Behind Latin America's $90 Billion Marketing Success with Sean Summers (Mercado Libre)

24:11In a much better position, still humble, still ignorant on a lot of things. But you know what? Very curious. Very, very curious. I love this about this job, that the learning curve is 90 degrees, and it's been 90 degrees for the last 14 years. And if you get excited about learning, this is the place to be. The people around you want you to succeed. They're open here to giving you feedback, to give you input, and you can ask whatever you want, and someone is going to help you, you know, with the thinking process.

24:40Jim Stengel:I've read a lot of people describe your company as a blend of Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and Shopify rolled into one. How do you react to that? Yeah, it's hard to describe. We started as the eBay of Latin America, and eBay was a shareholder for many years. But we were very quickly to adapt to consumer behaviors. So early on, auctions never took off. So we moved into used products by the office price, and then use products, you know, I'm sorry, from individuals, so C to C. But then we realized that, you know, we had to bring small amount of enterprises and start working on new products. So the company has always been evolving.

25:13At some point, we became the Amazon plus PayPal. Then I said, look, probably the best analogy is Alibaba and Alipay in China. If they had decided to work as integrated as we work, but they decided not to do it. So it's quite unique. The way I think about the opportunity, thinking about opportunity, because 27 years on, I still think that the next 10 years are going to be fantastic. I think that this is a company that could be the biggest retailer in every market where we operate. Retailer, not e-tailer. We're already the biggest retailer in Brazil, in Argentina, so we can be the biggest retailer.

25:50I think that Mercado Pago, our fintech business, will be a top five bank in every market where we operate over the next five years. and we have a fair chance of being a top one over the following three to five years. We're going to be a top three media company in the region in the next three years. We're now top five. And we are going to be one of the top players in the query. And in the process, over the next 10 years, I guess that we are going to find other problems, people problems to solve. So it's very hard to describe what this ecosystem is. But the thing that unites everything is that we have a huge consumer base, over 120 million people buying in our platform every year, growing 20%, over 80 million monthly active users in our fintech business.

26:39So you have a consumer base that is highly demanding, that trusts our brands and our platforms, and that is constantly asking for, okay, what else are you going to solve for us? So who knows? It's hard to describe what the business is today, and I don't know what the business is going to be in five or three years' time. I can tell you it's going to be very different. I've seen in my 14 years at least four versions of this company. It's like a living organism that is constantly evolving and allows you to evolve with it. So that's what makes my day-to-day so exciting.

27:15Jim Stengel:I mean, that's a tricky leadership challenge, right? People don't generally like change, and you're a company that has been thriving on change, and you have a great culture, you have a great employee base, a great customer base. What is it about the leadership team that keeps people with you? Employees, customers? I think that there's a sense of the mission that we do have an impact in the lives of people. Each of us has so many stories of people that say, look, I built my business around your platform or your payment system has allowed me to access a new market, an untapped market Or, you know, finally, I can use financial services and I can start, you know, going up the ladder in terms of gaining access to credit.

28:01Or even, you know, the basic thing, you know, when we live in big cities, we are used to having access to a great selection at great prices with a lot of convenience. And we assume that that happens all over the place. And the reality, at least in Latin America, go 50 miles away from the big cities and the reality is totally different. So we have given access to communities very, very far away from the big cities to the same products. So I think that it's a mission component. There's an element of, I think we are building something that is different. I know everyone wants to be part of something that is different.

28:37I always tell my children that I think that, let's say that I stay here for another 10 years, and I'm pretty sure that we're building the most consequential company in the history of Latin America and being part of that in terms of impact, in terms of how we're changing the lives of people around the region, being part of that is like, wow, it gives me goosebumps there's an element of this company is always looking for more so you're always going to be challenged to your point, we thrive on change, we're static you know, I think that we would die. So if you're looking for the next challenge, if you're looking for a place where you can make decisions and, you know, be accountable, you know, for the outcomes, the positives or the negatives, this is the place to be.

