they do it? How do they transform the business to be more creative? And what were the results? And importantly, did AI play a role in it? So I'm joined by the cmo, Gail, in this episode alongside Janet from BCG to uncover all the secrets and so you can learn from what they've just done. Here we go. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to UNSENSOR and cmo. It's great to see you both. How are you?
- [01:27]
B
Great, great. Thank you so much.
- [01:29]
C
Doing very well, thanks.
- [01:31]
A
There's kind of a nice full circle moment here because two years ago at Cannes, Adam Morgan and I did a presentation called the Extraordinary Cost of Being Dull. And we got a call from Novartis saying, oh, will you come and do the presentation at our place? Because we've heard it's quite interesting. And Adam and I were going, this could be a bit awkward because we actually looked at the dullest categories in the world and pharma was the dullest category. So we're like, how's this going to go down? But it actually went down brilliantly. We had an amazing time with your team and now, of course, you're back here and you're accepting you won two. Is that all right? Two.
- [02:11]
C
You won two Cannes Lions in the Grand Prix for integrated campaign in pharma. So isn't that amazing?
- [02:17]
B
Congratulations.
- [02:18]
C
Amazing.
- [02:18]
A
Well done.
- [02:19]
C
Thank you so much.
- [02:20]
A
So tell us a bit about the journey from where you've come from to this point and what's changed.
- [02:25]
C
Sure. I mean, and you were part of that journey and so many other talented people because we've made creativity and creative effectiveness central to our marketing philosophy. We believe marketing is the science of behavior change and creative effectiveness in the work you put into the market matters. And we decided to do a systematic approach to training our entire marketing organization on what makes creative, what are the elements, the formulas, et cetera. And part of that is putting a mirror to your own work and saying what could be better. And you helped us make that change by pointing out that some of the work we've put into the market isn't the most exciting. And we want to be relevant and we want to be information people act upon because it matters. It's changing their lives for the better. And so we've been on a multi year journey. We developed a program called Create and it's not a one and done. It's something we dedicate resources to and in fact visiting. We work with Cannes advisory and do curated, walk the work and spend a lot of time in the Palais, really interrogating other people's work so we can make our own work better.
- [03:35]
A
I think, I mean, Janet, I reckon that Gail and the team are in the minority here because, I mean, how many people actually go and check the workouts?
- [03:42]
B
It's extraordinary. I think the notion of going to the Palais is a pretty rare idea for people here.
- [03:48]
A
More people should follow your lead.
- [03:50]
C
I think I agree. First of all, it's instructive. Imagine seeing the best marketing work in the world, the best campaigns in the world. And another thing we've done is we've invited our inner agency team, the creatives across our networks to come with us. So there's no competition. We're all there to talk about what makes work better. We get educated. And then for me, what's most exciting about it, because not everybody gets to come to Cannes, is we do work. When we get back, it's an obligation of those that were here to host an event which a very clever team member of ours called. We're in East Hen Hanover, N.J. he called it East Canover. So we host a whole session where we share and this year we'll have a lot to celebrate. But we share what we learned, what work resonated, and we look across all categories, inside and outside. It's with French themed things.
- [04:44]
A
Okay, love that, love that. Now I'll make another connection. So when we did the Costa Dao, we tried to emphasize how most advertising doesn't create an emotion. And we identified that one of the antidotes to Dahl was surprise, surprise has an Amazing ability to capture our attention, create an emotion. It's a very, very powerful force. I think it's fairly safe to say your last two super bowl campaigns have been rather surprising. Can you describe them? Because I think for anyone who hasn't seen it, I'd love them to understand this, because farmers are very regulated, very traditional, formulaic kind of category in terms of communication. And you definitely rip the rule book up with this.
- [05:22]
C
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. So it actually started with our ambition, which was to help people be more proactive in screening and getting preventative testing, because really, there's a very, very large unmet need. So we're leaders in treatment of prostate cancer, women's health, and breast cancer, among other things. And there are tens of millions of people that are skipping their annual mammograms or not getting their PSA blood test. And that's led to an increase in later detection of cancers, and of which there are fewer treatments and fewer options for people. So we really want to get people to be tested. Earlier. We thought about how best to do that. And of course, the largest platform in the world for marketers and for getting your awareness messages was the Super Bowl. But for me, it wasn't just about awareness. We really need people to take action. And so we started with this idea that we could do both, right? So we could do both things really well. And as we worked with our agency, and each campaign was done by a different agency partner. So last year, we ran your attention please, which was based on the insight that breasts are adored but ignored. And we thought that the super bowl broadcast was a great place to kind of surprisingly talk about that. But really, you know, 6 million women who were watching the super bowl at that moment could have been diagnosed, could be diagnosed with breast cancer. So this is a huge unmet need. And we worked with Wanda Sykes, who's a breast cancer survivor, somebody who credits early detection for saving her life. And we always work with people who are closely connected with the message. There's an authenticity there. And organically, we wanted to have some humor. We didn't want to start with a heavy message, so we want to be relevant to the context. We know the super bowl is a context where people are not necessarily looking for heavy messages, right? They want to have fun, they're tailgate, they're in their living rooms, et cetera. We wanted to start a conversation with a very clear call to action. And we're seeing great response, and we're seeing tens of thousands of people get those screenings and additional screenings.
