Nick Law (Accenture Song) | The Marketing Industry Needs More Freaks

23:28And so David's ability to surround himself with great people and to have a vision that is around growth and growing because, you know, Peter Drucker, the great business leader, would say that you don't have a company without a customer. And when you hear that, you think, well, that's obvious. But so many companies become so operationally obsessed that they abstract themselves away from the customer.

23:54Jim Stengel:What are you most proud of as you look back in the time at Accenture Song? I think just turning a company that was not known as being particularly creative into a creative company. I mean, all the things that it takes to do that, getting the right people, creating the right conditions inside of this enormous structure is, I think, a real accomplishment. And David gets most of the credit for that. But hopefully I helped a little bit. Yeah, I think you did. Now, I want to talk about CMOs, right? You have a unique purview of them. I've heard you speak to that. And I've heard you say in one interview that the core part of the CMO job that a lot of people don't really get is that their role is to make their companies or brands interesting.

24:38Yeah.

24:38Jim Stengel:And then you have to be where people are to discover how interesting you are, of course, which I know you believe in. But I'd like you to wax a little bit. You knew a lot of CMOs and heads of marketing in all of your roles. You're seeing a lot of them at this company because you work with almost everyone. Yeah. So what's some of your counsel, thoughts, wisdom for senior marketers, CMOs today on being effective? And by the way, being fulfilled and happy in their role. Because I mean, you know, you need to be both for it to be sustained. And I think for great work to come out of it. Well, it goes back to what I was saying about David's leadership, right?

25:20Which is unfortunately a bit of an anomaly right now, right? One of the things that is true of big companies is that they are systems, right? And they're complex systems. They're also built mostly on software now, right? Which is in itself this systematic platform. So there has been this drift towards more operational leadership in all roles. And I think most ruinously in the CMO role for the reasons I mentioned, right? So if your job as a CMO is to make your company interesting, then you have to have a theory of mind about your customer. And there tends to be this continuum of thinking that goes from being more empathetic to more systematic.

26:07You need this inventive instinct, how to make things work, and the expressive instinct, which is how to make people care about that. I think you need both. And I think the one that we're missing the most right now in the CMO role is the expressive one because marketing has become a very complex and matrix system, right? So I'm not saying you ignore that, but at least acknowledge that your primary role is to understand the customer. And if that means balancing out your team and having both of these ways of thinking, then do that. I read somewhere today on LinkedIn about someone saying that CMOs need to be system architects now.

26:47Well, I think that's an important part of being a CMO. But is that the primary role of us? Does a system architect typically have a great theory of mind about the customer? How far can a company abstract themselves away from what a customer cares about? And of all the roles that shouldn't be doing that, who should understand the customer the best? it's a CMO and yet somehow we have a generation of CMOs that where that has we just don't even talk about it anymore yeah and I'm someone who who's built a career on working with great technologists and really being interested in technology so I'm not saying I'm not one of these Luddites that think that you know that we just need to do beautiful films at all I'm just saying that we that you know going back to where we started which was that there's a magic in how you intersect different capabilities, different ways of thinking.

27:41And marketing is a system, but it's also a story. It's like this fever dream of personalization scale. My heuristic there is that service should be personal and brands should be communal. And to me, that's obvious. You don't have a brand unless everyone agrees on what that brand stands for. And you don't get that agreement If you send out a million ads that say more about the people that you're sending them to than the company itself, balance. Figure it out. Balance. Make decisions. Think about integration. Stop. You know, it's this ridiculous tribal war between performance and brand and performance is one.

28:23In recent years, performance is one.

28:25Jim Stengel:So is that what happened? Did CMOs get sucked into the performance vortex and forget about the story? Yeah, I think it started with the separation of these two ways of thinking. So, you know, I have this visual of, it's not even a funnel, it's more like, this is the state of mind of the consumer, because we know that the funnel isn't this sort of methodical march from awareness to transaction, right? And the way I think about it is that, you know, at the top, you've got how people feel at the bottom. It's how they're acting. And in the middle, it's what they understand, right? So, and instead of thinking of it going from top to bottom, I think of it from starting in the middle and going out, right?

29:09And why I think that's so important now is that I've seen too many marketing organizations that are divided between feeling and acting, right? So between brand and performance. And the brand marketers are making these beautiful things that no one sees. And the performance marketing are making ugly things that everyone sees. And the problem with that is that you've got this organization that's shaped like an hourglass because the middle is empty, which is the understand piece. Because, you know, having a banner chase around the web is not really clarifying the value of the product. And neither is a big metaphorical spot, you know, that is getting played during the NFL.

29:47and people are making decisions about what they think about brands and their products on third-party sites because they're the because they're the places that best represent like you go to youtube get a reddit you get all these places any sort of considered purchase that's where you're learning about what you care about and so i just think that it's this sort of false you know you shouldn't be fighting for brand marketing above performance and you shouldn't be fighting performance where marketing what you should be starting with is how do you clarify the value to a customer that doesn't have time to wallow in all the stuff that you want to say, that wants to know why they should care about you.

