Adapting to the age of Chief Multipurpose Officers with Nine, Adore Beauty, and LEGO
We know there’s a shift in the air. Jobs are transforming right before our eyes.
With the rise of Generative AI, it seems as though there’s a new role crawling out of the woodwork everywhere we turn.
On this episode of The CMO Show, we’re joined by Liana Dubois, Chief Marketing Officer at Nine Entertainment, Dan Ferguson, Chief Marketing Officer at Adore Beauty, and Angie Tutt, former Head of Marketing at LEGO Group. They tease a new concept – the one of the Chief Multipurpose Officer.
In the ever-evolving landscape of marketing, the traditional role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) has transcended its conventional boundaries to become the Chief Multipurpose Officer.
For Liana, it’s all about putting the customer at the heart of everything that she does.
"If you put the customer first, it means by default that you’ve got to engage in an end-to-end role. It has to be founded in that diagnosis up front into strategy, and then execution.”
“As a marketer, as the chief customer officer in your organisation, you naturally fall to touching almost pretty much everything.”
Dan says not to underestimate the power that marketers hold when it comes to the customer.
“We have amongst the greatest access and understanding of our customers, and that comes with a responsibility. It also gives us a lot of power, a lot of leverage, particularly as our businesses get more plastic,” says Dan.
“I see my job as driving growth for our business. We can add products overnight, we can add new shop windows and shop fronts very quickly. It means that the sky is the limit. When you look across functions, I do work with all of them.”
For Angie, the recent rise of AI is nothing that hasn’t been seen before.
"It’s just another trend that’s coming in. We’ve had trends come and go, so we do have to get used to it. Our role in marketing in general is not just to look at the here and now, but to look forward and find trends.”
“I like the Chief Multipurpose Officer, because marketing has always been complicated. It is one of the most misunderstood areas of business, but we now have a lot more tools in our pocket to be able to explain it, especially from a 360 consumer journey.”
Dive right into this episode of The CMO Show, recorded live at the iMedia Future of Marketing Summit in September 2024.
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Credits
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The CMO Show Production Team
Producer - Pamela Obeid
Audio Engineers – Ed Cheng & Daniel Marr
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Transcript:
Mark Jones
We know there’s a shift in the air. Jobs are transforming right before our eyes.
With the rise of Generative AI, it seems as though there’s a new role crawling out of the woodwork everywhere we turn.
Well, I have a new one for you – the Chief Multipurpose Officer.
It’s all about staying agile, and if there's ever been a time for agility, it’s now.
--
Hello, Mark Jones here, thanks for joining us on The CMO Show.
The CMO Show is a podcast made for and by marketing leaders, created by ImpactInstitute, and proudly supported by Adobe.
Now, marketing is ever evolving. Gone are the days where we can fit the role of a CMO into a neat little box – with its new challenges and complexities, it’s more like a Chief Multipurpose Officer now.
I recently had the pleasure of hosting a panel discussion at the iMedia Future of Marketing Summit on the Gold Coast with the cream of the marketing crop.
Sharing their observations on this shift, I’d love to introduce you to Liana Dubois, Chief Marketing Officer at Nine Entertainment, Dan Ferguson, Chief Marketing Officer at Adore Beauty, and Angie Tutt, former Head of Marketing at LEGO Group.
Let’s get into the panel!
I am really excited about this because firstly, these guys are rock stars and they've also been soaking up all of the knowledge. So we've got a big task ahead of ourselves this afternoon, which is to synthesise some key ideas, to learn from really incredibly experienced people. They almost need no introduction, but I'll give them one anyway, Liana Dubois.
Liana Dubois
Hello.
Mark Jones
Thank you for joining us.
Liana Dubois
Pleasure.
Mark Jones
CMO at Nine.
Liana Dubois
Massive stitch up calling us rock stars.
Dan Ferguson
Yeah.
Angie Tutt
Yeah, thanks.
Mark Jones
Well, I believe in you. You're going to get there.
Liana Dubois
Thank you. That's too kind.
Mark Jones
Dan Ferguson, CMO from Adore Beauty. Thank you for joining us. Again, a big friend and fan of iMedia. So great to have you with us.
Dan Ferguson
Awesome, thank you.
Mark Jones
And last but certainly not least, The pink mini figure in the corner, Angie Tutt who was formerly head of marketing at LEGO Group. So again, welcome. Thank you.
