In short
Value creation in marketing and business strategy—how “the math” includes human value, trust, focus, and fast listening; why B2B marketing became feature/product-heavy; and what B2C can learn about attention, entertainment, and real value.
Guest backgrounds
Jessica Jensen is LinkedIn’s CMO. She grew up in Kansas City writing jingles with her dad (creative director at DDB) and her mom (speech/language teacher). She started at BCG in business strategy, then returned to the “family business” of marketing/creative. She’s worked across BCG, Apple, Meta, Booking Holdings, Indeed, and now LinkedIn.
Key claims
Every role in marketing is part of business math (ROI and revenue, not just brand). Best companies create value through love and trust (with trust as the operational core). Value destruction comes from low listening, fiefdoms, and lack of focus/over-diversification. Innovation must be step-change plus continuous iteration, co-developed across marketing/sales/product.
Notable examples
LinkedIn’s “network that works for you” unifying message across ads, sales, recruiting, and subscriptions; Yahoo’s over-diversification; Facebook taking Sun Microsystems’ campus; LinkedIn’s creator economy growth (90% increase in “creator” profiles) and free AI training; “AI for sales” billboards on the 101 as banal, attention-wasting messaging.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOJessica Jensen's Background and Philosophy
0:00 to 0:22
Learn about Jessica Jensen's journey and her unique perspective on marketing.
“Your team has a launch to plan, while your customer inbox fills up.”
Jessica Jensen's Background and Philosophy
2:16 to 3:30
Learn about Jessica Jensen's journey and her unique perspective on marketing.
“It's a business show, it's a marketing show, and it's the show that argues they've always been the same thing.”
The Intersection of Math and Marketing
3:30 to 4:36
Discussion on the importance of quantitative analysis in marketing.
“She's learned that fiefdoms kill more enterprise value than a bad idea or bad creative ever will, and that good strategy, much like love, cuts like a knife, which is why LinkedIn in says no to so much.”
How Experience Shapes Value Creation
4:36 to 5:46
Exploring value creation across different business models and experiences.
“And my mom was a speech and language teacher.”
The Role of Trust and Love in Business
5:46 to 7:10
Understanding the significance of trust and emotional connection in branding.
“But isn't that a failure of the people training them?”
Challenges in Building Trust and Love
7:10 to 8:44
Discussing the difficulties of creating lasting trust and love in today's market.
“So, yeah, I think I have made it part of what I try to train people in is that we're all part of the math of this business.”
Common Pitfalls Leading to Value Destruction
8:44 to 10:00
Identifying behaviors that can lead to a decline in business value.
“Well, I think there are a couple of key forms of value creation.”
The Importance of Focus and Feedback
10:00 to 14:02
Emphasizing the need for focus and responsive improvements in business.
“Now I'm like just like it more than the next guy.”
The Importance of Listening in Business
14:02 to 16:42
Learn why continuous feedback and quick adaptation are crucial for business survival.
“And if you are not asking customers and people for their feedback and taking it seriously and fixing and building quickly, particularly now.”
Redefining Innovation in Tech
16:42 to 19:05
Explore the evolving definition of innovation beyond just technology.
“Is innovation, do you think what's, I mean, let's think about Apple.”
Show all 28 chapters
Managing Multiple Stakeholder Expectations
19:05 to 21:06
Discover how to navigate different expectations in marketplace businesses.
“Maybe with a little bit of sales input or a little bit of fringe marketing input.”
The Evolving Definition of Work
21:06 to 25:37
Understand how the definition of economic opportunity is changing in the workforce.
“And what happens if you make a decision that serves constituency A, this side of the marketplace, but not that side of the marketplace?”
Transforming B2B Marketing
26:19 to 28:00
Examine the shift in B2B marketing towards more engaging and creative strategies.
“This is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs.”
The Evolution of Marketing Focus
28:00 to 29:26
Explore the shift from human-centric to product-focused marketing.
“So people were in product marketing and they'd be like, the features and the operating system and the Scooby-Doo of this thing is Q, R, D.”
The Risks of Over-Selling Features
29:26 to 31:18
Discuss the dangers of emphasizing product features over human needs.
“Well, because I think that a lot of people in business and then in business marketing are obsessed with selling, making money, and the stuff in the stuff.”
The Absurdity of Current Ad Trends
31:18 to 32:49
Analyze the ridiculousness of current advertising approaches and their impact.
“And I posted it on a platform you may have some familiar with.”
Attention and Value Creation
32:49 to 34:16
Learn how attention relates to value creation in marketing.
“And doing those things at the same time is the magic and the art.”
Finding a Unifying Message
34:16 to 36:25
Understand the importance of a cohesive brand message in a complex business.
“Yeah, and all of the resources that go into that equation.”
Finding a Unifying Message
38:30 to 39:07
Understand the importance of a cohesive brand message in a complex business.
“Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
Finding a Unifying Message
39:12 to 39:27
Understand the importance of a cohesive brand message in a complex business.
Managing Brand Expectations
39:27 to 42:00
Examine how brands handle expectations and performance failures.
“As I hear you talk about the network that works for you, I hear, like, boy, that's a big thing to say because any one person can say, not working for me.”
Strategic Focus in Business Decisions
42:00 to 44:29
Explore how businesses prioritize strategic focus over diversification.
“enterprise value destruction, which is rampant diversification, diversification without strategic focus.”
The Misunderstanding of Marketing ROI
44:30 to 46:58
Discuss the misconceptions leaders have about marketing investments compared to product development.
“I think that many leaders naively believe that marketing is a dollar in and a certain number of dollars out.”
