← Uncensored CMO
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- [00:00]
A
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO and this limited series with BCG looking at the impact AI is having on marketing. Now, in this episode, I'm going to be joined by Josh Spanier from Google and Lauren Weiner from bcg, and we're going to be looking at how Google are using AI themselves in their marketing. What's going to be changing? And I'm also asking Lauren what their CMO survey revealed about the impact it's having on marketing and what the very best CMOs are doing to to take advantage of this transformation. Fascinating episode. There is a lot to learn here. It is. Lauren from BCG and Josh from Google. Welcome to the show.
- [00:41]
B
Thank you.
- [00:42]
C
Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
- [00:43]
A
It's great to have you. Yeah. And also, Josh, it's nice that you have your own podcast as well, talking to CMOs. So this is kind of quite of a meta conversation.
- [00:51]
C
I'm very intimidated having listened to most of your episodes. I'm a super fan, so. But I feel like I'm learning from the best from my own podcast, Frontier cmo.
- [01:01]
A
Oh, thanks, man. And massive congratulations. I mean, you've had some amazing guests on your show already, and it's an amazing listen.
- [01:08]
C
The power of Google. And then I'm learning along the way.
- [01:10]
A
Brilliant. Well, as you're here, we're talking about AI and how AI can transform marketing and what marketers can learn from that. And Lauren, as well, you've just launched this week a new CMO report as well, haven't you, which is very informative. I think you've launched it this week in Cannes, if I'm not mistaken. Yes.
- [01:25]
B
And this is our third annual CMO survey. And so we not only have a great snapshot of where we are today with AI, but also the trends.
- [01:35]
A
That's really interesting. I mean, one of the questions in my mind is, where are we on the Hype Cycle? Because if you go back two years ago in Cannes, everyone's like, AI is going to become this big transformation. Right. Feels like last year agentic, and we're starting to see what's possible, and this year we're into what's actually changing. Where do you guys feel we're at in terms of the Hype Cycle here?
- [01:57]
C
I'm pretty excited. Right. I've really seen AI starting to be used in interesting and engaging ways. And it feels to me like we're sort of at the end of the beginning. Right. So the first era of AI for me was really being defined by. And I'll say the first three years of this AI journey we've been on, kind of fear, am I losing my job? Uncertainty, what is my job? And sort of economic squeezing. I just have to deliver more for less for my cfo. And the whole mindset has been, what is AI going to do to me? And what I'm seeing now, what I'm seeing and speaking with CMOs and with good marketers around the world, is this sort of mindset shift from that what is AI going to do to me? To more what can I do with AI? And great creative teams are putting out work and inventing new ways of doing things, which I find really compelling and exciting. Now, that is a super positive spin on it. And of course I'm going to put a positive spin on it, but genuinely think that for all the challenges, all the concerns, all the fears, all the worries about AI, which are real, are still there. The potential for doing interesting things is really, really exciting. And I'm seeing that starting to manifest for real here on the beaches of Cannes.
- [03:03]
A
That's exciting. I know in your CMO survey as well, one of the interesting things is I think CMOs have felt AI is something that's being done to them, isn't it? It's like they're having to cope with the consequences, saving cost. But I think what's interesting in your survey is there's a real shift happening where CMOs are a lot more in the driving seat now.
- [03:21]
B
I think that's right. I mean, I think CMOs, half of them are saying that they are in the driver's seat. They're also at a moment where they are getting political capital, they are getting actual investment capital. 43% of our CMOs this year said that they were spending 15 million or more on their AI transformations. That's up from 28% last year. So that's a huge lift. But at the same time, if you look at where they are actually in the transformation, about a third of them are getting points on the board. 20 to 30% cost savings, demonstrable ROI of like, 3x and speed improvements. But a lot of them are still stuck in pilots. And so I think the leaders are really emerging from this group and getting points on the board, but there's a whole group that are still earlier on their journey. So it's much more of a mixed picture than I think this time last year in Cannes.
- [04:16]
A
And mixed in a good way, as in it's moving mixed in a great way.
- [04:20]
B
I think the leaders have emerged and they have financial points that they've made which is going to allow them to continue to get investment. But we have definitely companies out there that haven't made enough moves or still using ChatGPT as a side tool to ask questions versus really using it to transform end to end workflows and demonstrate financial results.
- [04:42]
A
Because I loved your title by the way. From Illusion to reality. And I think that's where we are, isn't it? Is flipping from the promise to actually, you know, what AI can really do for us. I mean Josh, what are you seeing? Because you obviously talk to a lot of businesses.