A little bit about me, I've been host of The CMO Show podcast for nine years. Interviewed more than 200 CMOs. I had the privilege of being the opening keynote speaker at Future of Marketing in New Zealand, which was a great privilege. And the team have asked me to come on to chair the advisory board for next year's Future of Marketing in Australia and New Zealand. So look, it's just a wonderful opportunity.
I have in my past been a journalist. I have founded and run a marketing comms storytelling agency for 15 years and now I'm a speaker. So I'm rounding things out. So let me take a seat and we'll get stuck straight into it. Firstly, vibe check straight to you first. What's your biggest aha so far from the event?
Liana Dubois
It's probably not an aha, but I always love hearing from James Herman, author of Future Demand. I think the way that he has such an incredible knack at simplifying what some can often find complex, and I love that he reminds us that our job is both to capitalise on existing demand and pave the way to future demand. That certainly inside my business is something that is a critical focus of the marketing org, is really getting all the boats to line up in the harbour and take everybody on the journey that next generation audiences for a media company and building that future demand is critical to us continuing to exist for the next 200 years as we have for the past hundred. That asset that you used to be a journo for.
Mark Jones
I know, right? I feel like I left you. I was like, abandoned ship.
Liana Dubois
Yeah, I know. It feels a bit that way.
Mark Jones
Yeah. It's not personal, but kind of is. No, in all seriousness, we'll come back to that because I know that you are big on transformation-
Liana Dubois
Yes.
Mark Jones
And when we talk about creating future demand, that is a big part of that story. So that's cool. Dan, vibe check.
Dan Ferguson
Vibe check. Look, I mean the message is there about the 10 to 15 versus the people that are in the funnel versus those who will be in the funnel later is always like a, I wouldn't say a hygiene check, but it's something that it's worth reminding yourself of because it's always the hardest to do to focus on the total market as opposed to the ones most immediate.
I love the idea of attention that's been mentioned quite a bit through the conference. Attention, attention. And that being a really valuable metric. It's obviously measured in lots of different ways, but we're fighting for attention like never before as marketers. And I think there is a certain range of tactics we use, which is all about targeting. So there's this presumption that if we target them well we'll get their attention, but just being in front of them doesn't get their attention.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Dan Ferguson
And I think some of the experience I've had at Adore has been about how do you earn that attention? How do you give content, how do you give value that pays back the attention? I think that's a really exciting challenge, because it's a win-win.
Mark Jones
So you've been doing a lot of reflecting . Angie. Vibe check.
Angie Tutt
Yeah, I think just actually speaking to people as well as listening to the presentations, there's two things that are really underlying in messaging. One is fairly obvious that's been the personalization that has been in almost every conversation topic, I think, which of course is still to be seen. It's growing, it's becoming very interesting, it's very fragmented. But then at the same time conversations are also around keeping it simple, making sure your basics and your foundations are correct and they're almost juxtaposing to me. So how do you take such a complicated world with juxtaposing propositions and make it viable for your end user?
And also just getting to the value, I think, in my world at the LEGO group, you were very, very knowledgeable about both the customer or the shopper and the consumer. For us it was two very different people. It was kids and mums, whereas a lot of businesses, the customer and the consumer are the same thing. So a lot of times when we talk about value add and we talk about results and we talk about, you know, ROI et cetera, it's about the shopper, it's about the short term, but you still have to always remember how the end user is being seen and using your product.
Mark Jones
Just to pick up on that, the issue that's been raised a few times you've touched on there is what's new, what's old, what do we rely on, what should we throw out and pick up? This is if you like, one of the longest running points of contention in my view in marketing.
Angie Tutt
It still was though.
Mark Jones
Right? What's changed the most in the last five years say?
Angie Tutt
I mean there's been a lot. I think evolution is going faster and faster, but I mean just over the last couple of conversations, it is all about the data. It's about data-driven decision-making, it's about analytics, advanced analytics, how AI is bringing that in and it's just the pressure that it's putting on us to really find so many more nuances yet keep it clean and simple.
But one of the biggest changes I'm seeing with my teams is how all of that complexity in that data is creating pressure on my marketing team to come up with the answers in such a complicated environment. I hate to use the words, but there's a little bit of burnout here and there. That's a conversation that we talk about and I think sometimes we underestimate the empowerment. When you give empowerment to your employees, they have to come up with the answers and they feel that. And if they're loving their job, they do feel empowered, but they need to come up with an answer. And so choosing let's say the right one or two or three things to focus on is really, really hard in a fragmented world. So there's a lot of pressure on our teams-
Angie Tutt
To get the right answer.