29:26We are in a very good position competitively and everyone wants to be part of a winning team. So the whole package is like, if you're intellectually curious, this is the place to be. Now, if you are used to operating in an environment where you know which is the direction and what's the playbook and everything, this is not the place because you have to be very comfortable with not knowing a lot of stuff. I say what I've had to do over the last 14 years is to learn and unlearn, learn and learn, learn and learn. It's a whole process, which, yeah, it's tiring. For the last 14 years, I've spent at least two hours every night really about what's going on in my industry, in different industries.

30:12Two hours per night for 14 years, seven days a week, just to keep updated with what's going on with the world. So you have to be curious. You have to put the hours. But if you like that, and you're working with really smart colleagues who push you in the right way. So we create a lot of friction. It's not that we are band of brothers. Now we're not a family. We are a high performance team. So we like challenging ourselves a lot, but we are united by a common goal by this desire to learn and just do great stuff. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work but in general, this feeling that, wow, let's keep moving forward.

30:51Jim Stengel:That's fantastic. Now listen, about four years ago you took on retail media responsibility on top of your CMO and I want to talk about that. You're a top five media company so that's a big deal to put that on top of your CMO job. What about that has made you a better CMO and vice versa. What about being a CMO has made you an effective head of retail media? Well, that's an interesting story. When I took on the CMO role, I created the function. Until that moment, marketing was part of each business unit. And at some point in early 2018, we realized that probably it made more sense to create an organization that served all the business units.

31:31And I came up with sort of the idea because I was asked for a point of view. and I thought that I would keep running near the marketplace and I would help them recruit a CMO. At some point in the process, I realized, oh, this is an internal job. I have to do it. I came back to marketing without wanting to do marketing. And that's why I call myself the reluctant CMO. I didn't want to come back to marketing. I was really happy writing a business. It took me two weeks to tell my wife that I had made that recommendation. She almost killed me. Tell me, like, you spent 20 years trying to become a general manager.

32:03But But the one thing I told Marcos at the time, my boss and the founder of the company was, Marcos, you like that? I'm going to do this because this is where I can add a lot of value. It's going to be a good learning experience, and I can build capability for the company. But I would love to go back to running a business whenever the opportunity arises. Three and a half years later, so three years later, late 2021, Marcos tells me that his co-founder, Stelio, was retiring. and he was the CEO of the company, he got a very big remit. And then I told him, Marcos, as you think about the new structure, Stelio has, you know, and I knew who would replace me.

32:41Ariel replaced Stelio. Ariel's the new CEO. He's a brilliant guy. I said, look, Ariel's going to have a lot of challenges, you know, on the commerce side. Let me give you a point of view. I think, you know, I would love to, you know, lead the retail media. This is why I see marketing and retail media as highly complementary and how we could leverage each other. And he looked at me and said, I like the idea. Let's do it. So I committed to him. This is my vision. This is how we're going to do it. So from a retail media point of view, we have multiplied the business by 10x in that period of time.

33:15And we're still growing north of 50%. I think that understanding how my marketing team works and operates, particularly my performance marketing team, they're super sophisticated, super demanding. We're the biggest client for Google, Meta, Pinterest. TikTok in the region. So I said, you know, whatever you demand from the big platforms, I want you guys to demand it from the retail media guys. So I think that they raised the game, even though they weren't internal clients. I told them, I want you to operate as an internal client and tell me if these retail media solutions that we have are good or not.

33:51So the first piece, you know, was that. So that significantly raised the bar for the product team in retail media. Then the second element I started thinking a few years ago about, well, I have all these capabilities in marketing, which are really good. What if we turn them into products? And we've been turning all of those capabilities, and now I'm making them available to our retail media customers. I call it marketing as a service. Maybe I should call it marketing operating model. But that's an idea that I could only think and execute because both teams reporting to me, and I make sure that there's a lot of cross-fertilization.