- [07:29]
A
It's probably worth pointing out for anyone who doesn't understand pharma advertising, you're very heavily regulated.
- [07:33]
C
Yes, we are.
- [07:34]
A
Which is part of the reason why, you know, the average performance is so low. And if you're advertising the drug itself, you have to put about half the air time over to the reasons what might happen afterwards.
- [07:44]
C
So I think.
- [07:44]
A
But you didn't do that in this one because you supported the general cause. Didn't you rather the drug itself?
- [07:50]
C
Yeah. So we had a little bit more flexibility in terms of how we delivered the message, but we are still regulated and we go through all the appropriate FDA and regulatory processes.
- [08:00]
A
So that was the prior year, and then this year you did something with the tight ends. Yes.
- [08:05]
C
So this year we turned our attention to prostate cancer. And it's interesting. The stat is one in eight women in the US will be diagnosed with breast cancer. One in eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer. So similar stat. And it was based on the insight that. And it was a different problem to solve because women know they need to get mammograms, but they skip them for various reasons. Men just avoid going to the doctor in general, and in this case, they certainly avoid requesting a PSA test or a prostate test because they think it starts with a digital rectal exam. So we knew from the insight that they literally clench themselves through some of the patient insight work. We did. Did. And we started talking about this idea at the same time. And let me separate for a minute. We have an NFL sponsorship and partnership which I could talk a little bit about. And we wanted to really lean into football. So one of our creative teams, this was at Publicis, came up with the idea of tight ends and how can we work that? And so it became, well, how do we relax or Relax. It's a blood test. Relax your tight ends.
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A
There's a juxtaposition with these well known tight ends. They're big, muscly, hardcore guys that are going to battle each other.
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B
Incredible creators. Totally.
- [09:19]
A
And they're just hanging out, having yoga, you know, painting. But, but, but you told me something which. Which I found kind of reassuring is that you cast them in authentic roles, didn't you? Which I thought was quite neat.
- [09:30]
C
Yes, yes. You know, Coach Aarons, who's our spokesperson, one of the spokespeople in the. In the creative. He credits early detection of N a PSA blood test for saving his life. So very credible spokesperson for us.
- [09:45]
A
And am I right saying you also partnered with the NFL to do this as well?
- [09:48]
C
Which I think was A unique move. Yeah. So we are NFL sponsors, and we work with seven NFL teams. And one of the elements of this ad that I think, you know, there were a lot of Easter eggs in the ad that, you know, if, you know, you know, and if you're a big football fan. But each of the players were featured in their uniforms of their era. Some were current players, some were not. But we worked. You can't just have your creative show NFL. The players can't just be in their NFL uniforms. We had to work with the NFL and the teams to get perm. And part of that was possible through our relationship with the NFL. We have a different kind of partnership with the NFL. We're the first pharmaceutical partner, all categories, and we really share the common goal. They, for more than 10 years, have run a program called Crucial Catch, which is about early detection of cancer. They run that in October. But we share this idea that we want to reach people in their communities around the fans. So we do a lot of community activations. We're not even one year into our team level sponsorship, but we host screenings, we bring plays players in. And what we're finding is people are very open to receiving that kind of information and being proactive and having the test done when it's done through that. That kind of a filter. And so we're seeing more and more of that. We have very ambitious goals to get people, more and more people screened because there is such a large unmet need.
- [11:06]
A
Now. A lot of people say to me, I would love to do the kind of work you're doing and you're celebrating today. I just can't get my organization to think like that. And I'd love both of you to give me some advice on how you get an organ to kind of embrace some of the. Well, I mean, people would call it risk taking, but actually, the riskiest thing you can do is not do what you're doing. Right. But how do you bring an organization through the process and make them more creative?
- [11:31]
C
I mean, I know this is gonna sound boring, but it starts with the foundation and the elements of marketing and trust. So you don't just get to do, at least any company I know or I talk to my peers work at this caliber. And we have an amazing leadership team that supports it. But at the end of the day, we have to deliver on our marketing objectives holistically. So it's not just, oh, hey, let's show up at the Super bowl. We set rigorous KPIs, of course, and we have the foundational, the foundation set to really build an integrated program that's going to deliver on these outcomes. So, you know, it is amazing to do creative. And I've had the good fortune to work on other super bowl ads at other places I've worked, but it's not because I want to. You know, it really needs to fit with your. What. What objectives you're driving. And the most important thing, and I talk about this all the time, is to agree on how you want to show up and make that integrated. And you have to do that from the beginning. So it's across every discipline.