Liana Dubois
I think for me, one of the things I always find in this industry, having been in it probably for far too long now is in the marketing media and advertising community, we tend to get a little bit overexcited about shiny new toys. We're a bit like the cat with the laser light like jumping around trying to pounce on the next shiny thing. And for me, while Professor Rachel from Ehrenberg-Bass has obviously shared some fantastic science and academia around how marketing has evolved in many ways over decades, there are some fundamentals that do remain true.
Any successful business is the result of a good product marketed well. And understanding consumer behaviour and behavioural economics and those sorts of things is a critical, critical piece for all successful marketers. The data conversation I think is really interesting and I'd love to get to the data conversation because I think we're surrounded by a sea of data. I know in my own company with 22 million signed in Australians, I've got too much data. Which data is the right data is the question we need to be asking ourselves.
But if I think about the skills and capabilities that we're going to need as marketers and our teams are going to need into the future, there's two really critical standouts for me. One is genuine human understanding and almost like psychology, psychological understanding of how you shift people-
Mark Jones
So, interpreting the data.
Liana Dubois
How you change behaviours. Well, yeah.
Angie Tutt
Yeah. Human behaviour. That's where we're at.
Liana Dubois
Human behaviour, really. And then the second for me actually is ethics. I think Rachel said just because you can, doesn't mean you should or somebody did . I think the rise of the chief ethics officer is going to be critical in particular when you think about things like data privacy legislation coming over the hill, those sorts of things.
Mark Jones
So is data the biggest thing that's changed for you in the last five-ish years?
Liana Dubois
I don't know if it is to be honest with you. I think that the pace of acceleration might be the thing that has changed most for me in the last five years. I'm probably somewhat spoiled compared to some of you in the room because I operate inside a media organisation that has had for a very long time a wealth of data.
Mark Jones
Yes.
Liana Dubois
It's not a new conversation inside our business, but I respect gratefully that it probably is in many of your own. But the pace of acceleration for me in the last five years has been extraordinary and I think we'll outpace ourselves in the next 10 compared to probably the last 50 I assume. So pace of acceleration-
Mark Jones
Quick check. Who's feeling a bit exhausted from the pace of change? Need a holiday?
Liana Dubois
Yep.
Mark Jones
Booked an extra day here. No hands, but I think I saw nodding. Okay. At least one. Thank you. Dan.
Dan Ferguson
Look I work for a pure play online retailer, and so data is very much everywhere through our business. And I think most e-com retailers have a significant skew in their business and how they spend tied to last-click attribution or they have. So you can say data-driven marketing, but if you're using the wrong data or if you're using myopic data, then you're going to make decisions that are completely biased by that.If you ask Google what works, Google tends to say Google, it's not a huge surprise, but if you look at media that exposes messages that can be impactful, then you know that your customer can be moved by that. And so it's our job to question that and to find data structures, to find ways to capture the full response and interest of our customer.
It's one of those things when I look at, I've listened to thousands of hours of our podcast because I was looking for what content should we do? And one of the very first things I noticed was when people drop off and people drop off when they think they're hearing an advertorial, people drop off when they think that you're not giving them value, you're trying to get value from them.
Mark Jones
Yes.
Dan Ferguson
And so that was just one of the insights and it goes to that data-driven thing. Sometimes you have to actually sift through a lot to find insights that are actually useful. So I think yeah, sure, data-driven marketing has been an increasing thing for us, but we need more data sources and it becomes more complex. We're adding MMM at the moment. We've done that over the last-
Liana Dubois
So have we.
Dan Ferguson
18 months-
Liana Dubois
Well done.
Dan Ferguson
And it's a great ride. And suddenly you're talking about channels or activity or brand activity that is really obviously often a philosophical discussion, which it shouldn't be. It should be a talk about, hey, this changes trajectory over months and years as opposed to weeks and months-
Mark Jones
Yes.
Dan Ferguson
And this is how it doesn't and this is how I can show you the data that's there. So it's a data-driven discussion, but it's a diverse one. I think that's super important. And one of the thing that's completely changed it for me as a CMO has been the mass digital transformation of the Australian shopper and the consumer. COVID came and went, but that also meant that a lot of retailers picked up their game when it came to online. And I think that's been great for Australia and it's really picked up the competition for us, but also that has been a different feature and it means we're all much more accessible, much more targetable and brand becomes more important.