34:32So I think that all the strengths that we have in the marketing team are being reflected in a much more powerful and full funnel product range in retail media. And you can see that in the results. And then as a marketeer, as I told you before, I'm a business guy. I'm not an expert. I'm not the best guy doing branding. I'm not the best guy doing performance marketing or data science. But I'm a really good generalist And having both hats and having the customer-facing, I really like the customer-facing interactions with retail media. I think that I come back to my marketing team with first perspectives and new ideas and new capabilities.

35:13We're now building a whole suite of solutions around social commerce. We've created our own affiliates program that already has millions of affiliates. We're creating our creators program, our live shopping program. So there's a lot of back and forth. And so I think that the marketing team has become better because they're close to retail media and retail media has a much stronger understanding of what good marketeers need, but also a much stronger product suit.

35:47Jim Stengel:If you were a chief marketing officer in consumer products, I want you to think about something for a moment. You have creative that works. You have campaigns that capture attention, but somewhere between that moment and the register, the signal gets lost. You cannot see what actually drove the sale. You are making optimization decisions on inference, not truth. Well, that changed in February. Infilion acquired Catalina, four decades of deterministic purchase intelligence, 130 million U.S. households, 70 retail banners,$600 billion in verified annual consumer spending. And here is what really matters.

36:22Jim Stengel:over 90 % of consumable purchases still happen in-store. Infillion and Catalina together can close the loop from digital advertising to in-lane purchase and incentivize the next one. This is not a measurement tool you consult after the campaign. This is a live signal that runs through your media while the campaign is in flight. You can now optimize from attention to action in real time against people whose actual purchase behavior you know. A consumer product's brand needs return on ad spending. It needs foot traffic. Infillion now delivers all of it. Not as separate vendors you reconcile later as one connected platform.

36:59Jim Stengel:That is what closing the gap looks like.

37:05Jim Stengel:Could you go a little bit deeper in how your marketing group is stronger? Since, you know, you took on retail media. They started working together. You're taking your marketing capabilities outside the company in some ways with your partners. So when you step back over the last four years, what do you think has really strengthened? What muscle in your marketing group has strengthened? So I think that we added new things to the toolkit. So historically, for the first almost 20 years of the company, marketing was performance marketing for us. So we were the first ones to knock on the door of Google back in 2002.

37:39Even before they knew where Latin America was, someone in our team knocked and said, guys, we would like to be a client. So for the first 30 years, it was all about performance marketing. You know, let's operate in the online world and let's make sure that we are capturing whatever transactions or buyers are available there with a very short-term ROI kind of mindset. It's a transaction that is profitable. Great. And that worked really well for us. And actually, I'm a big fan of we have evolved that significantly. So our toolkit is very sophisticated. We have our own measurement systems, our attribution, incrementality.

38:17So that works really well. And by the way, everyone calls that performance marketing. I call that its performance, but it's also the first line of defense of branding. Because if you truly believe that your product is great, every single interaction with your product, with your platform, is a brand equity building exercise. Particularly for us, where my e-commerce app or my fintech services app evolves and improves every day. So every time I bring in someone, they're having a new and different experience. So it's an opportunity to surprise. So performance, but also thought as a branding exercise.

38:54Then over the last 10 years, we added a second layer, which we call it brandformance, which is operating 52 weeks, a year calendar of promotional activities. We call it brandformance. Why? Because on the one side, it has a performance side, which is creating spikes, short-term spikes in demand. but also it plays a branding exercise because it allows us to create consideration maybe in categories where consumers wouldn't think about us, you know, groceries here or there. So that second layer built on top of the performance marketing and with the same tools and with the same analytical rigor. And over the last seven years in particular, communications.

39:35We have taken our communications in different directions. We didn't used to focus on communication. And I think that we have evolved significantly. No surprise that we've been participating in Kansas. Suddenly, our communication, suddenly people pay attention. But it's interesting because we have won Grand Prix on promotional initiatives. It's not just on the big, crazy ideas. It's the stuff that delivers actual results. And there, our framework is, we call it the Do, Think, Feel framework, which is also a tier. Let's make sure that we have a very clear and solid set of communications where we want consumers to do.