Fostering Curiosity in Leadership
46:59 to 50:08
Learn about the importance of curiosity in leadership and its cultivation.
“Well, I can tell you what drives my own curiosity, but the second question is much more rich and interesting.”
The Role of Joy in Work
50:09 to 52:20
Discuss the intersection of economic opportunity and joy in one's career.
“Yeah, because life and careers are processes of elimination.”
Understanding Consumer Behavior and Signals
52:21 to 56:00
Examine how consumers evaluate products based on signals rather than intrinsic qualities.
“than we've ever been, about the same, further from?”
Understanding Psychological Expiration Dates
56:00 to 57:05
Learn how psychological expiration dates influence consumer behavior and value perception.
“Better safe than sorry, sure, but still.”
Understanding Psychological Expiration Dates
57:06 to 57:39
Learn how psychological expiration dates influence consumer behavior and value perception.
“Today's episode was produced by Art Chung, Jim Mackle, Manolo Moreno, Brandon McFarlane, and Ashley Futterman from the Fox Media Podcast Network and the Wisdomist Company.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00It's late.
0:01Jessica Jensen:Your team has a launch to plan, while your customer inbox fills up. No worries. In one prompt, Klaviyo builds the whole campaign. The emails, the texts, WhatsApp. All in your voice. Never without your okay. Plus, Klaviyo spots the revenue you're leaving on the table and answers those customer questions, so your team can get some rest. Go to klaviyo.com slash bestfriends. The world of business is constantly evolving, and Comcast Business keeps you in step, with secure, AI-backed networking in more than 100 countries, powering over 90 % of the Fortune 500 and millions of small businesses. And behind it all, thousands of experts answering your call at 2 a.m.
0:45like it's 2 p.m. One partner, that's it. Powering how business gets done for companies around the globe. When you add it all up, no one does business like Comcast Business. Go to comcastbusiness.com slash enterprise to learn more.
1:05How many third-party vendors does your company use? 20? 200? Thanks to AI, someone on your team probably added three more this week. And your security lead has no idea. Traditional third-party risk management can't keep up. Vanta gives you continuous coverage across every vendor. automatically so you actually know what's in your stack and what to do about it. AI on, risk off. Vanta.com slash TPRM. Human slop has long preceded AI slop. Thank you very much. Yes. And so many brands and businesses have forgotten that outrage, humor, entertaining is a means to an end, not the end. Exactly. so.
1:56Jessica Jensen:And if you are not telling me something compelling about how this car, hotel, drink provides some value to me other than shocking me with a cattle prod, I wish you the best.
2:16Welcome back to Creator Destroy. It's a business show, it's a marketing show, and it's the show that argues they've always been the same thing. On today's show, I speak with LinkedIn CMO Jessica Jensen, who calls herself a painter with an abacus, which is about as apt a description of what a CMO should be as I've heard. JJ grew up writing jingles at the kitchen table with her dad, who was a creative director at DDB, and her mother, a speech and language teacher. Her first job was at BCG, where she spent the first part of her career in business strategy before finding her way back to what she calls the family business.
2:50This combination, a rigorous quantitative training married not only to a qualitative orientation, but to a deep passion for artistic expression runs through everything in our conversation. From JJ's conviction that every person in a marketing org is part of the math of the business, whether they realize it or not, P.S. you ought to realize it, to her belief that the best companies create value through love and trust, which she had to defend against my pushback that maybe love was too high a bar in today's world. And she did. Across six very different companies, BCG, Apple, Meta, Booking Holdings, Indeed, and now at LinkedIn, Jessica has learned that the fastest path to value destruction is losing focus.
3:31She's learned that fiefdoms kill more enterprise value than a bad idea or bad creative ever will, and that good strategy, much like love, cuts like a knife, which is why LinkedIn in says no to so much. We also talk about why B2B marketing has been so sleepy for so long and what B2C can in fact learn from B2B, which is a question too few ask and one where her answer surprised me. Let's get into it. One of the things I love about the way you describe yourself is, why were you laughing? I didn't even get there.
4:05Jessica Jensen:You're darling. One of the things I love about it is you describe yourself as a business person who became a marketer. And I'm wondering if you've got a perspective on why so few marketers are, in fact, business people. Yeah. So I came up through management consulting. That's right. Where were you? Boston Consulting. You were at BCC? Yeah. So as a marketer, now I call myself a painter with an abacus. Yeah. So I really grew up in business strategy. And then ironically, my dad is a painter and became a creative director and worked at DDB. Where'd you grow up? Kansas City. Kansas City. And my mom was a speech and language teacher.
4:44Jessica Jensen:So we would write jingles at the table at home. My mother was head of new business for Bozell Jacobs, if you remember those guys. I would write basically taglines at dinner. Okay, we were doing the same thing. So I found my way back to the family business, and I'm very, very happy that I did. um but i so i think i had very rigorous quantitative training in the early part of my career and around you know business segmentation and growth and growth strategy um so i often seem like to people who came up through the creative way the agency way i seem kind of like a business wonk um which is not untrue but my passion for for artistic expression is also very deep i think There are so many marketers who have come up through the brand side or the creative side, and they get to a point in their career where suddenly they have to care about the money and the ROI.
5:45Jessica Jensen:But that can come quite late. Right. But isn't that a failure of the people training them? I haven't stood in Murgatroyd, yes. Because I've told this story before. I don't know if I've told it on the show. So if I have, audience, forgive me for the redundancy. If I haven't, it's new to you the first time. Two or three weeks into my career. Yeah. At Avion, third person in the marketing department in the U.S. My job is to hang banners and place coolers at tennis tournaments, right? The efficacy being drive brand awareness for this new brand. Sure, sure. And new category. CEO comes by my cube so long ago I don't have a computer in it.