- [04:55]
C
So there's a couple of ways you can look at this. Google Marketing is a very sophisticated advertising organization and we are quite far down the path of AI transformation. You'd expect that from Google, of course. That said, if you think about this, AI transformation is a 100 meter race. Google Marketing right now I benchmark. We think we're somewhere around meter 12, maybe meter 15 in this 100 meter race. And there's a lot of brands out there, a lot of companies who are further behind than us, but they're around meter 5, meter 8, meter 10. We are all clumped together. It's still so early and there are definitely some companies out there which I think maybe at meter 18 or meter 20, but no one is much more than that. And so one of the things that has been really encouraging to see and hear is sort of we all need to relax in a sense that no one's crap. This, no, no one has the answers. There is no silver bullet. There is no playbook. Exactly. Yet from bcg, from anyone. We're all still learning and formulating and trying to do this. So we're trying things out. So yeah, pilot paralysis, not a great thing, but it's actually a huge way to go. What is very apparent though, and this is really important for anyone listening to hear. I've met with something like 150 senior marketers, maybe 100 CMOs in the past six months. I've met with C suite, CIOs, CEOs. It is abundantly apparent to me the people who are talking the talk versus the ones who are actually walking the walk. And that's the key differentiator. If you as a CMO or senior marketing are not using these tools yourselves in your personal and professional life, it becomes very, very clear in conversations and you kind of, it's getting exposed. That's where you need to lean in. And then the CMOs who are, you can see it flowing into their teams and don't Blame them. Why should you change everything you're doing? If your boss is saying, do as I say, not as I do, you
- [06:46]
A
must be seeing the same. I imagine Lauren, as well, you meet a lot of CMOs, you've done the survey. What's the difference between the CMOs that are getting it right and the ones that aren't getting it right? What are they doing?
- [06:56]
B
Yes, I do think using the tools is important. I also think the CMOs who are getting it right are really thinking backwards from what are the enterprise goals for my company, what are the outcomes I want to achieve, and then what are the big bets I'm going to make versus thinking about the specific tools and how interesting the tools are? And that process of really working backwards, of thinking about how they're going to drive value on the top line and the bottom line of the business, is a key difference. I think that's 1, 2 is the CMOs who are getting it right understand the interdependencies. They've got to be best friends with the cio, they've got to be best friends with the head of product. It is really important that they're working in lockstep because this is a transformation based on technology deeply rooted in product. And the scope of what it means to be a CMO is so much bigger than it was before. It's not just about your brand campaigns and your performance campaigns. It's about how are you showing up in Reddit. And that is deeply related to what your site looks like. It's about your digital customer experience. That's a big lift we saw this year in terms of what's on CMO's mind, and that is very often controlled by product. And so they're very mindful of these interdependencies. And then the third one is, in addition to thinking about what are the bets you're going to make, the CMOs are increasingly thinking about what's my martech stack, what's the state of my data? Can I actually do these things that I want to do from a technological point of view? And so it is that holistic look at the system that the marketers are taking who are getting this right.
- [08:29]
A
And the interesting thing there is that it's a real collaboration job, isn't it? It is. I mean, to use the orchestration phrase, and that gets used a lot with agentic AI, but you're having to manage across lots of different parts of an organization rather than just deliver the marketing output that you might be KPI'd on.
- [08:45]
B
Yes. And Collaboration is a great buzzword, but it's also very time consuming. It means you need to be incredibly generous with your time, despite all the other competing priorities. And it means that you need to be internally focused, probably more than you were previously as a cmo, to make sure that you're getting everything working correctly.
- [09:07]
C
So a lot of the things I've been thinking about is sort of, what's the future of marketing? What's the future of the agency? What's the future of our internal organ structure? And I don't have the answer. I don't think anyone's got the answer yet. But one of the things I really feeling and seeing and it's come through in my own pod, is this notion of moving from sort of outbound narrative and storytelling that's still important and will still always be there. The fundamentals of marketing don't change. You need a brand purpose and vision and all that sort of stuff. But this notion of, to what Lauren's saying of becoming like a brand systems architect, the notion that you can actually see these disparate different disciplines and break down those silos, bring them together and then see, well, here's where an agent can do that role, or here's where a system can do that role, and how you stitch all these things together at scale and at speed is really, really compelling. So this sort of brand system architecture is this sort of new nascent sense of this is what it means to be a CMO in the future. One of the questions which comes up a lot is, do you need to be able to code? I don't think you need to be able to code. You need to be able to vibe code. You have a sense of where these technologies are at. But it's a really interesting and arguably one of the biggest shifts in what the marketer's skill set is, because. And Lauren, I'd love to get your thoughts on this at a certain point. One of the things we're seeing is that product teams feel like they can do marketing because they can build an agent and they can push it out and done right, yes, everybody's a marketer.
- [10:25]
B
Everybody's a marketer.
- [10:26]
C
Everyone's always been a marketer, Everyone's a coder now. Yeah, but. But the question is, is, and I think it's a really important conversation for the industry, the marketing industry, is what is the role of marketing? Are we going to take more of that role and sort of lean in and partner with those other disciplines, or those disciplines going to lean in and take more of what Marketing does. And that's. I think it's up in the air and if you don't take steps, I think it could be trouble.
- [10:49]
A
I think this is exactly the challenge. I did a survey earlier in the year of CMOs, been on the podcast and asked them a lot of questions and one of them was which of the Ps they control now? 92% controlled promotion pay, less than 50% controlled the place P. And when it got to products, it was less than a quarter.
- [11:07]
B
Yes.