40:17And all of that is about price and selection. And that's stable stakes if you want to be a retailer. Then, on top of that, what we want consumers to think. Let's give them rational reasons why to choose us. If everyone is offering price and selection, okay, we give you fast shipping, free shipping, our loyalty program, guarantee returns, free returns. So let me give you an additional reason why. And the combination of both is where we're delivering on the brand promise. If we deliver on that brand promise, then we earn the right to go to the third layer, which we call it the field. Let's talk to consumers about stuff that is not linked to selling another case of something.

40:56It has to do with showing them empathy, showing them that we care about the communities where we operate, that we care about the things that are going on around the world, that we care about their own passion points. And that could be sports, that could be some stuff around DEI or even politics. We've had some communications related to politics. But the way the entire stack works is that it works all together. It's performance, plus performance, plus branding, in constant interaction and very coordinated. And having the retail media and being able to talk with brands and agencies constantly and learning from what others are doing.

41:34I think that, you know, we keep feeding back. Look, guys, here, you know, you're right. Here, I think you're wrong. So there's a retrofitting system that it's almost real time that works really, really well.

41:46Jim Stengel:I read a quote from you, which I love. So I want to read it aloud for our audience and get you to react to it. I'm not a technical guy. I'm not a great creative. I'm not great at any individual function, but I think I'm really good at setting crazy goals. My role is creating the capabilities building the talent team and making sure we have the routines and processes that allow them to excel that's a pretty good description for a great cmo so i'd like you to talk about react to that but two things in particular how do you choose the capabilities that you need to build it sounds like a simple point but it's not and how do you build the team to deliver those capabilities you said a few minutes ago, it's taken 10 plus years to build the team.

42:35Jim Stengel:So could you talk about both of those? I think it'd be massively helpful for others. So I think on the meta message, as you grow, in theory, you're becoming more powerful and more important. I really believe it's the opposite. You have to move behind the scenes. Let's go to filming. We start our careers as extras, and then we have supporting roles, and then we have leading roles. And then we could become directors and now you know what we are and all of those are in the limelight and you get all the awards and everything we are the executive producers the executive producer nobody knows who is the executive producer of a movie except if something goes really wrong okay so that's it those are the guys who have to make sure that you know they put the right people in place the right processes I think that you know we should be happy with being the executive producers that nobody knows about us and we should shine through our teams and our work.

43:31Okay? So, in that context, how do I pick the capabilities? For me, it's always about everything we do has to deliver growth. And when you start with what's the business objective that we're trying to achieve? And what's the contribution that marketing can do? And let's be super clear. Then it's easy to decide, okay, based on that, how to have different strategies that we can use to deliver those results. And I'm going to come back to the short and long term. Let's focus on the short term results. Great. If these are the strategies and these are the channels that could deliver, how do we make sure that we're the best at doing that?

44:10And it's identifying, you know, by doing. By doing, you identify, look, here we are okay. Here we are not that great. Okay. And then you start listening. Okay, what would be best in class? And I link it to, you know, bringing the best team. In order for me to identify those problems and those solutions, I had to bring technical people around me. If not, I wouldn't have even been able to identify the problem. So from day one, I surrounded myself with technical people who could help me understand what the issue is about or what the opportunity is about and how do we start building that capability.

44:48The building capability requires a long-term vision. There are no silver bullets. These capabilities are always, you know, year-long journeys. And what you need to have is very clear milestone. Okay, success this year is going to look this. And these ways, we're going to organize the data to make sure that we can measure correctly, you know, the results. And then that we can attribute, you know, better. So it's being very clear inside the team, but also with other stakeholders. This is the long-term goal. These are the milestones for this year. This is how success looks like. this is what we're going to learn.

