Marketing Has Forgotten What It’s For

0:00Today we're talking about the one job that a CMO actually has. Marketing is a commercial strategy. Full stop, the end. What would your marketing plan be tied to if not business goals? From running cultural strategy at Hollywood Agency, CAA, to being the first global CMO at Live Nation, Seth Matlins has spent 35 years as an insider in a marketing C-suite. Your job is to drive sustainable, profitable growth. Brand is just a strategy within that. Brand is the greatest performance engine in the history of performance engine. With AI, it feels like it's more important now to show the human element, that the love of it, the heart of the brand.

0:38You bring up something super important. We don't know what's real anymore. We don't know what's been created by a machine or by the person who's presenting it to us. I think it's fundamentally important that we recognize the people that make up that data, the humans that make up that data. Every decision a company makes either contributes to influencing value creation or value destruction. If we do not understand that our job is to move the business forward, then I don't actually know what we're doing besides making pretty pictures. Seth, welcome to Marketing Trends. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm excited.

1:12This one's been a long time coming since I last talked with you. So I just want to jump right into it. So I know you have a hot take that most marketing leaders and the CEOs who are hiring them, they have a CMO job description that is fundamentally wrong. So I'd love to hear more about this, like the job description. Why is it wrong and how are people hiring incorrectly? Well, I see a lot of JDs from search firms and candidates who are just kind of bouncing things off me. What I see too often, and too often, by the way, is if at all, because it should never be the case, is a position where the JD and thus the job as it actually gets executed is completely untethered to business results, right?

2:02It is a tactical, typically amplification of what's already been codified. Sure, you get to switch your agency, you get to create a new campaign, you get things to make things your own. But it's divorced from the commercial realities, which means that it's divorced from what marketing actually is, does, and should do, which is create and keep a customer, to quote Peter Drucker. Mm-hmm. Okay. Have you seen any shifts recently though? Like as, especially now the world that we're in and with AI, like, have you seen these job descriptions getting closer to business goals? Because that is a theme I've heard from past guests of like some of the best marketers who are like, this is how I think about my marketing plan.

2:48It's closely tied to what the business needs. And to me, that's been a more recent thing I've heard. I mean, honestly, like Shut the fuck up. Not you, them. What would your marketing plan be tied to if not business goals? Marketing is a commercial strategy. Full stop, the end. Your job is to drive sustainable, profitable growth, recognizing that growth can be defined by different enterprises differently. But let's, for simplicity's sake, just refer to it as revenue growth and shareholder value for the publicly traded companies, right? That's the job. And brand leaders who see themselves, marketers who see themselves as brand leaders and not as commercial leaders, get the job wrong, right?

3:33CEOs who hire brand leaders and not commercial leaders to be their CMOs do their business and their shareholders a disservice because marketing is, as I said before, marketing is a strategy. Brand is just a strategy within that. Brand is the greatest performance engine in the history of performance engines. Brand is what differentiates a product from a commodity, right? Product or service for that matter. And if we do not understand that our job is to move the business forward, to drive it forward, to be principal architects of business strategy and results, then I don't know. I don't actually know what we're doing besides making pretty pictures.

4:20Yep. What do you think about when it comes to terminology? It feels like oftentimes people are talking about marketing, but then they're also talking about brand growth with marketing, it's all the same. It's like being used in the same way. And so, yeah, how do you think about using accurate terminology to describe the role? Well, actually, I think you point to something essential, but I don't know that it's all being used in the same way. And I think that that's actually the problem is this has become a practice of prefixes, right? There are a thousand words that can precede the word marketing, digital marketing, social marketing, media, you know, whatever, right?

4:59It's all just marketing. And what's happened too often is that too many across the C-suite and of course down because the C-suite has not done historically a brilliant job of training marketers to market. Too many are confusing objectives, tactics, and objective strategies and tactics, right? Just what I said before, marketing is a strategy. Marketing objectives are a business strategy. Marketing's executional piece is again, has to be, must be tethered to driving growth because recognizing that it can be hard to model that out. It can be hard to identify, especially for larger companies where there's so much in the ether and they're doing so much to identify what any one thing did, not always, but sometimes what any one thing did to drive the business forward.

