Norm de Greve on Growth, Reinvention, and Leading Through Relentless Change

0:00In this era of AI and transformation and uncertainty, creative still matters. It totally matters. The machine, at least today, doesn't know taste that well. All of the AI tools I've seen so far have to be directed by a creative who says that's it or that's not it. Maybe at some point in the future we'll be a different place, but we are not there today.

0:24Marketing today feels a little overwhelming. The ground keeps shifting faster than we can keep up. We're supposed to be in the era where marketing is the engine of growth. So why do the leaders who could actually navigate that chaos feel so rare? Hi, I'm Josh Vania, VP of AI and Marketing Strategy at Google, and welcome to Frontier CMO. I'm excited about today's guest because he's one of those rare leaders who's delivering impact through change at one of the most complex, largest, and quote, old school companies in the world. Norm DeGreve has spent much of his career navigating moments of massive change.

1:01At CVS, he helped reinvent the company's identity by walking away from billions in tobacco revenue. At Digitas, he lived through the first waves of digital transformation. And at General Motors, he stepped in as the company was rebuilding almost everything at once. The portfolio, the marketing model, the operating system, the mindset. In this episode, Norm talks openly about what sparked GM's turnaround and why constant change is both energizing and terrifying for the teams inside it. Norm also lifts the hood on GM's new growth structure, the AI-powered Metropolis platform, and the creative overhaul reshaping how the company shows up in the world.

1:43It's a candid look at what it takes to lead insider business moving at the speed of reinvention. That's enough from me. Here's my conversation. with Norm DeGreve.

1:57I've decided I made a huge mistake in my career. I should have stuck and stayed in automotive. I've been listening to all these podcasts. I've been watching these things on YouTube. I found this podcast called The Auto Line After Hours. I have no idea if it's GM approved or not, but they're fascinating guys. And so I've just been listening to all this stuff. And I worked on GM way back in the day when I was in my Goodby Silverstein advertising days. So I went to Detroit a lot. But yeah, the auto business is unbelievably complex and interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the reasons that I took the job.

2:29I had done some work for GM and I'd seen a lot of industries, but automotive is just fascinating. It really is. There are just very few places that it's like a medallion product where it says something about who you are. People judge you by it. So brand really matters. and also have this massive research phase that spews off tons of data and also has the actual individual register of the purchase at the end so you can close the loop. There's just very few places that have all of that. The other thing that's fascinating is it's really a momentum business. It takes so long to make new products that when you get it right and if you're ahead of your competitors, they just can't, they cannot do much.

3:20And when you get it wrong and your competitors are ahead of you, you cannot do much. You just have to get it right in the next product cycle. And that part for me was fascinating. If you look at kind of the history of GM, I mean, in the 1960s, it held half the U.S. auto market, 50 % market share. Wow. And pretty much once the 70s showed up until, you know, the 2000s sometimes, It was just a decline in market share for a long time because the products weren't as competitive as they needed to be. And marketing was kind of tasked with kind of covering that up a lot. Like, you know, hey, look over here.

3:58This is cool. You know, if you forget about the car, you'll be cool. If you have this car, you'll be associated with something else. And now the products are back, which was no small feat, really an amazing kind of corporate America story. but the products are really back. And that makes the marketing a lot more interesting and a lot more fun to do as well. Because, you know, you're operating off strength and you're not operating off weakness. So as I was preparing for this interview, as we were preparing for this notion of a frontier CMO, and we'll talk about that a little bit, looking at your resume, looking at the history of GM, looking at all the places you've worked, change just seems like this really constant part of your world.

4:41You've been at the center of or within some really big moments in change. But I just want to go back to what you said about getting the product right, because ultimately good product sells, good marketing can't sell a bad product. What happened inside GM a year ago, five years ago, 20 years ago to get you to good product today? The ultimate catalyst was going bankrupt in the 2000s. That'll do it. Because you can tell yourself any story you want to tell yourself. but when you're bankrupt, there's really no hiding, that there's a problem. And that wasn't just a one-time event, that the Treasury Department had people sitting in meetings at GM for a long time.

5:22So like every day you're a bit humiliated that you can't run your business. And so that to me was really the catalyst that said this idea of pride or we can make it work or whatever it was that was keeping the old model floating, or even the fact that you had all these constraints of all these different, you know, you couldn't raise your prices or you couldn't change your EBITDA or your costs were a certain way. Bankruptcy helped clear that. So when you were hired to General Motors, it's been a couple of years now, right? Yeah, yeah. Were you brought in, do you believe, with a change mandate of, we know we've got good product, we need to turn marketing around or we need to change things up or we need to match the velocity and momentum we see on the product side, on the marketing side?

