Inside a Brand Strategist’s Mind with Brian Irving

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. My guest this week is Brian Irving, the Chief Marketing Officer of Lyft. Brian has over two decades of experience building and marketing iconic global brands, including Meta, Eventbrite, Apple, Google, Levi's, and Airbnb.

0:41As CMO at Lyft, Brian leads all marketing, creative, and communications for the brand. This includes developing a strategy for and executing on all product and brand marketing, the creative studio, social media, and external communications. Now, prior to joining Lyft, Brian was responsible for, quote, branding the metaverse. I love that. Promoting a range of new product initiatives in the sector, including Oculus, MetaQuest goggles, Ray-Ban smart glasses, and the Horizon VR world. It was there where Brian led the MetaQuest pro launch, bringing the first ever integrated sports partnership to Meta with a multi-year content marketing and product deal, MedX and the NBA partnership.

1:20Previously, Brian was the CMO for Eventbrite, where he led during the company's IPO and launched their first ever brand campaign called Made for Those Who Do. At Airbnb, he launched positioning across marketing and products teams called Live There that highlighted how Airbnb can help you, quote, travel like a local versus being a tourist. Brian's route into marketing was non-traditional as he started as a financial analyst, business planning manager, and then moved into an account management role at Digitas and Wrapped before going in-house. And finally, Brian is based currently in San Francisco where he lives with his son and his dog, Brian Irving.

1:58Welcome, my friend, to the show. Hello, Steve. Can you just follow me everywhere I go with this? That was a shocking and humbling moment to hear you read all of that. I have a burgeoning career as like an announcing people at events. I swear. I really, yeah. I mean, wow. Tears in my eye. Right. You're like, who's this great guy? I'm just this little kid from Flint, Michigan. Exactly. That's not me. Well, when I get done with you, you're going to win a Nobel Prize. All right. All right. So I want to start your role. I mean, your stops along the way. My gosh. Just a few brand names, Meta, Apple, Google, Levi's, Airbnb.

2:39Talk to us. Let's start with, you know, I actually want to start with financial analyst. Yeah. Into CMO. And literally, if I had a dime for every time, I would have one dime. Walk us through. Give us as much background. How does one go from financial analyst to CMO? First of all, thank you for having me on. Like, this is a blast. And I love your approach to this because I think that the more real and the more humanity we have in our community, it's only going to get better. So thank you. I love not setting up the pre-rehearsed one-liners. I said this earlier, but I grew up in Flint, Michigan. Like I had no idea what the world was outside of that.

3:17But I just knew that it was more than, you know, and like I'm very proud of that. And I have a lot of my friendships are still there. And I think that just gave me probably the ambition to say yes to a whole bunch of crazy opportunities. I mean, my undergraduate degree was international relations with a focus on sub-Saharan politics. So the fact that I ended up in finance was the biggest weird first jump. And that was luckily to GE. GE had this amazing financial management training program. And it was notorious for, you know, being accelerant for those who were interested in the finance world because you got hands on, you know, you were working in a job, but you were also getting MBA level training on finance and leadership skills from a very early age.

4:04they took a handful, like I think it was capped at three of each class that could come from non-traditional finance backgrounds. And, you know, my class, I happened to be one of them. And I also attribute a lot to serendipity and kind of gumption. So it's like a combination of my willingness to say yes to things. And, you know, just being on the lookout for those random doors along the way that you don't expect to be there and be willing to kind of open them up and check them out. So I do think that that foundation and finance has actually helped me immensely in both my early days of marketing, where I did more, you know, analytically driven CRM, early days of digital implementation, it gave me an incredible foundation there.

4:47And then as I evolved my skills and had more opportunity to expand my horizon and sort of the full spectrum of what marketing could enable, I carried that structured thinking and the ability to talk to whether it was the CFO or the finance head along with me and understand the implication of things that we're doing on the balance sheet, on cash flow, on expenses, and be able to have a foundation of credibility in the conversation with them to be able to then say, well, what if? What if we did this? And so I feel incredibly privileged. I feel incredibly lucky that I've been able to be attached to a lot of these incredible brands along the way.

5:30And I think that the thing that seems the most odd about it, which is the finance base, has been the thing that's probably helped me really get to where I am as well. It's been an incredible circuitous, to say the least, right? Pass. And I'm just curious, having that financial background starting, right? Do you recommend, like, for those listening, either new CMOs or want to be a CMO? Yeah. Would you give them to say, maybe don't go down the exact same path as you, but it's going to help them to at least understand what a CFO goes to kind of thing? 100%. And I mean, I think that this is like, you know, I talk a lot about and luckily the CEO that I get to work with today is rooted in customer obsession.

6:11And we have lots of different customers, you know, especially within the marketing world, our external customers that we, you know, try to serve and support and connect with and being obsessed with what their lives are like. But we also have, you know, internal partners. And in some ways, if you think of them as customers, and being empathetic and understanding is incredibly helpful. So I would 100 % encourage any marketing leader that is up and coming that wants to continue to be a marketing leader of the future to understand and spend time with the CFO, or again, like a finance leader, where you can build that credibility, you can speak that language, because it will pay off immensely.