30:23And then once you've established that, once you've established the middle, inflect it up into big awareness things and then inflect it down into more transactional moments. But always start with the core. It seems obvious to me, but the structure is the thing that's stopping this from happening. And culture, because you've got artists and mathematicians that are in this in this war yeah yeah

30:53Jim Stengel:hi everybody i'm andrea sullivan the ceo of vive and we have produced the cmo podcast with jim stengel for many years 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 that'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.

31:34Jim Stengel:So if you are someone that wants to learn how to grow your business and grow yourself, check us out at vive.co. That's V-Y-V-E dot co. We'd love to talk to you.

31:51Jim Stengel:You've had a number of soundbites already in the show, but I've heard you say others that I want you to comment on. And the first one is the industry needs more freaks. Yeah. Well, especially now. I mean, I've always thought that, speaking of management, I think one of the things that I learned at RGA was that some of the people that create the most value are the most difficult to manage. And to expect everyone to be a good corporate citizen is to engineer a company that is really mediocre. And so your job as a manager is often to manage people that are difficult. Not disrespectful, not abusive, but just difficult because they're just not like everyone else and you've got to i think to great great successful companies figure out how to manage the freaks the irony is that you know bring yourself you'll be a whole self to work hr meme coincided with with with a time when actually they didn't want that so you know so again there's a challenge there because you don't want people that are that are so disruptive that they just, you know, so you need to figure out how to work with peculiar people, I would say, you know, in a good way.

33:04Jim Stengel:Did you bring more freaks into Accenture? Oh, definitely. Yeah. And, and, and you have to protect them, protect them from themselves sometimes. As a percentage of people that were, was RGA the highest in freaks? Oh, absolutely. Of the place you work? Oh my God. Yes. We were an exotic collection of different personalities, but again, But they all believed in the mission. Yeah, right. You know, so this is the thing, the sort of variety and the diversity of thinking was there, but it was all pointed in one direction. Next down, Brian, I like this one. People who will thrive in our AI world will have agency, ambition, and taste.

33:44Jim Stengel:Yeah. Is that the brief for CMOs? Well, I think it's an operating way to think about operating with this amazing technology, right? I think there's a version of working with AI, which is a surrender that will lead to sort of cognitive offloading and the works of, you know, being very mediocre. And then there's another version of it where you have agency over these tools and it sort of amplifies your thinking. so in a funny way it means that what you need now is people that don't have that don't come from the academy that don't come from the sort of received wisdom world but are autodidacts people that are just naturally curious and want to learn and want to you know and want to interrogate their thinking with these tools as opposed to surrendering their thinking to the tools so you're basically solving for the how with these new tools but only a human can solve for the why right which is your ambition and the what which is where taste comes in you know where you look at the thing that you made and say is that good you know do people care about this so but you know so you were bookending this amazing technology but we need to bookend it can you coach ambition and taste i mean i guess the answer is yes because i guess you've been doing it you can encourage ambition but you know there's a point where it's innate i guess but you can give people confidence and their ambition matters enough that they exercise it at work.

35:11And, you know, taste is a lot to do with exposure. This is, I mean, one of the things that people are concerned about with these tools is that, you know, you build up your own large language model just through living life and making decisions. And, you know, you've got your own data set of experiences and taste gets built over time. No one's born with great taste. You might have a sensitivity. You might have the predisposition to look at aesthetics or understand language or something, but it needs to be developed. It's a muscle. And this is the thing, I think, why I worry about the triumph of the systematizer over this more empathetic sensibility, is that there's an assumption that creativity is somehow the thing that you come up with in the shower.

35:58That anyone can be creative and that it's sort of subjective. and it's just not true. We know that good creatives take a lifetime. You know, they have the talent, but there's the gladwillian 10 ,000 hours that go into becoming really good at this stuff and it should be respected as such. And taste is one of those things. You know, going back to Rick Rubin, that's what he's got, it's his superpower. It's not an accident that he has produced, you know, culture-defining music for decades. It wasn't just an accident. But it wasn't him just subjectively throwing a dot at these things. It's a real skill.

36:37It's discipline.

36:38Jim Stengel:Okay, last soundbite. Most leaders have not yet solved the marketing organization design of the internet era. And we're now in the AI era. The internet era was, what, 20, 25 years ago? Yeah, I know. What's going on? That's not good. So lack of courage or silos or what do you think? Well, I think it's hard to imagine completely rethinking the talent and the organization that you need having become successful in the old model. I think that there are three big revolutions that marketing has had to handle. The first one is the Industrial Revolution. There was no marketing before the Industrial Revolution because there wasn't mass-produced products to sell.