6:11Yeah, I mean, there was good marketing before I showed up. The reason that I was asked to join was to match the model of marketing that was needed for the challenges of today. And what was happening is, in addition to remaking all these better products, there was a huge movement to EVs, of course, and EVs are great for all the reasons we know. They are also a lot less profitable than gas vehicles. And you know who doesn't care about that is Wall Street. And so what we had is launching all these new vehicles, some of which are new nameplates. Now, it's a product that is a new name. It takes a lot of money to embed that name into people's heads.

6:51And an operating model, not just a marketing, but for the company and a vision that was challenged with profitability to get to that vision. and so you really needed a fundamentally different approach to getting there into delivering on that that we had before so in some ways it was less about the work before wasn't good it was just a different model and it was a different time and a different model was needed for that time now what that meant was a pretty substantial um transformation of how marketing operates yeah We're going to get into that. But before we do, I just want to, I mentioned earlier, you've been around some pretty momentous moments and you're famous for the CVS dropping tobacco.

7:36You worked at Digitas through a pretty transformative decade in Digitas' history. You were an entrepreneur, started your own company back in the day. As you think about these moments of change and then coming to General Motors, what is your personal motivation? Do you enjoy being at the frontier of these change moments? Does it ever become overwhelming? How do you process and cope with, here we go again, momentous change, constant upheaval? I like to build things is really the core. It also feels like we're trying to identify the attributes and the skills needed to be a frontier CMO to operate at this point.

8:14sort of bleeding edge of marketing and of industry. But change is coming faster and faster. And it feels like it's now a fundamental, there is no normal or regular. It's constant change. I see that in my role at Google. I'm sure you see it at GM as well. If you're not comfortable in operating at this change context, you're not going to succeed, right? I think a job of a leader is to help people feel secure in different ways because the change is happening. So like if you can tell them we're going to figure it out and you're going to, I believe in you, that takes a lot of anxiety out of them. But the actual facts aren't changing.

8:57You know, I have this, I'm kind of known for a phrase of like, you can only move forward or we can only move forward. And it's just so true. It's just what happens. And what you're pointing out is the velocity of this change continues to increase. And I think the AI thing is scary, not just for all the reasons we know, but for one reason, that it's really defied what our historical understanding of change was, which was a little bit in technology, that we get so excited in the short term that we way overestimate what it's going to do for us. In some ways, for those of us who've been around a while, there was some comfort in that.

9:34No, this is the phase where we overestimate, and then it will be good, but we'll have some time. And I think in AI, we're just seeing that we continually don't overestimate it. It continually outperforms our estimations. And so that creates some anxiety too. In all this sort of talk of constant change, as I was prepping for all this conversation, your role changed. So you're now the chief growth officer of General Motors. What does that mean? And is this a new paradigm for marketing? is the CMO need to become a chief growth officer? What's your take on all this? Well, in general, I think that there's a lot of pressure on marketers to be clear on how they're driving growth.

10:18And you're seeing the chief growth officer role pop up in a lot of places. We had a couple of things going on at GM and the reason my role evolved, which was we had built, we'd done a huge transformation of marketing in the US. And we saw two opportunities for growth. One was everything outside the U.S. needed to go to the same place. And then in the U.S., we looked and we saw particularly like social and events that the comms and the marketing teams were overlapping a little bit. They were doing some of the same stuff. And we thought, well, we could pull those teams together and make sure that they're on the same theme and same story.

10:55And so we wanted to make that happen and have some leverage. I think getting to an agreed definition of what growth is, is pretty important. There's the financial office, the CFO's office, and what they think growth is, which tends to count for a lot in these conversations. Yeah, but Josh, you see this, like there is only one definition of growth, it's sales. Like we can call it whatever we want, but that, like, I don't really know people who measure growth any other way than sales. Right. So let me just follow up on that, because you said a few minutes ago about EVs are a much lower margin. So I'll just speculate here.

11:35There is a group of people inside a GM who would articulate, we should sell more ICE cars, you call them, internal combustion engine cars. Internal combustion engine, which means gas, but it's called ICE, sometimes referred to as the ICE age. okay so so we should sell more ice age cars because that's going to mean larger profits and more more margin and and all the rest of it and and don't promote the evs as much but you guys have made a bet on the ev so there is even when you get under the hood of what growth is and you know sales just sales feels like it's too limited although i completely get the point that sales are important well the ratio of the products that you want to sell is kind of driven at the at the kind kind of the overall business unit or CEO level, that marketing's job is to help deliver on that.

12:24Now, in terms of the automotive industry, it's absolutely true that the gas vehicles make more money. But we had seen the future in terms of, it's just a better experience to be in an EV. They're quieter, they're smoother in acceleration, they're faster in acceleration. There's everything about them that's just a better experience. What's important to note, though, is within that, our job as a company is to follow consumer demand. That's what we do. And so when we look out at the EV versus gas mix, we'll follow where the consumer demand goes. And I drive an EV, a couple of them, and I love it.

