Bob Liodice | 31 Years, 1 Industry: Bob Liodice Looks Back and Shares His Future Perspective: Part 1

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0:22Bob Liodice:Welcome to CMO Confidential, the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions, and choices that go with being the head of marketing. Hosted by five-time CMO, Mike Linton.

0:38Support for this show comes from Noan, the company that builds a fact layer for your brand and business. Sometimes your marketing is a mess. Your positioning is a brand book PDF. Your messaging is a doc only three people can find. Your agency has its own version of both. That's not a source of truth. And your AI effort is sitting on top of all of that and guessing about what's right. Known fixes that issue. Known coordinates everything into a single brain and standardizes every change system-wide. A brain built on facts for your team, both human and agent. Get known for facts sake. Go to getknownatgetnoan.com backslash CMO.

1:29Welcome marketers, advertisers, and those who love them to Chief Marketing Officer Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions, and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry.com, here today with my guest, Bob Leodice. Today's topic, 31 or 32 years, one industry. ANA's Bob Leodice looks back and shares a perspective on the future. Now, Bob has been with the Association of National Advertisers for almost 32 years, 23 of those as CEO.

2:16the ANA was founded in 1910 and is designed to be the voice of the marketer. Under Bob's leadership the business has grown from 188 to more than 1600 companies and over 20 ,000 brands and has emerged as a critical driver and researcher of industry issues including media transparency, measurement, governance, and programmatic. Full disclosure I've known Bob and the ANA for many years including spending time on their board. This is his second time on the show. Welcome back, Bob. Mike, it is a delight to be here. I didn't realize I did all that stuff, huh? I know. It's amazing. Yeah, when you do that much stuff, it's easy to forget some of the big wins.

3:03Before we begin, I have to say this is a fantastic run in a business where runs are often short. So congratulations. Thank you. It's been a lot of fun. It's, you know, it's in a weird position. I mean, nobody studies to be a trade association exec. So when you get here, it's really in a very unusual world. You're not an agency, you're not a marketer, you're not a publisher or media exec. You're this trade association thing. And there's nobody like you in the industry. I mean, trade associations are not meant to be repetitive. You have one for lots of different things. And so I've had the blessing to essentially be the lead of a trade association of marketers, which in and of itself is very, very three-dimensional, Mike.

3:51I mean, our members are, I mean, you think about it, they run from junior marketer to CMO. They run from digital marketer to multicultural marketer to brand marketer, media manager. And then you've got all these verticals, you know, packaged goods and financial services and technology and travel and entertainment. So the beauty and fun of this is that you never get the same thing twice. And it's very, very hard to get bored in a position like this. When they get a giant melting pot of marketers. Exactly. And who probably don't agree very much on much stuff, other than marketing is a super important function.

4:31Well, that's what we do. We referee. Oh, and you had to prototype a lot of this job, given what you've done. So, you know, I bet there's probably a whole prototype or lessons learned that you can share with somebody down the road. here. So you've seen a lot. We've established that, including all kinds of marketplace transitions. You were there for digital, mobile, social, and now AI. What's your take, writ large, on the state of marketing and the agency business? Yeah, it's obviously at its most dynamic place in marketing history. It's really funny. For the first time, I'm in the middle of watching Mad Men.

5:17I hadn't never really seen Mad Men before. And going back to the early 60s and watching the state of marketing then with television, radio, and print and all the buffoonery that went on at that point in time, and now to be sitting in a place where the intersection of digital and AI and linear marketing, it's just almost overwhelming to think how complex this industry has become. And when you think about all the relationships, you were alluding to agencies. Well, now we have digital media supply chains with DSPs and SSPs and publishers doing different things. I mean, it's enough to explode your brain.

5:57On one side, it's extraordinarily exciting because as I said before, every day is a new adventure and every challenge is something you probably have not experienced before. But on the other side, it's also very humbling because you recognize how much you still need to learn in order to keep pace and in fact, try to stay ahead of this growing complexity, which is always too fast for any one individual. So I think it's extraordinarily exciting. I think the capability for marketers to do what they do is phenomenal. And I know it will lead to an incredible amount of productivity. But to me, the big question is, will it truly enhance growth?