- [11:08]
A
So, and then I also asked them, but they had influence over those and it was less than 50%, roughly speaking, across all of those. So as marketers, most marketers don't really control beyond the kind of promotion P which makes this challenge particularly hard, doesn't it?
- [11:20]
B
I think it does. Look, I think we. One of the interesting questions is what's the skill set that a CEO should be thinking about when they're making their future CMO hire? And on the one hand, the core creative skill set is incredibly important because no matter how good these tools are, they're not gonna give you that breakthrough creative idea. They're not gonna be the arbiter of judge and taste and all of those kind of great things. But on the other hand, the science aspect of it, the ability to be super rigorous about measurement, ROI and the ability to manage a portfolio of investment bets to drive growth in your brand is incredibly important. And so you really need a CMO of the future to have the right brain and the left brain. I think that's incredibly important. I also think for CMOs to be super successful, it's advantageous if they've either worked in a startup where they had a much broader scope or they had lateral moves through product and other kinds of fields so they understand how to influence and how to drive growth through those other kinds of functions and disciplines.
- [12:24]
C
I made a prediction earlier this year, not a public facing prediction, so that
- [12:28]
B
there were, oh, we're going to get
- [12:29]
C
a secret, a secret prediction. And it's a negative one. So it's not great. But it was that this year, 2026, there would be a accelerating higher turnover of CMOs. Right. Even more so than in a regular year. Because the thought was at the beginning of the year that a lot of the companies stuck in pilot phase, the cfo, the C suite, would basically say, enough of this. Why are we not seeing larger AI wins and gains and transformation that would accelerate the pressure on the cmo? What's been interesting is that's happened in part, but the people being hired back are not so far deeply technical product nerds. There's actually been a push to. We need people who are brand storytellers, so maybe a slightly younger generation. But I just find it really interesting at Macro trend now this is all my finger in the air sense of it. So I don't really know what's going on. I chatted with someone at Spencer Stewart recently about the hiring process and such, but there's something very interesting happening is the industry vacillates between that technical stuff you think you need versus the brand stuff you absolutely need. Especially in an AI slop feared world.
- [13:32]
B
I think it's. Sorry, I think it's, you know, this is the golden age of slop. Right, right now is what we're seeing with AI. I think we can make it, you know, the golden age of beautiful creative enabled by AI. But I think there's a little bit of ways to go. I think it's a both. And though like, I think a CMO has to be an outstanding storyteller, they also need to understand that there's parts of the story they control and there's parts that will be democratized with Everybody else on TikTok and Reddit and able to contribute to the story. So that's a broader aperture of storytelling than we've seen in the past. But I don't see how a CMO who doesn't understand the operating mechanisms to get this in the field, the importance of measurement, roi, deep data analytics. I don't see how they're gonna make it five years from now.
- [14:20]
C
I agree and I'll name some names in a positive way. So Vineet. Vineet, the CMO over at Chime, he controls. Controls is wrong. What? He's the chief Product officer on the marketing side of things as well as the growth officer and cmo. And they've done some really incredible things, like real case uses of AI. So they get tens of thousands of telephone calls every day. People dialing into their bank who are concerned about their money. These are serious conversations. You care about your money a lot. And they've used generative AI voice technology to basically resolve something like 60 to 70% of those calls without having to speak with a human, which sounds terrifying, but what it really means is, and he's got the data to show it, the customers who call in worried about their money are happier. Higher CSAT scores and their actual people manning their call lines are able to focus on the more intractable, tougher problems. And those people are happier as well because they're getting better. Service. And it's like it's AI actually being used to make the CRM and marketing better. And that's actually. That's really exciting.
- [15:19]
A
It's funny actually. I met Will Godara last year, who's the. He created the world's number one restaurant. He's got an amazing book, Unreasonable Hospitality. And he tells a similar story to that, which is he really resisted automating the bookings process because, no, you must speak to a human. I want to make sure that everyone gets that human touch. And then we ask you loads of questions about you and why you're coming to the restaurant and this kind of thing. And he said he then tried out himself and he was on hold for 20 minutes and he started getting irritated and he realized he didn't have time, he had to go to a meeting and he couldn't do it. And he said, I wish I could book my own restaurant in my own time. And he realized in that case, technology is actually the helpful thing to humanity because it enables you to do it on your terms and get the answer quicker rather than waiting for the human experience.
- [16:02]
B
Yeah, look, I think call centers are one of the first areas that are ripe for disruption. We've worked with a financial services company to help them use technology to scrape the call center, identify customers that were displeased, and translate that into scripts for actually financial advisors to then make phone calls to their clients with a summary of what the concerns are and suggested responses. So it's an area that is super ripe for disruption and again bleeds into marketing because what is that script? What is that message that you're going to say to your consumer that should be consistent with the narrative that you're seeing throughout your other forums.