13:10And I'll never drive a gas car again, because once you drive an EV, it's fantastic. But others will make different choices for different reasons. So I think you're getting to part of the conversation with the CMOs that chief growth officers have to have, which is, you know, short term versus long term, profit now versus profit later. And it feels like there's a really, there is always a constant tension and push and pull. As you navigate and as you work through this new growth role, as you've done so for the last couple of years, just talk a little bit about that tension between the short term gains and the sort of the medium and long term benefits of the brand for your individual box?

13:48Yeah. Well, I think first it's how do you even judge the effectiveness of your marketing? You know, we look at it at a minimum of 12 months. So when you get into short-term versus long-term, you'll have a business unit leader sometimes like, that's great, but I like, I need to make my numbers like today. And what are you going to do about that? And that's just reality. Like you can't live in a vacuum. Sometimes you have to make those decisions, But as a general operating mentality, we're operating off of, you know, 12 month plus kind of best ways to do things. That takes care of, I'd say, 80 % of the answer.

14:23There's another 20%, which is, I'd say, really core brand building that's frankly just really harder to measure. and that comes from just a belief system that imbuing your product or service with some sort of deeper characteristics and meaning drives demand. And I've seen this over my career. There are people who believe in it and there are people who don't. And the people who don't will basically never be convinced and the people who believe in it don't need to be convinced. So inside Google, this is quite a few years ago, but we did this fun experiment where we took the Google search results, a regular page of search results.

15:05It's probably 10 years ago now. And we took all the Google branding off and then we took the same results for the same search from another search engine. And then we just showed them to people and we asked them to rate the results with or without the Google branding. And it was pretty eye-opening. Although people judge the Google results as better because they are, of course, the delta was significantly less than you might have hoped and that was actually a pretty powerful argument in terms of why you need to invest in the differentiation the product and in the long-term brand you can't just believe that your product alone is going to do it for you brand matters a lot it does um it does matter a lot and i i think the challenge is it's sometimes hard to quantify Yeah.

15:54And I say that knowing a lot about how to quantify it. It's not that I haven't really spent a lot on this time on this. It can just be sometimes harder to figure out. When you were pitching and involved in the decision at CVS, when you were working at CVS for seven or eight years, and you decided as a company to move into BK, more associated with wellness and healthy lifestyle, and you guys took tobacco off the shelves. We don't need to re-go through that decision. I mean, you've spoken about that before. But what were the conversations like in terms of here's a billion or$2 billion of revenue we're giving up, but here is a brand halo lift we're going to give.

16:31How did you articulate that in the context of what's this doing for our brand and our positioning? It's a good case study because generally people didn't want to give up$2 billion of revenue. That's kind of a hard thing to give up. And so there is a reality in there. And in fact, the evidence of that reality is that the idea of getting out of tobacco was not new. It had been around for years, but it hadn't gotten done for exactly that reality that, you know, how are you going to do it? So where did that start? Just as a, not to go too deeply into it, it started with, as you said, a vision for what's the future of the company.

17:09In most industries, the companies that were winning were the companies closest to the consumer. In healthcare, the pharmacists are closest to the consumer. So the idea started to percolate that could CVS become a large healthcare company because they see people much more than the doctors see people? This all starts to become an interesting idea with the one problem, which is you're profiting from selling the number one cause of preventable death in America. So you don't really look like a healthcare company. And so just to get into the decision on that then is not just hope of, hey, people will like us more, it was to knock down a barrier that was preventing growth towards a vision as well.

17:58Now, what is absolutely true is that nobody thought the stock was going to go up when that announcement was made. And it did. And in some ways, there's brand right there. everybody knew somebody who'd been affected by tobacco and they felt the power in making that move and it made the stock go up even though we told them we were cutting two billion dollars in revenue it's really fascinating to me it's a true case study of change in the industry and i think it speaks to some of the things which i find fascinating about how marketing and vision for marketing and positioning of a company can drive real business trajectory and outcomes.

18:45And one of the things I'm interested in your thoughts on is it feels to me that marketing as a discipline has generally not had a seat at the high table or whatever table you want to call it, right? I read a report recently that less than 84 % of US companies do not have a marketer on their board or someone who has got real marketing experience in their background. And that just feels like a miss. And there is an opportunity right now with a rapid change of AI to actually have marketers, growth officers, people who are close to the customer, actually bring that insight into the boards, into the CEO suite.

19:22How do marketers do that more? How do we get more credibility? How have you achieved that in your roles? By the way, I think there's a companion study that says the companies that do have a marketer on their board outperform. And I think that says a lot about the risk taking that they're willing to do and the consumer centricity that they have probably before they even get a marketer on the board, which is why they wanted one. I think that when there's a lot of components to this. The first part is that marketers need to realize that once they're a CMO, they're not on the marketing team anymore.

