Don McGuire (Qualcomm) | How Qualcomm Turned Snapdragon Into a $180B Innovation Brand

23:54And then I also learned a lot from the limitations of that story. That Intel Inside story was limited by product category. Intel as a company sort of missed a couple really key inflection points in the technology sort of revolution. And so over time, that opportunity became smaller and smaller and smaller and more verticalized. And then when you saw, you know, after building it and establishing it, they took their foot off the gas and started focusing more on performance. And you've seen sort of the degradation that that has had. So understanding that, learning from that and making sure that we don't make the same mistakes or heading down the same path.

24:30but what they've done to take the brand and then couple it with every part of whether it's a linear funnel exercise or a non-linear funnel exercise was a masterclass for sure. I had you on the show about four years ago. You were a new CMO. You're in your first year as CMO. We had a great chat. This one's even better by the way. And my three takeaways though, I look back on that. You talk about the need for marketing to be accountable for business results. You talk about how companies need to own their narrative and we're speaking a lot about that right now. And you talk about how leadership and leaders need to evolve to build stronger skills and empathy.

25:04Now we're here four years later, you're a more experienced, more confident CMO because you've been in the world. How do those takeaways sound? Is that done today as CMO or would you add a few things to that? Yeah, I think progress has been made, but there's still a lot to do. You know, we were four years ago, we were just coming out of COVID. I mean, I became CEO in 2021, so we were kind of still in a mess. I think the empathy piece of it is still really important, but the context is a little bit different. Things have shifted so much. And with the advent of AI, there's a whole new complex algorithm that goes into that equation.

25:39And as we transform marketing, and as we're all talking about it here at ANA and just pretty much everywhere over the past year, how AI is going to transform marketing or the use of AI will transform marketing and the discipline, empathy is going to be even more important because people are scared. And there's lots of fear out there about what is it? Is AI going to take my job? Is it going to replace my skills? So empathy is going to be, as we go on this journey together and individually, empathy is going to continue to be really important. And it's not about like getting you out of your locked down house and back into society empathy.

26:10It's, or because you are locked down in your house and you have no contact with anybody to empathy about upskilling, job retraining, and showing the benefits and integrating the benefits of AI into your workflows so that it seems more natural. and less daunting. So I think that empathy still applies, but in different contexts. Accountability is still something really, really important. I think we're still on that journey of convincing the rest of the C-suite about the importance of the discipline as a business driver, but we've made a lot of progress. And I think in some companies, it's a lot easier because especially in packaged goods and things like that, the brand is the business.

26:47right? If Tide loses its brand cachet, the business falls apart, for example. Not that case in technology in some cases. So still on that journey, but a lot of progress has been made. And I don't think we'd be able to do what we've been doing for the past three years if we hadn't built that credibility and if the company hadn't become believers in what we've done. We've made bold moves in the last three years, especially around partnerships. And our partnership with Manchester United was a bold move. And I would have put a 5 % probability on that whole partnership actually coming to fruition when I first engaged with them on the topic.

27:23And the fact that we pushed that boulder up the hill and got over the finish line is a testament to progress that we've made. So a lot of boldness has come into play since I started that I didn't really know how it manifests itself at the beginning, but I knew we had to do something. I do want to talk with you primarily today with the rest of our time about sports, actually. You just took us there. And I also do want to talk about AI because I heard you speak about AI at a meeting at Deloitte with CMOs a couple months ago, and it was a fabulously useful talk. So I want to go there. But first on sports, I mean, I've heard you say that it's become a very powerful platform to scale Snapdragon's awareness.

28:03And you said Manchester United, but you're Formula One, Drive to Survive, the Live Golf Tour. I mean, you're in a lot of places. So we didn't talk about that four years ago. That's true. Right? It didn't really exist. Right, right. So I want you to go there. Why did you have that awakening? I mean, sports is a major part of your platform and your brand now. So how did you come to that? How do you feel about it? Is it working for you? What could others learn? It all starts with how and where do we want to show up with the brand? And how do we attach ourselves to people, our audiences, in a compelling way that's relevant to them?

