Shiv Singh | CEO Savvy Matters | Why Cannes Can't - Things That Aren't Covered at the Big Soiree

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1:37Learn more at typeface.ai slash CMO. Welcome 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, Shiv Singh. Today's topic, Why can't? Things that aren't covered at the big soiree in France. Now Shiv is the CEO of Savvy Matters, a co-founder of AI Trailblazers, the former CMO of LendingTree, and he just came out with this third book called Marketing with AI for Dummies.

2:34He is a provocative and prolific poster and his The Five Marketing Truce You Won't Hear at Cannes, which was also featured in Adweek, caught our eye. So we invited him on the show to riff on some of the things going on in marketing beneath the shiny surface you might have seen at Cannes. Welcome, Shiv.

3:01Thank you for having me on, Mike. Great to be here. All right. Excellent. All right. Let's start with Can and tear apart the big five. Let's start with your thing that AI is killing jobs. Tell us more. So first and foremost, the AI transformation that we're all hearing about is far greater than even the hype may want us to believe. And it's doing a couple of things in the marketing function, and it's starting to with a lot more to come. Firstly, specific job activities in marketing, most notably around performance marketing, are increasingly being optimized and automated end to end. So what started with the algorithms doing a little bit of magic behind the scenes has now evolved into the algorithms doing practically everything from writing copy to creating audience segments to running the campaigns to actually coming back with the results and leaving little time for us to do much.

4:07When it comes to the world of creative, and I know I'm going to get in trouble for this one, Mike, the idea of what it means to be creative, what is creativity is fast changing. Because we have AI tools and technologies and I would say the unknown factor in AI that is increasingly able to replicate the way we think and imagine. So that's also having an effect on how we do creative work. When it comes to marketing strategy and planning, I was just listening to Joe Fuller, the Harvard Business School professor, and he talked about how knowledge workers are the most at threat in the AI era because we're increasingly moving away from presentations being our deliverables to agents and bots as our deliverables.

5:04So imagine that if you're a marketing strategist and, you know, I built my career at Pepsi and Visa and we have large marketing strategy teams alone. Instead of them delivering presentations, we'll be getting bots and coded agents accomplishing tasks as the deliverables. So when you think about it, practically every facet of marketing, everything that's made us proud of the work we do, win awards, build our reputations, is fast changing with AI. And when I say AI, I do not mean it in generic terms. I mean specific facets of AI as well. I think this is very true. And we also had a show with Michael Treff, the CEO of Code and Theory, who said everyone's a creative now because it's about creative thinking.

6:04It's not about being the creative. I want to go on to your other thing where you said, hey, the CMO role is broken. People have been saying that for a long time. Tell us why it's different this time. Because it was a big part of your post. Yeah, without a doubt. So first and foremost, the CMO role, and I say this with incredible empathy, having been in those shoes, both at a late stage startup and then at a brand that had, you know, a nearly billion dollar spend. And what's been happening over the years, first and foremost, is the job scope, at least when it comes to the job definition on paper, has been getting wider and wider.

6:50Whereas the actual opportunities or the actual resources or the actual swim lanes have been getting more and more blurry with every passing day. So first and foremost, CMOs are asked to do a lot more with a lot less. And just as their roles are, they define the role, which guess what? Someone else in the C-suite is given half the job as well to do. And that alone sets them up for failure. There's this great Gartner study that was done that talked about how 65 % of a CMO's role overlaps with another C-suite executive's role. Oh, two-thirds. Two-thirds of the role. Two-thirds. It's mind-blowing.

7:38You know, and it reminds me, when I was at LendingTree, one day I woke up and I said, my role is not the chief marketing officer. I'm the chief alignment officer because all I do every day is spend my time aligning. And that's not what I built my career on. That's not where I'm adding the most value to the business. but the scopes have gotten so large, they overlap so much. That's what's making the CMO role broken. That's one piece, but Mike, there's more to it than that. You know, I remember the days of the early social media era where Facebook and Google and all these platforms, you know, and now more recently, TikTok even would say, you know, creative on our platform and planning and buying on our platform is so special, so unique, you need to develop specialized skills around it.

8:33And metrics for us matter very differently. We have our own language of metrics. We won't even share with you the algorithm beneath it. Yes. So yeah, yeah. And that's when I wrote my first book, Social Media Marketing for Dummies, because I was like, why are these folks complicating marketing and creating greater complexity. That has only gotten worse over the years. We now have these platforms. They do an incredible amount for marketing, but they're walled gardens with their own creative formats, their own metrics, their own ways to measuring success. And what it's led to is it's made it incredibly hard for a marketer to assess true performance and take that back to a CFO or the CEO or the board.