5:54But if you don't know what you're getting for the dollar you spent, you can't keep spending dollars and expect to, you know, unless your growth rate is, the proverbial hockey stick up and to the right and expect to keep getting funded. Yeah. Do you think there is a period though, that's more reliant on intuition? And I mean, Yeah, I had a CMO on Don Jeter from Torque, and he's like, some of this stuff, I don't know. What's going to drive anything? And he was very willy nilly at first, but then he came back a year later and he was like, no, it worked. I just didn't know when I was really doing it.

6:32It was a lot of guessing. Do you think there is a grace period of these are a lot of guesses and let's give it a year or more? Well, depends on tenure, I guess, of these CMOs, but it's a longer term view that I'll have to circle back and figure it out, but give me enough time to see. I would be very uncomfortable hiring a CMO who was guessing. Now, in fairness, I think there's a difference between guessing and being certain. Certainty doesn't exist anymore, and that's absolutely the case, right? Nobody can be certain about anything, any more than any CFO or CEO or board member is certain about the investments they make in their own lives, what that ROI is going to be.

7:13I don't know why they expect that certainty from marketing, which has the incremental challenge of serving and being in service to human beings. And we're a rather idiosyncratic bunch. Who the knows what we're going to do next? And so there's a difference between guessing, certainly educated guessing anyway, and being sure. But that's why I think in today's world where marketing has become so complex, so varied. There are so many hundreds of thousands of options when you start breaking things down to their most granular level of what you could do with a dollar, what you could do with time, what you could do with resources.

7:58You always have to be in a learning and optimizing mode, but optimizing against the need of the business, not the need of the function. And that's, you know, if I can just go off on another brief tangent, I think that what we're seeing is too many marketers, and this is true outside the marketing function and across the organization, but too many people are being compensated, rewarded, and trained to optimize for what they do rather than for what the business needs, right? So just to bring it back to marketing, you have people who are experts in the platforms, right? So you've got somebody who's optimizing for Facebook, for meta, for those metrics, not necessarily looking at whether those are the metrics that are in fact driving the business forward most efficiently and effectively.

8:49And that's a problem that I kind of referred to as everything is connected, but not everything connects. And when the connected things don't connect, that's where you're punching growth in the face. So when thinking about who's doing this well, I mean, I'm thinking I'm a team member, you know, I'm working on Facebook. Of course, this is my world and I want to show I'm doing a good job. What are the best leaders doing to connect that up to business goals? Because I'm thinking back when I was at Google, I knew of Google's business goals. Did I always think of how easily mine fit into the highest level goals that sometimes I would see these KPIs and I'm like, that has nothing to do with, you know, Google Maps.

9:32So how do you really make it like an embodied goal for a team member who is five ranks down from the CEO? It's such a good question. And I think the answer is far easier than the execution of the answer, which is – and you said it. You understood what the overarching goals of the business were. It's then kind of – and too often business becomes like a game of – when we were kids, we'd play that game of telephone. and there'd be 10 of us sitting around the table and I'd whisper into the person's, it'd start with me, I'd whisper into the person on the right and I'd say, oranges are delicious. And by the time we got to the 10th person, it was like, buildings can be tall or small in a complicated world.

10:19And that's what's happening, right? And so I do think there is an obligation both from the bottom up and the top down and everything in between to ensure that alignment, right? To ensure cultural incentive, well, A, to ensure that understanding, right? So that people understand their role within the broader enormous objectives, right? The broader business objectives. Now, you got somebody who's been working two or three years in a company of hundreds of thousands. How does she decide? How does he decide? How do they decide how to best impact a business the size of Google's, just to use your reference.

11:05That's leadership management. That's cultural incentives. But the best organizations are doing it. And it's not a perfect scenario, right? Expectations of perfection are misplaced. But it's how can we minimize the inefficiency that comes from somebody optimizing for what they do rather than what we as the business need. You know, communication is always imperfect, but as is or designed too often. But if we have organizations designed to allow for horizontal perspectives rather than just vertical expertise, we're more likely to get there, in my opinion. Yep. Yeah, I remember a story when there was an app that was being worked on.