28:36So instead of just talking about technology for technology's sake or speeds and feeds and specs and things like that, and features and benefits, what Snapdragon really does is it enables people to explore their passions and experience their passions in very compelling ways. If we are inside your phone, we make your pictures look better. We make your music sound better. We make your ability to watch your favorite team in 8K better. And so we really kind of create these experiences that people sort of are manifesting themselves in their passions. And people love art and they love photography and they love music and they have sports.

29:11And that's where they find affinity in their lives. And that's where their passions lie. So we decided to attach ourselves and the brand to people's passions, sports being one of them. I'm a big believer that people feel passionate about players and teams. not so much leagues. So that's where we've gone with our sports partnerships, mostly at the team level. In the case of Bryson, at the player level, although he has a team too with the Crushers. But that's where we started in sports. And then to your point, we wanted to align those sports activities with where we saw business opportunity to build more brand affinity for Snapdragon with different audiences across sport.

29:50And it's working? I mean, it's still in the early days. I mean, how do you measure if it's effective? Is it qualitative, quantitative? I'm going to share some data today on our first year of being in the front of shirt partner with Manchester United. I mean, again, I mentioned earlier, we knew this was a big deal. You know, it's a large investment on an annual basis. And, you know, they presented me with the numbers, you know, and that was part of the business case to getting it there. But then the results that we've seen after the first year have just blown my mind. Wow. I knew this was one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in sport.

30:24I didn't know how valuable until we got the results after our first year. And this is with a team that isn't really doing very well on the pitch, but it almost doesn't matter. Because when you're partnered with a brand like Manchester United, their brand ethos is so big. They're a global sports brand. They're arguably the largest global sports brand in the world by so many different metrics. 1.1 billion fans around the world. It's not just about Manchester. It's not about the UK. It's about their brand affinity around the world and what that can do for Snapdragon globally. So it brings us massive scale and reach for the brand.

31:00It allows us a massive storytelling platform to do amazing things and create amazing content. And I mentioned on stage today that after season one, 9.5 billion impressions for Snapdragon, which is the AVE equivalent of 182 Super Bowl ads in one season. Wow. with a team that ended up 12th in the pre-week. Pretty phenomenal. Upwards of almost a half a billion video views of the content that we've done with the club. Our launch video with Eric Cantona was the most watched piece of Manchester United content for a front of shirt launch in history of the club. So what's driving it? It's how you're doing it too, right?

31:38Well, yeah. I mean, it comes down to execution and it comes down to the recipe I talk about in my conversation today on stage. It's really about knowing your audience, providing context, making it relevant, driving that resonance to action. And so I've shared some stats on stage today as well about 85 % of Manchester United fans are aware of Snapdragon, think it's an amazing technology, provides premium performance, and has genuine love for the brand. That's critical. That's - That's only after a year or two? That's only after a year of being a front-of-shirt partner. You set a tough benchmark.

32:11Yeah. I mean, it's pretty amazing. So those KPIs and those stats and the results that we've seen have been phenomenal. And we're not stopping there. Another thing that we've done is we've tried to drive innovation into our contracts. There's these standardized store sponsorship kind of deals that people do. And you're basically exchanging money for assets, but we wanted to build some innovation into the contract. And with the cooperation and collaboration of the folks at Manchester United, we were able to do things like once every season, we can choose a cause of our choice and replace the Snapdragon logo with that causes.

32:45and drive a whole storytelling platform around that. I talked about brand with purpose before. That's one avenue and asset now that we have to tell that part of the Snapdragon story. So that's phenomenal. And I share the Red case study on stage today and the partnership with Red that we had this season, which was a huge success. We also have pass-through rights. You know, Snapdragon, it lives inside of so many amazing products from amazing brands. And I have amazing brand partners. And as part of the marketing mix, I market with them. and alongside them. And so I want to be able to bring them into our world.

