Growth Signals From CES - Chase Miller

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski, part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist. I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to, of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. Welcome to a very special CMO Whisperer at CES episode. This is part of an ongoing series of conversations we're recording before, during, and after CES to give CMOs and growth leaders real perspective on what actually matters right now and what's coming next.

0:41Today, I'm joined by Chase Miller, Chief Growth Officer at Claritas, where he leads go-to-market strategy and revenue growth, aligning sales, marketing, and product around an integrated growth vision. A longtime builder of market-making data business, Chase brings deep experience across analytics, monetization, product strategy, and strategic partners. He is a co-founder of Nielsen Catalina Solutions and has held senior leadership roles at Nielsen, Indian Hill Group, and Claritas. Across his career, Chase has focused on turning data, identity, and measurement into scalable growth engines for brands, agencies, and platforms.

1:24And finally, Claritas is graciously supporting this entire CES series, helping making these conversations possible so marketing leaders can learn and hear directly from operators who are deep in the work, not just talking about it. Chase, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. You are more than welcome, my friend. Let's jump in. And we're going to start with what I'm going to call growth reality check. From where you sit, what does quote unquote growth actually mean right now for brands navigating AI fragmentation, as well as, of course, pressure from the top? Yeah, that's a great, great question.

1:57So when you think about what growth means in this new age, it's, I think about profitable growth, AI, technology, new frontier we have allows you to build product faster, unlock intelligence operate more efficiently. So growth should accelerate and profitability should accelerate even faster than it's ever done in the history of the industry. So how does, I'm curious about your thoughts about that last line of the first pressure from the top. How do you measure, how do you balance all that AI fragmentation and a little while your phone's ringing, hey, you know, I saw your numbers. They didn't quite, you know, to any CMO.

2:42Sure. So that pressure from the top, you have to deliver your numbers, you have to deliver growth. I think what we, as the folks accountable for driving growth, is how do you deploy these technologies, these tools, to hit those performance metrics, not just for your company, but for the customers that you serve? And so as we think about customer acquisition costs as a key fundamental economic metric for how you grow your business, new technology, the AI evolution here should be driving customer acquisition costs down and therefore allows you to acquire customers at a lower price and then serve them better over the life of that customer or increasing the customer lifetime value of your spread.

3:30should get wider over time with the new technology innovation. What are some misconceptions you see as CMOs or growth teams still holding on to? I think there's still a little bit of uncertainty or fear as to what will AI do for a business? We're losing control if we're using agents and bots to make decisions and present us data that humans have to still act upon. And there's still some kind of, how strong is the underlying data that the AI is using? How strong is the logic that the AI is using to provide you this? If a bot says, hey, you have a risk in this area of your business, or you have a growth opportunity to spark it, there's still some nervousness of, can you trust the bot to give you reliable, actual intelligence?

4:23I think that's almost human nature of the fear of change. we've been doing it a way for decades and now this innovation cycle I think happened faster than anyone in our history you couldn't prepare for it and now you're forced to accept this reality and that makes folks nervous exactly and we all know how reluctant we humans are to change so oh wait a minute I've always done it this way you're telling me to do something different but the old way works what do you say to that someone on your team or like, why are we changing things? Yeah. So we've gone through this kind of organizational transformation, kind of, you know, scaling up all of our employees, not just developers, but, you know, finance team, HR team, marketing on, you know, not just using AI tools for, you know, external product purposes, but for internal operations.

5:14So that comes with the fear of like, do I lose my job? It's like, you know, AI doesn't lose your job. Like the person, there's going to be a person that knows how to use AI that will take your job. So we're scaling up our entire workforce so that they are prepared to ride this AI wave. And that's kind of the rally cry. You can't fight this wave coming. So how do you adapt and evolve and learn from it and benefit from it as opposed to trying to stop it from crashing on you? Yeah, yeah. There's a line. I forget the name of the movie. And the line was like, adapt or die. So there's the book, Who Moved My Chiefs?

5:51Yeah. And so, I mean, we've kind of issued that book to everybody in the company. This is what we're facing. If you're the mouse that keeps going to the same spot looking for your cheese where it's always been, you know, that's not a path to success. Yep. So, there's also the analogy that you can't fight City Hall or there's just like there's this massive market movement. You can't stop this train coming. So, you have to accept this new reality and build the skills to compete in this new market. So you used the word adopting before. What's the difference between adopting tools versus building a real growth engine system?