6:45And people have said, well, of course it's going to. And I say, you know, I'm not exactly sure. And here's the reason why, Because we saw it in digital and social media back in the 2010s, where all of a sudden marketers had all of this great capability. We could talk more directly to consumers than we ever did before. We moved from mass marketing to kind of one-to-one marketing. And you know what happened? Growth during that decade actually got worse than the previous decade, which included the Great Recession. So I'm looking at AI and saying, hmm, is this the great equalizer? Meaning to say, if everybody's using AI, who has a competitive advantage over anybody else?

7:29And if you do, how long does that competitive advantage last? So that's going to be one of the question marks I affix to this era when we look back on this in the future. I think that's a really good thing. And look, when I was in the job, I always thought, you're in the front of an avalanche of capability and math. Your goal is to just stay near the front of that avalanche. You're never going to outrun it because you can't use all the tools fast enough. Right. And then the second thing I think that you're saying, and if I'm getting it wrong, stop me. Just the fact that you have more personalization and more tools doesn't mean you can sell more stuff.

8:09Right. It might mean the competitive playing field is flatter, it's more fair or whatever, but it doesn't necessarily translate to sales. Exactly. We are taking a short break from this show for a word from our sponsor. Support for this show comes from NON, N-O-A-N, the company that builds a fact layer for your brand and business. Sometimes your marketing is a mess. Your positioning is a brand book PDF. Your messaging is a doc only three people can find. Your agency has its own version of both. That's not a source of truth. And your AI effort is sitting on top of all of that and guessing about what's right.

8:50Known fixes that issue. Known coordinates everything into a single brain and standardizes every change system-wide. A brain built on facts for your team, both human and agent. Get known for facts sake. Go to getknown at getnoan.com backslash CMO. Now, back to our discussion. Let's dig into AI a little bit. Sure. Because, you know, we've had a bunch of people on the show. You know, we've had over 175 shows. AI is a big topic. But one of the things people are saying is AI is eating consumer discovery and the marketing funnel alive. And the whole idea of, yeah, you know, you are now in control of your message.

9:41That's gone. You're not in control of your message. People believe influencers more than they believe the brand. And you have, you know, GEO going on, consumers more and more power, influencers. How should marketers and agencies be thinking about all of this now? Because you used to have the funnel and the playbook. And even when digital came in, you could just slot them in. Now you can't. Yeah. I think there's a lot of truth to that. I think that marketers are losing a lot of their control of the narrative that's out there. I mean, think about, again, the old linear days when, for all practical purposes, if you could afford to be in primetime television, you pretty much owned the marketplace.

10:23Now, it's a whole different story because the whole playing field has been democratized, and you said it before, has been level set and has been turned over to the users. I mean, user-generated content is by far and away the most exciting and enhanced by what creators and influencers are currently doing. All of that says the marketers are not necessarily in control unless they are heavily invested themselves in being a part of that conversation. And I think that's really the essence of how deeply is your brand going to get involved? and that's not always an easy answer because who can test that?

11:08I mean, who can play that out in such a way where you really understand where those investments should be made? Now, I'm not saying that you can't generate the level of loyalty that you were once used to, but big brands by far can stay ahead of the game because they have the resources to be able to do it. The flip side is small brands now have very, very few barriers to entry to being able to create something that, in fact, can be very viral, very, I mean, that's what creators do. They basically take the common place and then find a way through their own creativity and ingenuity to blow them out.

11:48And so I love, you know, the David and Goliath stories that can go on out there, because it kind of gives everybody an equal chance to dominate. Right. It does. It also raises the level of expectation for your CMO. Exactly. To know, and my thing is, there's no possible way you can use all the tools and have any native knowledge of them. So you have to orchestrate them, which brings me to my next kind of question. A bunch of people have come on the show and said, look, the CMO job is maybe the hardest in business or the toughest in business. if not, it's maybe number two, right behind the CEO. So you're a CEO and you talked to a lot of CMOs.

