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Uncensored CMO
Why creativity matters more than ever in the age of AI - Adobe CMO, Lara Balazs
00:41:15
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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 One 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 Uncensored cmo. Now, in this episode, I am talking to the CMO of Adobe, Lara, and she joins me to talk all about the big change that they are going through. Now, she has got some previous in this because before she was at Amazon, she was also at Nike and at Visa. She's got lots of experience about what it takes to manage serious change. This is a fascinating conversation about how marketing can sit in the driver's seat transforming an organization using the power of AI, but in service of a bigger mission. This fascinating conversation. Here it is. So, Lara, welcome to Uncensored cmo.
- [01:21]
B
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
- [01:23]
A
Now, I thought yesterday I did a talk in the Palais called the Startling Power of Surprise.
- [01:28]
B
Yes.
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A
So I thought it would be of fun just to ask you, is there anything about you that people might be surprised to learn?
- [01:34]
B
Oh, perhaps that I've actually, I've done two marathons. I never wanted to do even one marathon, but I was signed up for a half and in Vancouver, Canada, actually, and I go out, I was going to do half of the, you know, 26.2 miles. And I thought, you know what, I'm just going to keep going. And I. But I. Cause they had a full marathon as well. And I kept running and then I thought, this is going to take forever. So I just ran as fast as I could. And because of that, I qualified for Boston. What? The Boston Marathon. And then my friend said, you know, you qualified for Boston. And I didn't even really know what that meant. And so I ran the Boston Marathon because if you qualify for Boston, you have to run Boston. And it was absolutely fantastic and such an experience.
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A
Had you trained for half? I had.
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B
I had trained for a half. But then I did start running longer distances because I thought, oh, a half will go even better if I've trained For longer distances. You know, this was a long, long time ago. I will say it was my younger self that I'm talking about. And so I had put some, you know, I put the miles in, you put the reps in, as they say. But I really did not go out to run the fall.
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A
It does show the power of human potential though, doesn't it? Because you plan to do half and you ended up doing twice what you set out to do.
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B
Yeah, in preparation. You know, I really wanted to get the, I wanted to do the half so well because I thought it would be the only half that I would ever do, let alone a marathon.
- [03:11]
A
Now we're recording this here in Cannes and I know CMOs are a competitive bunch, right. And I basically spent all week, breakfast, lunch, dinner, talking to CMOs about their experience in Cannes. And just to give you a compliment, you come up or Adobe comes up, I should say more often than not, in terms of who do you admire in terms of activation, it appears you are everywhere. So what's, you know, in a very competitive short distance, which the quasi is a lot of people competing for attention, how do you manage to stand out amongst all the competitors?
- [03:46]
B
Yeah, well, thank you for the compliment and it means a lot. I mean part of that is we and my job and my team markets from everyone from business professionals to students to individuals to creators, aspiring creators, and everyone's a creator today, all the way to the biggest enterprises in the world. And all of those people are here. And so we have to think about how do we have the red thread, no pun intended, with our beautiful Adobe Red. But how do we have a red thread while still speaking to those audiences? And you know, I have a wonderful team. I just get to represent the work they do. But with that it, you know, you, you want to show up with a end to end story, which is from idea to impact is what we're doing here, which is now the power of creativity plus marketing plus AI kind of magic across all of that and showing up in all the spaces. One really interesting story too is across Le cresset, we create 150 pieces of assets, static assets, 170 films and then there's over 150 aspect ratios that go into. When you have to create for all these different sizes across the entire tapestry here and now with AI those aspect ratios, which is not what you wake out of the but oh, I just want to resize images all day. If you're a creative, that is all done by AI and our Firefly AI all in one Studio. So, you know, you're able to have fun and create the imagery you want to create because you're freed up now to do that. And I'm so lucky because we use our tools.
- [05:32]
A
Amazing. Well, it's having impact, so well done and it's impossible to miss if you're here.
- [05:37]
B
Yeah. And just we now have a creator beach too, with Lions, and so we're the headline sponsor and so we're able to have creators come into our space and use our tools and give us feedback. It's just phenomenal.
- [05:49]
A
Love that. Yeah, well done, well done. Now, I noticed you were named in the Forbes influential CMO list in 2024. I'm curious to know what makes a CMO influential and how do you do it?
