Carla Hassan on Trust, AI, and Leading Under Pressure

0:00So we've been training on people, retraining on people, retraining our agencies to actually use the tools at less than perfect. Everything is the worst that it's going to be right now and it'll get better every day. The biggest thing is like change management with our teams too. You've got to think about, you know, a group of people who have done very, very well. Thank you very much, right? Doing the thing that they have been doing for years and how to get people to believe that this is not only going to, you know, be better for the business. but it's going to be better for them.

0:36I was just listening to Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie. That word, pressure, is repeated 10 times in that song. It's a lot of pressure. It's also a pretty accurate description of the modern CMO role. Pressure from AI, pressure from regulation, pressure to prove growth while earning trust in a more skeptical world. Hi, I'm Josh Bania, VP of AI and Marketing Strategy at Google, and welcome back to Frontier CMO. Today's guest knows a thing or two about operating under pressure. Carla Hassan is the Chief Marketing Officer of JPMorgan Chase, leading more than 3 ,000 marketers across one of the most recognized and important brands in the world.

1:17From growing up displaced by war, to leading marketing across the Middle East and Africa at PepsiCo, to now shaping one of the most valuable financial brands in the world, Carla has built her career on navigating complexity and finding clarity inside it. In this conversation, we unpack how to build trust in an era of institutional skepticism, how AI doesn't fix broken systems, it forces you to confront them, and why resilience and operational discipline are now core leadership traits for CMOs. If you're feeling the pressure, this episode is for you. Here is my conversation with Carla Hassan.

1:56I've got a whole bunch of questions about the future of marketing and frontier marketing, but I've noticed a resilience in your career, Carla. You have faced many obstacles, moments of crises, and significant things. And on your Wikipedia page, it says you are a refugee from Lebanon. What does it mean to be a refugee today and how that sort of impacted your growth, your career and your ability to navigate these strange times where we're living in? Growing up in the UAE as someone whose family left Lebanon because it was wartime, like the reality is my parents would not have left Lebanon if it had not been in the middle of a civil war, but felt like they had to extract their family from there into a foreign country and build a life for us.

2:47And, you know, I was always struck by that. I always remembered my parents yelling into their phone to the people on the other end in Lebanon, like, you know, asking how they were worried, sick about them. Sometimes the line just cutting out. And I'd always, you know, wonder, like, why are they yelling? I always remember the sort of longing for going back home and the longing to be proud to be Lebanese. And so that has always stuck with me and frankly, has really shaped who I am, not just as a person, but more importantly, I think as a leader, staying really, really, really true to yourself. And there was a moment in time where I was lost with that because I didn't want people to know kind of what my background was because it was I was afraid.

3:32I was afraid that people didn't like Arabs and that we'd be, I'd be branded a totally different way. And so, you know, I always talk about how I pass. No one knows I'm from somewhere else or that, you know, I think in Arabic or whatever, or that I grew up somewhere else. No one knows that because they don't have to, not by the way I talk. But it has really kind of shaped who I am, like really making sure that I'm proud, proud of my culture and proud of my heritage. I think I take that a lot. It is about resilience there because, you know, kids are, you know, even when they're funny, sometimes they're mean and they don't realize they're mean, right?

4:08So like, you know, they'd say, what's your last name? And I'd say, Zach, which is my maiden name. And people would like spit it out. And it's like, how do I belong to a group of people that I don't necessarily organically belong to? How do I, how do I, you know, find a way to survive it? Thank you for telling us about that. I was just thinking and relating this to sort of a marketing area. Inside of Google, we have constantly struggled with being a global brand and then operating at a regional level and then at the country level. And, you know, we have the GRL is one of our acronyms and we constantly debate getting the balance right.

4:46Right. You were a CMO of PepsiCo for the Middle East and Africa. You're a global CMO now. I was just wondering, as you run a large marketing organization today and you operate globally, you have to think locally. How do you take some of those things you've learned, some of that resilience and actually get that balance right between global, regional and local activations in marketing? I'd say first and foremost, whether you are a local marketer or a global marketer or beyond marketing. If you're a local leader and a global leader, both, by the way, in the sense of geography, local and global, but also in the sense of like running narrow but deep businesses or like, you know, not as deep but like really broad organizations, right?