- [16:43]
A
I wanted to build on this actually, because. Interesting parallel to Covid. So during COVID of course, lots of CMOs were being let go, the tenure was reducing, and everyone was in a panic about what the future of the CMO role looked like. There's some really interesting research done that actually in a crisis, the organization looks to the cmo. They want leadership, they want strategy, they want a narrative. They want to know what the kind of roadmap looks like. They want to know how we're going to get out. And I think sometimes we've got the script the opposite way around. It's like in moments of transformation, like we're in. Who is the leadership role in the organization? It's usually the cmo. It should be the cmo. And it was interesting about the survey as they looked at CEO expectations of cmo. And actually in a crisis, the CEO is looking to CMO to step up and fill that, kind of fill the void that would otherwise be there.
- [17:29]
B
I think that's right and I think that's the moment we're in. There was a lot of conversation I think last year around cost and productivity and we're seeing that shift. About 40% of the CMOs that we surveyed, over 300 of them said yes when they're talking to their CEO, it's still primarily about cost, but 60% said it was about growth as well as cost. And so the thing we're talking to cmos right now is about self funded growth. Certainly you need that investment upfront because Martech and data and all that is expensive. But then as you get on your journey, how do you make it self funding? And that really flips the conversation and provides the way for other functions to look at marketing and say, oh, actually that is an amazing way to do self funded growth, to shape the talent in a different kind of way, to more fully utilize technology. And I want to mirror that in my function. So in many of the organizations we work with, marketing is now the leading function. It's really at the vanguard. So I think it's an exciting place to be a cmo.
- [18:30]
A
Very encouraging that because I think you say conversations flipped, hasn't it, from how much can I save to how much can I grow?
- [18:36]
C
Yes, 100%. And one of the challenges is I think AI has been seen like the big bad wolf, right? It's super scary, it's coming for your job. But actually one of the challenges you have in marketing is like good special effects. You go to the movies or you see a TV show, when there's great special effects, you don't notice. You're just drawn in and absorbed by it. When there's bad special effects like that Coke ad, right. It becomes a negative story, right? So I don't know if I can say that I drink a lot of diet Coke. So you know, I feel like I'm a member of the company.
- [19:05]
A
We're obviously the same age because I'm a diet Coke drinker.
- [19:09]
B
I like Coke Zero. I like the packaging. It just feels like really retro nostalgic.
- [19:14]
C
I ding their creative ad. I'm very sorry Coke, but it's only when it's bad that you sort of notice. Meanwhile, AI is kind of transforming the world at a very high level. Google has technology, we work with hundreds of cities around the world to basically use AI to smooth out traffic lights. The Combination of basically getting traffic lights to change their sequencing to save on fuel of people waiting at traffic lights is literally saving hundreds of millions of barrels, gallons of oil or whatever a year in lower emissions. I mean, AI is doing amazing things. And on the marketing side, I'm starting to see some really fun uses of AI. Right, so can I share one with you? Because I just really like this, right? It seems small, but I think it's like indicative of you can think bigger. So I'm going to give you two, right? First one is sort of very much at a brand level. It's the World cup right now, 40 or 50 years ago, Pele, the world's most famous footballer, scored what has been called the best goal of his career. The best goal of his career. There were no video cameras, there were no TV cameras there, right? And Google team, working with the Pele family, with the Pele foundation, and the Pele family went and interviewed everyone who was there. There were two, as I understand it, pictures taken of that goal happening. Just two pictures. And then using Gemini, using AI, they've recreated the goal as it would have happened, validated against all people who are there. And it's going to be released by the time this episode's out, it'll be out in the world. I saw a little bit of this. It made me cry. I'm a salty old British guy and literally seeing this thing and it's going to be a great brand moment for Google or Gemini because the technology, but it's a great for everyone. It's this fun, good thing. So that's one just really great example. The other one is not a Google marketing thing, but I thought it was just really clever. So it's for the Salvation Army. So the Salvation army is a charity thrift store in the United States and they need to get people come in and buy stuff and they have this really good insight, right? Because they don't have stock like other companies. It's not like you see someone with something and they can go in the back room and get you the next one. It's one of one of one. Every single time someone's dropped off a leather jacket, someone buys a leather jacket, it's gone. You can't go, can I have the same leather jacket? That fear of missing out came this really powerful insight. So it was an agency called Barclay obp. Omp. Barclay, right. Working with the Salvation army and they did this thing where they connected the Salvation Army's point of sale software to their website where some associate had scanned whatever the item was for their sort of inventory logging just with a janky picture of it and then that item would sell. And then they pushed out, connected their point of sale to Nanobanana, Google's image generation technology to create a really beautiful version of that product. A leather jacket, a lamp, whatever it might be. They geotargeted around the store location to a couple of miles and then they used demand gen Google's ad tech to push it out there. So you're scrolling on your phone and you see this thing saying hey, this amazing leather jacket, it's been and gone. Get down Salvation army, find the next one. Really clever, really connecting all these multi technologies AI enabled this. You couldn't do this before AI came along and it drove massive footfall into the Salvation army stores which is a good thing. But you don't know that it's AI but it's happening. And I think we all have to think more creatively about how we can both move faster, find interesting insights and then develop around that. It's really fun.
- [22:28]
B
I love what you're saying there. I mean I think we talked about the golden age of slop and this is like the golden age of creativity with real time sensing of what's happening in the market, with personalization and then you know, driving measurable results. With the Salvation army one, I think the Peli one is just a beautiful nostalgic one.