6:22And he says to me, like, out of the fucking blue, he's like, what did you do to drive the business forward today? And I had no idea. You're like, uh. But what he taught me in that moment was even the guy who's placing the coolers and hanging the banners is responsible for moving the business forward every day. And so for me, I don't know how different it might be but for that.
6:43Jessica Jensen:Right. Well, I think most people do not have the benefit of that. And I have worked with a lot of creative teams where I've said, I know you're going to find this tedious. Get ready to party down with some math. And this was before, you know, the use of email. Right. Right. Literally with an abacus. And half the audience is Googling abacus right now because they don't know. It's a very useful tool. It survived. Yeah. Successfully for centuries. Millennia. So, yeah, I think I have made it part of what I try to train people in is that we're all part of the math of this business. And if you think your role is thought leadership content, what you're really doing is building the brand to drive sales, to drive revenue.
7:33Jessica Jensen:And your thought leadership and the quality of that also really matters. But if you want to focus on that and negate or ignore the other part, you will not succeed. Yeah. I love the language of the math of the business. Yeah. And I think that that's something that people on all sides of an enterprise can learn from because I'm going to paint with a broad brush and generalize. There are a lot of CFOs who think the math of the business ends with numbers and the math of the business includes everything you were just speaking to. That is so true. And the best CFOs I have worked with know that a brand is the sum total of experiences that people have with a product or service and that the monetary element is a fraction of that.
8:18Jessica Jensen:Well, it's also what follows from that. It is the yield of that. Yeah, exactly. So you've worked at BCG and Apple and Meta and Booking and Indeed, and now you're at LinkedIn. These are six like baller enterprises, but at least a handful of different business models. Very different, yeah. So I'm wondering, you know, as somebody who has seen different business models thrive, are there any one or two things you've learned about how value gets created irrespective of the business model? Hmm. Well, I think there are a couple of key forms of value creation. One is monetary and shareholder return. And I love that and I appreciate that.
9:08Jessica Jensen:I think by far the more valuable one is human value. And is your business solving problems and creating opportunities for your customers? And do you ask them what they want? Do you take their feedback seriously? Do you iterate and change? And do you gain their trust? And I think that the best businesses create value through love and trust. Both of which are increasingly hard to create in today's world, or even if you've created them to continue. I mean, trust is a challenge. It's hard and fleeting. And I think even love, which earlier in my career I would have defined love the brand as a real aspiration.
10:01Now I'm like just like it more than the next guy. Because I think love is such a high bar across so many categories.
10:09Jessica Jensen:I think that's a low aspiration. Yeah, well, maybe push back on it. I mean, we'll edit it out, but push back. You're wrong, but I cut that. No, I know what you mean. I think, I guess I feel like, yes, is there a river of mediocrity and a river of fakery? There's no question. And the brands that we care about rise above that. I do think the ability for people and brands to tap into their own voice, their own employees, share that on video where people can see you, hear you, feel you, and either believe you or not. that availability and that distribution is abundantly there. And I do actually think that AI helps us.
10:56Jessica Jensen:Now, AI helps us produce a lot of crap, which is not. But the ones who really earn trust will be through their people, through their voices, and through the experiences of their customers sharing those experiences. And that is the cream above the river of crap. Totally agree. but you were pushing back on me about love and your answer was about trust. So push back on me about love. Okay. That's a good point. I think that trust means I listen to you. I value you. I'll take a flyer on something you want to sell me. But I do think the aspiration to be beloved and be emotionally potent to the person seeking the experience or the opportunity or the liberation or the flavor or the dance party exists and is important and people seek it.
11:53Jessica Jensen:And particularly in such a dark time as now, people want to love people and brands. And if we show them the way, we can get there. I think where I completely agree with you is in the aspiration. And I think if we think about love, right? So I'm going to use your language to qualify what I said. it's got to stay the aspiration because you know it's it's like the high school yearbook quote if you shoot for the stars you wind up on the moon right you know it's got to be the aspiration i just don't know and maybe i've become more i mean i've definitely become more cynical um if it's a reasonable expectation across so many i mean apple is loved not by all not by all but apple is loved certainly by some yes right it's that great great warm buffet quote if i gave you ten thousand right now to never buy another Apple product again, would you?
12:45I'm like, hell no. What about value destruction? Are there any kind of common behaviors or attitudes that you've seen? And maybe it's the inverse of what you've said.
12:56Jessica Jensen:Let me actually - Low aspiration or low listening. Low listening, which is saying, arguably, and this I think was your point, if you are not of value, if you are not valuable to your end user, you will not monetize or create enterprise shareholders stakeholder value. That is right. Are there things that you've seen across a storied career where you're like, yeah, this is the fast path to fucked? Yeah. Fast path to fucked. Yes. A few things. Over diversification is a fast path to fucked big time. I saw that at Yahoo enormously. Every business, every country, all at the same time, we're going to be everywhere.
13:37So the absence of focus.
13:39Jessica Jensen:The absence of focus, I think, is a big one. Believing that your bathwater does not stink and that you have nailed it in a category or an industry. I actually think one of the biggest business learnings I had was at Facebook. Facebook took over the Sun Microsystems campus and they turned the sign around, but they left Sun Microsystems on the back. and the point was someone is coming to take your campus and i always i i have kept the competitive market share fire burning inside me because someone will eat your lunch immediately and if you think what you have is awesome you are wrong or maybe you're right for six months yeah Or maybe you're right for a year.