9:24The world gardens have been killing the CMO's job. I fundamentally believe that. Now, when you add the layer of AI to it and the newer platforms as well, and the latest black box, which are the large language models, it's hard to assess performance even more. So the CMO role is broken partly because of the scope, partly because the world gardens and increasingly now the retail media networks, their new generation of wall gardens, create more chaos in the ecosystem and harder for the CMO to demonstrate not just their own value, but the value of the marketing function as a whole to the business.

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11:09now back to our episode with shiv singh we we agree with you um i want to combine your next two canned things into one which is big tech is really running marketing and budgets are distorted um tell us you know put those two together because it comes right after the whole walled garden discussion and it makes perfect sense to me. Yeah. So, so I personally enjoyed being at Cannes. It was wonderful for me. I got to catch up with a lot of friends. I got to see some of the great creative work. And I drank some incredible rosé and I'm a wine drinker. So it was fabulous. But what struck me the most about being in Cannes was how big the presence was of the technology companies.

12:02And it was Meta, it was Alphabet and Google, it was then Pinterest, it was TikTok. They also threw the best parties and they had the most interesting demos and experiences. And it was nearly as if they were the kingmakers. I grew up in the world of marketing where we CMOs ran the show. We were the celebrities in marketing settings. But for the first time, I felt the amount of power and influence, and I mean it as a compliment to these tech giants, not as a criticism, in the power that they have in how they own our audiences, how they are increasingly redefining what creative is, how they own the distribution, how they've made such massive investments in AI, capital investments, and you see it in their earnings, that they also own where AI is going forward.

13:01They are the new kingmakers of can and the new kingmakers of marketing. If I'm a CMO and I want to try and understand where marketing will be in the next five years' time, my best friend and my job is more dependent on a Google than it is on an ad agency, than it is even on my CEO or anyone else. this is interesting and i i think the other thing that has happened on the big tech front is they have convinced an awful lot of people if you can't measure it you shouldn't actually do it you know you should move the money to us which i think is also a really interesting marketing play to be having you know your super yacht at can where your basic story is we can measure everything So give us the money.

13:55If I'm getting that wrong, tell me. Yeah, no, I think it's been incredible. I mean, when I was at LendingTree, a big part of my relationship with Google was we were optimizing our search spend. They were pushing me to do more display. They were selling me on performance max. But more than anything else, they were selling me on YouTube as a replacement for TV. Exactly. And their argument was, we have better metrics, it's an amazing closed loop, and we'll deliver you incremental returns. The truth is, that was true to a certain extent, but not completely, but it works well for them. So without a doubt, that happens, that continues to happen.

14:40Where, Mike, it's about to get even more interesting is as we enter what I refer to as the zero-click era of search, where people use, whether it's Google search with their AI mode or AI overviews, or they use ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude, and they search for content or they look to accomplish tasks, but they don't click through to the websites, to the publisher sites, to the brand sites. And all of a sudden now, we have these high intent users. Historically, they'd go to these platforms and then eventually come to us. Now they're not even coming to us. They're staying on the platforms, creating new monetization models for the technology visibility into them.

15:34Yeah, we did a whole show on this called, Is Your Next Best Customer an AI Bot? Let's go to your next and your final five things was, Can is not for everybody. And one of the things we hear from some of our listeners is, gosh, the marketers look really self-absorbed at Can. you know they're drinking rosé they're doing this thing they're talking to people that sometimes are even in the same city back home at the regular jobs tell us what you meant by everyone's not it's not for everybody and then also you know some of the people that are saying maybe this is a self-indulgent thing for marketers

16:37can it's not for everybody um you know some of our listeners well have said hey gosh it looks like a self-absorbed bunch of marketers traveling to france when they could meet with each other right where they live now. Tell us what you meant by can is not for everybody and then the self-absorbed comment.

17:13So Mike, that's a really important question and I'm going to be careful in how I respond because I don't want to upset too many dear friends that I have. You would like a little upset on the show, so don't hold back. All right. Look, so I want to begin with a premise that I sit on the board of a$50 billion market cap company that has 30 ,000 employees. And if I were to tell them that I went to the south of France for a full week drinking rosé for a conference, they would laugh in my face. And they'd be like, we don't believe that for a second, that you were getting any work done whatsoever. I share that because for an industry that's all about building reputation and building brands, we score the ultimate self-goal with the way we approach can.