6:31Sure. Yeah. So we look at it. So we look at our growth from how we know who our ideal customer is and focusing our effort on how do we serve those customers as best possible, the best way possible. and we think that the you know with the ai revolution the value chain in marketing and media is collapsing so we can stream together workflows and tools so it's not just a top-minute tool but it's like getting comfortable with and you know helping our customers manage this you can do more one-stop shopping so yeah yeah where you have a platform that can kind of go more end-to-end seamlessly and the solution is better because you don't lose signal at each step of that value chain.

7:15Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about how should CMOs, if you're talking this, or heads of marketing, whatever, think about speed versus precision when it comes to growth decisions. Sure. How do you manage that balance? Yeah, so are you familiar with the OODA loop? No, please tell us. So OODA loop's an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Okay. And I think it came from the U.S. military fighter pilots. Like the fighter pilots, you observing and orienting to all these signals in real time and having to decide to act. So your risk of a bad decision is low if you can oodaloo as fast as possible.

7:54So yeah, there might be more risk with your decision, but because you can change course and you can sense and respond faster now than you could before, it's okay if that decision wasn't perfect or wasn't optimal. you have the opportunity to change course quicker yep yeah exactly and that's the challenge right is when to because look even in the time we're sitting here recording this by the time we record this time it goes live how many things are going to change that's how that's the speed at what we all have to acknowledge like it's not like oh i'll get to that right like Right. That's I'm going to put words in your mouth, but there's no.

8:39Let's have let's take it on the advisement kind of thing. Right. Yeah. There's too much opportunity cost to wait. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Let's talk about CES. Is there anything you're looking for as a growth leader that you're hoping to see? What are you curious about? So and there's kind of two things. One is talking to customers here, partners, where are those enterprises at in their AI journey? And just kind of mapping out, AI is here to stay, but who's really leading the market? Who's kind of maintaining the market? Who's trying to catch up? And then how do we help our customers accelerate their transition?

9:26I'm looking at our competition. What is our competition doing? Are we ahead or behind? I'm trying to benchmark our own performance and where we sit on our AI journey. And I think that we're probably, you know, more on the leading edge. There's a lot of leading edge companies here. And with that, I've talked to two companies so far today that are thinking about the next horizon, governance, control, protocol. So I'll give you the use case example. So Claritas for the last two years has been scaling up in Salesforce, I mentioned, on all these AI tools. we're using to build front you know front of office products for our customers also how we change our internal operations so we've trained up our our employees we now have a like a six Sigma belt like certification process for employees they can go quite belt yellow belt green belt brown belt black belt as they build their AI skill and as you they go through that process it's organically building agents and tools across the company so two years later everybody has agents everybody has tools that they've built but it's all been uh you know tribal in nature so now the question is as a you know as a leader of an enterprise how do i harvest all of that innovation and then have the governance in place that you know my board expects our customers expect expect around their daily that's fascinating what else do you see i mean since you went there let's let's kind of take it past ces you know the one year two year five years when you get asked by your customers or someone you know where do you see where where is this going and how do you answer that can you possibly answer that so i i try not to predict the future yeah but i think what we you know there's there's trends in the directions as like the value chain will collapse we will employ you know bots so think of an agent as a as a virtual employee and that's how you know if our customer or cmos are asking where's instead of you're headed towards a world where you know half your marketing anymore won't be physical humans right they're going to be these bottles and you have to think about managing the bots as you would a human so somebody has to train the bot somebody has to measure the boss performance somebody has to it it's very much like an hr mindset but yeah you're applying it to a robot that's fascinating so for example our our uh our marketing leader uh he produces uh his org chart for 2026 and he had 22 agents represented as boxes that would normally have like somebody's name and picture wow that's the sign of the times like almost doubled his marketing team through months.