33:18So I have pass-through rights in the product categories that I own. So I can bring a Samsung in. And on the smartphone side, I can bring a Dell in on the PC side. And we can storytell together and I can help them get more value and attach themselves to this brand ethos that we're building between Manchester United and Snapdragon. That's another piece of innovation that most sponsorship agreements do not include that has been super, super productive for us and providing more value to our partners, which has been great. So those are some of the things that we've done. We've done that with our partnership with Mercedes and Formula One, which the advent of that was really about our growth in automotive and other things that we've done.

33:52So it is working. We're trying to drive innovation in it. We're trying to look at things differently and how we exploit these partnerships. And then we also are very committed to making sure our technology is helping our partner as well. So it's helping Manchester United Football Club become a better Manchester United Football Club through the use of technology. It's helping Mercedes, AMG, Formula One become a better team through the use of our technology. And we think that's really important. It's a sort of two-way partnership. That's a fabulous story. I mean, what is normally a transaction and a contract that is transactional into a creative, innovative partnership?

34:29Yeah. And we're always learning from others. I mean, I got to give credit where credit is due. I think what Meta has done with WhatsApp, and they're also a Mercedes partner, what What they've done with their partnership with Mercedes is incredible. And with the storytelling platforms of the Netflix documentary on Kimi Antonelli and how he won the seat on driving the car down Fifth Avenue in New York with Lewis. And that was really, really amazing innovation and how they structured their relationship with Mercedes to be able to do that. I was a little envious of, to be honest with you. And as we're looking at our continuation with the team, we're looking at building some of that into our contractual partnership as well.

35:36out and gain fresh perspective. Deloitte will help you see the bigger picture together. Learn more about the CMO program at cmo.deloitte.com.

35:49You talked about passions to align your brand with. Sports is a big one. You threw out some other ones. Is there a second area you think is really rich for you as a brand to be part of? Yeah. Music is really rich for us. We've done a lot of things we've dabbled in. We had a partnership with Live Nation, done some things there. We have our Snapdragon Sound studio series that we've done. We've done some things with iHeart in the past. We haven't really nailed something that I think is long-term. So we're continuing to learn in that area, but we've brought music into our other partnerships. We just did a collab with Manchester United and the artist Kaleo for the second season launch of The Front of Shirt, where we happened to connect the dots between Kaleo, who's an amazing band from Iceland, who's a huge Manchester United fan, the lead singer, and he's always wanted to perform at Old Trafford.

36:37And so we brought that together with the front of shirt launch. There is a song that United fans love. It is a re-wording of Country Roads. So he did a cover of that, played it on the pitch in Old Trafford. Pretty good. Very, very good. And it was all shot on Snapdragon. And then we released that as part of the second season. So we've kind of intermixed things together. We like to cross-pollinate our partnerships. So that was super compelling. So music, definitely. And then with photography or videography or just the whole art of creation that, again, devices that are powered by Snapdragon can bring a creator's ideation process to another level and the delivery to another level, we are actually launching Snapdragon Studios.

37:21So we're going to be producing original content in partnership with Live Nation, Sony Pictures, and we're going to give a go at a studio. Physical space? Virtual and physical. Virtual and physical. Yeah. Super. Now, I was with you, I think in August it was, late August, outside Dallas at Deloitte's University, the training center. It's an academy they do for next generation CMOs, great program. And I heard you speak about your thought about AI in your organization, in terms of skills, training, putting it at the center of where you're going. And it was a beautifully told story, massively helpful for the audience.

37:56So I'd like you to tell us a little bit about how you have thought about your organization with this unbelievable technology. And you talked about the empathy skills have shifted, and I agree with that. But it was a really wonderful story you told. So if you could just go how you're thinking about your organization, setting it up, the right design, work structure for the future? Sure. Well, I mean, we'd been going down this path that I think a lot of marketing organizations and CMOS have been going down, which is the introduction of AI tools. And so you have your existing organization and how it works and your existing workflows, and then you have these AI tools.