- [06:01]
B
Well, it's our teams. Whenever I get any kind of, you know, I'm humbled to get an accolade, an award, I always say I am really standing on the shoulders of my team and I really, really mean that. And I so to recognize them. And it's building, so therefore it's building great teams. And then underneath that is given how much change is happening in marketing and, you know, the fundamentals remain the same, but the technology has shifted from, you know, it was DOS at one point, you know, then we went from on prem to cloud and we went from desktop to mobile. All these massive changes in now AI that requires disrupting yourself. And so having teams, be learners and enjoy the curiosity of life is really what's underneath that. And so I am so humbled that be getting the accolades, but it's really the teams now.
- [07:00]
A
You've had a fascinating career and worked in some amazing places at times of incredible change. Amazon, for example, Nike or Visa. These are businesses going through rapid growth, facing rapid challenges at the same time. And now it's Adobe. What kind of lessons have you learned about kind of coping with the kind of change you talked about? So what would your advice be, let's say to CMOs, about how to manage through rapid change?
- [07:22]
B
Yeah, disrupting yourself, reinventing yourself, reinventing your teams. Trying, trying, trying every new offering out there. You know, at Adobe in technology, we call it dog fooding. You dog, you eat your own product. Yes. Or my boss, Shantan Orion, who's the CEO of adoi, says, drinking your own champagne. I've been talking about it here as drinking.
- [07:52]
A
That's not great on the dog food.
- [07:53]
B
Well, no, but. Or here you can drink your own, I guess, but we call it Adobe on Adobe or we're customer zero because I'm marketing B2C and B2B and B2B. We're co creating the tools. My team is sitting with the engineers, the product folks, giving feedback in real time and often building the tools. So for example, and so that's key. But just an example is as everything has moved to a gentic search and there is still SEO, but there's GEO now or AEO depending on which acronym. My team was seeing search come down on some of our key terms and we realized everything's showing up in LLM searches and so we were starting to build an LLM optimizer and then we started finding there were companies out there. SEMrush we just acquired and now we have a unified platform to do both SEO and GEO search. So, you know, you can find out what, where is your brand being discovered? Because discovery has totally changed in this world. And brand discovery, if you're not showing up, all the marketing you're doing, you know, it's game over. So we have now brand visibility which allows us to do that. But that came because my team, Dog Foods is customer zero, Adobe on Adobe, whatever, you know, term you want to use. And that's the magic in it. Yeah. So this, I mean this role is really unique.
- [09:33]
A
I did actually meet someone at the sales director at Mars Pet Care Ones and they do do that. You know, they go in and present the, the new dog food range and they'll sit there and eat it.
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B
Well, there you go. That's really dog food, your dog food. Right.
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A
I have evidence that that does actually. Okay, well, I think I might join a champagne company. Drinking your own champagne is far nicer.
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B
That would make a long day, but there we go.
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A
Now you've been at a dope a couple of years and you, you've joined at an incredible time. I mean, you know, talk about inflection points of, you know, radical change. What's your sort of plan and vision for Adobe and how you're going to, you know, what did you want to do when you joined?
- [10:09]
B
So I was really lucky to be a customer. And what's interesting about Adobe is you tend to think about it how you originally got to know it. So I make my kids, one of them was the head of the yearbook in his high school and so he learned indesign and that's how he thinks about Adobe. A lot of people think about it from Photoshop. You know, that might have been their first interaction with us. And for me it was being a customer on the enterprise side. So I use them at Intuit across the brands There and so we all had different, you know, you have a different. It's an empty vessel but at the same time the one thing in the DNA that is so unique to us and you have to find that point of difference. You have to know your value prop and what makes you so different and especially in what can be a sea of sameness. And for us, that DNA of creativity and creating, you know, we really believe that everyone is a creator, just like Nike believes, if you have a body, you know you're, if you haven't, if you have a body, you're an athlete, no matter what. I mean, we believe everyone should be able to create. And so when I came in we had a mission statement and, and usually a mission statement, you kind of leave that alone. But I already knew to motivate my marketing team that I wanted and it is incredible but it should always be the most modern agile innovative marketing team in the planet because we're Adobe so you know, we should embody that and do that. I needed to have something so inspirational as a North Star and a mission does that so and you know, this is part of our craft is having both the rational and the emotional come together to create that magic. And so working with the executive team, which changing a mission statement is not for the faint of heart, working with them, I got the permission to do this and then bringing them along and my team helping me and others all throughout the company created a new mission which is empowering everyone to create. And that is powerful because you can create a company, you can create an analysis, a campaign or you can create, you know, what's in your mind's eye. Now anyone can do that with a prompt if you're using Firefly or all in one AI studio or Photoshop because you know, you may love the layers and the power and the precision and that still exists. So you know the idea that everyone should be able to create is so key. So that that was. And it's true to the DNA of the company. So it, what you want to do is you want to grab the legacy and be true to the original beginnings of the brand that, that are so part of the core. You know your why, you know what is your why all the way to though future proofing and that will no matter what, no matter what technology exists, the idea that we create as humans and that's a human visceral need will always exist and we believe that and a human is involved.