12:14Wow. Interesting. I want to talk about measurement for a second, if we can. And this comes up when I talk to CMOs all the time about the growth teams get stuck when they try to connect data to media, to creative. How do you tackle that, connecting those dots when it comes to measurement and growth? So measurement is a fundamental building block of any kind of growth engine. You need to know what's working, what's not. and that's what you know that signal of what's working what's not is what helps feed these guys you know the ai tools to optimize and help identify where do you have pockets of opportunity and risk right so having solid fundamental measurement to drive your decision making is even more critical now and extracting the decisionable actions out of that intelligence is even easier you know gone is the world of an analyst would create a powerpoint for you and say hey cmo like here's some out here here's who you should target here's your market opportunity here's a creative that should message you know 50 slide you know powerpoint presentation multiple hours oh yeah we've all seen them oh yeah yeah now in part of the claritas practice you you can get an ai summary of how your campaign is performing where's it working where's it not and just in real time yeah so they we use a you know they're from the what to the so what now we're focused on the now what and how we use the AI technology to get to the now what as fast as possible.

13:39So your title is chief growth officer. When you get asked in layman's terms, what does that mean? How do you answer that? What like, so how about you meet someone on the street or in a bar or in a red? What do you, I'm the chief growth officer. How do you answer that? I'm just curious. I describe it as I'm thinking through where Claritas should play. So which customers we to serve which markets and how we win what is our differentiation what's what's our hook yeah what sets us apart yeah and you know having a strong fundamental product like we do you know i know we have a differentiating product management where can we deploy that product and acquire customer at the the right you know acquisition cost and what would generate the right long-term value so there's almost i call like we're eating our own dog food or drink your own champagne and Claritas has been doing customer profiling and segmentation for our customers.

14:28Yeah. So I'm like, I'm doing what Claritas does for our customers, true Claritas. Yes. Which you know, the cobbler's kids has no shoes, all those old terms of the doctor's his own worst patient. It's very common for a company to go, we'd kill it for a given company. What do you do for yourself? I don't know. Yeah, so we've actually set up a program with our product team. So our head of marketing is the first customer of our initial products coming out of the innovation. How does this work for us? Yeah. Well, if you think about it, a customer will go, do you use this? And if you go, no, why would I trust you?

15:09I love that. But it gets so overlooked. It's amazing that companies don't eat their own, drink their own, whatever the case may be. How important is your relationship? if you're talking in general, in generic, sorry, the rest of the team between a chief growth officer and a CMO. You're talking like, what advice would you give to either a chief growth or a CMO? Because they all listen. How's that relationship? Why is it so important? Yeah, so I think the advice I would give, and I do give our partners, experiment, learn, you have to test everything. And it's no longer like, don't try to push it down in the organizations.

15:46have somebody go learn this, learn it yourself. It's not that hard. It's a little scary. We have our CEO built an agent to sit on top of our financials and analyze our financials for him. Normally, you'd dial up your FP &A analyst and say, hey, how's pricing trajectory? How's our discount controls? Our CEO built his own. It's mind-blowing. The executive level is rolling up their sleeves and getting hands-on, more hands-on with these tools and in their business. So that's the event. Don't be afraid. Go do it yourself. Yeah. And not to put words in your mouth, but I would imagine a part B that don't be afraid to fail.

16:29Correct. Because you're going to. But then you learn what not to do. That's right. And I think in front of that, I use this term with my kids. You never lose. You learn. Every failure will come out with like, oh, I learned this. to your point but then other ideas come up and you're not looking for it to come from the you know so the more you know the junior employees the line line folks originally like bring it like you can you like you can ideate and spin up a beta product on your own so like we'll have our uh you know we have sales reps like hey i spun up this little like screen and like if we got a this part of the ui you know if our customers would you know would you know would find this valuable i upsell across all or generate this value only so your your organic innovation ideas are are coming from a broader swath of the organization because you know they're they a they can get their hands dirty and start doing some thinking on their you know on their own their own lab right before they bring it out and maybe it works maybe it doesn't but maybe your ideas for like oh you were headed this direction i was almost on a parallel track let's bring these together and now we have a viable solution.

17:44They weren't viable independently. Makes all the sense of just communication. Communication. Keep it simple. Right. What a great conversation. Chase Miller, Chief Growth Officer at Claritas. Thank you so much, my friend, for being on. Thank you for having me. And thank you to Claritas for enabling these conversations at CES to happen. Well, that wraps up another episode of the CMO Whisperer Show. I hope you shared this episode with your friends. And if you have not already, please subscribe to be kept up to date on all the latest episodes. And if you're so inclined, leave me a review on your favorite podcast platform.

18:19Thank you.