Angie Tutt
It's caught Australia up to the rest of the world almost.
Liana Dubois
Can I just pick up on two things actually that you've just said, Dan? So I'll continue on the data conversation, but I then also want to talk about attention. So I'll give you an example inside our business, which as I said to you, like I've got data out the wazoo, but the question is what is the right data for me to be looking at? One example, and I'll use my television asset as the example, forever in a day since we were all children, television has been measured via overnight ratings. Yeah? You wake up in the morning and you check how many people watched your show the night before.
Mark Jones
Oztam.
Liana Dubois
Well yes, Oztam. It used to be Nelson back in the day, it's now Voz and Voz Streaming, but that's another show another day. But that metric is actually really quite useless by today's standards because the way that my television asset is consumed is sure via an antenna and a broadcast channel by some people still today or it's live-streamed via the internet. So any of you can watch my television shows right now on your phone via the 9Now app. And then there's also obviously video on demand consumption. So you being your own programmer and deciding when you actually want to watch my stuff. If watching Married at First Sight at 07:30 on Sunday night isn't the right time for you because you're on a date with your partner, and don't tell me you're not watching it because it's everybody's dirty secret.
So overnight ratings are actually really irrelevant by today's standards. So what we are constantly trying to understand inside Nine is what is the actual relevant data that I need to look at? And increasingly when it comes to television, it's that view of a total television viewer, it's overnights plus it's live-streaming plus it's video-on-demand.
And then I link it to the attention point that you raised, Dan. Not all attention is created equal. And there are actually, if you haven't actually read any of their white papers or anything like that, go and have a Google of Professor Karen Nelson-Field of Amplified Intelligence who is considered a global expert in the attention economy as it pertains to media. And she's done a lot of exploration around the attention paid to particular media channels and what has greater attention and what has less attention.
Mark Jones
One of the things that I've also picked up on that theme is constant partial attention. So are we measuring the right things? Yes. How are we measuring the attention? But we're also seeing it split across multiple channels and different types of activities. And maybe this is going to be one of the biggest things we've got to get our heads around in terms of how we understand that data. What are your thoughts on that?
Dan Ferguson
I'm thinking about my son.
Dan Ferguson
When I come home and my son's on the couch and he's playing Minecraft and he's also on his phone at the same time and I say, how was your day? And he's like, "Good."
Liana Dubois
Grunt.
Dan Ferguson
And back. I mean he's obviously dividing his attention a lot across multiple different form factors.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Angie Tutt
The younger the generation, the more complicated their viewing is, this is where I guess our focus has to come into it. You've got all of these data points, you have to go based on data and maybe a little bit of insight thrown in there to find the commonalities and then reach out and take a decision on which channels you're going to focus on or which channels you're going to do. But all of those channels have to have some kind of cohesion across the board. So you can go up to maybe 10 channels, I don't know. But for me the cohesion is the hard part, the telling the same story across different channels.
Dan Ferguson
I think it's also one of the biggest goals that I've had over the last couple of years is to grow installation and use of our app.
So I talk about two funnels, where, as marketers we're always obsessed about this pushing our customers down the funnel consideration and purchase all that stuff. But there is a different one, which is this funnel of a deepening relationship where over time your customer trusts you more, you deliver and you give them value and value exchange continues and they do things like install the app. They get closer, they become more accessible to you. They listen to all our podcasts and read all our articles and they become more engaged with us. They open more emails, they give us more cookies. Cookie cookies.
It's a deepening relationship. And I think as humans we look for that, right? If it's a static relationship, that relationship is more likely to be stepped away from.
Mark Jones
Yeah. One of the themes that you are reflecting and we've heard today and certainly in the last couple of days is complexity versus simplicity. And we keep coming back to being human. And that point is also an echo of the membership versus subscription model, which we're trying to push everybody into subscription models because once you are a subscriber, you stay and you spend all your time there and you don't go, it's the marketing Nirvana.
Let's pick up on the multipurpose officer idea. I think it's a good time to come to this and I don't know that I've got the greatest pun to be honest, but the expectation from CEOs and executive teams as we know shifts and changes over time. Like do more growth, do more brand, nobody knows who we are, make me famous. These sorts of top-line, big picture ideas. And it seems now that growth is one of the big levers that a lot of CEOs are looking to pull if you think about the economic side of things. But I wonder about each of your reflections on that because what is the strategy that you own your expectations of yourself in the role versus the pressure that you're getting? How do you see yourself in that dynamic?