45:24If something works well, we're going to be the first ones to tell you, look, this didn't work. So it's always that way. And whenever we're executing, we're learning something and we course correct. But the thing there, the last element is understanding what not to do. Because in terms of opportunities and gaps in capabilities, there are plenty. But it's like understanding what's going to have, you know, what's going to bring you the biggest bang for the buck. You know, because we have to deliver long-term results. and say, we're going to focus on X, Y. Yeah, I would love to do all of this, but this is not going to be a problem.

45:58And let me give you tangible examples of that. For the first, I got here in 2012. Until 2015, I wasn't even thinking about Meta. I was only thinking about one channel. It was SEO, Google, search engine, marketing, and strategy to do an email marketing. Yeah, I could see other channels, but we were rubbish at doing that. So I said, look, until we fix this, we saw that every time that we fix something, we would deliver the business results. So at some point, it's like, let's get these things running. Then it's, okay, let's move to the next big opportunity. Let's keep optimizing what we have. We moved to Meta.

46:37Then in 2018 or 2019, we moved to TikTok. And then in only last year or 2024, to Pinterest. So they said, yeah, I would love to tackle everything altogether. It's impossible. I take a long-term view of that from a branding point of view. The moment that we started doing branding, I couldn't attribute the results as easy as I could do in performance marketing. I sat down with my CFO. I said, at the time it was Pedro, look, we cannot just focus on performance marketing because we're going to be fishing in a small pond. We have to go and create a demand outside of the online world. These are the ways to do it.

47:18we're going to have to feel comfortable being uncomfortable with not being able to measure everything. Measurement is going to mean X, Y, and Z. I don't have silver bullets. So I was very clear. We're going to build this capability. If we do all these things in three years' time, I'm going to be able to do X, Y, and Z. So I think that being very intentional about what to build, what not to build, explaining how all the pieces fit together, and then managing expectations. Rome wasn't built in one day. But I think that I was given the leeway to do that because, as I always say, 80 % of my time and 80 % of my budget was spent on stuff that delivered 100 % of the short-term results.

48:06So I created the conditions, me and the team created the conditions for us to have that 20 % of time and money to invest in longer-term capabilities.

48:23Jim Stengel:I spent years at Procter & Gamble trying to answer that question. We had the creative. We had the reach. We had campaigns that genuinely stopped people. And then we watched that value quietly disappear somewhere between the moment of engagement and the proof of a business result. That gap between attention and action is where most media budgets go to die. And most digital media platforms have been content to live inside it just a little upstream from accountability. Infilion is the company that decided to close it. They started as the original attention company built on the idea that a consumer choosing to engage with an ad is worth more than one who ignores it.

48:58Jim Stengel:But they did not stop there. They have built the infrastructure to connect the moment of attention to the proof of action across every screen, every format, every vertical. That is not a feature. That is a fundamentally different idea of what an ad platform should be. And it is the one brands have been waiting for. Learn more in the show notes.

49:21Jim Stengel:I've heard you say there are three factors that have defined your career People helping you, being open to serendipity, and willingness to take risks So I'd like to talk about each one for a moment as we get toward the end of this great chat When people helping you, what person or two come to mind when you think about that? I've been lucky. I've had eight or nine bosses across my career all of them, great great, I could give you the list I know them by memory all of them very good friends two people have had a significant impact on my career, particularly the first 20 years Roberto Soto who today is the president of Latin America for Estilo Other, he was the marketing director in Argentina 30 years ago who hired me he took me to Mexico he's Mexican, he offered me my first international assignment in 2002 and he then left PepsiCo and he went to Nike and to Mondelez and every time he moved he would call me like Sean what are you doing?

50:21Do you want to come back? Let's go back to Roberto has been a massive friend and sponsor and then the other one is Antonio Lucio. I met Antonio three months after I met Roberto because as I told you Antonio was the vice president of marketing for beverages in Latin America and he was very generous from the first moment. And we were a small team. Roberto was generous that he would show us and they would take us out for dinner. And Antonio just got to get to know, you know, an ambitious young guy coming from Argentina. And over the next 15 years, he helped me a lot. But the funny thing is that I never knew that he was helping me.