- [12:31]
B
Yeah. When I hear Gayle talk about that, I think it really echoes so many of the things that I'm seeing across different companies when they're winning. The first is they're setting a clear goal and outcome. And I think increasingly the other word that Gail used is really important, which is they're thinking holistically. They're more dynamic across all the different levers that they have. So things like paid, owned and earned are no longer. And the channels within them are no longer in individual silos. They're saying, let's set a goal at the center that is really about growth holistically. And then let's have more fluidity across our teams and make sure that we're reimagining the workflows in creative and in media to work together against that goal. And then let's think about, when we look at that in our operating model, what needs to change around our roles? The way I need to lead the culture we need to build, the skills we need to have. Yes. How we think about technology and, yes, AI and all the other things that are going to dramatically change how we work together against that ambition and goal. And then how we hold all of it together as one integrated model as opposed to one off ideas. To me, you want to unlock that creativity and the surprise, which is where you started the conversation, but you also want to do it as a system. It has to be rigorous and have discipline so that you know that the surprises are going to happen organically and you will have that serendipity, but you'll have it predictably.
- [13:59]
A
I love that. It's really powerful. When I did my talk actually on surprise, one of the examples that we use was the German retailer Aldi and Audi have won awards for the quality of their champagne for the. They call it this middle aisle where they have really surprising, like you could buy a kayak or you can buy a barbecue and all this other thing anyway. And they've consistently delivered Surprise. And Adam, my colleague, was, was asking the CMO what's the most important thing in delivering surprise? And the answer she gave was discipline and rigor.
- [14:31]
B
Yeah, I was like, oh, it's paradoxical.
- [14:32]
A
But yeah, you know, because it's easy to identify surprise as a strategic lever. But actually if you're going to deliver it, you need to think through how you deliver it, where you deliver it and the mechanisms do it and should absolute discipline. Rigor has been the, you know, the underpinning of making that happen.
- [14:46]
C
Yeah, it's always been, it's always been interesting to me and done a lot of, I come from a consumer and media background, done a lot of real time marketing and the success you can be, take more, I don't say risks, but you can be more agile in that if you have a good framework and a lot of pre planning. So paradoxically, to be very agile, you have to know what your guardrails are. And everybody needs to be on the same page.
- [15:11]
B
And a part of that on the same page is how you bring the internal teams together more holistically. And then the other piece of that increasingly is how do you bring your external partners into that. So the media partners that you work with, the agencies that you work with, and all the technologies that are sitting in the stack, all of those companies, they're not vendors anymore. If you're doing it right, they're true partners. Because if they're not aligned to your goal as well, you're gonna fail. If they're transacting with you, you're gonna fail. They need to be an extension of your own capabilities and aligned to the objectives that you have. They should feel like part of your team. And when that happens, that agility that Gail's talking about really manifests.
- [15:52]
C
Yeah, I love that. And that's very much the philosophy I have and how we've treated our agency partners and our media partners, the more they know, and again, it's under the right restrictions and privacy and NDAs, but the more they know about what we're trying to achieve and why and how and et cetera, they bring a lot of creative ideas to the table. Of course our agencies do, but even our media partners and Janet and I both come from a media background and we know what creativity exists in those ecosystems, but it's often untapped because it's very transactional. I have the ability to say, oh, I know they are capable of that kind of ideation or those kind of problem, you know, solving those problems. And we brought a lot of that thinking to the media planning that we did, for example, for. Because it wasn't one and done. It's. It's. It's a platform that we are running. You know, we continue to support.
- [16:43]
A
That's really, really important, isn't it? If you take attention, please, how do you get the senior stakeholders outside of marketing on board? Because.
- [16:50]
B
Because this is a good question.
- [16:51]
A
I can just imagine, I mean, the
- [16:53]
C
boardroom discussion, if you were a fly
- [16:55]
B
on the wall, what did that feel like?
- [16:56]
A
Cinti would be like, let's go. And then you've got to go to the boardroom and then go, I have an idea.
- [17:02]
C
Yeah. I mean, again, I have very, very supportive leadership. And I think as you create, you tell a story internally and externally. You have to do your selling internally and externally. And it wasn't that it was a huge selling proposition internally, but it was something we'd never done before. Novartis had never run a Super bowl campaign, period, or something at that scale. And then we can all acknowledge we were going right into the. Into what we saw the issue, the societal issue. And we wanted to be respectful, appropriate, and reflective of culture. And so we tried to make it as authentic as possible and not salacious. So it wasn't done from a, oh, let's just show more shaking, or et cetera. It was done from, does this look like the world you live in? And that was truly what we were trying to. So once we connected those dots and you can only tell a story so much with storyboards, which it was a little funny when I had to show the videos, but I think we handled it appropriately, and that was the balance that we tried to strike, which is. My goal wasn't to shock anybody or be risque. It was, does this look like we had a woman in a coffee shop? And many of us have experienced that somebody looking you up and down. It was meant to be real, but reflective of the culture we live in and pay attention when it matters most. And it all happened fairly organically when we really focused on that. And again, to make something that strikes that balance and that fine line, you really have to have a lot of discussions, because you can imagine anybody getting involved in those discussions is going to have a point of view and it could go in a different direction. So we were very consistent throughout the. Throughout the process.
