There is no longer a distinction between brand marketing and performance marketing. Just ask the chief marketers of some of the world's biggest brands.
This week, marketing, media, and ad tech professionals gathered in Miami Beach for the second annual conference, Possible. This event became a hot topic last year when Elon Musk gave the keynote speech.
The Drum spoke to some of the industry's leading brand marketers on the ground about how the role of the CMO is changing in light of increasing economic pressures and rapid technological change.
One of the themes that resonated most was the idea that today's marketers need to be not only creative thinkers, but also technologists and futurists.
“When I started working at Pepsi, all we did was create amazing, groundbreaking ads that would air during the Super Bowl. Life was good,” said Pat O'Toole, Burger King's chief marketer. He told The Drum. “It's not that simple anymore.”
Some of the top executives at Burger King's parent company, Restaurant Brands International, including president Tom Curtis and executive chairman Patrick Doyle, came from Domino's Pizza, where they led the ailing brand in 2008. He led a major undertaking to turn around and expand the pizza chain's market share. Their approach focused on top-of-funnel brand campaigns, primarily run on terrestrial television.
“That strategy doesn't work today,” O'Toole says. He said players like Burger King need to prioritize numerous channels and meet different audiences on the platforms they care about most.
For marketers, he says, that's a tall order. “The CMO role… is more like a technologist. You have to stay on top of all the trends and technologies.”
A corresponding change in the CMO's job description is the narrowing of the gap between brand marketing and performance marketing, which were once two distinct functions.
“Before, you might have had a CMO who was more brand-oriented or more performance-oriented,” says Laura Jones, chief marketer at Instacart. “Now we find that all her CMOs have to be able to do both.”
Jones himself has a background primarily focused on brands. Prior to joining Instacart, he served as global head of marketing for Uber's ride-hailing business. Prior to that, he worked on brands at Google. But in joining Instacart, which has made headlines in recent years for big, bold, celebrity-studded brand campaigns, such as Lizzo's spot on the bubble in 2022, Jones said she's excited about its brand and performance marketing efforts. We made it a priority to connect the dots more actively. .
“Brand actually multiplies performance,” she says. This ethos guides Instacart's comprehensive marketing strategy. Even an organization's brand-focused efforts are measured against performance metrics, Jones said. “If we have a great brand and people love us, we can bring new customers into the funnel, we can convert them better, and we can retain them better. We have a great story. You must be a teller, understand how to build a great brand, and be able to hit all the metrics you need to hit to be accountable to the CFO. [and shareholders]”
Jones isn't alone in her thoughts. Tony Marlow, chief marketing officer at LG Ads, agrees that brand and performance are worth combining marketing efforts. “B2C marketers, especially those who leverage CTV, have become what I call 'performance storytellers,'” he says. “In the past, you might have been a brand marketer, you might have been in consumer packaged products and it was all about awareness, or you might have been a performance marketer. Maybe you're in the financial industry, so you were trying to get credit, like selling cards or converting online for travel. Previously it had to be one or the other. There is an opportunity to drive brand impact and drive performance results, not only because of the times we are in but also because of the media available. ”
Marlowe points to the interactive CTV ad for Barbie, the Warner Bros. movie about the iconic Mattel doll that took the world by storm last summer, as an example of “performance storytelling” in action. Masu. A series of spots running on LG's TVs promoted the cotton candy-colored film while presenting viewers with his QR code that seamlessly allowed them to purchase tickets to see the film at their local theater. “Before, that wasn't possible,” Marlowe says. “We had to have another lane.”
And for some brands, the lines between building a brand and increasing profits are blurring, creating new positions.
Heidi Andersen joined Nextdoor, a neighborhood-focused social platform, in 2020 as chief revenue officer. She is from her LinkedIn where she served as Vice President of Global Sales. But once Nextdoor consolidated her B2B marketing department under Andersen, she began to identify significant opportunities to connect revenue with traditional marketing operations.
“The more we do everything in the market, the more influence we can find, the more we can bring our customers to the forefront, and the faster we can move,” says Andersen. .
When the organization saw that their predictions were correct, they made a critical decision. The company expanded Mr. Andersen's remit and appointed chief revenue officer and chief marketing officer.
The decision has been a boon for the business, Andersen said. “We can move much faster. We're more agile because we don't have to run two different organizations. [every initiative] Through. This allows for smoother integration of technology and programs into your organization. It also creates better career paths and opportunities for employees. ”
Regardless of her future at the company, she says she would advise Nextdoor to maintain a joint CMO and CRO role.
Ultimately, says Andersen, the new shape of her role is a testament to the growing demand for marketing to integrate science and math with creativity. In many ways, this is the same view expressed by Burger King's O'Toole, Instacart's Jones, and LG Advertising's Marlowe.
“The CMO role is a combination of left and right brain,” she says. “There are a lot of benefits to coming from the business side, where you're always focused on numbers, accountability, and creating goals, and you're comfortable adhering to them.” [targets]. It was very healthy for us to bring some of that discipline into the marketing world. But at the same time, the bottom line side of thinking, the left hemisphere, can remind us of the power of creativity and art, and injecting humans into the heart of our thinking about delivering value. ”
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