- [22:45]
C
It's going to be, they're going to put a. If you want to have a little cry, watch the documentary. But it's just that it's AI is going to do amazing things to our culture and our society and yes, there are consequences and we work through those. But I really want to be optimistic that the glass is half full.
- [23:00]
A
I love that. I mean similar on the World cup theme, I loved Adidas ad with Timothee Chalamet where they recreated this iconic story of this three on three football game that happened in the sort of suburbs of New York and it's kind of this iconic football story and they brought Zinn Zidane back and David Beckham back but they brought them back as their younger playing selves from their early 20s. And it's like you're looking at going is that really David Beckham with a buzz haircut from sort of the early 2000s. So again, technology in service of an amazing idea. An amazing story, well told, beautifully crafted. Is incredible, isn't it?
- [23:39]
C
It really is. Can I just say, I think David Beckham is a tiny bit overexposed. He's in so many different campaigns Right now, at least in the US So between his watches and all the other stuff he's doing, it's a little sus.
- [23:53]
A
Well, maybe that's where. That's the genius of it. Yeah. It's the fact that it's not David Beckham today, is it?
- [23:58]
C
Yeah, I guess that's the thing what makes that work. Yeah. One of the things that how you go about making a change inside of organization is I think has been really important for us inside of Google. Right. You can take the horse to water, can you make it drink? And there's been so much fear in the creative community, so much concern about AI and what we found is when we hit a couple of home runs or even just a couple of singles or doubles in baseball parlors, it changes the mindset. So last fall we had a brief to do a commercial around search around Thanksgiving. And the creative team came up with a whole bunch of concepts. But the one they really liked was to create a Nick Park Wallace and Gromit style Aardmark anovation film. And it served the purpose of what they're trying to do. They loved it. They couldn't make it. The cost of it was just prohibitive and the time cost, you know, you can't. It takes too much money to do stop motion animation in that way in a dynamic business world. We're operating it. And I guess we published inside of Google this sort of creative report this week in Canada as well of speaking to a whole bunch of creatives and every creative the world over has their entire career had a sort of mini accountant on their shoulder. On the back of their mind, they know what it costs to build an idea, to shoot an idea, to do something. So they've always limited their creativity and we're never going to be able to do that. Right. In this instance they had this idea we were able to make. They were able to make, not me. They were able to make this animated film featuring a Thanksgiving turkey escaping from the, you know, the Thanksgiving drama where turkeys get eaten in the US in six weeks for a very low amount of money relatively it wasn't possible before. And when the creative team seemed like, oh, any idea anything? What is the Adidas line? Impossible is nothing.
- [25:41]
A
Impossible is nothing.
- [25:42]
C
One of my favorite taglines of all time. But when our creative teams, when our media teams, when our teams identify, oh, I can do something I've never been out done before, it's really exciting. And finding those two or three or four north stars within the organization, just light bulb going off changes the Game. It's been really powerful for us.
- [25:58]
B
Yeah, I'd say one other thing on that point. I think we have the personalization book in front of us right here, and it really is an ability to do personalization at a scale never been done before. We worked with a restaurant chain and they were able to put out creative that personalized the menu by region, by demo, by zip code. In terms of, like, you know, do you want to put out, like, is this the kind of a market where it's like fried chicken or grilled chicken, what color, who's sitting in the living room, what's the profile, what do they look like? All of that can be changed on a dimension. So personalization, I really do think this is a moment where the power of creative to drive true connection. Because before, what you had with personalization is you had the mechanics of it. You had data AI, machine learning, so you could do a next best action, but the message wasn't able to change at that same kind of variation. So I think from that point of view, there's a real ability to connect to consumers at that deep emotional core level, both in mass with the examples you were given, but also at a super targeted level on their exact food preferences.
- [27:05]
A
Doesn't always go right. I mean, I remember a couple of years ago, you did your Dear Sydney commercial, didn't you? Which I actually thought was great. I mean, it was relevant to the Olympics. You had a girl writing a letter to, you know, an Olympian, but using Google, right, to kind of come up with a letter. And that got a bit of a backlash. Now, I was intrigued because I did put it through System One and it actually scored very well. And there was a small amount of criticism of the use of AI, but not a lot. But it seemed to become a bit of a lightning rod kind of conversation at the time, didn't it, about how we use AI.
- [27:37]
C
Yeah. So it turns out we're not perfect like every organization, like every team, and we make mistakes. And I think in that one we got the tone wrong. Right. We didn't read the room and we didn't have the checks and balances in place to go. Hold on a second. Interestingly, we'd been running that through some sort of research, and we'd spotted there was could be some chatter on it, but we kind of ignored it. Right. And we pushed, pushed this thing out there and we quickly got the blowback, and we recognized that the blowback, I think, was correct. And so we pulled the ad and, you know, you learn and you move on. One of my favorite aphorisms at the moment came from a peloton instructor of all people. But it's we never lose, we learn, right? So in this instance, we put an ad out in the world, it wasn't quite right, so we learned from it. And there are things you can do. One of the things that I do not the whole of Google marketing is I will take an asset, I'll take a piece of work and I'll run it against synthetic audiences. Mandatory now to basically say how are different audiences going to respond to this? And that's actually been incredibly helpful, incredibly cost efficient way to do it. Just get a sense check. We all live inside our own bubbles and sometimes those bubbles give us blinkers and we miss things. But there's going to be more. One final thing though here, John. That was a year and a half ago, two years ago, and we are at a different moment in culture and society and there is more comfort level with certain things. But so it's evolving. That's what makes this kind of tricky.