- [18:42]
A
I would love to have filmed that reaction. I think everyone can imagine, you know, what that's like. You write about the imitating real life because the scene where the camera even does that, to kind of follow the
- [18:53]
C
bartender the director that we chose was a woman that worked on that. Your attention, please. Had directed episodes of Ted Lasso. So that was another thing about creativity is we wanted a sort of upbeat, more fun and humorous, but also serious because it's striking, that balance. And we thought that reel and that director did a nice job. But it goes back to every decision. Creative decision contributes to the holistic experience. And you think these details are small. Obviously, choosing a director is a very important piece of it. But even one of the scenes in your attention, please. The woman is riding the bus. And at one iteration, she was riding a subway. And we said, no, there are only subways in certain cities. We want this to be reflective of broader community. So she's gonna be on a bus. So, like, literally everything was intentionally discussed and tried to reach the broadest audience with the right message.
- [19:53]
A
It's a good example of this, of, I guess what you might call the serious case for humor. But sometimes when you're actually trying to tackle something really important, humor can be the best way of doing it, can't it? Cause it unarms people, doesn't. And allows them. If you can laugh, then you're more open to kind of take the serious point that you're trying to make.
- [20:09]
C
What I heard, because obviously I was very close to it, is people are like, where is this heading? What is going on here? What am I watching? And then, you know, oh, okay. But it brings them in. Yeah, brings them in.
- [20:18]
A
And what was the reaction like after the Super Bowl?
- [20:20]
C
Well, you know, we knew. It's funny. I happened to be at the super bowl. And of course, when you're at the super bowl, you're not watching the Super Bowl. So I'm on a streaming platform watching it, so I could see the ads. Right. And instantly you started. We would get reports of social media website traffic. So really, very quickly we said, you know, find out more. Find out your risk, or if, if, if. If you should get screened and. Or get an appointment. And instantly we saw that the traffic surge to our websites. Obviously, we had search and everything all set up. And I think one of the things that. Sorry, I haven't mentioned before, is the close work we do with our advocacy partners. Because part of putting this ad together is really understanding the communities you're speaking to. And of course, we do a lot of insights gathering and research, but we made a decision to work very, very closely from inception. And, you know, that could be tricky because you're asking for opinions from a lot of people. But we believe that our advocacy Partners can help us shape this in a way that is most meaningful. And that was what was exciting right from the start. We had a number of advocacy organizations say, yes, we absolutely want to be a part of this. But as the campaign rolled and in the coming weeks, we had more come to us that we put on the websites. And in fact, we did some lobby in Washington as the only pharma company to ensure that there was access to screening. So working with a broader ecosystem. And you talked about the ecosystem in our case, we've even made that further with our advocacy community. We took the same approach with Relax as a blood test.
- [21:55]
A
That's amazing. It's funny, actually. Funny fact. I spent the last seven years being paid to watch super bowl ads. So I worked at System One, which does pre testing and advertising. So I'd be in New York with producer James here, and we would find a bar and we'd literally be watching all the ads. So we'd, you know, flick through the game a bit and then we'd go, right, we've got to pay attention. So when everyone else in the bar is calming down a bit, we're like, right, this is our moment. We gotta re look at the ads. But the reason I say that is that I remember your ads because it was so surprising. It was, you know, because, I mean, super bowl is so competitive. There's between 70 and 80 ads, and you can only really kind of remember five or six afterwards. But yours was so surprising. That is kind of impossible.
- [22:36]
B
To high praise.
- [22:37]
C
Yeah. Thank you.
- [22:39]
A
Now we must bring AI into the room as well, as it would be rude not to kind of thing. But this year, I think I'm right in saying 40% of Cannes line winners have used AI in the production of the films. And I mean, it's only like a year or two since we were beginning to talk about maybe AI could have an impact. So I was intrigued to know from both of you how you're seeing AI being used in service. Creativity and what the pros and cons.
- [23:04]
B
I just want to bring in something that I heard here at Cannes Lions because Jeffrey Katzenberg was quite artful in the words that he selected at one of the events I attended. And I will not try to replicate the words that he used, but he contrasted the notion of creativity and reasoning, and he actually presented the definition of both. So if creativity is essentially, and I'm going to paraphrase, he read a definition. He read it from a piece of paper that he had pulled. And one for reason. If creativity is essentially intended to come up with net new ideas. And everything that we just talked about, the nuanced human choices that Gail was just talking about, all the things that went into it, if that's for it, a completely net new idea that can be combined in a creative process with reasoning, which can come from AI, which allows us to do things in a process where we are essentially going to be using logic to reason through things. And that too can be in a creative process, but it's towards a completely different endpoint where we're actually using logic to reason to what that should be. And so I think about, for example, in a fully integrated program, all the various permutations, for example, of creative, with lots of different aspect ratios, hundreds of different permutations, that is in a creative process. But when we take the two pieces together, creativity and reasoning, they can work together. So I think the beautiful thing about this moment here in Cannes lion is actually that I feel like there's tremendous optimism. I feel like the human versus AI moment, thankfully, has actually gone away, I feel like from the dialogue. And we've arrived at a much more nuanced and sophisticated dialogue, which is how do we work to reimagine processes and actually think about how both the creativity and the reasoning work together, and the humans and the AI work together in service of better creativity. And obviously creativity and service in many cases, and certainly in marketing and customer experience and service of the business, how do we use those together? And to do that requires you to reimagine. And the last point I would just make on this is going back to the ecosystem point. So much of the AI dialogue focuses on technology, and technology is not the hard part. Where I feel like most of the dialogue, thankfully, also has shifted is to what is the system for the business? And how do we artfully and purposefully start to architect the various components that we are going to need so that all the different parts of that ecosystem are actually accretive to growth? Because everyone's got an algorithm. And if you walk down this closet, I promise Gail, if her badge was turned the right way and somebody could read her title, everyone had an algorithm that could optimize towards her goal. I promise. They all tried to sell it to her. Every agency, every media owner, and every other person, they had an agent for it and an optimization, but they don't work together automagically. So if someone like Gail or Gail doesn't deliberately build a system that works together, it won't. And so that's the new challenge, is to put those humans and that technology to work so that we get the best of human judgment and creativity, by the way, not just in creative processes, but in business and do that together with AI and the reasoning. And that's the beautiful moment that I think we're in.