11:50And the person who was leading the division was like, look, daily active users, and the time spent in the app is like skyrocketing. Yay, it's super sticky. And then it took someone from outside the team who's like, wait, I think you don't want them to be in the app for a long time. Like for this specific app, we hope they're not in there a long time. So that's not a good metric. And you and your team are celebrating it. And it was like a very clear picture of like, whoa, very disconnected from Like, you know, one team's goals to like, that's probably not what the business thinks is good because it means something bad is happening in the app for them to have to spend that much time maybe in like maps or whatever it might be.

12:25It's such a great story. It's such a great example, which is there is a certain degree of inevitability to that in behemoth organizations. Obviously, it's easier to communicate in a startup, right, where there are fewer people and more people doing many things, right? Right. But it's not, I don't mean to suggest it's easy, but I do mean to suggest it's imperative. And unless we design, and I think that we're in a moment, given all of the changes being foisted on organizations of every size because of AI and technologies advance, we're in a moment where every organization is being forced to reconsider how they do what they do and how they get done what they need to get done to move the business forward.

13:09to create value and not destroy value. And in that context, I think there's a moment where we get to say, maybe we need to get back to communication fundamentals. David Drogo said something to me when I had him as a guest on a podcast I used to do when I was at Forbes called The CEO's Guide to Marketing. He said to me, and I think I'm getting this quote, it could be a paraphrase. Complexity is oftentimes an organizational tax on success, which is the more success you have, the bigger you can grow, the bigger you grow, the more complex doing the simple things can become. In another word, perhaps, I don't know, this is what David means, but what it makes me think of is bureaucracy, right?

13:55Bureaucracy rarely serves the business. What it's there to do is to cover people's asses. It's there to protect against downside. And that's important. Don't get me wrong, but protecting against downside keeps your eye off driving upside. I mean, there's a balance of course. And I do want to just go back to something that you said a moment ago, which is when you kind of framed the question for me originally, everybody wants to prove that they're doing a good job or at least to feel like they're doing a good job, right? When I began my career, I was the special events coordinator at Avion, right?

14:33Third person, the marketing department for this bottled water that nobody understood why they could be drinking it or how to pronounce it for that matter, let alone why they should be paying so much for it. And my job was, you know, I was sponsoring tennis tournaments and golf tournaments and beach volleyball tournaments. My job was to hang banners and place coolers. And I would get, I can't remember from whom, a media equivalency report, right? Which is, oh, the banner was on NBC's broadcast to the beach volleyball tournament for 42 seconds. And that equivalency based on this math was 42 % or whatever, 42 is a percentage of 60, the equivalent of a 60 second spot.

15:16So call it two thirds of a six. I was like, come on, this is nonsense. This is ridiculous. What did I do with that data? I walked right into my boss's office and said, hey, look at all the media value we're getting out of hanging a banner. Because I wanted to prove that what I was doing was of value. However, I didn't think that the metric was of value. I didn't think it was proof, but it was quantified. And therefore, I used it. I wouldn't today. I would look for some connectivity between what we did here in a given market and or national broadcast and things that actually are important metrics for a business.

15:57And it's hard, especially when you're a special events coordinator. That it's hard doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. I want to check with you. I think you had a story around the Papa John's thing. Is that a good, I would love maybe to go into that, but. Well, it's a bit of a segue. Okay. If it's too much of a segue, I can go there at the time. Because I'm like, it felt like it tied into what you were just talking about. is like value versus I'd love to hear any stories around work that you truly were just not proud of where you knew value was not being created. Well, I definitely have my share of that in a career that's as long as mine.

16:35But what I think of is, as you asked the question, work that was so important in the moment. And I think that I just got it so wrong. And it's not at the beginning of my career. It's only like, I don't know, I think it's six years ago now, seven years ago. So there was a moment when the U.S. pizza chain Papa John's was faced with a fairly significant crisis. Their owner founder, I'm sorry, their CEO founder, a guy named John Schnatter, used the N word. It was captured, disseminated, and appropriately caused outrage. There were a lot of resignations amongst his agencies. And he ultimately was removed from the board, removed from his CEO's position.