37:24So the Industrial Revolution spawned marketing. And then I think the Internet Revolution, you had to then think about not just the stories you tell, but how to connect with people because there was this interface in front of all media. And then you've got this AI revolution, which in a strange way, if the industrial revolution helped you make everything, and then the internet revolution helped you connect everything, then the AI revolution combines everything. It synthesizes everything. And so you have to solve different problems, right? Which means that you need to be honest enough to think about different processes, people, structures, right?

38:05And it's just really hard to do that. And, you know, like one of the things I alluded to this earlier, one of the reasons I think a lot of the agencies didn't figure out the internet is because they assume that creativity was this thing that was invented in the late 50s by Bernbach, art and copy, right? So this perfect team of art and copy could solve for anything, you know, because that's a creative team. That's a primal creative way of thinking. It's ignoring the fact that one of the important creative disciplines in the age of the internet is experience design. And that is not narrative thinking.

38:40It's design thinking. And, you know, that's why we, you know, our version of the Burnback model was stories and systems on art and copy. But to admit that, you then need to start hiring and firing and, you know, redesigning yourself. You know, all the things I said before. And it's just, it's really hard. And I suspect, by the way, that what you need to run a creative organization with AI tools is going to change not just what needs to be made, but the commercial model so drastically that there's probably a better chance that those companies will emerge separate from existing creative organizations.

39:19Jim Stengel:That's often how it goes, right? Yeah. And the marketing organizations today who have the most forward-looking designs are typically younger ones. Yeah, exactly. Younger companies, yeah. Yeah, they don't have to sort of justify legacy pieces.

39:41Jim Stengel:So I want to flip to the creative brief and I want to take you back to school. So you grew up in a suburb of Sydney, right? Yeah, yeah. And you went to a trade school. You didn't have a classic formal education. So could you talk a bit about that, why you did that, what you were thinking about then? I was spectacularly unacademic at high school. I really was. I had a feral childhood. No one was paying attention, least of all me. And so I came out of high school and the only thing I achieved was playing really good rugby. And so I didn't really have the option to go to university because I didn't have the academic credentials.

40:20But there was this technical college that you could apply for with a drawing test. And so that's what I did. I applied for it. I got in. I think I was the last person that was accepted into this little trade school after rounds of these practical. So there was no, you know, you didn't get into the school by having a good mark in your high school. This is completely separate. It was just doing these practical tests. That's how I got in. And it was two years. got a certificate at the end of it learn how to use a t-square and a drafting table no one's seen the certificate ever since so i was i was in the industry by the time i was 20 i would i you know i had a job and was working what was the first job out of the trade school i worked for a little design company that did mostly corporate identity and brand work

41:08Jim Stengel:were you a an artist as a kid i mean did you have talent in drawing yeah no i could yeah i draw i was constantly drawing constantly yeah and my my dad's a writer so i also have a little bit of that what did you draw as a kid football players monsters all that cool all that grabby little boy stuff that crosses cultures right crosses continents yeah i i don't think i had a very very sophisticated you know sensibility when i was young but yeah i want you to talk about you've looked at a lot of creative briefs in your life so is there one that stands out as the most amazing brief you've ever worked from you know what it was it wasn't a brief because it sort of accreted over time and turned into something but the original nike plus was so interesting to me because it wasn't this sort of you know what's zeitgeist and you know and what's and what do we need to tell the world it was we've got this technology and how do we combine it all in a way that makes a great user experience.

42:09And RGA was working separately on two things that sort of converged into Nike+. One was a manual tool on Nike running where you could track your pacing, right?

42:22Jim Stengel:So it's a run tracker, right? But it was manual entry, so it was, you know, but it was still in an interface. And the other one was doing workout mixes on iTunes, right? And if you added this hardware technology, which is a pedometer that spoke to a sensor that you plugged into iPod Nano, then all these things came together. The run tracking, the music, you know, and the interface that showed all these things together. So I think it was a good example of something that I don't think Madison Avenue understood, right, which is that sometimes ideas can bubble up when you just combine the potential of existing technologies.

42:58You know, because in a way, there was a brand argument in Nike running around whether the way that Nike running positions itself, which was two high-performing runners, whether those people actually ran listening to music. So there was a bit of a back and forth about, are we pitching this from a brand point of view in the right way? Now, as it happened, pretty high-performing runners ended up using Nike+. But there was a question about whether it fit into the brand story, which was a little bit odd given how advanced the technology ended up being.

43:29Jim Stengel:You might answer this the same way, but what's the most personally meaningful brand or campaign or initiative that you worked on in your career? Uh, well, the, all the Nike work would fall into that, but I think, I think, um, the Beats by Dre work just before Apple acquired Beats by Dre. And the reason I say that is because the same year that we did the Beats Music app, right, which is, I think, one of the reasons that Apple acquired Beats. We did amazing storytelling, right? So we did the game before the game work, which was, you know, so we uniquely created great digital product and great storytelling for one brand and it all felt coherent and great.