5:33Like global organizations. I would say that in all of those, for me, listening and learning is really, really important. And so to your point, when I was CMO for Middle East Africa region in Pepsi, I had to know the difference between the Saudi consumer and the Egyptian consumer and the Jordanian consumer. And, you know, they're very, very different. We had to learn what mattered to them, what made people tick, how cultures shaped their choices. Because to your point, what works in one country might totally miss the market in another. And so I think as a marketer and as a leader, you've got to stay curious.

6:06You've got to stay open. And, you know, at the same time, when you're in a global role, you're thinking about the bigger picture. And sometimes it is important to solve for the lowest common denominator because it's more efficient and it makes it easier. However, you've got to balance that. I mean, for me, we've got to make sure the brand's purpose and values are clear and consistent everywhere. We've got to make sure that the tonality of how we talk to our consumers and our clients is the same. But we also have to be flexible enough to know that like some of those things might need to be tweaked a little bit to be relevant locally.

6:41I learned pretty quickly that you can't just drop in with a global playbook and expect it to work. I'll give you an example. When I was at PepsiCo, we had a new tagline for brand Pepsi. It was, you know, as the sort of head of marketing for brand Pepsi, it was like, no, no, we got to get this tagline everywhere. in English everywhere. And once you start talking to the teams, you realize that actually even the translation from English to a different language, you can't necessarily translate word for word. And so, but you can, in some cases, translate the idea and the feeling. The net of it all is you've got to build relationships with local teams.

7:21You've got to trust their expertise. You've got to give them the freedom to adapt for their markets, but you have to have a very clear framework of what are things that are completely non-negotiable. So what are your three or four absolute non-negotiables? I think one non-negotiable is what the brand stands for, right? Like, so we cannot, we live too much in a global world that, you know, someone, you know, one part of the world is going to see something else about the brand and another. The other is non-negotiables are about the tonality and the voice of the brand and the visual identity of the brand.

7:55So if you take Google, right, there are things that you can play with, but like Google is Google, no matter where you are around the world. It's the same as Chase, right? We have Chase International in the UK right now. And there are certain nuances in the creative or in the marketing that are for the UK market. But the colors of the brand, the essence of the brand, the tonality of the brand, the voice of the brand all has to be consistent. Well, I am a Chase customer, so I see some of that as I'm sort of a global person. I just want to go one touch deeper here. Money is incredibly personal, right?

8:34And it must have incredible nuance between what people in the UK, people in the US, even across the US think and sort of connect with their financial services provider. And just talk a little bit about the different culture of money in different parts of the world and how that expresses itself. Yeah, it's a really good question, right? Like I'll tell you, for example, in some parts of the world, people don't talk about money. In the US, people talk freely about money and people talk freely about learning about money and people talk freely about like financial empowerment and understanding money more.

9:08In other parts of the world, they may not. And so you have to really nuance sort of how you're talking to them, right? So a message about savings, you know, in one country might be a little, have like a slight nuance to another. It feels like with money meaning so many different things and so many different audiences, how do you get a consistent brand purpose for Chase, which actually speaks to those different audiences and the different approaches they have to money in the first place? How do you operate globally like this? I'm going to take it in two because one, we think about our firm's purpose and everything kind of emanates from our firm's purpose into the two brands that we have, JPMorgan and Chase.

9:45We think about JPMorgan Chase, the sort of corporate entity. We've done a lot of work to understand what is our role in the world? Why do we exist? If we were not here, what would people miss? And I think that's really, really important. And where we have landed is that we talk about making dreams possible for everyone, everywhere, every day. And the idea, this notion that if you are an immigrant and you are looking to open your, you know, your first small business, we help make that possible for you. You know, if you're two founders and you're sitting in your garage and you decide that like, you know, now all of a sudden you have this really big company, you decide you want to IPO the company, who would you trust to make that dream possible for you?