38:31And they were kind of almost sitting side by side. And then you were trying to connect the dots wherever possible. Oh, this tool is great for copy development. We're going to plug it in here. Oh, this tool is great for video editing. We're going to plug it in here. And we decided to like take a pause on that for a second. And again, after consulting with some of my CMO friends, I was at a lunch with Jonathan Adashak from IBM. We were chatting and he was like, this is what I'm doing. I'm blowing up my organization. I'm putting AI at the center. I'm building a systems architecture. And then I'm reorganizing my team around that.

39:03And I was like, wow, that's pretty cool. I think I'm going to do that. So I came back from that conversation and we started down a marketing evolution exercise path where we are working with partners and our internal team. And we are building a systems architecture where AI is not a set of tools that sit over here, but there's this AI systems architecture that is a foundational layer, then building workflows on top of that and process on top of that. And then people around that. And we call it AI powered human led. And so that's the tagline we came up with for the internal team to market it to my marketing team.

39:42Really, it is AI powered and human led. And in the middle of the process right now, we hope to roll out kind of phase one in January. But it's a really new way of looking at this that we, I feel, will yield not only a better incorporation and integration of AI into the marketing discipline, But it will eliminate a lot of the fear because it will come with filling gaps, upskilling, training, and making sure that AI is truly helpful in the process of marketing and not friction driven or friction creator. So that is how we're approaching it. And so far, so good. We are almost complete with the systems architecture piece.

40:27And that's also been a great exercise on its own because we've been trying tools, we've been experimenting with stuff, but we didn't have everything figured out. And we've been working with a company called Proficient and they've been helping us kind of fill in those gaps with maybe the tools that we have can be expanded upon, or maybe there's a new tool that we need or whatever to kind of fill in that architecture. And that's been going well is in combination with the other pieces of the puzzle. But I have a great team who's working on it and I'm excited about what the results are going to be.

40:55I was very impressed when I heard you speak last time about the discipline and intentionality of the training and the inclusion of people and the phases of training. One is general training on AI and then on some of the tools that are an important part of your future. Could you speak a bit about that? It's a real commitment to your people. It's a real commitment. And obviously, being a company that's in the business of AI, as well as trying to integrate AI, we had to get on things pretty quickly. And so we have an AI council at Qualcomm. I'm on that council where any new tool or any new AI kind of thought is kind of brought through the council and vetted for safety and enterprise readiness and all sorts of criteria.

41:32And once it gets through, right, then we go into test and learn or eval and then scale. So it starts there. So every Qualcomm employee has to go through AI training. And that's primarily driven by legal, which is sort of the do's and don'ts. And don't be dropping IP and proprietary code into ChatGBT. That's a no-no. And so everyone has to start there. And then we have our individual tool training. A good example is with Writer. Writer is a tool that I've deployed broadly. It's even now being deployed outside of marketing because people are seeing how valuable it is across the organization. The Writer team has been phenomenal on helping us train our people, but also make the most out of their platform.

42:09we've created like 25 custom apps we've now we are now moving into agents in their agentic platform and rolling that out as sort of a first mover and we're saving about 2400 hours a month wow by just deployment and use of the tool kind of with our super users on top of the ai training we sort of do this super user fomo type of thing where we pick some key people we get them using the tools they see how useful and helpful it is they evangelize and then people like oh i want that too And that's how we build scale adoption throughout the organization in a kind of natural way. And it's worked so far.

42:46And now we're going to, again, enter this bigger transformational phase of this. And that's where we'll increase the upskilling piece of the puzzle as well. Because there'll be things like brand governance, which in the future, based on this architecture, 99 % of it will be done by AI. And so if you've got multiple people doing brand governance, do you really need those people doing brand governance? Or do you need one person who spends a little bit of their time loading the rules into and updating those rules when they need to be updated, but then you can redeploy those other resources into other things.