50:59I found out that many years later through a third party. You know, yeah, yeah. We offered you a job, an internship, you know, in your summer job of the NBA because Antonio said, you guys have to hire Sean. and he then called the president of UK to say, you have to hire Sean coming out of the NBA. So I never had a conversation, a formal conversation with Antonio about that. He was incredibly generous in that sense. And I know over the last 10 years, we have become very good friends and he has been a mentor. So in terms of sponsors, definitely Roberto and Antonio, but Sergio and Jose Luis and Joaquin Anguillo, So many, many good friends and bosses.

51:41From a mentor point of view, my dad. I have to say, we started playing tennis together when I was eight. He taught me how to play tennis, so we became very good friends. I started working with him when I was 12. He had a very successful business career, and suddenly he decided to get out of the corporate life, and he passed all his savings in Argentina in the 80s, and that went really bad. But he went from 10 years of practice to being bankrupt. And I found out about that at 12. And so I worked all my summers with him. And my first two and a half years after high school, I worked full time with him.

52:18He was an incredible mentor. We became incredible friends. But he shared all his wisdom from a business point of view, from a strategy point of view, from a leadership point of view. And also about his failures. Look, and I failed here, here, here, and there. So my toolkit, when I entered Pepsi 30 years ago, my soft skills toolkit was super strong. I would argue that most of the stuff that I have accomplished over the last 30 years from a leadership point of view, they come back to all my learnings working with my father between the age of 12 and 20. So I, and that's a guy who did the belief that he had of me.

52:59Sorry, I get emotional.

53:01Jim Stengel:Now, Sean, what was his business? He went to Argentina, invested. What was it that he brought you into? He worked at Bristol Myers Crip for many years, and he had a very successful career. He decided to get into the distribution business that didn't work out, and he reinvented himself as a consultant. In the 80s, as a business consultant on many things. And then he came out as a very successful executive research consultant, a headhunter in the 90s. So I was, you know, coming out of high school, I was his researcher from the age of 18 until I joined Pepsi. So I learned about career paths. I learned about industries.

53:42I learned about challenges. He gave me a framework when I was young. He always told me, Sean, you have to think always your life, you know, 10 years from now. Where do you want to be 10 years from now? Professionally. Okay. And if you want to be in 10 years there, What are the stepping stones? Where should you be in five years? Where should you be in three years? And which are the different paths that can take you there? And it wasn't an exercise, you know, that was supposed to get you fixed or locked in in a direction. It was to give you an idea of you making the progress that you need to make, to know that if you're on track or not, or if you need to course correct, or to identify alternative career paths.

54:21And then the second column was, from a personal point of view, what do you want to do? you know do you want to marry do you want to have children where do you want to live yeah and that was pretty and he said both have to be compatible you want to live abroad make sure that you get married to someone who's willing to live abroad i've been living abroad for 25 years i miss my country a lot but you know i got married to my esperanza you know who has been my cornerstone through through this journey and uh but i was here i told her in the first day look i don't know this is going to go somewhere but i'm going to live abroad i'm going to do this So just to make sure that professional, personal life are compatible.

54:59So definitely, you know, my dad has been my hero in that sense, my mentor. And in terms of serendipity, look, on the one side, because of all the experiences that my father had, I think I came into the professional world being a little bit more conservative and I'm going to do my passing in Mexico and everything. But then, you know, the best career choices that I've done in my life have been linked to, because I had this framework, being able to, you know, seek when everyone's sad. So let me tell you, six moments in my life that helped me get where I am, all risk-taking. At 23, I left Pepsi for the first time to launch my own startup.