12:32Give us your take on where this stands in the hierarchy of toughest jobs. Yeah. I mean, I think you nailed it. It is a ridiculously complex job. And I can appreciate how tough it is because think about my position. So I'm sitting here at the center of this universe and I need to have my organization be ready to take on subjects like AI, data, measurement, media complexity, et cetera. And yet we don't necessarily practice that day to day. And so the ability to bathe yourself in these increasingly complex areas without having necessarily practice it. And that's unfortunately what many CMOs are in the position of.

13:18They've not necessarily directly engaged themselves in it, usually as somebody else that's doing it. And yet they have to be the expert, particularly when it comes to the CEO and the CFO. So it's a very convoluted type of relationship that the CMO has with the balance of the C-suite. On one hand, they're expected to be the most knowledgeable, particularly about AI, about creators and influences, which are gaining great favor in the C-suite. But on the other hand, to your point, the complexity of all of the tools interwoven together into an integrated unit that tells a consistent narrative that is winning over consumers has become increasingly difficult to do.

14:01So I think you got it right. CEO job one, CMO job difficulty number two. And the reality is it's probably not working very well because a very, very large proportion of CMOs lose their jobs at quite a rapid pace. whether it's 30 months or 24 months or 36 months, the answer is their tenure is relatively short. The landscape moves extraordinarily quickly. And if they're not prepared to be able to take the bull by the horns and wrestle that animal to the ground, they are likely to not succeed. And I always thought one of the other things, I always thought the job was a lot like being a major league baseball manager.

14:47Everyone can see all the teams and everyone can see all your strategies. That's true. Everyone thinks they could manage the team, but there's a lot of complexity in that. And, but the expectation is that, you know, since you rub up against the customer and you're at that interface of technology, the company and the customer, you know, all of this. That's true. And do you have any thoughts on how CMOs should manage this complexity and level of expectation? Yeah, it's a fantastic question. First of all, we all need to learn to become better marketers. Anybody that doesn't have the curiosity or the instinct to want to continue to become expert in this field in as many dimensions as you possibly can, then shame on that.

15:37And I talked about some things that were not necessarily inherent to the chief marketing officer community 10 years ago, which are data, technology, measurement, and the complexity of media. So job one is everybody, regardless of whether you're a CMO or a middle-level marketing executive, you've got to be able to learn how to do this. And so that's job number one. Job number two is you have to be an astute observer. curiosity is inherently the foundation for great marketing. Why? Because you have to watch how others are doing it and learning the different pathways and approaches to become a great marketer.

16:22And those that watch and learn and listen, they have to know how to be able to make decisions. And to me, the best pathway to making great decisions is to have great people. You know, we talk so much about technology and how technology is co-opting many, many marketing positions. The reality is it has to be a great blend of humanity and technology together. Those two make the most powerful combination. And the humans that you have in your organization, particularly the more senior types of execs, have to know how to make the best decisions because the complexity of choices that we have, it's just overwhelming the different pathways that you can go.

17:09And you have to make decisions about what to test, what to learn, what to implement, how much to be able to invest where. Well, what's your framework for making those types of decisions? Larger marketers, they have a more complex pass-through system that allows decisions to You go through different filters so that you can, you know, kind of optimize and improve the probability of your decisions. But with the A &A, we like to look at it through the lens of the small to medium sized businesses, because candidly, that's what there are more of there out there. Yeah, and they can't afford to look at everything they have to pick.

17:45And to your point, though, my thing, every year you have to tear up last year's playbook because it's not going to be good enough because there's too many new possible plays. Exactly. And even a trade association, we have to do the same thing. We replan from the bootstraps every year because the landscape has changed so rapidly. Hey, so let's go back to where you were going on the small and medium-sized companies. And also, if you could weave in the differences between B2B and B2C, where the whole B2B marketing funnel and marketing qualified leads, that is a done and old playbook that's not going to work anymore.