6:48There are so many tropes of the terrible relationship that CMOs have with CFOs. And I think it's real. And it's a fate that can be controlled largely by leaning in to try to understand more and then learn how to know when to maybe come in and say, it's not fair that you're cutting my budget to going to understanding the craft, understanding the impact that marketing can have on that business. And then knowing like, hey, if we're under cash flow pressure for this quarter, we're under EBITDA pressure, what if I proactively came and said, hey, if we pushed off to, you know, this budget to three months later, it could help with cash flow, it could help with EBITDA.

7:33And I think like, here's the short-term impact we think it would have on our metrics, but we think that the long-term metrics may be, you know, like just going and proactively having that conversation, I think can actually lead to a greater likelihood of retaining the budget in the quarter as opposed to actually having it pushed out. Yeah. Let me take a step beyond the financial metrics for a second. Sure. That's okay. Yeah. Yeah. What are the brand's top priorities for next year? Yeah. For this coming year? I know we're already in February. I know. I can't believe it. Although January, I'm convinced had 72 days in it.

8:04But like, other than that, like, it is. I think it's the dog year thing for every day in January. Yeah, it is so true. I mean, by far, my biggest priority right now is reinvigorating this absolutely incredible brand and is a huge reason why I wanted to come here, which is this rare gift of having a brand that has sort of kind of like faded into the background of people's sort of consciousness. And yet when you recall it, it usually is greeted with a smile as opposed to, oh, wow, man, they tragically did something wrong, you know, or wow, I'm carrying this baggage that I have along with it. So having this brand that actually makes people smile when you have them think about it again, and moving beyond the legacy of the past of the mustache, the pink mustache and the fist bump and the things that made it human back then, and we're novel, what are the things as we move forward, like the future of Lyft.

9:04And so that is by far my number one priority. And, you know, beyond that, it's, you know, translating that into business growth, you know, the last few quarters, under the leadership of the entire executive team, we've demonstrated consistent financial growth and achieving what we said we were going to achieve. So marketing as a driver of not just the brand, but also of the business and lots of great, great traction there already. I'm freaking if I'm wrong. Either you read it or said it, or you used the term, and again, I may be dreaming, but transforming transportation. Yeah. This is part of what the purpose of the company and sort of the at the core DNA it had been of like really like thinking about the transforming like kind of even how cities and we've evolved the purpose beyond that of really being more like, how do we serve and connect with the customers, the communities, the drivers, the riders that we engage with?

10:04And, you know, rideshare is the core of our business. So a lot of it comes through the rideshare. And we also have businesses, we have the business of Lyft Urban Solutions, but down at the consumer level, what that feels like is city bikes in New York, right? And it's another way that we can help to serve and connect people in the real world and getting people using technology to get people not deeper into technology, but deeper into humanity and the world around them. And so this, yeah, that is a big part of the sort of like the core of the brand that we're rebuilding. Yeah. Now, I know Lyft emphasizes you serve both riders and drivers as customers.

10:46Absolutely. And Forrester, I think, had their first CRM report, which is focused on service, if I'm not mistaken. How is Lyft thinking about the modern CRM to balance those conflicting needs sometimes of those two different customers of riders and drivers? Yeah, I mean, it's funny how it can feel like they're conflicting. But in the end, and if you think about it, I mean, Lyft is a truly fascinating business. And just in the time that I've been here, I've learned so much already. but you know as a we are like one brand and if you think about it we are one technology that a rider and driver engages with as an app and yet the reality of what we are is we're hundreds of micro marketplaces operating simultaneously 24 hours a day seven days a week where we are trying to in real time match a driver who has availability who's trying to earn money and we are trying to help them maximize that with a rider who needs to go somewhere in that moment.

11:43And so while you think that they would be at odds, they're really like, they are this, they are one in the same. And so I think that through the lens of what you're putting, like from a CRM perspective, the commonality there is being like hyper focused on like being obsessed about our customers and the multitude of customers that we have and trying to understand it at a macro level and what trends and what things can help drive like safety, like earnings, like reliability, like pricing, and making it incredibly personal and micro because that's how we operate. And so this blend of macro data with like hyper personalized data actually is the same goal, which is serving these customers and making sure that we can enable their match in a way that serves both of them well.

12:37Right. You kind of alluded to a little bit, and so this may be a redundant question, but what specific initiatives, as much as you can share, are you undertaking to improve that all-important communication and transparency with both drivers and riders? I mean, we've already done a lot. And I think we have seen over the last 18 months, especially with the hyper-focus on the humanity of the driver, our driver preference over competition is multiple digits higher. It is significantly higher of driver preference because what felt like historically, I think at best, like a transactional relationship in that it's like, hey, we're going to help you make money and we'll give you the money quickly as we can, is become more of a trusted relationship.