43:18And so that's really where we're at today. Now for the CMOs listening to this, what's the biggest lesson if they want to do what you're doing and you were inspired by IBM, you're doing it, it seems to be going well. What's the biggest lesson you would share with them? Make sure you know what your objective is. So my objective and Jonathan's objective were different. I happen to be severely under-resourced marketing organization from a human capital perspective. So I'm really using this exercise to scale my capabilities. I like to say the world moves at the speed of TikTok. It's really hard to keep up.

43:50I could add 500 people to my organization and still not be able to keep up. So for me, it's a scaling exercise. I have to keep up with the pace of the business, our diversification, new things, and I'm not going to be able to grow my labor force the same rate as needed. So AI is going to be a scale tool. In some cases, it will be a tool to become more efficient in some marketing organizations where size is a problem or size has created slowness or bureaucracy, your objectives might be different. So my objective and Jonathan's, although we're deploying the same philosophy, are different. And that's okay.

44:23So just understanding your objective, I think, is number one. How is this going to help you and your organization? And in my case, it's really about scale, which is less scary, I'll admit. And so I think the one takeaway is start with a really solid objective, going into it, and then customize your process around that.

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45:46i want to move to the creative brief in our time remaining your brand is 40 years old your company is 40 years old this year are you having a birthday cake you're doing anything we did an appropriate i think amount of celebration we had in new york in may we had like a 40th anniversary celebration at nasdaq and then we hosted some partners and some media at a cocktail reception in Manhattan where we rolled out 1985 when the company was founded. So I keep, I love that song, you know, by Bowling for Soup, 1985. So we basically showed technology from 85 and then technology today. So it was a fun interactive experience.

46:22We had like video games in 1985 versus video games today. We had computers and things like that. So it was, it was interesting. Then we, for the employee base, we've had regional celebrations all over the world throughout the summer. And then we had a big celebration in San Diego in September. at Snapdragon Stadium, where we invited the entire employee base to come and celebrate the 40 years of history. We rolled out some cool new technology. We had a humanoid robot walking around and we had a bunch of other stuff. And then Cristiano, we had our founder, or when Jacob's come and speak, who's 91 now.

46:56It was just a really fun time, a sense of pride for everybody. And it's good to celebrate these things. We didn't go crazy, but it was the right amount a celebration. Last time we talked, you said the first brand that made an impact on you as a young boy was Vans. Yes. Do you stand by that? I stand by that. I'm a sneaker guy, so shoes have been always a part of my brand ethos. Is there another one? Maybe not just a young, back in the day, because it didn't exist back then, but a brand that is in my daily life that I literally could not exist without is Starbucks. Yeah, Starbucks. Say more. Well, every day, pretty much every day, no matter where I am in the world.

47:34My ritual is I, and I don't drink coffee, which is even the weirdest thing, right? I'm an ice cream tea guy. I love their ice cream tea. So every day I start out with a massive ice cream tea. There's one over there and that's my ritual. And yeah, I could go to a coffee bean or a different place or Pete's, but it's not the same. So you're a real brand fan. They have a CEO who just had his one year anniversary, Brian Nickel, who came from Chipotle. He's a friend, XPNG guy. How do you think he's doing? From what I can tell, I think he's making a lot of really, really good positive decisions to move the brand and the company in the right direction.

48:10He's got different challenges, obviously. He's got a massive retail sales force or people force and all the challenges and opportunities that comes along with that. He's got stores. He needs to continue to modernize and update and keep up with trends and consumer behavior and how people want to buy and consume things. I think pulling back the menu a little bit and kind of creating more purposefulness to it, I think is a good thing. Got a little wild, I think, and really confused the baristas and made it really complex. And I think he's found the right balance there. If you look at the results and you look at some of the recent press I've read and some of the interviews I've listened to of him, it sounds like he's applying a really good recipe for success.

48:56Yeah, a good playbook. Yeah, a good playbook. It was interesting. I think their stories changed quickly, shortly after he became CEO. Absolutely. The content they put out was more about who they are. Yeah. They went back to their roots. They did, yeah. It's almost a rallying cry internally, I think. Yeah, and which I think doing that, like going back to the heart and soul of who you are. By the way, before you even start to deploy audience metrics and context and relevance, you have to know who you are as a brand. And when things start to go awry, when you start to deviate from that, and we've seen that recently in a couple of examples that we all can probably articulate where things just go south really fast, by the way.