Liana Dubois
my job is to grow commercializable audiences, in a sentence. That means in order to achieve that I have to be the chief customer officer, basically. I've got to put the customer at the heart of everything that I do. And so when you're talking about this notion of a multipurpose officer or the Swiss Army knife of the C-suite, if you put the customer first, it therefore actually just by default means that it's got to be an end-to-end role. It's got to be founded in that diagnosis up front into strategy, and then into execution in order to be able to deliver something that a customer is actually going to need and want into the future. So I think, and whether your title is that or not, but as a marketer, as the chief customer officer in your organisation, you naturally fall to almost touching pretty much everything.
Liana Dubois
But it's a wonderful thing because while burnout can be a very real thing, particularly for marketing teams and for CMOs, I think the value that marketing can bring to the table because of its craft, particularly for marketers that are trained in the craft, whether you did it at uni or you've done a mini MBA or you're doing the training courses with ADMA or AMI or whatever you're doing, an academically educated marketer can bring such value to the C-suite, which I think is why it ends up in all of those different pockets.
Mark Jones
We talk about data, that's your customer data, but what do we know is best practise? And I think what I heard you say there was the very traditional and important notion that we own the customer, at least that sensibility of who they are, how they think, how they feel.
Liana Dubois
Yeah.
Mark Jones
But I wonder what's the tension when it comes to the opportunities of Gen AI or whatever else the new thing is that you now have to also understand that I think is where some of this pressure is coming from. Dan, I don't know if you've got any thought on that.
Dan Ferguson
I think in marketing we do have amongst the greatest access and understanding of our customers, and that comes with a responsibility. It also gives us a lot of power, a lot of leverage, particularly as our businesses get more plastic. I see my job as driving growth for our business. And the purpose behind that is I think that we provide a better beauty retail experience. I think it's a positive one. I mean obviously I'm not foolish. We are a retailer. We are looking to make money. However, I think that there's a democracy by the way our offer and there's an accessibility and we offer La Roche-Posay, we offer Cetaphil alongside Giorgio Armani. And we make beauty democratic in that way. And I think that's a different experience to that, am I cool enough for this nightclub? That sometimes can be in beauty. And so I'm really passionate about extending and giving an increasing amount of my target audience a better beauty experience.
And so when I think about that, some of my job is about looking at unit economics and seeing how I can change those to empower more marketing or to make marketing more affordable or to reach more of my target audience, my customers, my future customers in a way that's affordable for us. And an example for that has been the rise of retail media in our business. It's an income stream for us, but it also allows our brand partners to communicate with our audience and changes the unit economics of our business so that we can consider other forms of marketing. We can add products overnight, we can add new shop windows and shopfronts much faster than we ever could digitally. And that means, well anything. The sky's the limit. And when you look across functions, I work with all of them.
Angie Tutt
I think for me, with the addition of AI, it's just another trend that is coming in. We've had trends come and go. So we do have to get used to it. Our role in marketing in general is not just to look at the here and now, but to look forward and find trends like TikTok is telling us. But the chief multipurpose officer, I must admit, I actually like it in a way because marketing has always been complicated. It is one of the most misunderstood areas of business, but now we have a lot more tools in our pocket to be able to explain it, especially from a 360 consumer journey. So for me, the multipurpose officer, while a little bit dangerous, it's a double-edged sword, is perhaps giving a little bit of recognition to how complicated and how busy and how many areas of the business we do work with. I see marketing as the people department. Now you might say HR is the people department, but HR is technically getting the people to follow the business department.
Mark Jones
The real live mini fig department?
Angie Tutt
We are, yep. Well, mini figures are the biggest population in the world, so-
Mark Jones
Correct.
Angie Tutt
There you go. But we deal with people, right? So it's not only the consumer or the shopper though, we deal with all people. We have to deal with the C-suite. We have to deal with our internal stakeholders, the sales team, the logistics, the finance. We have to deal with our agencies, we have to deal with the customer buyers, the retail buyers. I mean we are always about influencing people. And what we have to fundamentally come down to, where my role is, is to create demand to understand how our product or our service is attaining to a person's need or a person's want.
Mark Jones
Why do we keep forgetting the customer? And when I say we, I don't just mean all marketers, but in business. Is it that we keep getting distracted by the shiny things? Is it that we have bosses who push us in different directions? And I ask that question because it does come in and out as like, oh by the way, don't forget the customer.