14:29Jessica Jensen:And if you are not asking customers and people for their feedback and taking it seriously and fixing and building quickly, particularly now. I mean, you know, a decade ago, you'd be like, that's on next year's roadmap. Yeah. Now people are like, you're adorable. Yeah. I'll be vibe coding that this weekend. Right. Yeah. I'm going to need that in 10 days. Yeah. So I think that the listening, adjusting, rewiring, building, re-releasing, did we get it? Is that it? Listening. And doing that incessantly at high speed. If you're not doing that, your lunch will be eaten. Whose job is it to listen and or to synthesize all the listening?
15:18Jessica Jensen:Well, it's different. Well, it is the CEO's job. Yes. Yes. I love that you said that. And there are some who take it seriously and some who don't. Typically, I have been the insights compiler across sales, product, marketing in various places in a marketing function. But sometimes it's run by an insights leader in the sales org. More often than not, it's scattered about in a company and littered in various places. and people are trying to figure out the connection points. And I've tried to be a galvanizer of that in several places. But a lot of companies do it extremely poorly. Yeah, they listen, but they don't.
16:04Jessica Jensen:Or the product people listen to certain things about features. And the customer service people listen to bitching and moaning about pricing or something else. Or features. Or features. And then the marketing team is thinking about the brand and trust and this, that, and the other. And you're like, 1 plus 84 plus 17 minus the fourth power equals. So I'm reminded in this moment of that famous Peter Drucker line about, since the business of business is to create and keep a customer, the business has two principal functions, innovation and marketing. Everything else is an expense. It's having worked inside tech for as long as you've worked inside tech.
16:47Is innovation, do you think what's, I mean, let's think about Apple. And it's come up in a show, an episode of the show I did with Gary Vee, where we were talking about, you know, like under Tim Cook's brilliant reign. Yeah. Where shareholder equity was up something like 10x. Wasn't a lot of innovation. Right. Certainly not in Atlanta. There was a lot of incremental improvements. Siri still sucks. I mean, that business has been the phone. That business has been the phone and maybe some accessories. Do you have a definition of innovation coming from the tech side that is about more than the tech?
17:28Like marketing innovation, as an example, or enterprise innovation? How do you look at it? And is Drucker right in today's world? or because things are moving so fast, to your earlier point, is incremental improvement okay?
17:44Jessica Jensen:I think that if a company is truly listening to the needs of whatever group is trying to address and help, they will both, in this day and age, need to make breakthrough step function innovation changes. That's a great way of putting it. And constantly be innovating along the way. And that all of that needs to happen in tandem rapidly. So you are step-changing in terms of, I mean, in our talent recruiting business, right? We have had a number of different things that we have offered over the years. Then we made an AI agent-based hiring assistant that operates completely different. That was a step change.
18:28Jessica Jensen:And now we have to train recruiters to use this agentic offering, which is a major human river to cross. So that's a step change. But then also we are adding new data and features and functionality to existing products and that product every month. And so I think you see the best innovative tech companies now doing the step change and the innovation constantly. Yeah, it's a prerequisite. But I think I'd ask the same question I asked earlier. Whose job is that? Like, where does that live inside the organization? Or is that, again, an organizational mandate? I think that in many companies, it lives ill-advisedly only in product.
19:13Jessica Jensen:Yeah. Maybe with a little bit of sales input or a little bit of fringe marketing input. I think in the best companies, you have marketing and sales and product marinating together, co-developing, iterating all the time. Why do you think that tends to be the exception more than the rule? Because people love fiefdoms and many businesses have personality-driven teams with a leader who wants to carve their own territory and is not passionately interested in the experiences and input of other teams. Right. Right. So objectives are not aligned. They are. Or there's a level of intention and care and inquiry that is ignored.
20:10Yeah. What you're talking about, of course, and you alluded to it a second ago, which is, you know, change is management is a human condition, challenge, problem, responsibility. Having worked for some of the biggest marketplaces in the world, you've served or had to serve multiple constituents of humans who sometimes have very different expectations.
20:39Jessica Jensen:Internally and externally. Always internally, but externally in a marketplace. And who have different expectations of going back to what you said really to begin, which is of what is valuable to me. How do you operationalize? Can you operationalize? Making those different definitions of value work in tandem, to borrow another of your words, across multiple constituencies. And what happens if you make a decision that serves constituency A, this side of the marketplace, but not that side of the marketplace? May I clarify, are you talking internal or external? External. You're talking external. As opposed to your colleagues, yes.
21:27Jessica Jensen:Yes. I think I have worked in a number of marketplace businesses where you're managing at least two sides and maybe six. Six. So LinkedIn is small businesses, giant enterprises, governments, media organizations, all C-suites. And then we are very, very purposefully member first, and we make that explicit. If we are not doing things that help 1.3 billion people achieve economic opportunity, then we should shut ourselves down. That is why we are here. now we are also feeding many many mouths around and for that group of people and certainly we we do things that will you know uh maybe make a policy maker somewhere unhappy or angry but it helps certain businesses so we are to your point turning knobs frequently but i think a core principle of our of our business and this has been true at other businesses i've worked for is If it helps that core base of workers, of humans, to achieve economic opportunity, find a job, build a business, some of these other less happy parties, we wish them the best and we'll see them on the other side.
22:54In a world of economic change, where forecasts are, there could be, and I shouldn't say forecasts, I should say prognostication, does the definition of economic opportunity, of creating economic opportunity, not so much change as get maybe more facets to it? Yeah. Because originally it was, we'll help you find a job. Yes. And now it's a more dimensionalized perspective. That is true.