- [13:34]
A
You've touched on something that most marketers I think get wrong is in the desire to reinvent and do the new. They forget that the answer to the question probably lies in the past. And tapping into what is already true, your job is maybe to rediscover it or retell it or bring it to life, but the amount of people that just change, and you lose all the benefit of the latent legacy that people already have, the impressions they have, the things they associate with you already.
- [13:58]
B
Yeah. And I'll tell you, that's one of the beauties of knowing the founder story. So in the case of Nike, you know, you have Bill Bowerman and you have, you know, Phil Knight. Those are the stories you tap into for the inspiration. So in our case, our founder, you know, John Warnock, was one of our founders, and he was just, you know, a guy who was involved, and he actually worked at Xerox and then knew that there was an important capability in printing and fonts. And so, you know, fonts are part of our background, and that dates all the way back to the founder. And there's an aesthetic and a quality there that that's what we tap into every day. And so you can't lose that because then you're reinventing something that you didn't need to when there's so much other things that are now you have to reinvent because the technology is changing all the time.
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A
That's amazing.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Now we're here at Cannes, obviously, Festival of Creativity. The one conversation everyone's having is obviously AI.
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B
Yes.
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A
And I just wondered, any examples where you think AI has been used powerfully in service of creativity that you've seen?
- [15:20]
B
Oh, yeah. One thing that's interesting about AI, we have been using it for a decade. Most companies have, especially if they have a tech team, and every company has a tech team. And that is because LLMs and machine learning have been running in the background, doing the algorithms on the social platforms. So, yes, there's absolutely seismic change happening with generative AI and agentic. And, you know, we are at customer zero on that, helping be part of building incredible models. And, you know, I'm very biased, I think, with the work that you can do with Firefly, which is our all in one AI studio, where you ideate off of Firefly boards. You can pull in images, video, use all of our tools which are embedded, and then, you know, go to market and see the magic. I think, you know, I am biased. I think some of our work, like here at the at Cam, we have a, you know, Panda drinking a cocktail, you know, on the French Riviera, is one of our Big iconic pieces of creative and it gets so much positive feedback. So that's one I also, you know, a great example and I, I, I, you know, everyone is doing such great work. I'm so inspired by my peers. But we did what I think was incredible to start to kick off our Firefly product was we created something called the Unfinished Film and we asked a creator to come in and start the film and just begin the arc of a story and, and then open it up to creators around the globe to then finish the story, finish the film. And this unfinished film, the arc of the story. So amazing, just about a journey of a person and fantastical experiences that you saw in this end to end film with interesting narration and the plot line. And that was giving my brand away to do that. Which as a marketer makes you so nervous. You know, now, you know, user generated content creators, that is all a thing and it's really powerful but you always get a little nervous and it has been one of our most impactful pieces of work. And it's so, you know, you know, the underpinning of Firefly. So there's a product truth underneath it all. AI generated, however, the emotional takeaway of a story that you don't know how it's going to end because you've given away the control is also so powerful. So that's one of my favorites.
- [18:04]
A
I love that example because I think we're so fixated with AI doing the same thing, but cheaper. But in this case you're doing something that couldn't have been seen before. Oh, completely a lovely example. I heard the other day, Pele, the world's greatest ever footballer, apparently the greatest goal he ever scored wasn't filmed because I don't know why that wasn't filmed. Maybe it's too old or something. And so they set this project out so they interview people who were there, they looked at photographs, they looked at kind of newspaper write ups of the time and using AI they were able to recreate the greatest goal ever scored by the greatest footballer because of AI
- [18:41]
B
that's so great, you know what I mean?
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A
So it's like imagining what couldn't have been done before rather than let's do the thing we already do and do it cheaper.