10:36And then also our own people, 320 ,000 people, right? How do we make their dreams possible? There's so many things they want to accomplish in life. And so this idea of making dreams possible is really important for us as a firm, and it's grounded in the values that we have as a firm as well. But that, I would say broadly, is how we think about Chase. Okay, so I sense a tension here, so I'm going to ask you about it. JPMorgan Chase is the world's largest bank, or one of them. It is the richest bank by assets under investment. Your CEO is famous. And so I'm just interested in the tension between, from a marketing perspective, How do you build a brand which is the most successful, richest, broadest, and all that against a backdrop where people don't like or trust large institutions as much?

11:33The trust isn't earned in a tagline. It's to me earned when you like show up in the moments that matter for consumers. So helping a family safe for college, guiding a first time home buyer, supporting someone, rebuilding their credit day in and day out. The differentiator is that it starts at the top of the house for us. And then it becomes a framework that helps people make the right decisions that ensures that we're like innovating and talking about the right things. And so there's the example of the work that we have done over the last, you know, five to 10 years with Detroit. And so since 2019, I believe, we've invested$200 million to help accelerate the city's economic recovery.

12:15I think it's just the day in and day out, living in the communities and working with the communities that builds that trust. It makes perfect sense. We see the same thing in Google. And I see the data against institutions. A broad level, people rail against the institution, but they like the person close to them. So the local branch, I can understand that. The local insurance person is great. The insurance industry is problematic. There's this weird dichotomy that we as marketers have to understand. People just want transparency. They just want like the real deal, you know. And so when you're transparent, when you're like trustworthy, I think, you know, people will also, by the way, I think the other thing is, I think people sometimes, if you're building that trust with folks, to your point, whether it's like right across the street or your neighbor or whatever, or feeling like we're in their community, then when the inevitable happens, which is like this small hiccup, people will forgive you for it, right?

13:07Like people build relationships with brands just like they do with people. I always tell my team, like brands are living, breathing things. Like every day we're evolving as brands as well. And so I think that, you know, just the ability to just be honest and transparent when you make mistakes, but then be there for people when you like to really solve problems for them, I think is important. Everything we've talked about up to now feels and sounds in a good way, like classical marketing, like the things you probably were taught when you were at PepsiCo right in the beginning of your career through to today.

13:38And there's a bunch of stuff as marketers, I think we need to keep. I'm also really interested in in what we need to change, what needs to evolve, where the edges are. And I'd love to get your thoughts. I asked Gary Vee on an earlier episode of Frontier CMO to talk about liquid death he's an investor in and how they've done this brilliant sort of breakthrough, innovative marketing. But then how do you apply that to the banking sector? And I'd love to hear from you. What does modern marketing mean today? Where are the boundaries changing? What are you learning? What are you trying and what's not even working?

14:10Here's the dichotomy, right? Which is when we talk about modern marketing, because there are so many things that have changed and yet there are also so many things that will stand the test of time. And so for me, what stands the test of time is that you've got to know who you are and you've got to know who you're not. And I think that's really important. By the way, Gary is a prime example of knowing exactly who he is. I tell him that all the time. You know exactly who you are. And that's what's incredible. Like, you know what you're going to get from Gary. And that is why people are drawn to him.

14:45What has changed is so much. Like, I go back to when I first started and the, you know, quote, technology was four stations on a television. And then I remember, I remember the conversation about like, we've got these things called digital banners on the interweb, you know, what are we going to do with those, you know? And then you go from there to like, you know, now where we are, which is you think about how consumers are actually getting their information. And you think about even something like a Google Gemini or AI mode in Google and like how people are going on and asking questions and getting the entire answer.

15:27And so the disruption is happening all over the place. And so that has changed dramatically how people are getting information in social media, right? Even social media has changed dramatically. And now we're moving into a space where like e-commerce is now a huge part of social media. Now live shopping is growing in social media. Now people, at least from a financial services perspective, one in three Gen Zers, one in three Gen Zers are getting their financial services advice on social media. And so as a marketer start to think about that entire cohort of people, it's not just about the technology.

16:07It's about how the technology is shaping their behavior. And so as marketers, we've really got to think long and hard, not just about, you know, how we used to do it, obviously, but like all the things that are changing. I think we've got to be nimble, way, way, way more nimble. Like, again, gone are the days of where we'll like test something for an entire year to see if it works. Like now you're putting it out there. If it works that day, you can amplify it more. If it doesn't, walk away. The only last thing I tell you that I think is changing dramatically, other than, you know, all the stuff we're just talking about, is I think that as important as the digital life is to a consumer, they are craving in -person experiences.