Liana Dubois
I'm going to go short-termism, I think is why we forget about the customer. Short-termism and a sometimes bloody-minded, pardon if I can't swear, sometimes bloody-minded charge towards the commercial outcome. We are making money like this today, therefore this is how we make money and let's just keep making money. But if you're not looking ahead and around the corner and you're not seeing how consumer behaviour is changing and you're not seeing how the market is shifting around you and what competitors are doing and all of those sorts of things, you will lose sight of your customer. But your customer is all that matters-
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Liana Dubois
Because if I don't have, and I've got different types of customers, right? Because I'm a media business that has both free assets that you can consume for free, but as an advertiser, your advertising is funding that asset or I've got subscription assets as well where you can pay for a subscription to Stan, or the City Morning Herald, or the AFR, which I know you're a subscriber, you told me yesterday.
But so if I don't have all of those audiences as advertisers, you can't work with my sales team to buy them. So the only thing that matters is the customer. And I also think about what the advertiser experience is too as a media owner. What are the advertising products that you need access to that are going to be reliably delivered to you and deliver to those audiences so that you can then achieve the growth ambitions that your organisations have by using my assets?
Mark Jones
So let's pick up on the next sentence, which is what lies ahead and in the time that we have remaining. A couple of quick takes from each of you on what your priorities will be, and feel free to add in and subtract things like personalization, we've talked about data, we've talked about brand a lot, we've talked about creativity. Just from your perspective, what do you think is going to be the focus areas that will deliver the most value?
Dan Ferguson
I think about loyalty. So just about every single business has a loyalty program and that means that it's just table stakes. It also means-
Mark Jones
We're all loyal to everyone.
Dan Ferguson
Yeah, we're all loyal to everyone, so we're loyal to no one.
Liana Dubois
And loyal to no one. Exactly.
Dan Ferguson
That's the problem, right? And if you look at loyalty programs, essentially it involves an escalation of benefits and rewards, and it doesn't really focus on an escalation of engagement and value. And there's plenty of interesting example in the market. Temu, if anyone has ever experienced that, focuses on everything right now, you must put something in your cart. Second something's in your cart, then it's all about, you've got something in your cart, you need to take action. It's all about right now and it's about loyalty right now. And are you engaged? And so therefore then they'll engage with you.
Mark Jones
That's way too panicky for me.
Dan Ferguson
But it's agnostic loyalty.
Mark Jones
Right.
Dan Ferguson
It rewards you as long as you've been loyal yesterday and today. And I think we need to evaluate how we reward our customers regardless of loyalty programs, how we return value to them and how we are going to deepen our relationships with customers. Because something that stood out to me increasingly is when I used to do market research, there'd be this real concept of we have customers, we own these customers.
Mark Jones
Yes.
Dan Ferguson
If you ask customers now, they freely will talk about how much they pick and choose. They are not loyal to one brand. Pretty rarely. And I think that's a challenge for us to meet.
Mark Jones
That's great. What do you think?
Angie Tutt
Perhaps this is because I've worked in the LEGO group so long with the storytelling, but I think the art of storytelling is probably going to be one of the things that we really have to get an understanding of. I agree with the value and the loyalty side of things, absolutely. But if you step up and above, if you are going to win in the marketing and advertising world, you have to create a compelling story that is very quick and simple to understand. Simplicity is key. And there's a hook in the first three seconds. It's all coming through social media. It's changing the way we look at our advertising. So for me, trying to tell a simple story taken from all of the complicated touch points and data that we have is a huge skill that we have to continue to evolve and practise. I don't think it has changed over evolution, but I still think it's a very important thing going forward. We can't get lost in the sea of the weeds, right?
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Angie Tutt
Come back out and tell a succinct story.
Mark Jones
And as a storyteller myself, that's music to my ears. But one of the things I've loved about the LEGO brand and many others do this around the world, but it's successful brand partnerships where both win-
Angie Tutt
Yes.
Mark Jones
And you don't confuse the brands too much. And if you think about the LEGO movie of course and everything else that goes-
Angie Tutt
Maybe LEGO Masters?
Mark Jones
Lego Masters-
Liana Dubois
Lego Masters? Great example.
Angie Tutt
There you go.
Liana Dubois
Thanks for the shout-out.
Mark Jones
That's beautiful panel synergy right there.