23:21Jessica Jensen:The definition of work is changing every day, and we are a part of that dynamic and that organism of global labor. And certainly, once upon a time, I'm going to go be a junior copywriter, and then I'm going to march along. That path is largely going to be destroyed. Now people are, and we know younger people who are, I'm a creator, I run a small business, I do some consulting, I also run a restaurant and you know two years from now I might be a full-time financial analyst and then six months later I'll be a creator and I mean this patchwork quilt of work gig contract creator founder is exploding in the world and on LinkedIn and so yes once upon a time with LinkedIn was like come here we'll get you a job in a company there's still a fair amount of that And that will persist for a while.
24:17Jessica Jensen:But this patchwork evolution is exciting and terrifying and liberating and wonderful. And we are trying to help people figure out how to do that. How do you do that? How do you help people figure that out? Well, we are super invested in the creator economy. And we've seen a 90 % increase in people adding creator to their profile on LinkedIn. We are super invested in solopreneurship and small businesses. I am a solopreneur. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Oh, yeah. We got you. We provide free AI training. So we're trying to expose you to new career paths, give you training, help you build a network in your desired area.
25:07Jessica Jensen:we're making all kinds of feed algorithm changes to expose you to the best experts and content in something you're exploring yeah so you know it's we're stretching new muscles for sure
25:25Jessica Jensen:meet klaviyo your brand's new best friend with all your data in one place klaviyo knows you and your customers its ai agents build campaigns from one prompt and answer questions 24 7 always on brand, always with your okay. Go to klaviyo.com slash best friends. If you're looking to hire, you need Indeed. With Indeed sponsored jobs, you can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. And listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com slash podcast.
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27:00All right, so let's stick with something we've been talking about and use it as a bridge to something else. Amongst the most important constituencies that LinkedIn serves is the B2B audience, right? Because you can't serve your member unless there are businesses. Having said that about LinkedIn's business, I want to then just think about B2B broadly. Which, and you've said something, which is, you know, B2B marketing tends to be rather sleepy marketing, I think you've called it.
27:34And I think that there is both a lot of agreement with that within B2B marketing. But I want to ask two questions, which is, why do you think that is? And then actually have a follow up.
27:49Jessica Jensen:I think that most B2B marketing, it's getting better. It's getting better. We have confidence and hope. But most B2B marketing started as product marketing. So people were in product marketing and they'd be like, the features and the operating system and the Scooby-Doo of this thing is Q, R, D. And so then that became communicated through the marketing. And now you see Matthew McConaughey's doing some crazy stuff for Salesforce and things like that where you're like, I never in my wildest dreams thought that we would be in this territory. And so I think that the best work is the smushing of those sides.
28:31Jessica Jensen:Yeah. Right? What are the sides you're smushing? The side is creative, evocative, maybe emotional, maybe a little wacky, and great product and feature and value communication. Yeah. Why do you think, so I've said this a handful of times on the show, one of my favorite ads of all time is 1974 IBM ad, the mainframe ad where it says nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. That's a great, great example. Because it spoke to the human and it spoke to the human condition and the need state and the need state was I don't want to get fired. Once we had it, why do you think it got lost along the way where people did become so product focused, so feature focused, forgetting they were talking to a human being on the other end of that communique?
29:26Jessica Jensen:Well, because I think that a lot of people in business and then in business marketing are obsessed with selling, making money, and the stuff in the stuff. Mm-hmm. Right? Right. The components, the elements, the, you know, the, and I mean, I've been in tech a long time, right? Like how many people in a tech company are like, well, if you just explain that the Q factor is higher than the Z to the four and the Hertz is at a frequency, like they get so enamored of their own junk, which may be marvelous and amazing, but that's not why people buy it. That's not why people buy it. And you're pointing at something very important, which is that most people in a B2B buying context are risk averse.
30:17Jessica Jensen:And they're afraid that they're going to spend too much on something that doesn't yield. And so there's a herd mentality. And, you know, so we're fighting multiple currents here. But I do think that you are seeing some real progress now where, well, then I was, so we're seeing progress because there's a number of B2B companies. who are actually selling to hearts and minds at the same time. But then I drive along the 101 freeway in the San Francisco Bay Area. Have you seen the billboards? It's not so much that I've seen them as I've heard people talking about them and how atrocious they are. It is literally, I am not joking when I say, AI for sales, AI for enterprise.
31:02Jessica Jensen:This AI agent will save you. I've got an AI. It is banal and meaningless and hilarious. We're recording here in Cannes at the festival, though I don't know when the show is going to come out. But along the closet, I'm going to leave the marketer anonymous. Somebody posted, we put the AI in Pele. That's awesome. And I posted it on a platform you may have some familiar with. a familiarity with called, is it, it's LinkedIn. Oh, I should check that out. And the response to my post, but there was like, and my note was just, please make it stop. Please make it stop. Please make it stop. So we decided to run billboards on the 101.
31:53Jessica Jensen:And we wrote, we don't understand what your billboard says, but we'll help you hire a copywriter. I love that. I love that. And what I love about that is its halo effect across multiple constituencies that really matter to your business. I really love that. Which then takes me to the follow-up question I wanted to ask. Business has long said B2B has a lot to learn from B2C to our point about marketing and selling to humans. What do you think B2C has to learn from B2B? Thank you. I love this. I think that so much B2C is shock and awe and goofy humor and crap, right? There's a lot of just sensationalist, dumb stuff.
32:48Jessica Jensen:We know the best consumer ads pull your heart or make you laugh and also convey real value. Yeah. And doing those things at the same time is the magic and the art. But now in our two-nanosecond time attention, we love zombie apocalypse. And I do think there's this kind of like junkification. Human slop has long preceded AI slop. Thank you very much. Yes. And so many brands and businesses have forgotten that outrage, humor, entertaining is a means to an end, not the end. Exactly so. And if you are not telling me something compelling about how this car, hotel, drink provides some value to me other than shocking me with a cattle prod, I wish you the best.