55:43It was a B2B marketplace in Argentina back in 99. First wave of internet, I raised the money. I built a team. I launched a business. I couldn't get to break even. I closed the business. Okay, great experience. Pepsi took me back. Second, risk. Roberto offers me, you know, in 2002, you know, leave Pepsi Argentina, come to Mexico. It's on a local package. We don't do, you know, you're too young. There's no expat package here. I said, I'm going after the opportunity. I've always gone after the opportunity, not the money. I said, Roberto, where do you want me and where do you want me there? I'm going to be there.

56:21Then, 2005, I go to Stanford to do my MBA. At the time, I was 30. It didn't make any sense economically to go and do my MBA. I was being offered a promotion to director in Pepsi, which, you know, money-wise. I said, this is a personal objective. I want to do it for me. It's about investing in myself. And I'm going to take a long-term view. My father was also an MBA from Stanford. I knew that long-term, that was, you know, the right investment. I left Pepsi. I went to PepsiCo UK. And then in 2010, I left PepsiCo for the third time. I said, look, I need a different challenge. I want to be the owner of my career.

57:00You know, I don't think that I love this company, but this is not going in the direction that I want it to be. I went to Twinings in the UK. One third of the size, smaller team. On paper, it doesn't make any sense. It's the culture intuitive move. I wanted to go to a place where nobody knew me, a different culture where I had to prove myself, where I had no brand equity and no support network. And I fell in love with the people and the project. And that was one of the best professional experiences that I've had. I came to Mercado Libre in 2012. It was a public company, but it wasn't the success.

57:36My friends told me, you're going to a Turkish bazaar. What are you doing? Are you crazy? And then the sixth one, 2018, I did this lateral move to be the CMO of the company because I felt that it was the right thing for Mercado Libre. I thought that it would be a good learning experience, and I trusted the system. Each one of those allowed me. All of those were, I call it calculated risk, but you have to take risk if you want to do something different in your life, in your career.

58:10Jim Stengel:You know, interesting, your career path is a bit like Antonio's, right? He went to different categories. He was open to serendipity. And also Fernando Machado, who has a very deliberate framework to go to the next. Every time he goes to another assignment, he wants it to be something he hasn't learned yet. So very intentional about the leaps he has made. and he's jumped around, as you know. The beauty is that I don't need to jump around because I operate, I have the luxury of operating a business that changes so much that I can get all those experiences. I don't know where my role is going to be.

58:46Let's assume that I keep the same dual role. In first time, the nature of both roles is going to be significantly different. I don't know exactly how, but that's what makes it super excited.

58:56Jim Stengel:Hey, by the way, my granddaughter is named Esperanza. This is your wife's name? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, many times we talk about our professional successes. And I've heard you talk about your wife and your daughters. It's like the reality is that impossible to achieve all of this without them. You know, in terms of the support, in terms of when you're taking this crazy risk, you know, the trust that they put on you. Be the wise, you know, the words of wisdom. You know, she was a kindergarten teacher, so she doesn't come from the world business. but always having the wise, you know, advice on those moments of truth.

59:33And then holding the fort at home. All this professional success is worthless, you know. The things at home are not there. I have wonderful children. You know, she has led, you know, all the work on raising them. So I always joke, if she ever divorces me, which I hope she doesn't, I'm not going to do it. She deserves 50 % or more of everything that we have generated. Make sure she listens to the episode. Yeah. And you know what? They don't get it. I think that we give them the credits, but in public, they don't get the credits. They are more than 50 % of, you know, whatever success, so-called success we have.

1:00:10Jim Stengel:Sean, as you think about your childhood, what's the first brand you remember making an impact on you? Two brands. Actually, childhood, Fisher-Price. Yeah. Obviously, you know, my parents, you know, they were very generous. But as a teenager and, you know, at the beginning of this process that I told you when my dad went bankrupt, the one brand, the product that I remember, Levi's 501. That first Levi's 501 that I got gave me so much social confidence at the time when maybe I wasn't. So Levi's 501, definitely. Did you ever visit Levi's when you were at Stanford? Yeah, actually, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:00:48Now that you mentioned, I did a company visit. It's a fantastic company.