17:23And that was a real moment of crisis, which is the new CEO is trying to figure out how do we come back from this? For reasons that aren't worth going into, I was at Endeavor at the time we got to pitch for Papa John's ad business. And while we had a few super accomplished ad execs inside our universe, we were not an ad agency per se. We were a cultural marketing agency. Somehow we won that pitch. I mean, I'm not going to lie. The work sucked on me, not anyone else, but that pitch, three hours, people crying, it was magic. The work sucked. And the reason it was on me is because I was the strategist and I was the lead on that.

18:08And what I got wrong, and again, this is like 27, no, it must be, it was pre-pandemic, I think, I don't know, six years ago, call it. What I got wrong was I looked at what precipitated the crisis and I thought the right response to it was purpose-led approach, a social-led approach, right um which was dei hadn't become a bad word yet woke was still a good thing by the way i still think that it is certainly when you compare it to being asleep um and it seemed right but also not only did it seem right for the moment it seemed right this is where it really goes off the rails for the category right everybody in the fast qsr pizza business was you know competing on you know delivery price and then taste, give or take, right?

19:03Hard to tell, you know, one marketer's, one brand's, um, uh, spot from another. And we thought this could be a real competitive advantage. All the trends in the consumer landscape were pointing to, uh, pointing to it, especially amongst the younger generation who's, you know, the big pizza buyer. I was wrong. And, and I was wrong because that's just not the voice of the category, right? And while you want to differentiate within the category, there are typically rules that you still have to play by. And I want to caveat what I just said, which is you don't have to play by the status quo. The status quo is oftentimes any organization's biggest competitive threat doing things because that's the way they've been done.

19:50They've been done, but not everybody wants social good. And we were like, you know, social justice was really kind of the emphasis, at least in its intent. That's not what you want from your pizza. It just was dissonant in a bad way. And, um, yeah, it just wasn't good work. And that's, you know, great creatives on it. That's entirely on me. Um, cause I had the, you know, authority to kind of push it a little bit. But what I'd also say, and I think, you know, I've spent a lot of my career going back, I've spent the entire of my career actually going back and forth client side, agency side. And I think I kind of on balance, have an agency bias, which is, you know, that's the way I think.

20:40But this was also a client in that moment in time where putting aside all the things that I did wrong, they made it really hard to be successful. And I remember the relationship was coming apart for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which was my fault. And I was in a meeting with the new CMO, the CEO who had hired us, RECD, some other folks. And the CEO says, why do you think this isn't going well? Well, I didn't say because I think our purpose strategy was wrong. What I did say, because it was clear it was not going well, was because you neither give nor take direction. And it's impossible to win when that's the case.

21:25It's like that Alice in Wonderland thing, right? You know, if you don't know where you're going, all roads lead there. If you don't give or take direction or find a balance situationally between the two, you don't have direction. And then you're just making shit up, which is what we were ultimately doing with two weeks before it needed to go on air to support some LTO, bacon cheese crust or something. Wow. It reminds me of a mentor once told me, he's like, do you think that people are more unhappy if they make the wrong decision or no decision at all? And it was the hanging out and the no decision that caused the most unhappiness because it's easy to at least commit, make the decision, move forward, and then you can pivot and you at least know kind of what you committed to.

22:08But if you stay in that indecision, like that's how you stay in like unhappy land. Look, I am one of the world's great procrastinators. And yeah, like no decision is just a terrible place to be. You can almost always come back from a bad decision. But no decision, I mean, there's, I can't remember who said it, but a line that says a decision not to do something is a decision in and of itself. and when you're not making a decision, you're deciding. You're losing time, resources, opportunities. The landscape is shifting underneath you. And so you better recognize that, yeah, you're making a decision while you wait.

22:50You can change it, but you better. Yeah. So when I was listening to your story, which thank you for sharing, by the way, what was coming up for me was, one, that doesn't sound like a super obvious fail. It's like, yeah, hindsight, oh, that didn't work. But now when I look at the space we're in now, it feels like those kind of - Yeah. Culturally with AI, it feels like those kind of shifts with a brand feels like it's more important now to show the human element and the human behind it, the love of it, the heart of the brand in a way that maybe back 2017 maybe didn't matter as much. I mean, I see that now with all these companies leaning hard into AI and I see them moving quickly, but then I'm also wondering, at a certain point, everyone will have the same tech.