Angie Tutt
Did you like that? You didn't even think of that, did you?
Mark Jones
Yeah. That was seamless. Yeah.
Liana Dubois
So it would be super easy for me to agree violently with Angie around storytelling given the very nature of our business is content creation and storytelling, whether it's journos or people creating TV shows and everything in between. But I think I'm going to go potentially a slightly boring or back-to-basics way. Every single person in this room, and I am no exception, is in competition for people's time and attention. You could choose to watch or read or listen to a competitor of mine, but you could also choose to go and spend some time down at the beach or read a book or do countless other things other than spend-
Mark Jones
The beach is your competition.
Liana Dubois
It's my competition. Other than spend time with my stuff.So digital transformation has been a significant journey for Nine and every other media organisation and every other organisation for decades. But you can now watch, read, or listen to any of our stuff on any of the devices that you have got sitting in this room with you today. Whereas you used to be bound to your TV screen on the wall or the newspaper at the cafe or whatever that was. So mental and physical availability for me, regardless of everything that shifts around me is the thing that I'm most focused on.
Mark Jones
Last question before the clock runs out. What's your philosophy on leadership? And I think this is key because you are working with teams to make your big ideas go. You're working with agencies and you are working with really interesting collections of individuals at a management level. So what's the approach that you take to get the most out of people? And we'll go back to you Angie.
Angie Tutt
I mean you could say a lot of different things under that, but I'd say probably one of the key things I love doing, and we're all curious as marketers, and if you're hiring the right curious people, for me it's just making sure the so what or the why. What's the why question, right? You don't need to know what you're doing. You need to know why you are doing it.
So it's just really important to understand every part of your business. If you are asking the right questions, you understand why you're doing what you're doing, then if it's successful, you can learn from it. And even if you fail, you can learn from it. When I have new people in my team, I will always tell them, I'm going to ask you questions around why you're doing what you're doing, not because I'm trying to tell you off, but just because I want us to understand the business better.
Mark Jones
Yeah. And if you can articulate it to somebody-
Angie Tutt
Yes.
Mark Jones
It's an incredible moment of clarity. Dan?
Dan Ferguson
Yeah, I think when we talk about storytelling, for me it's like as a CMO, I'm reinterpreting customer value proposition to all the different audiences. And you have to be great at that, right? And when I'm talking about where we're going in our business as a subset marketing, I need to be able to retell that story in different ways to those different audiences, in a compelling, relevant way to them. Right from investors through to email marketer, what will bring them along the journey? What is going to be meaningful for them, and how do I enunciate that? How do I make it clear?
Mark Jones
Yep. Last but not least.
Liana Dubois
So someone once said to me early on in my career, leaders cast a long shadow. And it's always stuck with me and I think there's nothing more true. And that shadow could either obviously be a nice shadow, something that's cooling from the burning fire in the hot sun, or it could be a really dark, dark, dark shadow. The way I see leadership is I work with the people in my organisation and spend time with the people in my organisation more than I do my family because eight of the hours that I'm at home with my husband and my two boys, my eyes are shut. So five days a week when I'm engaging with, whether it's people in my team or people around me, I think it's really important to be a very human leader these days. I think the expectation has changed. I think command and control leadership styles with fists being slammed on tables and all those sorts of things, thank goodness have gone the way of the dinosaurs mostly.
Mark Jones
That was never my experience in the old days in media.
Liana Dubois
Of course it wouldn't have been.
Mark Jones
No, never. Never.
Liana Dubois
But I genuinely believe because you spend so much time with these people, get to know them, really get to know them and find out what makes people work and how you can take everybody on the journey and get the most out of people using a bit of empathy and a bit of integrity to do so.
Mark Jones
That's a great note to end our panel. Would you please thank our panel Liana Dubois, Dan Ferguson, and Angie Tutt? Thank you so much.
Liana Dubois
Thank you.
Angie Tutt
Thank you.
Liana Dubois
That was fun.
Mark Jones
That was Liana, Dan, and Angie.
It’s interesting to hear so many different perspectives, but with one consistent thread – if you tell the right stories and keep building customer loyalty, that’s half the work done.
Being a successful Chief Multipurpose Officer is no easy feat, but it seems the trio is more than up for the challenge.
You’ve been listening to The CMO Show, created by ImpactInstitute and supported by Adobe, and I’m your host, Mark Jones.
Thanks for tuning in. We’ll catch you next time.