- [28:58]
A
And I think that's an important point because I think that was timing and context at a time and often with backlashes, you could do the same thing a week later and there'll be something else in the news that takes over and it doesn't become a thing. So some of it's the vagaries of how the algorithm works on that particular day.
- [29:14]
B
Some of it is. I think one of the transformations we're going to go through though is just in the same way that advertising went from more gut to really data driven in terms of what works. I think we're going to see that with creative. You mentioned synthetic twins. I think that's going to become kind of standard best practice to rapidly run any kind of creative through testing to see what sort of reactions you're getting by different audiences, demos, regions.
- [29:39]
C
I agree and I'm a little conflicted by all this, but as long as the tail doesn't wag the dog, right directional, right different inputs and it's the true of there are so many factors. This is one of the wonderful things about marketing. It's still so unknown and I'm told that we know like 1% of what we need to know about the human brain, yet we have brain surgeons, we are the brain surgeons and marketing, as it were, that nothing is absolute. There is no silver bullet, there is no panacea. You have to test, learn, experiment, chart a new path and then learn from it and keep going. That's what I'm really enjoying yeah.
- [30:14]
A
In your survey there's quite an impactful statistic. 94% of CMOs said the expectations had been raised about what they were going to deliver, but it wasn't met with increased resource. So there is a challenge, isn't there, with all this technology that actually particularly the CMO is more is expected but less is provided. How do CMOs cope with that challenge?
- [30:37]
B
I think for CMOs, again it's really important to talk about this notion of self funded growth. You do need investments, dollar investments for Martech data. That's not going to go away. But they have to be looking at their entire ecosystem and thinking about the places where they can get more productive to fund the places that they need to make investments. And that's on top of thinking about, you know, getting the points on the board with marketing ROI and increasing the speed of campaigns and all those other kinds of things. But we've seen that again, the leaders have gotten much better at doing that this year and that's why they're pulling farther ahead. The group that I worry about is the ones that are not using the tools yet to drive meaningful change in speed, roi, productivity. Because the productivity is absolutely essential to be able to fund these other kinds of investments.
- [31:33]
A
Yeah, I love the way you're looking at it. Think of it as a reinvestment.
- [31:37]
B
It's a reinvestment, it's self funded growth.
- [31:40]
C
So I'm agreeing with Lauren, as always. I also think it's a little unfair that pressure being put on marketers and CMOs. In all honesty, what is the phrase, you have to break some eggs to make an omelet. And the change that we are going through, the different skill sets, it's not an easy thing to pull this off. I'm not saying you need to let marketers hire hundreds of new people, not saying that. But it's just you do need to fund some of this. And I think one of the things we've learned inside of Google marketing is we do largely zero based sort of planning and all the rest of it. But you have to allow for real investments, even just in compute. Right. Someone's got to pay for that. Compute. That's got to be sort of budgeted in there. But I kind of always go back to, I feel like, like references from the 90s. You know, it's just where I went to college and where I grew up, it feels a little bit like Tom Cruise, A Minority Report. So in that movie there was that one seminal scene where Tom Cruise is standing in front of these screens and he's waving his hands and data is being manipulated and stuff's happening. It's like this magical vision of technology that Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise come up with that's still not possible today. But I often feel like the C suite of companies think that's what AI is and thinks that why aren't marketers more sophisticated, more advanced and more sort of knowable and all these things. And you know what? That was a made up movie. Get that frame out of your mind. It's not that easy. If you're going to actually power AI, you need to give the, I guess the good grace and to try and experiment and actually fund some of it. Now I agree with you completely. You need wins along the way. And the easiest way to have wins along the way is productivity. So an example where we have actually found productivity gains is translation transcreation. We operate in 150 markets around the world, right? We are spending a significant amount of money, tens of millions of dollars translating all the ass we are making around the world, right? Using AI, we built a self serve translation technology which is faster, cheaper and we've actually reduced our cost of translation bound by a factor of 10. Right? So if we were spending $10 million, we're now spending a million dollars. Our marketers are happier because it's actually quicker and better, the technology is better and actually we validated actually performs hard, faster and better. And our CFO loves it because that's a real tangible win.
- [33:56]
B
That's a great example.
- [33:57]
C
And that gives us then the license to go. Okay, so now we're experimenting here. But don't forget we've done this bit already to actually buy the goodwill along the way.
- [34:04]
B
Yeah, and John, just one clarification point. So 43% of CMOs have said that they're investing 15 million or more. So they are getting capital investment for again the underlying infrastructure. It's just that they're not getting dramatic increases in the headcount and those types of ongoing annual expenses.