16:49We are seeing it more than ever. Like almost 80 % of consumers are telling us that they are craving in-person experiences because they're lonely. So all these things that are changing, but the most interesting one to me is that as deeper as people go in digital, they're also trying to fight it with experience. And I think the two are figuring out how they live together. So I've heard you talk about how you've partially restructured your own marketing teams and you've sort of created new roles for editors and prompters. Just talk a little bit about how you're adapting the team. You know, we talk a lot about AI changing everything and AI replacing jobs.

17:27And of course, it absolutely, it absolutely will. But the example that I usually give, and I'll give it even in just how our media team thinks about even old school terminology now, search engine optimization. But, you know, writing the articles and like that, you know, all the stuff that is driving our quantitative content. And again, historically, you've had X number of people and those people are writing those articles. That is their job. They are writers. Today, those people are editors. And we have seen an increase, an efficiency of 30 % so far. We're going to get more, but we're still in the beginning stages of it.

18:04We've also seen our ability to double the content that we're producing because of the tools that we're using from an AI perspective. Now, interestingly enough, what I will tell you is it's an absolute journey. I think there's a lot of folks, and this is where I think as marketers, we go wrong, is I think there's a lot of folks that go, oh, here's a tool. I'm going to bring it in. I'm going to like hit go and I'm going to, it's going to be perfect. It's much harder in the very beginning because we're learning. And so it wasn't until there was like a moment in time where the team's like, oh, now we got it right.

18:38Like now we are understanding how to prompt it better. Now it is learning, you know, our language and it's like the model is actually learning how we want it to respond. And that's when it unlocks the true productivity. And I will tell you that the teams themselves feel like their work is a little bit more meaningful because now it's not like I'm just writing. Now I'm actually strategically thinking about what are things people might be asking for, less about just writing an article about like, what's the best travel credit card. When you say teams there, how has the work shifted inside of your teams with your external agency partners?

19:19Is that been going through a transformation? It is going through a transformation for sure. We brought a lot of the capabilities in-house years ago. And so it's less about how it's changing with our agencies right now. And it's much more about the roles that we brought in-house years ago. So we have almost like a hybrid right now where we test things against each other to make sure like the way that we did it before, we know that works. The way that we want to move to, we're not quite sure. Let's test it against each other. And what we're finding in almost every instance is that with minor tweaks, the new thing that we want to go to and the new workflow and the way that we want to do it is actually just as good, if not better.

20:03And so I think it also helps our agency partners to know we're leaning into that innovation and they're starting to bring more to us where before they probably wouldn't, right? Because they just assumed that we're going to be too conservative on it. So one of the things is it's also incredibly frustrating as a marketer right now because the systems architecture, the overall tools and systems that are being built, they're not mature. One of the things we really got to and really sort of started to understand, it sounds like you're doing the same as you have to use the tools. Because if you wait for perfection, by the time perfection comes around, you don't have the muscle memory and you haven't been to the gym to work out how to do this stuff so you can really get going.

20:43So when we had Nano Banana launch in the US or around the world, we had spent nine months trying to make object permanence, hacking our way through to that. It was painful, difficult, and frustrating. Nano Banana comes out, instant object permanence. And in one regard, all that work up to that point was a waste of time. But it wasn't because it was like the equivalent of going to the gym and actually getting skilled at that. And so we've been training on people, retraining on people, retraining our agencies to actually use the tools at less than perfect. Everything is the worst that it's going to be right now and it'll get better every day.

21:16The biggest thing is like change management with our teams, too. You've got to think about, you know, a group of people who have done very, very well. thank you very much, right? Doing the thing that they have been doing for years and how to get people to believe that this is not only going to, you know, be better for the business, but it's going to be better for them. You have to feel it. You know, it's funny, not AI related, but get made fun of a lot for how much I am on social media. And like my behavior on social media would have you think that I'm a, you know, a 16 year old. I'm sure if you ask Gemini, how old is Carla has done, based on her social media footprint, it would tell you she's like 16 to 18.