44:15So I think that was a high watermark for proving out our model.

44:19Jim Stengel:Do you still play rugby? No, not really. I mean, there's a version of rugby, which is like flag football, which I could probably hobble around and play a little bit of. So what do you do now for your fitness and kind of overall wellness, health, well-being? Yeah, I try to keep fit. I go to the gym, I don't know, like four times a week or something. And I find it very therapeutic. It clears the head. It's the closest I come to meditation is sweating. I think the last time I may have seen you in person was at a gym. Didn't I run into you at like Adobe's meeting? Yeah. Yeah. Right. I think you were getting a pastry though.

44:58Jim Stengel:I think I was coming out of the gym and I ran into you in the cafe. What's the first brand you remember making an impact on you as a young boy? Well, as a young boy, it was the rugby team I followed and they're called the South Sydney Rabbitohs. And they have a little logo there of a rabbit, which I thought it's so weird and quirky and their colors are red and green. red and green stripes. And so, you know, back in the seventies, when you watched the Rabbitohs play on a color TV, it would make your eyes hurt because the red and green would like vibrate. It's like bad Christmas lights. Yeah. Yeah.

45:41So, you know, but, you know, as growing up, Apple was definitely the brand that I, you know, that I had a relationship with and I was abnormally curious about everything they did. Yeah.

45:53Jim Stengel:Who's been the most inspiring person in your life? That's a really interesting question. I mean, I tried to convince myself that I haven't really had any mentors, which is bullshit, of course. But I think, you know, my first job was with this crazy guy who had a little design company. What I learned from him was, you know, Oscar Wilde said, nothing succeeds like excess. And I think this guy was a version of that i he burnt out at some point but his commitment to design was just was crazy and i so i learned that from him and then i think the thing i learned from bob greenberg founder of rga was which not to not to fall in love with like i think what why it's hard for a lot of creative people to change is because they often build a reputation and and a career doing one thing and And so then they spend the rest of their life trying to force that one thing into whatever's going on.

46:51And so they try to justify, you know, when things change, they're like, oh, but what I do still matters. And I think because Bob was really a producer with a great creative sensibility, he didn't care. He knew the thing he was always interested in, always sort of applied his production mind to. And that's very liberating, even for a creative, just not to dwell on your craft, but to think about the sort of context of creativity. And recognize, by the way, that you can't be creative without technology. It's, you know, like to make something, you need a medium and all mediums are a technology. And the technology is the thing that shapes what you pre-visualize before you even do something creative.

47:39So we need to be honest about that, that as creative people, we are completely reliant on technology to express our thoughts. And so learn technology because that's going to open up the potential of your next creative act.

47:53Jim Stengel:That's a good place to stop this, Nick. That's a big thought and the right thought. So how'd this go? Did we talk about what you thought we'd talk about? Yeah, I think we covered a lot there. Yeah. I didn't expect the rugby detour. hey go where the guests lead you right and you led me to rugby yeah that's funny yeah no it's been fun thanks jim i appreciate it and i'll see you next month right yeah i'll see you there and we'll chair you out into the on to you're gonna be dolled up you're gonna have a tuxedo on i are we are we expected to i don't know i've never seen you in a tie so don't disappoint me i don't want to see it as the first time you in a tie yeah well this this yeah you might i might have to whip it But yeah, it'll be like, I mean, at the ad council, I wear a tie.

48:40Jim Stengel:Oh, you do really? Okay. Well, I've never seen it. Well, I'm going to surprise you. All right, Nick. Hey, thanks for this. Thanks a bunch. It was wonderful. Great fun. I'm sure I'll get the chance to congratulate you for the Hall of Fame, but I'm going to say it right now. Congratulations. That was my conversation with Nick Law. Three takeaways from this one for your business brand and life. The first one, companies need more freaks. I loved our discussion about this. I asked Nick if he has brought more freaks to Accenture. He said yes. But what we really talked about is the diversity of thinking and styles and talents that every company needs to succeed well.

49:19Jim Stengel:Nick is good at nurturing those people and pulling them together with common goals and a common ambition. Second takeaway, follow great people. Nick would not be at Accenture Song without David Droga, who he has long admired. When David called Nick to ask him to come on this journey, Nick didn't know that much about the company, but he trusted David Droga and he followed him, and it's been a great, great experience for Nick. And the third takeaway, a CMO's job at the end of the day is about the customer. And Nick kind of waxed about how we've lost a bit of that in many companies. And at the end of the day, a great CMO understands the customer, is never complacent about it, is always curious and brings the customer's needs, wants, feelings, habits, practices back into the company so that everyone can work together to make the customer experience better.

50:12Jim Stengel: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.