- [26:38]
A
There's some good data in your BCG CMO survey actually that points well, I
- [26:42]
B
appreciate you pointing that out. Thank you.
- [26:45]
A
So 96% of CMOs were saying they want end to end transformation.
- [26:50]
B
Yes.
- [26:51]
A
42% of CMOs were currently using it only to automate certain tasks. So there's this gap between what you described and what is currently being used.
- [27:03]
B
And I will just say, and I'd love to hear what Gail has to share on this, but what I would say is so many of the early experiments were exactly what you just said. They were thinking too small. They were focusing on existing processes and looking at a particular task. And I think that when you're looking at an existing task in an existing process, you're not going to get the value from it. There's not that satisfaction and the kind of thinking that we were just talking about, when you're building the full system, it's hard and it takes time. So the notion that there's an easy button, that is not the case and you have to build towards it and there's a systemic change that one has to build both culturally and over time. So. But Gail lives.
- [27:47]
C
It's so many. Many can only imagine. I mean, for me, and again, I started my career in a creative environment, but in print, if anybody remembers, as we both did magazines. Yes, we did. And I came up through rigorous brand guidelines, systems, brand stewardship, tone voice. We didn't have as many channels, but boy, was that rigorous. When I made the transition to brand marketing. While I knew about all the foundations of brand marketing and had read about them, but I hadn't practiced them necessarily in the same way because I was on the creative side of media. What I recognized is that brand marketers had gotten pretty far away from the work because they had outsourced a lot of it to very talented agencies. But their jobs became very different and they became very distant from the work. One of the things that I learned, and again I came up through E commerce, digital marketing, performance marketing, and then moved more into the larger brand marketing, is you need both, right? And you need to actually understand how the work gets done. So one of the things I've done in our organization at Novartis is I brought some of the work in house. There's no intention to bring all of IT in house, but bring the work closer to the people doing the work who have the insights, understand and frankly the ability to change it quickly. Eliminate handoffs and translation of what we mean and outcomes. And so that makes us more agile. Great news. AI will speed that up. I still believe in context, curation, taste, judgment, institutional experience. The models can't possibly or yet be trained on all of that. They may be someday, but there's so much nuance in all of those and they're not logical or rational decisions, which is what the algorithms are trained to do. So in a really interesting way, I think it's creative's golden moment because we all have read the stats of how many ebooks, how much AI slop people are, are tuning out slop. We're seeing a lot of players saying that you can target now against slop. They have algorithms that will help you identify AI slop so you can target against that. So I think we will see a pendulum shift hopefully towards better creative based on again, fine foundations, tone, voice, all of these things in a new and contextual way. I love what you said about there was a stat about what percentage of creative is done with AI and I think all the lead up processes we could not have done, the type of creative that we put in, the platform that we developed, all the nuances I discussed, an algorithm cannot or would not have done that, or at least not as they are today because we use them. But in the ideation, the scenario planning, the bringing it to life so we could all approve it. Because I think one of the tough things in a regulated industry is everything obviously goes through a rigorous approval process. Sometimes the concepts are so novel it's hard to imagine them for the approvers and the legal and regulatory and compliance folks to imagine them because it's just so novel. Don't blame them. This helps us understand and bring to life things in ways that we can move through approvals more quickly. So it's actually a benefit. We are rethinking marketing through an agentic workflow. I will say, and maybe I'm in the minority. The task level work has given a lot of people exposure to what the possibility of AI is. So it's hard for people to go from. It's a cultural shift.
- [31:29]
B
It was a necessary step to go through.
- [31:31]
C
Yeah, and I really do believe that. I see that because if you're not. And I was always one of those people and how did I teach? I was an art history major who was a creative and crafter. Like how did I get into digital Marketing. What did I know about that? Well, I taught myself because I was interested and et cetera. So I think you can learn by doing. And I do think the task level work, as we've said, helps people move along the journey and know what's possible. I do think it's, you know, I say the technology has superseded. People can't adopt all this technology. My own iPhone, I'm not using every feature and I've been, you know, using it since whatever, 2008 when it came out. And I learned something new every day I can do on my iPhone, including Action mode, which was featured in a beautiful piece of Cannes line winning work this week in a beautiful piece of creative about Parkinson's disease and using action. Anyway, people are not using all the technology. They have technology. It's wonderful and we are all in, but it's also, we have to adapt it as it makes sense for our organizational needs and the goals and objectives that we have. And the last thing we want to do is create AI slop because we want to be trusted. We are a trusted resource for medicines that can extend people's lives. So we want to make sure that trust is a center of. Of that.