18:05So regardless of how valuable it may be for marketers and agency leaders and technology companies, And I think anytime you bring a lot of leaders together, yes, goodness comes out of it that leads to business growth. The optics of it continue to be terrible, and I would argue even worse. in certain industries, like in construction, like in financial services, where I've built my career, like in travel even to a certain extent, just to be in that location, you're losing equity within the corporation. You're losing goodness. And then you're spending the next six months trolling to get your seats at the table once again.

18:53So that's the first basic challenge. And every year, it's the same issue. It doesn't go away. It gets worse and worse, in fact. Now, what's happened now, more than it has in the past, is the tsunami around AI that we've been talking about is very real. It's very big. If I were the CEO of Cannes, Philip, instead of doing it in the south of France, I would say in 2026, we're going to move it to San Francisco because what was also missing in CAM this year was real substance around AI. It was the number one word from a hype standpoint, and it was on the tip of everyone's tongue, but there was no substance behind it.

19:42There was no real conversation around which large language model to use for which use case, which AI tool can help you create a piece of creative better than any other, which agentic AI framework is best used to rip up your marketing function and rebuild it from the ground up. there were not enough substantive conversations around the AI transformation. And I say this very seriously because in other corporate settings, when CFOs come together, when technologists come together, when product leaders come together, when board members come together, they're having more serious, more substance-driven conversations around not marketing or how marketing is changing or their field is changing, but how the business world is changing with AI and what's going on in the enterprise, where it's moving fast, where it's moving slowly, what kind of influence open AI has and how that gels with what's going on in their corporations.

20:54All those hard, serious questions. Can, for better or worse, where again, it's amazing to bring together everybody between the setting, between the lack of focus around AI. And I run an AI trailblazers, you know, it's a summit and I write books on this stuff and work with startups and big brands. The lack of focus on AI is imagined five years ago, can doing nothing around digital marketing, It would seem absurd. Part of the challenges also coming out of Cannes, there were a lot of conversations about that, you know, and it was in the on LinkedIn and in the trade publications, how marketers and agency leaders were like, Cannes was special because it was about a return to the fundamentals, about the value of a great idea, about the value of relationships.

21:55and the value of having a strong brand. Yes, that all still matters, but it only matters in the context of how much our world is changing. And it was completely - I probably agree with this. And I think the other thing is, there's also an awful lot of advertising awards given out at Cannes. I think it's thousands. So when all these people are posting this, I think a lot of the C-suite peers are going, come on, we got a lot of work to do. I could be reading that wrong. And maybe I'm just trying to make this a little more edgy, but that feels like, wow. You know, when you're talking about return to basics and you're talking about these awards, if your business isn't doing well and you're not doing execution, I think you could be really hurting your marketing credibility.

22:53Massively. And so, you know, along those lines, Mike, some of the best companies that I've seen in this AI era, because we're in this new era, whether we want to accept it or not, are the companies that are throwing out those old marketing playbooks and are going AI native from the start. So what does AI native mean? It means that you're building your organization design, your org design, with AI agents side by side with you. Two, it means that for every task or activity, your go-to is to see if an AI agent or an AI technology can solve that problem before a human can. It's a reason why at Google and at Meta, they've had the most number of layoffs in the Bay Area and the greatest number of profits simultaneously.

23:49In fact, just this week, Google announced earnings. They were off the charts. Meta announced earnings. They were off the charts, but their marketing teams are getting smaller and smaller. You need to go AI first in how you structure your organization, the roles you define for your teams, the work that gets done, and then how tightly integrated it is into the rest of the business. And that's the conversation that's not happening in Cannes. There are not enough product leaders. There are not enough CFOs. There was definitely nobody or very, very few people from the AI world in Cannes itself. And for the life of me, I can't understand how the biggest advertising marketing conference or festival in the world can exist without a much stronger business orientation and a much stronger technology orientation, given this transformation when we're on the cusp of not even AGI, but super intelligence coming our way.

24:49It borders on the immoral in a sense. All right. When you said you weren't going to be provocative and controversial, I think you actually crossed the line. So it's Brilliant. I want to talk about another thing about AI. You said, I think it was either in our earlier chat or you posted, AI is making us less intelligent. Tell us what you meant by that. Yeah, there's actually a lot of good research out on this. And I'd say it's making us less intelligent and it's about to make us a lot less intelligent. And I'll come to the latter in a moment. We're already at a point, if we know how to treat these AI tools as an equal partner, where they are able to do as good work as we can in many fields and for many types of activities.