19:59They're on the SLT team. And once they're on the SLT team, they need to speak the language of the SLT team, not their marketing language. Marketing is what they do when they go back to their shop. But on that SLT, you have to speak that language. And if you don't speak that language, you're just not as respected. Point two is no matter how much you speak that language, the decisions in marketing will be less certain than the decisions in most operations. Decisions in most operations, you can change how much you spend on a factory, change a floor around, move inventory here or there, do all this stuff.

20:39And there's a very quantifiable number that you'll get out of it. When you get to marketing, it's really based on a hypothesis of what will work for consumers. And sometimes that hypothesis gets refined through rapid testing and, you know, Google has PMX and things like this. But then somebody shows up and says, well, I'll give you more money. How many more sales can I get? And, you know, you say, well, I think it could be this. And they're like, what do you mean you think it can't be? Like that guy over there tells me it's definitely going to be this number. And so my point on this is just to say generally that CEOs, business unit leaders, and finance leaders need to get comfortable that the decisions are naturally just going to be less tangible.

21:22Now, that is exactly the same as corporate strategy. It is exactly the same because that is a hypothesis of where your market is going to go and where you should focus your company. Yeah, and it may not be controversial as such, but most of the time for us marketers, the challenge we have is apathy. People just don't care. They're not paying attention, they're filtering. Yeah, a great example of that is Buick, right? So Buick is a brand that, you know, a lot of people stop considering and they don't think it's relevant to them. Buick is also now one of the fastest going, I mean, it's only second to Cadillac in terms of being the fastest growing brand in America in automotive.

22:08And just be clear, it's not off a low base. It's actually genuinely growing really, really well. Yeah, yeah. It's growing. It's growing. It's not off a tiny base, but it's certainly a smaller brand, but it's growing. Okay. It sells more than Audi. Let me say that. So it's off a base bigger than Audi. There you go. Which is a remarkable fact, right? Yeah. Audi Smackdown. I love it. Keep going.

22:30And that was done. It started with product. then it started with relevance and advertising and focusing on your base and doing all that stuff so you can do this stuff you can create growth um in the right way and you can get people out of apathy it starts with momentum that starts with your core and giving them something that's new and exciting and has momentum and then is relevant to the circles just outside the core and then they start to see it they think that's cool too and they want that stuff i clearly um agree and it is fascinating looking at these case studies and seeing the crisis reaction.

23:05And then the, you know, if it's going well, you know, how you put your pedal to the metal to quote your industry and really accelerate in those positive moments when you can actually do that. One of the things about being a CMO today is that ability to move fast in the short term and the long term of scale up when you want to, and then, you know, plan for the long term as well. Something I've been fascinated by is what you've been doing and how you've re-orgued your agency structure. You brought in MediaMonks. And I'd love you just to tell our audience right now, because I know a little bit about it, and I'm speaking with Samartan Sorrell later on on this podcast.

23:42But what have you done with MediaMonks? What is the problem it's solved, and how's it going? Yeah, well, to understand MediaMonks, you have to back up to the agency structure we had and the agency structure that we wanted. So the agency structure we had was essentially a holding company model on different brands. And it was working reasonably well, I'd say. But what had happened over time is we had started basically outsourcing most of our marketing to these holding companies. So what we had was a kind of an underdevelopment of the capabilities of marketing within GM and kind of the wrong model for where we were.

24:20So we needed to change the model. That's where we started. To do that, nobody in finance shows up and says, why don't you give me more money to hire people realistically? And so we said, well, we'll use the agency fees to do that. And that meant that we needed to reduce our agency fees. That then said, okay, what do we really want? And what we really wanted was elite creative teams only focused on creative versus being in all our operational details. And so we went through a whole process where we selected these individual, one for each brand, creative teams, and that's all they do. They just do great creative.

25:00And I worked on the agency side, and I know the benefit of this, because what happens when an agency gets into all of your operations? Yes, their revenue goes up, but their culture changes. Their culture changes to be more of an operationally led versus creatively led culture. And there's a lot of voices in every meeting and every piece of creative. And all of a sudden, it starts to degrade. And so we didn't want the creative teams to have any of that. We wanted them to be on their own. So that's what we did. That meant we still have a lot of work that has to get done below that hero level of creative.

25:37And we needed an approach to do that. And AI was, of course, coming along at the same time. And that's where we put monks to say, go across all of our brands, make sure that we can scale in the U.S. with personalization, but just overall as well, and help us go globally because the other regions, you know, they don't have as much marketing money. So if they could take the U.S. assets and transcreate them easily to be relevant in their markets, that could save us a lot of money as well. Now, the challenge with that whole thing, there were two challenges. One is, turns out cars are very hard to render an AI.