33:48Yeah. And, you know, I'm going to go back to what you said at the very beginning, which is it's the math. It's what you say, the math of the business. And in the math of value creation, you really can't create value without attention. But the question then becomes, if you have my attention, what are you going to do with it? Because if you don't do something that I find of value, you are destroying value.
34:13Jessica Jensen:You are wasting my time and yours. Yeah, and all of the resources that go into that equation. And all of the time and money. And implicit in some of what we've been talking about is where the gap between what a business says it is and does and what a business does can be at Apple. It's seemingly quite narrow. At LinkedIn, it's quite narrow. You've worked at some places where maybe the chasm is a little broader. Mm-hmm.
34:46What happens in those moments when you're like, yeah, what we're saying, who we're saying we are, and who and what we're saying we serve, it's starting to sound a lot like bullshit. What happens to it?
35:03Jessica Jensen:Well, I wouldn't say bullshit, but I'll tell you the LinkedIn story of what I discovered. So I joined a year and a half ago, and LinkedIn is surprisingly complex. We have an ads business. We have a sales business. We have a recruiting business. We have premium subscriptions. And then we have 1.3 billion people creating, sharing, discovering. I mean, there's a lot of different businesses in there. And we had really gone to market as a set of silos. Yeah. And so when you talk to people, what is LinkedIn? I go there for a job. What is LinkedIn? Oh, I market my business there. What is LinkedIn? Oh, I have a sales nav license and I do sales development.
35:40Jessica Jensen:I mean, it was literally littered across the landscape, and there was no kind of unifying idea or concept. And we decided, you know, what is the most valuable thing that LinkedIn is? We are a network of humans and businesses. And so we came up with this line, the network that works for you. It works for your career, your business, your government, your media channel, right? And then we can hang a lot of ornaments on the tree beneath and around that unifying idea. But a lot of business, I mean, you know, Facebook and a lot of places, it becomes a collection of brands with a lot of different ideas, serving a lot of different people in different ways.
36:25Jessica Jensen:And the ability to galvanize all of that around a core idea and set of messages is hard work.
36:37Jessica Jensen:Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile with your summer price forecast. Now, unfortunately, we're seeing rising costs across the country with possibility that big wireless hates you 100%. Now, over here at Mint Mobile, we're seeing sunny skies and dropping prices. Every plan to just$15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.
37:09Jessica Jensen:This is Advertiser Content from IBM. Cold take. My laptop works fine at room temperature, and most things on Earth do. If quantum computers can only function and behave quantumly at insanely cold temperatures, how will they ever become useful to most people? My name is Olivia Lanes. I am the Global Lead for Content and Education at IBM Quantum. I want to emphasize that actually cooling down a quantum computer is not really as hard as I think people think it is. It really is just the push of a button that can take your entire infrastructure down to 10 millicalvin. That is not the challenge, scientifically speaking.
37:52Jessica Jensen:I also want to emphasize that in the future, we don't envision everyone having their own quantum laptop. Quantum computers are going to live in a data center. Data centers already have their own cooling infrastructure. It's not going to be something that you have to learn how to install and work on a personal level. But that doesn't mean that the discoveries made with the technology won't affect every person. Quantum computing has the potential to touch almost every industry that you can probably think of. If you would like to learn more, you can do so at IBM.com slash quantum.
38:30Jessica Jensen:Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack. That's why The Guardian is launching Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman, a conversation with experts who slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what's actually happening in the world. Three times a week, hosts Kai and Carter utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has to discuss the news, international affairs, climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion, and wellness. And The Guardian is not billionaire-owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference.
39:07Jessica Jensen:Go to theguardian.com slash stateside to learn more. And listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com slash stateside.
39:27As I hear you talk about the network that works for you, I hear, like, boy, that's a big thing to say because any one person can say, not working for me. And it made me think of, you know, an airline. I can't think of the airline, but, you know, we get you from point A to point B. I mean, yeah, you got me there in three days. I was supposed to get there in two days. Sure. How do you manage in the listening? Sure. How do you manage the people who's like, yeah, you know what, this value equation, it's not landing.
40:02Jessica Jensen:Well, I think it's a great question, and I think that that's a dynamic that most brands struggle with in some way. The failure to perform is inevitable. Exactly. For everybody. For everyone, in some measure. And the question is, what do you do about that? So we have, in this world of ours right now, millions and millions of people applying for jobs at the click of a button to a set of jobs. The recruiters are completely inundated. They're trying to sift through. and you know a lot of companies never respond to people who apply or the people who go through that process have an abysmal experience and we can sometimes get blamed for that right i mean because we are connecting well you're the marketplace it's like i i talked to kofi when he was still at doordash about this like when when very similar to when my meal restaurant meal comes and i blame doordash it's not the chinese place it's doordash right so we have to find ways to provide value to those people either.
41:05Jessica Jensen:We actually, and we actually do get millions of people jobs. So there's the other side of that. But we have to provide value to you as a worker above and beyond that one set of experiences, right? So again, it's back to the value creation. Are we helping you build a network who will actually help you get the job? Or, hey, you should start a business or you have a point of view on the farming industry. You should be a creator and share that view. And we're going to help you learn how to do that. Or we're going to help you learn how to sell to people. Or we're going to help you learn an AI skill that you need to get that job.