- [18:47]
B
Yeah, but you know, and somebody had to think about that. So this is it. Like what is in your mind's eye now if you don't have the power of the precision or know how to use those very high fidelity tools. And for me, Photoshop, I never learned it because the layers and the gradation and the pixels. That was something that you know, for me was more than I was willing to take the time to learn. Now I can do that with a prompt but I still have to have the creativity in my brain. And so the democratization and the ability for everyone to participate in creating which is again a human need I think is just so powerful.
- [19:39]
A
Well I can tell you. Right. So I do remember going to age myself now but I do remember at the university in university in the 1990s.
- [19:46]
B
Yes.
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A
Actually having Adobe Photoshop because I liked the idea of being a designer but I couldn't do it. I just.
- [19:54]
B
Well, why do you. I do the marketing side cause I like to hang out with creators because I couldn't do it. But I'm so inspired.
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A
Yeah, I remember the massive box. I mean they were sort of almost like shoebox sized boxes and the manuals were so big and all the discs and all the things and the beautiful balloon with multicolors on the front page. I just wanted to be that person, the kind of designer but I didn't have the technical know how to do it. So I love the fact that now everyone can do what was once the preserve experts.
- [20:21]
B
Yeah. And what's great is we just launched our agentic layer which is a Creative Agent Firefly AI assistant across all of these products. So InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, the list goes on. And it does open it up well still you have the option to use the highest fidelity features within the products.
- [20:44]
A
Definitely. Now I spent the last seven years working at company called System one that measures the emotional response to advertising. So how do people feel when they see advertising? 5 star scale, 5 stars at the top. And one of the highest scoring ads I looked this up from last year was your let's create campaign Sweet Caroline which is an amazing example of using human stories to demonstrate the power of AI which I thought was very impressive. It scored 5.2, 5.9 is the maximum score. So 5.2 puts it in the top half a percent of all things because it showed that it connected emotionally with people.
- [21:20]
B
Yes, it still matters and I say it still matters. I mean I think most of us who got into this craft so studied the fundamentals of rational benefits. That ladder to emotional benefits are really the name of the game. I mean I at Nike I was so, you know you learn so many things at different stages in your career and where there I learned hey the emotional side of sport and you know everyone is an athlete. You know all of those matter so much and that you Just when you're moved emotionally, that is the most powerful thing that makes you want to buy the brand. But, man, we still nailed the shoe shot in, you know, the footwear, because that product is what ultimately is the reason to believe and the proof point to ultimately getting you to the emotional outtake and the emotion. I can't, you know, I can't say in the brief, hey, you know, be emotional. I have to. The the what of the creative has to evoke that. And so that still matters. So I love hearing that. And that is such a great, great piece of work. And you know, in the case of what I love about the global brands that I've worked at, in that case, that came not out of our United States team. I get such great work from the EMEA team. I get such great work from the APAC team, the Japan team. Like, I just got some incredible work out of Asia Pacific recently that was, you know, cherry blossoms and, and it was all generated using Firefly. And it was just the, it just, it just spoke to anybody because of. And it was unique because it didn't come from just the sea of sameness that some sometimes can come out of a market that you always tap into. And that's why I love having people in Brazil and, you know, people all over the world.
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A
And that's the shift we need to make, isn't it? From using AI, because it's available, to using AI to help us, you know, connect and deliver a message and create an emotion.
- [23:27]
B
Yes, it's an service augmentation to humans.
- [23:31]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [23:32]
B
Always. Always. Yeah.
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A
So with all that in mind, what would you say? Because obviously you lead a large marketing organization around the world, you know, in a company with, you know, frontier of tech, what kind of skill sets are you looking for when you hire in your team and build the marketing organization
- [23:48]
B
required to take you there more than ever, it's mindset. It always has been mindset. And it's about embracing the gray, being a learner, curiosity. This is in this, you have to disrupt yourself and reinvention the idea that you have to ask the questions again and again. Because if you're not learning, then you think you're right. And at what cost to be right? You're not going to expand your skill set, garner new tools for the toolkit. And you know, in my own career, I think that has helped me because I always know I am not the smartest person in the room. And as I've gone on my career, you really, I talk about jungle gyming through your career. Because the more experiences you get through learning and, you know, I went down. I took. I went down sometimes in my, you know, titling to go up.
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A
Did you?
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B
Yeah.
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A
Oh, yeah. Interesting. Was that to get the learning experience?