- [34:25]
C
It's one of my. Okay, I'm old enough as well to have a favorite slide. So my favorite slide of all time is a. It's a. On the left hand side of the slide there's a line like up until the right. Right. The headline is what people think success looks like. And on the right hand side it's the same line but it's like incredible ball of spaghetti, right? It still comes out and it's like what success actually looks like. That's what this is happening right now. And yeah, one of the incredible things for all of us is we are currently in the most fertile, febrile, whatever the right words are, decade of transformation. It's exhausting and scary, but also incredibly exciting. So that's the thing a lot of our stakeholders don't get. They think it's up until the right easy peasy. Why aren't you just using AI Solution, add AI. The reality is it's two steps forward, three steps back, two steps forward again. It's very, very messy and that's painful. And part of that communication to your cfo, to your cio, to your CTO is actually bringing them along the journey in terms of, hey, we did that whole project with you and your team and it failed because of this. Don't blame us, work with us, partner
- [35:27]
A
with us to actually get really important point on culture. That though, isn't it? This kind of test and learn culture improvement rather than wait for perfection. What do you find from BCG perspective on this?
- [35:38]
B
I would say like every transformation is hard and different ages have called for different kinds of transformations. So AI is just the latest transformation and I really would lead with the transformation even versus the AI because what we find is 70% of getting this right is people, process, model culture, as you say, 20% of it is tech and 10% of it is getting the algorithms right. When it comes to people, I think it's a mix of holding people radically accountable, but also deep empathy. This is really, really hard. And what we find is the organizations that are able to navigate the change, understand that blend, they really sort of understand the behavioral science of change as well as the mechanisms. It's not enough to just have a transformation office and your projects and your rigor. It's important when the hearts and minds of the people to make sure they feel like they have actual agency, they're not just being rubber stamped to take their pulse in a quantitative way of how they're feeling, how are they doing and and to make sure they understand what's in it for them versus just what are they going to lose. Those are a few of the kind of important emotional principles along the way.
- [36:50]
A
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
- [36:51]
C
So Lauren, I've got your input. So I'm here at Can. I'm ex agency. I've been on the client side now for 15 years. I guess I still have a soft spot for the agency, but we work with a lot of agencies and the role of agencies in AI world. We have been going back and forth and you know, hybridization and all this sort of stuff. And it's. I've come down to the view that a couple of things are going on. One is we're kind of evaluating agencies using our old models of thinking. What have you done for me lately? Why are you so expensive? But then what the agencies are trying to do is actually bring fresher, newer thinking about transforming their ways of working and almost up leveling where they contribute instead of focusing on a campaign which is at the end of the process actually being higher upstream. And when we enable that, when we work with wpp, when we work with our other agencies and when they do that, we see such transformative results. And AI is I think, a pathway for agencies to have a fresh lease of life and less be the production workhorses that they sort of been. And then they get paid for that.
- [37:53]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great point. I do think that leading marketers are also thinking about how do they rewire and revamp the relationships with our agencies. The cost plus model is not one that works in this time where like it time, whose time? The agent's time, the person's time, like that model doesn't work. So the relationships need to be more strategic, more based on outcomes, outcomes that ladder up to enterprise value and are completely consistent. So they have to be part of the system for it to work. And I do think there's a real part for agencies in this journey. I think they're on their own AI transformations, just as I think there's a real role for collaboration with hyperscalers and all of the other partners. I think this is a point in time where the interdependencies between all the players in the ecosystem are very real and need to be thought through and reshaped to find that collaboration spot so that everybody can perform at the highest level with AI.
- [38:51]
A
Now, Josh, earlier you were making a prediction. Given everything you see from where you sit today, the people you talk to, what you know about Google, what would be your prediction for this time next year? What we'll be talking about or what will have changed, do you reckon?
- [39:06]
C
So I'm hopeful that the fundamentals of marketing are not changing like always, but also like never before. The like always will continue. Right? Insights, creativity, ideas, they do really, really matter and they can continue to matter. Everything is getting faster, I will say that. So the ability to move faster, to be connected into the technology, to enable that at the leverage of what your idea is and what your brand positioning is, I think is really, really important. My hope is, and I'm going to say the positive side, I think that doing lots of things, lots of places to people poorly is not particularly helpful. Clear focus, clear strategic vision, clear insights, focus approach to all of that. So I think there's going to be a tightening up and actually a almost a bringing in of marketing discipline in the right frame of that. That's what I'm really, really hoping. If there isn't. The flip side of that is I think you're going to see both the sort of the AI slop and messiness, but I think you're going to see a higher and higher turnover and worst case, a questioning of whether marketing should be broken up and put into other disciplines. So we have to get this right.
- [40:13]
A
I love your perspective because in a way where the barrier to entry becomes lower and lower, the fundamentals become more and more important because you haven't got the moat of the past to look after you now, you now need to get it right.
- [40:25]
B
Right.
- [40:26]
A
Yeah. Well, maybe to finish up, one question I like to ask on this at the end of every episode is the single best piece of advice you've ever been given and I'd love to hear yours. So maybe Lauren, if you're happy to go first.