41:45Jessica Jensen:So we have to have octopus legs of value that go out and surround people. Which makes me think of something you said earlier when we were talking about one of the things you've seen that can most often lead to value destruction, enterprise value destruction, which is rampant diversification, diversification without strategic focus. I would think for a business like yours, the temptation to diversify must be enormous because there are so many ways, places. We could be swimming in 800 ponds. How does the business make decisions about what to say no to? Because saying no is an imperative. That's right.
42:31Jessica Jensen:Good strategy cuts like a knife. Yeah. We have a fairly new CEO who's been at LinkedIn for, you know, who's counting 17 years. And he is a strategic wizard. and he really works across our leadership team and deeper down in the leadership team to deeply, deeply, deeply assess adjacencies that we can easily move into and hope to win in and further afield things. And we say no the vast majority of the time because have we won the ads business? Have we won the sales? Have we won recruiting? Like, we have enough knitting to do in our arenas to keep us busy for a very, very long time. Yeah. And I love that focus.
43:29Jessica Jensen:But we just did Shark Tank at LinkedIn recently. An internal shark? Yes, internal. So we had the senior leaders from all over the world come to Los Angeles, and we did Shark Tank across four new business ideas. and what would get to the billion dollars fastest. And then these teams presented to everyone, and we ran it like Shark Tank. And I thought it was illuminating, strategic, creative, and hilarious. It's an interesting reference, right? Which is Shark Tank funds investors investing. Sometimes it hits, oftentimes it does not. Why do you think so many CEOs, CFOs, COOs across the Fortune 500, but even more broadly, expect a marketing investment to always yield a certain return when they never expect that from any of their other investments?
44:29Jessica Jensen:I think that is an exceptionally good question. And I have seen it so many times. I think that many leaders naively believe that marketing is a dollar in and a certain number of dollars out. And they view product development or some other arena, usually product development, as experimental, green review. An R &D expense. R &D. We're going to build something and blow it up and start again. And I have frequently been in discussions and I said, how much time and money did we waste on that shitty idea while we were requiring a 3x dollar in, dollar out return in marketing? And I think that that is generally out of whack in companies.
45:22Why do you think it is so, though?
45:25Jessica Jensen:I think that in many companies there's this sense that product development is like alchemy. Mm-hmm. And that like brilliant people go into a barn with cobalt and nutmeg and some technology and create in an intergalactic vehicle. And that is very often not the case. They're just not, they're often not held to the same standards of return. Right. And I think it's a mess. I do not feel that at length. then I have felt that in other places. Yeah, I would imagine. I would imagine. So is there any truth to a hypothesis that says the more engineering focused something is, the more that is true, that discrepancy, that imbalance in expectation?
46:16Or no, I just made that up and it's stupid.
46:18Jessica Jensen:Engineering, do you mean engineering in the technical world? I've seen both sides of the aisle on that okay um we've talked about training right and the need to continue to learn yeah you talk a lot about um curiosity is being really at the heart of your own leadership philosophy. What drives that? And are we training curiosity out of people by not training people to be more curious?
47:02Jessica Jensen:Well, I can tell you what drives my own curiosity, but the second question is much more rich and interesting. I was raised by two people who were deeply, deeply artistic, and they read everything, and they went to every museum, and they went to every play, and they watched every movie, and they were voracious consumers and debaters of human creation. And I grew up in a constant state of exploration, critique, and really enjoying the fruit of human creation across media. And that was an enormous gift to me. Yeah, it sure was. Enormous gift to me. And then I've been very lucky through my career to work in, you know, I've worked in France and Guatemala and Japan and West Africa and a lot of different companies.
47:59Jessica Jensen:And so I am endlessly fascinated by people and what they do and don't do and eat and how they dance and what they use and what they want to build. And so I am just dying to see and learn anything and everything. You know, I have owned the URL, imsofascinating.com for 16 or maybe, fuck, it might be closer to 20, 18 years. Because I took it when blogs were just starting and Twitter was just starting and people like, here's what I had for lunch. You know, here's the poop I took. And I was like, not everything you do. Here's my salad. Yeah, exactly. Not everything you do is that fascinating. And so I took imsofascinating.com kind of as both a critique and I was going to, but I hold it.
48:52There's a there there.
48:53Jessica Jensen:There's a there there. That's great. And then I think to your second point, are we teaching people curiosity? I will say about five years ago when everyone was obsessed with coding and your kids should go to school for coding. And are you coding and you're coding and we're all coding and everything's coding. I saw a death of curiosity happening that was deeply concerning to me. And I now feel much better because with AI, what do you want to do? You don't have to really learn at the lay level. You can research, explore, test, build anything in so many areas. And I think that that is shaking people at their core.
49:42Jessica Jensen:like, if I could make it, what would that be and why? And I think that's really exciting. But I still think, and, you know, people ask me all the time, what should my child study in school? I hate that question. Yeah, me too. I think it is a sad question. And I think children and adults should throw themselves in any swimming pool they can and try to swim. Yeah, because life and careers are processes of elimination. My daughter just— And processes of joy. Yes, yes, hopefully. My daughter just finished her sophomore year of college. She's an econ major, and she's like, I don't know, what the fuck do I do with an economics major?
50:30And I was like, you know what? Then change your major. Who cares? Just go get educated. Go explore. Go like, yes, just become a well-rounded human because with training, with intellect, with curiosity, the well-rounded human is able to extrapolate and apply. And that's where magic can come from.