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B
Yes, to get. Necessary to get the learning, to acquire skills. And, you know, especially in the amount of change that marketing has experienced. Like you, we were talking about digital. Like, what is that? That's just marketing today. But one time it was. There was a digital marketer to get that experience, you know, you. You have to go, especially as you're coming up to go into that crap part of the craft. So that learning agility. Yeah. You should Jungle Jim around. And I did go down to go up.
- [25:24]
A
Yeah. It's really interesting. I think you've touched on. I often get asked what connects all the most successful CMOs, and I end up saying humility and curiosity, which is a really odd thing you might think to say. But I remember interviewing Kofi AMU Gottlieb. Kofi, incredibly impressive guy.
- [25:42]
B
Yes.
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A
Done amazing things. And almost the whole conversation is going, yeah, I'm still learning. I decided to go from here to here because I wanted to understand, you know, this technology. And then I went there because I realized I hadn't done much communication of this kind. And it's almost like he's seeking out opportunities to learn. Start again. Oh, yeah. And you kind of look at. You look from the outside at people like that, and, you know, people like you, and you kind of think, well, you must have. You must have done it all by now. And if anything, that's becoming less and less true now because of the amount of change. You cannot think you've done it all. No.
- [26:15]
B
And, you know, that's why you hire great people that have superpowers that you tap into. I will always say I care deeply about what my head of communications has to say because she's so good at that craft. He is so good at that craft. And I am now and increasingly with, you know, and we have customer experience, orchestration as a entire framing to how we look at our enterprise businesses that we support, where we sit over a content supply chain. From, you know, creating the asset briefing, creating the assets, managing the assets, you know, to putting them out, optimizing, putting, you know, keeping them in our CDP and making sure that we're creating again this massive amount of content because there's more content ingested than ever in the world. But through all of that, I am now just the chief, and we say chief marketing officer, but I'm the chief marketing Orchestrator. I am the orchestrator. Because the, you know, the flute and the cello and the piano, like, all of these. It's when you. All of these come together that you create the alchemy of it all. And. And I can't know all of those things now. What's interesting too is now as we use the power of AI and take out the repetitive tasks and all the things why you didn't get into the craft, and people are moving in squads, then they're all working together. Product, marketing, finance, all of it's working together using agents. And so there are almost many orchestras within the orchestra.
- [27:58]
A
I did a piece of research last year, actually, with a company called Worldwide Partners. They're a group of independent creative agencies. And they were saying to me, we want to sort of understand the CMO role a bit better. And they asked me, well, what are the kind of conversations you have when you're not recording, when people are completely open and they're not worried about what's being said? I thought, that's really good. Anyway, so we called it Confessions of a cmo.
- [28:21]
B
Oh, I love that.
- [28:22]
A
So we sort of did this, but. But we did it off the camera, right?
- [28:24]
B
Oh, that's great.
- [28:25]
A
And we found out, and it's really fun because in the summary that they wrote up, they basically changed the Chief Marketing Officer to a whole range of things like Chief Momentum Officer, chief Mutiny Officer, Chief Meaning officer, Chief Mood Officer. And it was amazing because what you realized is the marketing bit in the Chief Marketing Officer is only a small part of the job, if anything. But it was all the ability to kind of create the narrative in the organization, create the disruption to make people, you know, move, you know, sustaining momentum, completely adding. Adding meaning to what you're doing. It's all. It's all those things.
- [28:57]
B
Yeah. And one thing that you just said sparked something. So when we. So moving to the mission that I mentioned and having that North Star, one of the things also from the outside and then coming in, it's. We have so many incredible tools, but it can be really complex. Right. If. If you're a marketer and you don't know everything and you know, but you need our tools and you want to understand. And then I found our employees don't even know all of the things we're doing. So one of the. And if you do not have your employees singing off the same song sheet, no matter how big you are, no matter how, you know, global you are, you're already sort of cutting yourself off at the knees. And so I Worked very hard with our strategy team to say we've got to have a plan on a page for our company. So what we did was I had that mission statement at the top, the customers we serve, because it always starts with the customer. So here are the customer groups and we've moved to a totally customer centric even. Even how we think about our holistic P and L is based on customers and then the core products that support those needs of those customers and then ultimately the KPIs and OKRs that we have to serve up. And I am responsible for top and bottom line revenue at the end of the day for the company. I mean, that is what I'm judged on. But having that plan on a page and every employee meeting, having that as the red thread, along with that mission statement, as a north, that key beat as part of the narrative and then having building a corporate narrative that supports that is one of the most important things you do.