1:00:52Jim Stengel:Yeah, it is. They have great archives, the history of the company. It's fantastic. Sean, this has been an amazing conversation. It went to so many places I didn't expect, and I love that. I love the serendipity of it. So many lessons. You're an amazing leader. We didn't even talk about GUT, which I think is one of the most amazing agencies. And a friend of mine is amazing. Yes. Amazing partners. They push us to the limit, and we push them. And we were meant to each other. And we didn't know, you know, we never worked in the past talking about serendipity. Yeah, yeah, super. Well, did we talk about everything you wanted to talk about?

1:01:26Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, a very reflective phase of life. Last year, I turned 50. I'm, as I was telling my wife and my friends, I'm in a stage of, I am happy every day. I'm thankful for, you know, everyone who has helped me. So, yeah, I think that we could keep talking, you know, for another two hours.

1:01:45Jim Stengel:Do you still play tennis, by the way, speaking of being 50 and healthy? No, no. I'm doing a lot of running and a lot of training. I think I'm going to try to pick up golf. I'm going to try to pick up golf, you know, this next holidays. Something that I've always wanted to do with my wife. So I'll see. But no, and I will try to go back to tennis, although I'm playing a little bit of paddle. Paddle tennis is maybe a little bit easier. Maybe one last message. I'm very optimistic about the future of marketing in general. I think that after a phase where, you know, we became a little bit of big teams, We lost the seat on the table.

1:02:21I see more of, okay, let's regain it by doing stuff. Let's own our future. Let's make the right goals. Let's take some risks. So I have no doubt marketing and growth are exactly the same thing. Growth is the main mandate of marketing. I see it across. We have so many colleagues who are taking control of that growth agenda. Businesses without growth have no future. So we play a central role. So I think as long as we reinvent ourselves, we are self-critical, maybe a little bit more self-critical. We talk more of the business language. We should keep delivering good results for our companies.

1:03:00Jim Stengel:Well, Sean, thanks again, man. This is so good on so many levels. Have a great rest of the summer. Make sure your wife listens to this, your mentors listen to this. It's a fabulous episode, and I thank you for your generosity. Thank you, Jim, for everything that you do for the industry.

1:03:44Jim Stengel:Sean has a beautiful framework to guide his life, the career side of his life, the business side of his life, and the personal side. He's very intentional. He's very explicit. He writes it down. And when things happen and opportunities come to him, he has a way to filter them and think them through on both the personal and professional side. I thought the story he told about that, I thought was beautiful. And the last one, we talked a lot about curiosity on this show. Sean is one curious CMO. He's actively learning about his categories. He's actively learning from his bosses. He talked beautifully about mentors he's had and bosses he's had.

1:04:20Jim Stengel:He looks for coaching and role models very actively. The fact that he reads every night in about two hours to learn more about the categories in the business and the areas the company is moving into, I think is just an incredible demonstration of his insatiable curiosity. That's it for this week's episode of the CMO Podcast. As always, I would be grateful if you shared our show with your friends, along with subscribing and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. The CMO Podcast is a Vive original production. Hi, everybody. I'm Andrea Sullivan, the CEO of Vive, and we have produced the CMO Podcast with Jim Stengel for many years.

1:05:03Jim Stengel:And I'm sitting in his seat right now. It's so exciting. I wanted to tell you a little bit about one of our programs. It's called Vive by Vayner. It's a 12-month program that's designed for C-suiters and founders. And we want to help people to grow their businesses, but also to grow themselves. And so we bring in people from Shark Tank to talk to our founders, but we also focus on wellness. We want to make sure that people are leaning into becoming their best selves, their best and happiest selves. So if you are someone that wants to learn how to grow your business and grow yourself, check us out at Vive.co.

1:05:42Jim Stengel:That's V-Y-V-E dot co. We'd love to talk to you.