- [32:49]
A
You mentioned something, actually, I hadn't clocked before in terms of using AI to create the concepts that you then want to send into the organization. Because I've been so often. And also the more crazy, the more creative, the more brave the idea, the more imagination is required to imagine what it could be.
- [33:07]
C
Exactly.
- [33:07]
A
And if you're a creative person, you immediately go, oh, that's amazing. And then you go to the board and it's literally like, you know, crickets around the room. It's. It's like, oh, they don't get this.
- [33:16]
C
It helps you bring it to light
- [33:18]
A
because you can do it in a nanosecond. You can go, this is what I'm talking about here. All right, we get it. So I hadn't thought about that. That's a nice little.
- [33:26]
C
It's working well.
- [33:28]
A
And to go beyond advertising, do you use AI in product development as well to develop new pharmaceutical products?
- [33:38]
C
AIs have been at the center of drug discovery for a long time, so yes.
- [33:44]
A
Does it shorten the timescales to get things to market?
- [33:47]
C
Yes, it does. And that's the promise of the future. Identifies more compounds, more molecules, more ways to solve the problem.
- [33:54]
B
So, yes, And I think beyond the pharmaceutical industry, just more broadly. I think as we think about marketing, it's going to be about how marketing. Marketing is a beacon of lots of things that is to come. But what's beautiful about marketing going first is it's about the connectivity between different things. So for example, how does marketing connect to supply chain or R and D and product development and other things? Because eventually and we're not there yet, but as agentic workflows and as agentic AI starts to permeate the full enterprise and we are not there yet, that will allow us to trade off lots of different kinds of data and decisions across the enterprise and decide what the highest and best use is for scarce resources, people's time, capital and our teams and our attention. And so as we think about that, that allows us to make much more complicated decisions and scenarios than we could possibly do with dashboards and lots of meetings. So as that starts to emerge, there will be more fluidity. So in marketing we're starting to see that there's a dynamism around how we can move money around and start to about think, think much more dynamically across channels and teams, which is causing a lot of breakdown in the roles itself. There's a lot less around channel specialists. You're seeing lots of organizations talk about pods and squads and reimagine even the titles that sit in those organizations. But eventually as we're talking about here, you're going to see that in other functions as well.
- [35:28]
A
That's such good news, isn't it? Because as marketers we've lost a lot of the four P's, haven't we? We sort of migrated only to promotion in some cases. And we've also divided up marketing roles in used to be a digital role and a traditional role, whatever, and we fragmented ourselves. But this is a solution to that fragmentation in a way, isn't it?
- [35:46]
B
It is. And the thing I like about it is it hopefully will also shift us from AI being an efficiency conversation to a growth conversation. And by the way, I'm not anti efficiency. There is efficiency to be extracted. However, as that value gets extracted, the opportunity to create profitable growth by trading off decisions and saying I actually want to spend less here so I can spend more there because I'm going to get a better return on that and it creates growth faster. That to me is very exciting. Again, not just in marketing, but across different functions in the company so that you responsibly architect the company to be agile and create growth.
- [36:23]
C
I think as you think across big organizations, I'll just speak within marketing and our agency partners. There's so many silos of information and if somebody actually had all the information, they'd Make a better decision.
- [36:35]
B
Exactly.
- [36:36]
C
And today that's done through dashboards and meetings and follow ups or intuition. Sometimes you look at data and you're like, I think there's something missing here. Which by the way, is still an important, it's not gonna go away. Yeah, that's still an important skillset. But what I've noted is, and for me, what's exciting is what if I have a question I now don't need to ask three people. I can sort of ask an agent and get. So again, that's the near term, like, great, I can get the answer. So I'm not bothering somebody. It's an easy answer. But I had no way to access information before. So there's a lot of information locked up in our systems. And then I talk a lot about, and I've talked about for years before the AI era, data literacy. And if you know what's in your data, you can hypothesize different things. If you don't know what's in your data, how could you. So literally I've been obsessed with metadata and tagging and fields and what data are we collecting? You know, about our campaigns, about our work, and, and the average person doesn't have a good understanding of all the aspects of their data. They certainly know performance, data, et cetera. But the more we become, and again, this is all about bringing the work closer to the people doing the work. The more we become familiar and become literate about our data, we can ask better questions and frankly recognize when things don't look right. You know, if you don't know what you don't know, then you've got a
- [37:58]
A
problem that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Chat. I was wondering, you work with lots of different businesses helping implement the kind of change with AI. What's your advice on how to deliver the change? Because I think everyone's going to listen and go, well, of course we want to do more of what you just said before. How do you lead through change?