49:39It's never been more important to know who you are. Mark Pritchard, my successor, CMO at P &G, has been there a long time. He was chairman of the ANA. There was a switch that was announced yesterday. That was his talk yesterday. He went through several P &G brands, back to its roots, back to its core, showed some of the original ads. Wow. And how obviously times have changed, but they stayed true to the spirit of the founding of the brand. Yeah, for sure. And it's challenging as you, like even with us, as Snapdragon appears in more product categories. Sure. Right. How do you stay true to that brand ethos, but put it in the context of that product category?

50:13And it's a challenge. I mean, it's not necessarily easy all the time, but it's also not unachievable, right? if you're disciplined. And it's easy to be distracted. It really is in this world. It's really easy to get distracted. And sometimes people want to pull you in a direction and you have to say no. Right. And it's not as easy as it sounds. You live in San Diego. What's your favorite hack in San Diego or your favorite place to be? My favorite place to be is El Pueblo. Oh, okay. Taco shop. Okay, good. My favorite Mexican food place in San Diego. Favorite activity outdoors? You know, I love going to the beach.

50:47What's your favorite beach? I usually go to 21st Street in Del Mar. Yeah, that's just since I was a kid because I grew up in Solana Beach. So, you know, I'm a local. That's kind of my favorite. I just love touching down. I mean, I travel a lot for work, but I always love touching down in San Diego and walking out of the terminal and just exhaling. It's a good feeling. It's a good feeling. And Terminal 1's open now. That's right. Finally. The airport's less of a nightmare. Yeah. So we're here at the ANA. Bob Liudis is the CEO. He always ends every on stage. You'll experience this today. When you're finished, he gets on stage, asks you a few questions.

51:21But the last question is, what's your advice to the audience to do when they return to work? So I want to kind of ask that of you here in this small setting. I mean, you're an amazing CMO. Thank you. I'm not just saying that. I think this discussion has been rich. You're more confident than when I talked to you four years ago. You're having fun. I have some battle scars. Yeah. But I mean, I think you're really thriving in this role. Thank you. So I think your answer to that question, I think, is an interesting one for our audience. So as you think about all of your experiences since you've been CMO, what we've talked about today, what's one thing you'd love the audience to think about, ponder, consider adapting from what we've just talked about?

51:58I would say if it's, hey, what are you going to do when you go back to work tomorrow, whatever, don't panic and just take things one step at a time. It's easy to panic, but we're not curing cancer. I wish we were. I mean, our technology can do a lot, but just take things one step at a time. It's going to be okay. I love it. Don, thank you and all the best on the big stage today. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me again. I'll try to be there and cheer you on. I appreciate that. So thanks is a real gift. Thank you. Appreciate it. That was my conversation with Don McGuire. Three takeaways from that one.

52:30First, brand must perform. Kill the brand versus performance debate. Don's stance is blunt. Stop separating brand and performance. Your brand has to perform. Tie every initiative to a clear objective, build resonance that drives action, and show the business results. Brand building is a growth lever, not a side quest. Takeaway number two, scale without losing the core. As Snapdragon shows up in more categories, the job is to protect the brand ethos while adapting to context. It's easy to get distracted or pulled off course. The discipline is knowing who you are, evolving intentionally, and saying no when directions don't fit the brand's character and product truth.

53:11And third takeaway, build and use our generous CMO network. You're not alone. Don actively taps into peers at places like Google and American Eagle, picking up the phone to swap learnings, pressure test ideas, and borrow playbooks. Our industry is generous. When you're wrestling with an issue, call someone who can help you, who's tackled it, is going through a similar experience. 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.

53:49The CMO Podcast is a Vive Original Production. The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of our sponsors or its personnel, nor do our sponsors advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.