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A
And I think it's everyone underestimates how many times you have to say the same thing. Oh, like you think you've said it and then you get the employee survey back and go, oh, no one's understood this.
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B
No. And so this is, you know, we know this and marketing frequency is good. But I always say repetition doesn't ruin the prayer. We get like I as writing that plan on a page. I may be, okay, I've said it 500, but it, you know, repetition doesn't ruin the prayer.
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A
It's funny similar one when I was at System one because the old phrase familiarity breeds contempt and we reframe that to familiarity breeds contentment.
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B
Yes. I love that.
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A
You know what I mean? I love that because that's more true. Behavioral science is the more familiar you are with something, the more you like it. You know, big brands are big partly because they're familiar and they feel reassuring because they're known.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And this is something people don't realize. And that's why they change their creative, they change their logo, change their packaging all the time. Actually, that's unhelpful to them.
- [31:49]
B
Yeah, well, and when you do that, you have an understanding. And understanding is highly correlated with all of those, you know, awareness, unaided awareness and familiarity. And all these key metrics that we often measure that are, you know, the core equity, brand equity metrics that, you know, can move the brand up or down and it does matter. And there's another phrase that I use all the time because I've seen this in marketing teams, you know, across my career. And you Know at this point I'm now it's pattern recognition for me. I can remember that time at Gap or Visa or Intuit and I can, oh, I can apply this. But what happens is marketers will get paralyzed because they and I listen. I have creatives who care so deeply how the creative turns out but that they want it perfect. And perfection paralyzes. So and we, I mean we, it's Adobe we, our creative has to be so emotional and beautiful and happy and hit all the pieces of our brand book. That is a digital brand book. Now that is so critical still. But I always say progress over perfection because you gotta just if you'll, you'll never ship anything, you know, and marketing is product. You know, product is marketing, but product marketing is product. You're shipping product when you do. Marketing is another thing I say. And most things today in a digital world are two way doors. You know, you can walk through the door and if it doesn't work, walk back out. One way doors are very significant capital expenditures. This is something I learned at Amazon. Two way doors, one way doors and there. But there are very few one way doors. So assume life is filled with two way doors.
- [33:40]
A
Such good advice. I was chatting to Grace Beverly. She's a fantastically successful podcaster, businesswoman in the UK and done amazing things. I asked her what's the one biggest bit of advice that she's ever been given and she said that, she said about the understand if a decision is a one way or a two way door.
- [33:58]
B
Yes.
- [33:59]
A
Because the problem is we paralyzed about making a decision because we worry about what might happen. And she said the moment you reframe it to go most decisions are two way and you can change them.
- [34:08]
B
Yes.
- [34:08]
A
It liberates you.
- [34:09]
B
Yes.
- [34:10]
A
And the fear of making a mistake goes because you go, well what's the cost of changing course? If it's very low, then crack on it. And she said the same thing to me. She goes, actually the one way doors are very rare. And so worry about those.
- [34:21]
B
Yes.
- [34:22]
A
Don't worry about the two.
- [34:22]
B
Yes. And you know, interestingly, having been in this craft for so long, you know where we used to do the print insertion and if it was, you know, there were weeklies and dailies and monthlies and when I was at Gap, we did a lot of print in the Vogues of the world, you know, and, and you know that was going to sit on somebody's desk for a month until the next month's Vogue or In Style or whatever your favorite glossy was at that time. You Know, and, and, and we, we had so much fun. But you realize there were. That was almost higher stakes then because it was going to sit there and I couldn't run to everybody's houses and rip out that, you know, that print insertion and today digital. Okay, it'll be out there. It'll end. Yeah. But their cycles are so much faster and, and so you, you know, look, we still have to be super thoughtful and really, you know, especially in the earned. And earned media space, but you really. Most things are a two way door. They really. Yeah.
- [35:30]
A
I was doing an event yesterday with a creator called Eugene Healey, and he said to me his content started working when he went from 100% right. To 95%.
- [35:41]
B
Oh, I love that.
- [35:42]
A
I thought, that's interesting.
- [35:43]
B
That's another one.
- [35:44]
A
Yeah, there you go. Yeah, same kind of thing. Yeah, he's like, you know, a. The frequency of stuff that was made obviously increased. But he said, actually, you don't really want perfection.
- [35:52]
B
Yeah.