- [38:15]
B
So I try to avoid the phrase change management as a general rule, but that's a personal preference. I know it still is out there and it's still necessary. And I only do that because I think, I think it's laden with the meaning that that phrase has for so many people, which is that it happens after you've made decisions. And I think we're gonna be in a mode of continuous learning, continuous change, continuous building up, breaking down, rebuilding as the technology continues to roll out. And so we have to become accustomed to that. It needs to be a new muscle. But I think one of the things I like right now, just as a framework, is the notion of, of this deliberate, purposeful system that we're building. So there's really intelligent, top down, I'll call it building that's happening where you're rolling out intelligently in phases, the things that you want to build and by the way, supporting it with the right learning and bringing the people along with that. But I also think you want to unlock the bottom up, unleashing the democratization that unquestionably so much of this AI moment enables for so many people to do things that they just couldn't do before, like what Gail was just talking about. I think we're feeling that in every role in our personal lives and in our professional lives. If you lean in when you experience it, it's exhilarating. And then you want to do more, and then you want to share it with people. So I think there's bottom up, there's top down. And then I call it scale up, which is when people, for example, build an agent that's wonderful. That was bottom up. Or the connectors and skills start to emerge. The notion of sharing it with others when they're vetted, because you don't want everyone sharing everything, because then you end up with a little bit too much cacophony out there, the notion of putting it into a marketplace for people to share. So I call that scale up. So top down, bottom up, and scale up and making sure that all ideas are embraced because there's so much creativity that comes from lots of different sources. So something as simple as a lot of the clients that I've seen are doing something as simple as making sure that they have a means to capture all the ideas that people have for great agents and then sifting through those very systematically just so that the people who are. I want to hone in on this phrase that Gail said. The people who are close to the work, they know best, where the most interesting problems to solve really are. And so the notion that someone from the outside, and I'm going to say like a consultant is going to come in and know what that work looks like is not the right idea. The right idea is to make sure that you're really listening and synthesizing that and. And then we can take that and partner and bring the best of. How do we now look at this at scale and bring the best technology and the best strategic thinking and insights and really apply the AI together with the strategic insights and put that together. But I think those things need to all work together at this moment to drive the change.
- [41:05]
A
And there's some boring solutions to solve. I mean, we had Tarang and Corey from ELF here yesterday.
- [41:10]
B
So inspiring.
- [41:11]
A
It was great, wasn't it?
- [41:11]
B
Oh my gosh. I just want him to write a book, do a podcast and everything else. Listen to the podcast if you haven't already, the other one.
- [41:17]
A
It will be available. It was cool. Great, wasn't it? But it did make me smile when Corey was saying that, you know, most of her team spend eight hours on a Saturday doing their expenses. And she's like, surely AI could solve that. You know, so some of it is about 10.
- [41:30]
B
And she called it a big problem. And then if that's our biggest problem. Wait a second.
- [41:35]
A
Yeah, on the list of problems.
- [41:36]
C
Exactly. There are. We started auditing some of the work done to traffic assets across networks and agencies. We're becoming, we're working of different agencies and networks and somebody said it's, you know, 10 man hours, 10 years of man hours across people to do this and clearly AI is going to take that work away. And that's really exciting. But so there's, there's a lot of inefficiency, let's be honest, in all these systems, you know, for years and years and years and years, we were all told that sold the promise of an integrated marketing stack, Martech stack. And. And for big companies, if you're not a startup, you start with something, there's always technology in play. You inherit things or there's new things and so you can never have that perfect stack. Now we're moving to an era where everything's unbundled, actually, and you have to decide and curate your stack. So I'm excited for this moment where we could start to curate these things and theoretically, if we have the right data infrastructure, the right connectors, et cetera, we will eliminate all this crazy and expenses. Is a great example, is scheduling a meeting. Why does that have to be so difficult? Can't the agents hang around and put it in? You know, so there are boring problems
- [42:52]
B
and exciting problems they both need to solve.
- [42:56]
C
It takes up a lot of additional time and you know, there is a future in which some of these things will just be completely agentic. But including, including in healthcare, you know, we're already seeing. There's a story in the Wall Street Journal where in Utah you're seeing for certain more routine conditions, whether it's cholesterol or diabetes management, prescriptions are being refilled agentically, which to me sounds like heaven, but to some people, sounds like hell. You know, they don't like that idea they want. But for me, it means, oh, well, then my practice, the doctor will be able to spend more time actually talking to me rather than refilling a prescription. But it's, you know, there's both sides.
- [43:35]
A
Yeah. Yeah, I totally get that. You two have worked together for quite a long time, I believe, knowing each other for. For a while. So I thought, Janet, I'd ask you, what makes Gayle such a good cmo and what could other people learn from her?
- [43:47]
B
Oh, there's so many things I love about Gail as a cmo and I've known her in two past roles as well where we work together. I think, first of all, Gail is inspiring and visionary and very future forward. She pushes her team to go ahead of where anyone else is. But what I love also is that she's also hands to keyboard and actually really likes to know how things truly work. And if I can say it, you like to a little bit on that part, which makes it very practical because it's not theoretical and is so outside in. In sourcing all the best and most inspiring people, no matter where they are, for her own intellectual curiosity, but also bringing that in so that the whole team gets into it. And I think if you see Gail's excitement, you're gonna come on board with that. And there's. There's unquestionably, if you're working with Gail, you know that she is going to challenge the status quo, but she's challenging the status quo because she wants to make it better for everyone. And she's so deeply committed to any of the companies where we've been. It's been about the company being better and just deeply committed to creating more value for the company and for the team and for all the people who are working there and making it a better place for all of them to work. So that's.