50:52Jessica Jensen:Yeah, that's right. That's right. Speaking of magic, our last question. I'm going to hand you a magic wand. and you can, with all the power in the world, create anything tomorrow and destroy anything tomorrow. And it does not have to be, your answer doesn't have to be through any specific lens, but any lens, professional, personal, societal, whatever. What would you create tomorrow? What would you destroy with that magic wand? I would destroy human hatred for other groups of humans. I see a great rising tide in various places of hate, and it makes me nauseous and sad. And I think we need to be very loud against hate.
51:46Jessica Jensen:so now that i've gotten rid of hate i would create a way for people to seek economic opportunity and joy simultaneously because i think a lot of people think those those things are in opposition and so if i could help people discover work that they love to do that is meaningful and brings them joy, the possibilities for our planet would be endless. Do you think we're closer to that than we've ever been, about the same, further from? I think certain groups of societies have the access and the, frankly, the liberty. Yeah. to do that. Yeah. And I think there are enormous groups of people who don't.
52:46Which are not, yeah. You're right to segment it. Yeah, there is certainly no one answer to that. Yeah. With that, and I do love those, I hope you get that magic wand. Thank you. Jessica Jensen. I hope you get one too. Well, thank you. What's your answer? You know, nobody's ever asked me that on my own show. What is your answer? So I have had time to think about it. I would destroy the electoral college. which I think is kind of adjacent to some of what you've said. And I would create, I don't know what I would create, to be honest.
53:24Jessica Jensen:It's a hard question to answer. But in this moment, I think, and I have had the luxury of giving it more thought than my guests get, I think it would be opportunity. Because I think to your point of a moment ago, opportunity is in abundance, but it does not feel like it is for many, many, many people. Exactly right. Thanks for being on. Thanks, Seth. As this episode ends, consider this. We humans like to think we evaluate things rationally and based on what they are, product quality, service reliability, the ingredients, the experience, but the fact is we don't. We evaluate, often subconsciously, based on a portfolio of signals and cues that combine to create whatever meaning we do or don't ascribe to something.
54:15Consider the case of milk. Probably the first time you will. For most of human history, people knew milk had gone bad because it smelled wrong, tasted wrong, looked wrong. The signal was free, accurate, and ultimately telegraphed by the product itself. Then, in the early 20th century, as people moved from farms to cities, we didn't know our milkman anymore. And as the distance between the person drinking the milk and the farmer producing it and the guy delivering it grew too wide for direct trust, someone put an expiration date on the carton. Exactly who did this first is surprisingly hard to verify.
54:50What we know, however, is that coded dates for retail use appeared in the 1950s and 60s. In the UK, Marks and Spencer put them on customer-facing shelves in 1970, and by 1973, open sell-by dating was visible to American consumers, and it started to become standard practice. Okay, that's trivia, but here's the thing. This expiration date isn't, in almost any scientific sense, actually scientific. The USDA doesn't require it here in America. It's not a true safety threshold. It's a quality estimate, voluntarily stamped, inconsistently regulated, and milk, like so many other products with an expiry or best buy date, is typically safe to use for days past whatever's printed.
55:35And yet, and yet, according to Harvard researchers, 84 % of consumers throw food out based on date labels, at least occasionally, meaning that date label confusion accounts for no small amount of consumer food waste and therefore economic waste. The point is that a number nobody required and that measures nothing precise has trained hundreds of millions of people to discard food that's almost certainly still good and immediately buy more. Better safe than sorry, sure, but still. The lesson here is that the date stamp doesn't tell you when milk's gone bad, but instead signals when your confidence in the milk should expire.
56:13And it's this psychological expiration date that governs behavior. This is how humans work, not just with milk, but everything. We use signals because they're easier to read and process. And the enterprises that understand this, that understand their customers aren't evaluating their products in isolation or in a lab, but evaluating the visible signals around it, using the packaging, the price, the review score, the return policy, the way the website loads, the tone of the customer service call, to create meaning that turns into monetizable value. And from commodity offerings to luxury ones, in most cases, the signal is the product and the brand, whether you designed it that way or not.
56:54Got Milk used a deprivation strategy to remind people of the cost of running out. Milk's expiration date can teach all of us that signals make substance matter more. Something to consider. Today's episode was produced by Art Chung, Jim Mackle, Manolo Moreno, Brandon McFarlane, and Ashley Futterman from the Fox Media Podcast Network and the Wisdomist Company.
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58:02Jessica Jensen:You get paid back up to 90 % of vet bills at any vet in the U.S. and Canada, with claims paid back in as little as two days. Go to FetchPet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's FetchPet.com slash save.
58:22Jessica Jensen:Support for this show comes from Harvey AI. The future of law is agentic. Not just tools that assist, but AI agents that navigate complex matters. That's why Harvey created agents that can do the work from end to end. They build a plan, pull from secure data sources, run subagents in parallel, and draft the work product ready for your review. So you delegate the work and own the judgment. Trusted by more than 60 % of the Amlaw 100 and leading Fortune 500 legal teams, Harvey is the AI operating system designed specifically for legal work. Harvey. AI. Tailored for law. Learn more at Harvey.ai.
From the publisher
LinkedIn CMO Jessica Jensen calls herself a "painter with an abacus"—which might just be the most perfect shorthand for what a modern marketing leader should be. She grew up writing advertising jingles at the kitchen table with her father, a creative director at DDB, and her mother, a speech and language teacher. This unique combination of rigorous quantitative training and a deep passion for artistic expression runs through Jessica's leadership journey across six massive companies—BCG, Apple, Meta, Booking Holdings, Indeed, and LinkedIn—and informs every part of this conversation. Jessica observes that the fastest path to value destruction is losing focus, that fiefdoms kill more enterprise value than bad creative ever will, and that good strategy cuts like a knife.
Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins is produced by Wisdomous and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod
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