23:37Maybe one will be a little bit ahead of the other one, but I think what we're coming back to is the customer now more than ever is going to want to feel the human and feel the brand and know the leadership team and be able to bet on the person behind the tech. So do you think now that might have worked in a way that back then, and maybe never for Papa John's, maybe that's just a hard category, but. Well, I think that the short answer is no, the strategy I pushed was wrong, then it's wrong now. But you bring up something super important that I talk about a lot. And I first wrote about it in, I think, May of 2020.

24:13So a couple of months into the pandemic, when we thought maybe we were about to get out of it, right? We thought we were going to be back in the office, at least some of us did wrong yet again. And I wrote a piece, I think it was in Adweek that said, you know, it's time for brands to be more human. And I probably should have said more humane, right? We were in the middle of a humanitarian crisis. Everybody's saying better together, stronger together, the same thing and thinking it differentiates them in a chorus of the same words. And I think that to your point, that premise, while it was kind of rooted in a moment of extraordinary crisis globally, I think it's only become more true and more so today for exactly the reason that you talk about, which is, or at least amongst, you know, that's amongst the reasons, right?

25:07Which is, you know, we don't know what's real anymore. We don't know what's been created by a machine or by the person who's presenting it to us. And I think it's just so fundamentally important that we recognize, and I do think we have lost sight of this over the last 20 or 30 years, like never before, surrounded as we are, overwhelmed as we are as marketers, as business people, by data that has caused us to lose sight of the people that make up that data, the humans that make up that data. And we use really dehumanizing language like customer and consumer and client and agency and vendor and partner, all of which takes human beings down to a very transactional utility and efficacy to us, right?

25:57That's how we define them. Actually, I just sent a text to, I was either last night or the night before, to Maggie Schmarin, who's the chief, who's the chief advertising officer at United, because if you look at Maggie's, the work that brand has been doing lately, it's so human, right. And, and it differentiates them within the category. And I think it differentiates them across categories. It's so human. I'm not saying that other brands don't do it even, you know, the tech industry in particular, the AI industry has, you know, long use, well, tech has long use slice of life advertising to kind of humanize what is fundamentally and absolutely technological.

26:41But the voice that Maggie and United have been bringing to their work, it's just like, yeah, they're just talking to you. And it's not, at least it doesn't read to me as artificial. It doesn't read to me as a company trying to be human. It is a company succeeding in being human. And I think we can all learn from that. Oh, we'll have to bring her on the show. Maggie's great. Love her. Yeah. Have you ever been to Burning Man? I have not. Burning Man for me is like bungee jumping and skydiving. Amongst those things I want to have done, I just don't want to do. Okay. I always think that if every business leader went out there.

27:22To me, that restored my faith and connection to humanity when you're out there with everyone and you're just with so many amazing humans and it's all just so heart-centered and everyone's just actually collaborating, co-creating, contributing, giving. To me, if everyone could go out there and experience something like that and then come back into work. It shifted me at least and feels like that's the worldview that's kind of missing sometimes from not even just brands, but business leaders and how they work with their team and think about advertising and also co-creating and collaborating instead of just being super competitive.

28:01I completely agree with you. And while I've never been to Burning Man, I have had those experiences. And I think it's one of the great marketing case studies that is rarely told, But way back in the day, I was a big deadhead. And this is way back. See, that's what I saw. I was like, there's something in there that feels a little burning. I was a very big deadhead. And this is before Jerry Garcia died. And you just felt safe in that community. You felt seen in that community. In the early days, and no reflection on the current days because I'm less familiar with it, of something like Summit Series, right?

28:38Where there was, you know, where there was a real intimacy and a like-mindedness. You felt safe and you felt seen. You felt the permission to be vulnerable. And that's what I try and create at my CMO events, right? Which is through permission to be human. And that's what we ask people to come. Come as the human you are, not just the marketer you are, and certainly not the person in your job, right? But the permission to be, to say, I don't know, I don't get it, explain it to me. The permission to say, and the safety to say, I don't agree with you, here's why. The permission to be provocative and vulnerable, it's not going to get less valuable.