21:56But I do it because that is where our consumers are. And so it does take time. And I think that's where, you know, marketers don't think enough about it. Like it takes time and it takes everybody, at least having some sort of knowledge of the programs and the platforms that we are using with hands on keyboard. Otherwise, you know, it's just another thing that's sitting over here that's going to stay in proof of concept forever. We're in violent agreement. It's one of the things we've seen inside of our own large marketing organization, but the leaders who are actually trying things out themselves actually can then talk and push their own teams to work in those spaces.

22:36It feels like it's a mandatory now if you're a marketer. So I've seen some of your YouTube films and some of your TikToks. And how did you feel the first time you pressed upload on one of your little TikTok dances? Oh God, how do I feel every time I hit upload on anything, on anything on social media that I do? I'm like, I brace myself, you know, I started off doing them with my daughter. So they were more fun, you know, like it was like, oh, I'm connecting with my daughter during COVID, you know, wink, wink. But I do kind of hold my breath every time, but there's a purpose to a lot of, like, I just uploaded one last week because somebody that is like near and dear to my heart was going through some stuff.

23:17And I was like, you know what, I'm going to, I'm going to be silly. I'm going to post this dance that has a subliminal message and she's going to get it. And, um, you know, whatever. I think being a marketer today means kind of unlearning some of the things that we have learned and the speed of which social media works, the way I can post to YouTube shorts or post to TikTok and get instant reaction. Until you actually do it, you somehow don't internalize it. So I just, you unlearn the conventions of marketing, which are typically in months and quarters versus hours, days, and weeks. And we have to move that way.

23:55That, you know, it's, it's very interesting going back to, you know, not part of the person, but when you like talk about YouTube shorts, for example, right? Like, you know, I said earlier that there's some content that we create, that we test before we put it out in the world. And there are some that, you know, that we don't. There's a lot actually that we don't. But the best focus group is actually putting it out into the world. And so we have examples of content that we have created that we have put up on YouTube. And immediately you start to see reaction. You start to see people share. You start to see people comment.

24:29And you're like, oh my gosh, this is really great. To your point, if you as a marketer, personally and don't understand that, don't understand that dynamic. You can put something out there and it can get 30 ,000 views in about five seconds versus you're going to put something out there and it's going to get a hundred views in 10 days. The insight that you can glean from that as a marketer is incredible. And I think that the more you are in it personally, the more you understand how it works and the more you can see how you can apply it to your brands as well as a marketers. One of the things that we have spent a lot of time on as my marketing organization is process, because I do think that what ends up happening, particularly when something novel has come to the world and something new, I think that people immediately go, oh, let's take, you know, that thing and let's put it here on the current process that we have.

25:24And one of the things we are realizing in the marketing organization is that putting AI on a crappy process is a crappy process with AI. Like really, like it's the crappy process that's now AI. As opposed to looking end to end at our processes. And we have spent, you can imagine how many processes we have. Google's no different, right? Like, you know, I talked to Lorraine. You guys are a large, large, large organization as well that has been very successful through a lot of legacy processes. And trying to like look at those processes end to end and identify in a campaign execution, everything from strategy to content generation to, you know, audience building to measurement, ultimately all of that.

26:11We are totally relooking at all of those processes. It's not sexy. It is completely, it is completely like menial work, but we've got to do it because we now are overlaying all the different processes as we've looked at the process map and said, where does a human need to be involved? Where does a human not need to be involved? So we are literally using this opportunity with Gen AI as being an enabler for the things that we want to do to take an entire new look across the board at our processes end to end and say, how do we like shake all of that up and then overlay the tools that we need, whether by the way gen ai or not to be able to like drive the new process that we want i'm sure every marketer out there is going through a similar sort of process and i think the space the pace of technology such as this now a continuous optimization optimization optimization one of the macro things that i think i'm seeing and speaking to a lot of uh cmos and a lot of organizations and google itself is almost a rebundling when you can move as fast as you can when AI does speed up the process, the notion of the separation of creative, of media, of design, of social, of comms actually becomes kind of a distraction and not helpful.