- [35:52]
A
You know, you want a bit of authenticity, stumble, something that goes wrong and then you. That creates the engagement. I mean, we were laughing actually, because did a podcast with Rory Sutherland, January time. Absolute legend.
- [36:04]
B
Oh, I. And I, I listened to that.
- [36:06]
A
Oh, did you?
- [36:07]
B
Yeah, because I met him once and I thought, oh, my gosh.
- [36:09]
A
Oh, he's amazing.
- [36:10]
B
So interesting.
- [36:10]
A
He's just like such a gem.
- [36:12]
B
Oh, oh, he's just so insightful.
- [36:15]
A
But we do. We found this beautiful podcast studio. Right. It was. Had the orange crushed velvet sofas. It was very rock and roll. Right. With guitars on the wall. It was like the perfect place. And he actually turned up in a suit that perfectly matched the color of the thing. So he literally blended in completely. But these sofas, he became part of the couch. Exactly. But these, these sofas, the backs were terrible. Like, they were tiny little cushion backs. They weren't like proper.
- [36:40]
B
Yes.
- [36:40]
A
You know what I mean? They look great. But then as soon as you sit, and of course, with podcasting, you want to be near the microphone. Right, Right. So we set the mics at the moment we both sat down, we're almost horizontal. And I was, I genuinely was like, I'm not sure we can put this out because it's like a really bad look. You know, we're both kind of almost lying down. But of course, 50% of the comments were about the. Oh, good work. Matching the colors of the jacket and the chairs. And I hope you had fun lying down. You look like kind of in some Greek kind of tragedy or something.
- [37:11]
B
Somebody's peeling the grapes for You.
- [37:13]
A
Exactly. It looked like that sort of thing. So it's those, you know, authentic human things where things aren't perfect that actually resonates.
- [37:20]
B
Yeah, I love that.
- [37:21]
A
Maybe to round us off, what would be the single best piece of advice that you've ever been given?
- [37:28]
B
So many piece of advices that I've gotten from all of my years. And you know, one thing, when you. When you have a career, you have many, many different bosses. And what I have been humbled to do is experience those bosses. And you take no one's perfect because they're humans. You want to take the best of everyone and leave behind some of it. But I think taking risks has been a big one for me in my career. When I was at Visa, as an example, this was one of these lateral jungle gym to the side moves. At the time, you know, everyone was paying. You thought, oh, it will always be the rectangle plastic card, you know, and that's the mental model for paying digitally. And it was digital because what was behind the scenes of the card was a whole, you know, rail network. Rail of payment. A payment network. But I took this job that was, hey, we're going to maybe pay with phones one day and we're going to, you know, potentially have, you know, E commerce where you don't have to fill out the 44 film, you know, Fields. And so I went into this digital group doing marketing for. For really electronic payments on the phone. So it was. Now it's mobile payments. And everybody pays with their, you know, Apple, Apple pay, and everybody pays with Samsung pay. And I helped launch that for Visa. And. But everyone was whispering in the hallways, is she going like.
- [39:08]
A
It was that.
- [39:09]
B
I don't know why she did that. It's always going to be the plastic card and the magnetic strip. But it was the best thing I ever did in my career because we launched Visa Checkout, which was basically the PayPal at that time. And now it's just Visa. You know, you're just. It's all automated. And that was, you know, machine learning back then, too. And then tokenization on the mobile devices. So launched Android pay, Samsung pay, Apple pay. But that then got me into tech. But, you know, in the hallways, people were like, I don't know about that job for her. This might be it. And I was there for 11 and a half years, and then that's when I went to Amazon and then Intuit. And these are very big tech companies, so take risks, be bold and take risks.
- [39:54]
A
It's amazing. That comes up a lot, actually. And Often I get asked that question and I always borrow the Greg Khan question, which is, what would you do if you weren't afraid?
- [40:04]
B
Yes.
- [40:04]
A
Which is very similar, you know.
- [40:06]
B
Yes.
- [40:07]
A
Because often it's our fears that stop us doing the kind of thing that is such.
- [40:09]
B
And that is a great. That is a great question, isn't it?
- [40:13]
A
Lara, thank you so much. It's been a real blast. And congratulations on can. And thank you so much for sharing all about your journey and with the listeners.
- [40:21]
B
I know it'd be great.
- [40:22]
A
Yeah.
- [40:22]
B
Pleasure. So fun to talk to you. Thank you.
- [40:24]
A
Thank you. 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.