- [40:39]
B
Absolutely. Single biggest piece of advice is to take risks big and small and take them every day so that you get used to living with the discomfort and being in a constant stage of learning something new. Love that.
- [40:53]
A
The comfort with being uncomfortable.
- [40:55]
B
Comfort with being comfortable.
- [40:56]
A
That's good.
- [40:57]
C
Okay, so my single best piece of advice came from a gentleman named Derek Robson. He was the co CEO of Goodbye Silver Scene and Partners went on to become the CEO of ideo. And he said, hire people smarter than you.
- [41:12]
B
Good one.
- [41:13]
C
Hire people smarter than you. And he just explained to me that their brilliance will reflect on you and become your brilliance. And the worst possible thing you do as a manager is to, you know, try and tread down or have, I guess, dumb people. That served me incredibly well. The teams who have, you know, they make me look good. I wouldn't be here if the teams who I'd hired weren't way better than me. What they do love that.
- [41:36]
A
I think Branson has a similar perspective, doesn't it? Hire great people, then get out of their way.
- [41:40]
B
Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, right. It's a talent portfolio, right?
- [41:43]
A
Yeah.
- [41:44]
B
You hire, hire the best and brightest people, but also hire people that culturally mesh with each other and make sure that that becomes the fabric of your culture.
- [41:53]
C
Yeah. So John, I want to ask you, where is marketing going to be in a Year's time.
- [42:01]
A
We live in a golden age of marketing knowing, but we don't live in a golden age of marketing doing which is a problem. And I think we're at a bit of a crossroads where this could either be the best thing that's ever happened to marketing. And actually I like your fundamental point that actually where we are today is marketing is going to get exposed for good and for bad and AI is exposing it and the good will rise and the bad will just be exposed even more. So I think we're going to see a few brands absolutely clean up and a few great marketers do astonishing things, but they'll be the minority.
- [42:43]
C
That makes sense.
- [42:43]
A
Bit pessimistic.
- [42:45]
C
You're British, so that's okay. What we haven't had yet, I think in the industry is if you go back, there have been these, you know, so the BMW films. Yeah, right. The subservient chicken from Burger King. Right. There have been these moments where a certain piece of work has come to represent as a transition some of the DTC brands and sort of the emergence of liquid death, for example. So we haven't had that for AI yet. And so I would love to find, I'd love to keep talking about what is that thing which is going to transcend and become the North Star for the industry of. Oh, I want to. That's what it is. We haven't got that yet. And so it's a little uncertain.
- [43:19]
A
And I think to build on the point as well in the CMO server recently ran the most scary statistic was only 23% of CEOs said that they could play back the marketing strategy. So marketers have not done a very good job of marketing themselves. So I think marketers really quickly need to get on the front foot, understand how they use technology, you know, create clear visions, bring the organization with them, learn how to collaborate. But we've got to be better at demonstrating the value that we create in organisations.
- [43:49]
B
I think that's right. I think the complicated part is the creativity that you can see the visible part is critical. It's just only one part of it and part of this next journey that we need to see with our, you know, with marketing companies over the next year is about the invisible part. It's redoing the operating system, the workflows, the behind the scenes relationships with agency, with tech. So it's the part that you don't necessarily see that is going to be make or break. In addition to like you, I have a much greater aspiration for the level of AI driven, creative. But it's what you see, but also what you don't see underneath the surface that's going to be combined to drive success.
- [44:30]
A
I think that's why I want to dig into the how so much. Because, you know, you might go to the quas and you see the moldy whopper and you know, in a massive poster as you walk down the stairs and think, wow, that's amazing. But what were the conditions that enabled an organization to do something so radical like that? Which is a bit of a crazy thing to do, right? But you've got to ask, how was that possible? Why did they get behind it? What were the conditions and what got to the.
- [44:54]
B
Yes, exactly that. And also, if it is a phenomenally interesting story and campaign, but it has nothing to do with the CEO's enterprise goals, then it is just a beautiful campaign. It's a piece of art. What we need is beautiful stories, art that win the hearts of consumers, that are readable by agents and drive enterprise value.
- [45:17]
C
The funny thing is the rest of my can, I'm meeting 15 customers at Google talking about the how of our AI transformation, what we've actually tactically done to actually enable transformation. I'll have to come back and fill you in, Do.
- [45:31]
A
Honestly, I think that's where we're at at this point in time.
- [45:34]
B
It's about the how.
- [45:35]
A
Everyone's sold on the promise. We bought the business case, now how do I do it?
- [45:38]
B
How do we do it?
- [45:39]
C
Yeah, we need house studies, not case studies.
- [45:43]
A
Well said. Well, on that bombshell, that sets us up for the next next conversation, isn't it?
- [45:48]
B
Well, looking forward to it. Thank you so much.
- [45:50]
A
Great to have you.
- [45:51]
C
Thank you, John. Thank you, Lauren.
- [45:52]
B
Great to be here.
- [45:53]
A
So I hope you enjoy that episode of Uncensored Stuff, 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 top, 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.