25:42And don't listen to me. There was this, and this is what I referred to at the start, this wonderful interview between the OpenAI Chief Economist and this Harvard Business School professor just yesterday and it's on the open ai events page and i talked about in some industries 70 of the jobs are going to go to ai uh and away from human beings it'll create new jobs too don't get me wrong but that shift is happening on the more specific sense what it translates into is for us to do our best work we should depend on ai anywhere and wherever we can and that's a good thing, but it does come with a critical cost.

26:24It's just sort of when Google Maps first came out, I was able to find where I needed to go far more easily. Navigation became a breeze, but there was a piece in my brain, my sort of, my mental compass for the world around me started to corrode, and it's been corroding ever since. And if someone gives me a street address in San Francisco, I can't find it without Google Maps. If they give me a physical map of San Francisco, it's still hard for me to find that street. I get lost far more easily without my phone. So that's already happened with wayfinding and navigation. And that's just one tiny example.

27:10Now you extrapolate that to all the kinds of activities we can partner with AI on to do our jobs, if I'm looking for a piece of inspiration, if I'm looking for, if I'm writing an email, if I'm analyzing a document, if I'm supposedly trying to run an SQL query on a massive table, and I'm using AI with me for every step of the way, guess what happens? My own capability starts to degrade again more and more to the point where AI becomes my boss because I can't do anything without it. I'm just thinking if the if can move to San Francisco and Google Maps went down, no one would be able to make the event.

27:57We have to do it before it's too late. So anyway, so that's the first piece. The other piece I want to just very quickly touch on, and I think it's super important, is so we're already seeing that happen, happening with corrosion of our intelligence. And we have to practice to do things in the old world to stay sharp with the AI. It's nearly as if like there were certain activities I needed to do to stay clever with my kids. Now I have to stay sharp and train myself. So give me some recommendations for in this new world, what's a marketer to do? I mean, the CMO job is, you know, the five things at an interior account where that's not actually massively uplifting.

28:42So let's talk about what marketers should be doing right now. Okay. I'll, I'll, I'll first put two things to one side right away. There's, there's a great book. I know that everyone should read. I don't need to mention it by name again, but you can guess the book I'm talking about. If you want to hold it up, we can guess it. Yeah. So, so that's the first piece, you know, the second piece, and I think is super important is you know, we want to everyone's talking about, you know let's do an analysis let's bring in some tools let's do a little bit of cute experimentation on the side let's go attend a few conferences let's seek out which are the three or four use cases and go deep with them that's the way we all are thinking about this change I would argue that's going to lead to failure and loss of jobs or the CMO's own job.

29:40What I think is far more important is, first and foremost, is to understand the technology. Marketing as a function cannot survive anymore without the marketers being technologists at the same time. So, you know, if you're looking at the very basics, we all know Google search, you know, that's, I don't know, half or a quarter of all marketing spend in the world. We know that's been changed dramatically. We're already seeing that changes. Do you as a marketer know exactly how the large language models work? Do you know what it means to be deterministic versus probabilistic? Do you know when someone searched for your brand in chat GPT, what the first result will be and what the 50th result will be.

30:27Do you know why your consumers use Claude in certain ways and why it works in a certain fashion versus perplexity? Do you know how to code your own AI agents? I was having a conversation with the chief consumer products officer at Visa at a last summit, and I said, tell me fundamentally what's been changed. And he said it best. He said, our business partners at Visa, and he's like, that means the marketers and the product leaders, instead of giving the technologists specifications and strategies and presentations, they're now giving them code. So one, you need to know the technology and understand the foundational models.

31:18Two, you need to be coding yourself. And it's vibe coding. I'm not saying that you can do vibe coding with lovable. You can do, you can get love. Yeah. A lot of stuff you can do. Yeah. It's, it's a new language of communication. And as Mark says, we are fundamentally communicators. You need to be able to imagine where and how your brand will live in the future. And there's a lot of noise and stupid talk around it, but there's a very important letter that was published two days ago on Wednesday, or maybe it was Tuesday. and that was Mark Zuckerberg's letter when they announced that blowout crazy amazing earnings.

31:55Yes. And what he said very specifically was, he said, super intelligence is in our line of sight. Yeah. That's mind blowing. And he said, we're going to use it to empower users and individuals. So just to clarify, super intelligence means we have something, I'm going to call it something, at our fingertips, it could be through our glasses, it could be on our phone, it could be in our ear, each of us will have this something that is a hundred times more intelligent than any single individual human being or the human species in combination. And he said that's insight, which means five to ten years.