18:24How do you see this kind of, that small and medium and then the B2B and B2C spaces evolving? Yeah, I think B2B is an exciting new area. And we've been spending a lot of time in the B2B arena. You know, looking at A, the marketer themselves has to adopt a very, very dynamic lens. It just can't be the old stodgy playbook that I think you were referencing that essentially typified B2B marketers in a very unfortunate kind of way. MQLs and sales support. Exactly. Exactly right. But what we've seen today, and in fact, you know, ANA is a B2B type of organization, is that decisions are made as buying groups.

19:10You know, in the B2C land, you have a very, very different type of mentality because you're marketing directly to consumers. And it's kind of all of our stuff to the one consumer that's out there that you're convincing one at a time. But in B2B land, you're essentially trying to appeal to a buying group. Why? Because a lot of those buying decisions are happening over multiple years. A consumer may buy two, four, six, eight, ten times a year your particular product. But a buying group has to buy that product maybe once every three to five to ten years. So it's a much more patient and a deliberate type of system that requires a very different framework of marketing that is becoming in greater favor, number one.

19:58Number two, one of the things that we learned in going deeper into marketing was the recognition that many companies that are historically been known as B2Cs are actually B2B companies. In fact, we call them B2B2C. If you think about Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola, well, they have a B2B business that sells to C. So the chain - Because they're pouring so much stuff through Walmart and Costco and everything. Exactly. So those marketers have to apply both B2B skills and B2C skills, and they have been pushing the creative engine far greater than we ever anticipated. and it's becoming extraordinarily dynamic.

20:48So this says B2B and B2C marketing are merging actually in your mind. And I would definitely agree with that. Let's talk about beneath all this is the issue of measurement. Yeah. We've been taught, you know, you've got last touch attribution and MMMs and, you know, medium modeling and everything else. You're holding your face. Yeah, because, you know, everyone will say, we believe in the measurement, we believe in the data, but then no one actually will look at the measurement and fully agree, oh, yeah, this money we spent two years ago is impacting this sale today. And then if you talk to, like, Google or somebody, they're all about the last click.

21:33Exactly. And so you don't even have any way to measure. What's going to happen to measurement in your mind? Well, we're doing a little bit of, in fact, we're doing a lot of pioneering. And the number one issue from our members that they want us to solve is cross-media measurement. And just to clarify what that is, it's essentially being able to measure across multiple sets of media and understand what combination and what types of creative, essentially through a deduplicated reach and frequency lens. Now, that's extraordinarily complex, which is the reason why measurement has never really gained much credibility in the eyes of many marketers and other professionals that are out there.

22:20It's hard stuff because, to your point, last-click attribution is obviously ones that don't. It's so easy and so clear. Exactly. The idea that you bought the Range Rover because you clicked on this thing and it's unaffected by any of the other Range Rover. it's hilarious but what we're doing in cross media measurement is um we have been working uh globally uh there's a consortium that consists of the wfa the world federation of advertisers uh the is by the international society of british advertisers uh and the ana and what we have been doing in partnership with google and meta have been to develop a cross media measurement system where we're using partners such as Kentar Media and Accenture.

23:08So it's a big consortium that is working right now. And we are almost there. In fact, we've got 30 of our major advertisers that are actively using Akila. And what Akila does is it deduplicates reach and frequency and through the various analytical techniques that come through a technology that starts with a WFA and a group called Halo, H-A-L-O, that is pioneered by Google and meta engineers that has created a very, very complex technical blueprint that ISBA in the UK and ANA in the US have been applying to their respective business systems to test this out. And you know what? It works. This would be crossing the Rubicon.

23:53It would be, well, when this comes out, somebody, you or somebody from the ANA and anybody else you want to bring on has to come back on our show to talk about it. Well, I'm going to give you a name. Bill Tucker is from the A &A, is going to be your next spokesperson that's going to talk about AQUILA, A-Q-U-I-L-A. That's that cross-media measurement system that he'll be able to do a deep dive for you and make it far clearer than the mud you and I just talked about. Well, that's our job, throw around a lot of mud. Subscribe and join us next week for part two of our discussion.