- [45:04]
C
Those are some of the reasons why I mean that. Very gentle, genuinely. So thank you.
- [45:08]
A
Well, maybe to round off then for both of you, have a think about what is the best bit of advice you've ever been given in your career.
- [45:17]
B
Well, I'll tell you the worst advice I was ever given.
- [45:19]
A
Oh, let's do worst. Yeah, this is fun.
- [45:20]
B
So it was actually, we both worked at Time Inc. And I won't name the name, but someone said to me, your career will be evaluated based on the number of people who report to you. So when you have a lot of
- [45:29]
C
people who report you.
- [45:30]
B
So I'm Just saying, in this future world, if anything, anybody who's trying to evaluate their career based on the number of people, it doesn't matter. And it definitely doesn't matter now. So I love, like, we all need to be super egoless and super light and airy about it, because in this connected world, I think what matters more is the impact and the curiosity that we bring to things and the dynamism with which we actually look at our past legacy and actually abandon whatever we've done and actually reinvent ourselves to the future. People challenge themselves. I think they're the most interesting if you're looking at yourself by the number of people and the headcount that report to you probably the wrong way to evaluate your success.
- [46:10]
A
It's funny because I've often answered that question as I love the Greg Khan quote of what would you do if you weren't afraid? Which is amazing. But you've given me a thought. What would you do if you had no ego? Because actually, how many of our career decisions depend on our ego? Because we want the title the Brat, then a brand name above the door. We are, aren't we?
- [46:29]
B
We are.
- [46:29]
A
But it unlocks a different thought, doesn't it? Say, if you took ego out of the room, room, what decision would you make?
- [46:34]
B
I'm doing it now. I'm working bcg. I mean it. I get to do the. I get to do the work I love. I really do.
- [46:41]
C
I think. You know, it's funny going back to. And I had such a formative and amazing experience working at several of what we would now call legacy companies, or they were in print. But I worked at Conde nast for almost 11 years. And this is all before the Devil Wears Prada. And the Devil Wears Prada, too. But one of the leaders I work for along the lines of what you're saying, like, advice that you sort of question, like, what are you talking about? Said, you're not doing your job if they don't fear you when you walk off the elevator. And I'll never forget that moment because that's just not who I am as a person. I don't like to. I'm not above things and looking to. And I had to contemplate that. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, am I gonna have a career here? Can I be successful here? And it was like a throwaway. It wasn't like a career advice. But it's just that was the world we worked in in those days, and the world has changed. Dramatic. And those organizations ran that way and were very successful. And we learned a lot working in those organizations, and then we learned a lot about the kind of leaders we wanted to be and the ones that we didn't want to be. So I remember being, you know, recoiling when I heard that. And it's just never. Because if people are afraid to tell you what's going on on, then you've lost the room, lost the plot, and probably are not developing the best product, solution, service, et cetera. So the most important thing, and this actually ties back to AI, is to have that dialogue about what's happening and what isn't working. Because if you're just assuming everything's going on and they're not going to tell you because they're afraid of you or don't want to bring. So having that candor and. And that ability to just tell it like it is and have that conversation. So. And I know we've always had that relationship, which, in your new role, you know, I appreciate that, you know, you'll give advice and, you know, I can tell you what I'm trying to achieve and we can have that dialogue.
- [48:45]
B
So I think this moment requires unprecedented curiosity. But I think the word that matters more than anything is humility. And if you're not vulnerable with your partners, with your friends, with your colleagues, with the ecosystem, admitting what you know, what you don't know, what you're trying to work through together, this is a moment where you have to problem solve together, by the way, with technology. I love sitting there and working with technology as part of our team, as we're solving problems. I love working with our clients. But this is that moment where if you think you've got the answer, you're gonna come in and the goal is to be the smartest person the room. It's not going to work well, by
- [49:25]
C
the way, even if you have it next week, it'll change because there's a new announcement like, okay, that's no longer relevant. I got to move over here, so got to be ego at the door.
- [49:35]
A
Yeah, brilliant. Thank you both. That's absolutely perfect way to end. And what an interesting conversation. Thank you both.
- [49:43]
B
Pleasure.
- [49:44]
A
So I hope you enjoyed that episode of Uncensored CMO as much as I enjoyed making it. Now, by the way, I've got a new newsletter, so if you'd like to get my thoughts on the One Thing that I take out from each episode every week, then do subscribe to the One Thing newsletter. I'd really appreciate it. Also, I have another podcast just launched, Uncensored Renegades with the fabulous Corey Marchisoto. She is one of the world's best CMOs. She's an absolute rock star. Every week we pick one topic, spend 20 minutes trying to fix it. So check out that it's in your feed. Uncensored Renegades. And finally, I want to give a huge thank you to my sponsor, System One. They generously provide so much support for this podcast, it would not happen without them. So big thanks and lots of love to System One. I'll see you next time.