13:22and one where they realize that we are doing things like helping them solve some of the biggest pain points. They pick up a ride and it's taken them way out of their way. And so getting another ride where they make money had been difficult and they were sort of eating that time. We introduce out of your way pay, so we can help you get back and bridge that gap. Things like the ride, they thought for because based on the traffic and everything, it was going to take 10 minutes. Something happened real time, an accident or something. And it became a 15 minute ride. We're going to pay them extra for that ride, even though the rider is not paying more for the ride because of the time that they're there.

14:00So like, there's a lot that we're doing, not just saying, you know, it's not just about communication to try to like, to try to sort of tease the mind to believe something and to have a certain perception. It's, it's acting and then making sure that the communication around that is hyper personalized and relevant to them to kind of get there. Interesting. The DoorDash partnership. Very interesting, right? You're combining rise with delivery. And I'm curious, and I think a lot of people would be like, what are some of the KPIs for success for that? Yeah. I mean, the biggest thing is that, you know, and luckily, you know, Kofi is a great friend and like the CMO of DoorDash and is just a brilliant marketer.

14:37This was also kind of one of those fun ones because you're like, hey, we get to do something together. And, you know, those things are not always true. But essentially, this is peanut butter and chocolate make this beautiful new Reese's Peanut Butter Cup partnership. You know, like the chocolate is delicious. The peanut butter is delicious. But together, you get something new and magical. And it's delicious because we both do what we do exceptionally well. And when we bring it together for our customers, it's value-add. And so this is the thing. Like, obviously, like the partnership, we have incredible shared audiences from our customer base.

15:10And how do we bring shared value by bringing them a partnership that 1 plus 1 equals 3 for our customers? So what are, can you share any like the KPIs? I can't, I'm not going to share like any of the specifics KPIs out of it, but as you can imagine, like our, like connecting our shared food delivery customers with our riders is at the core of it. And like making sure that we drive that connection so that they are getting that overlap and then ultimately getting that benefit. So that's at the core of it. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, and you'll know, they'll tell you. Yeah. I mean, we're seeing it already.

15:46And it's been, I think, truly, truly incredible. So more to come there. And by the way, Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, in case you were curious, is the single greatest candy bar. For the record. I knew that. This was a hyper-personalized reference that I made for you, Steve. My CRM system. It is my kryptonite. If you ever want me to do anything for you, give me some Reese's. And so let's take the step back and get your thoughts on marketing in general, right? Because I know a lot of people, myself included, would love to hear, you know, we can come at it from the crystal ball. What do you see for 25?

16:22And obviously, you know, AI is so pervasive and omnipresent and it's part of our lives now and it's not going anywhere. If you want to talk about AI, we can talk about AI or just trends in general. What does Brian Irving think, you know, for the world of marketing? I mean, wow, such an open question, but let me go for it. And then you can either correct me or steer me. I mean, I think that we have to really pay attention. We have to be vigilant about micro trends and culture right now. So much is changing and that we can't carry forward any of our assumptions around whether you're looking at it through a generational perspective and their interests and their behaviors and what is, you know, quote unquote, true from political perspective, from policy perspective, from operating principle perspective, from technology and enablement perspective.

17:12everything is dynamic right now. And so we have to be really hyper vigilant because at the underlying this, like assuming things is where we always get in trouble, right? And if we assume the past is going to predict the future, we always get in trouble with that. And so I really think that we're we have to be hyper vigilant on trends on culture, and most importantly, on our customers and what they are obsessed about and what what is motivating them right now. So I think that is a massive trend for us in next year. And I think luckily, we are well equipped with a number of tools and partners and out there that can that can help us there.

17:47The other thing really to focus on is, you know, a continuation, this is my theme, connect brand to business and connect marketing to business. Those are not the same thing. And I think we also get tripped up on those two things. And ensuring that, you know, this theme of like the finances, as a core base of all of this is going to be incredibly important. So building our connection with our finance and business partners is another, I think, continuing trend. And then on the theme of AI, I agree. And I really, I love listening to your and Dara's conversation on this, because I think that obviously she's another brilliant marketer, has an incredible perspective on this hands-on of sort of like leading, especially from a generative AI perspective and what they do.

18:30But the one thing I would probably maybe push on is how much 2025 is going to be a year of focus in AI versus it still being a year of, I would say, focus on what we think the outcomes we want to have are, but the number of entrants that they're going to continue to come through, the number of even just deep seek coming and going, all these things that we think we knew about AI, which is it's big, it's expensive. And they're like, nope, it's actually not that. So again, taking it back to that first point. But I do agree, focusing on what outcomes we think are going to be the most impactful this year versus the most headline buzzworthy driving is going to be really important for marketers.

19:12Personally, I think around the worlds of productivity of what we do and how we do it are going to be big areas. And then around predictive, what can we do from a data enablement perspective, especially around to help take some of these. And then I do agree, I really agree with the point of like, sort of like cautiously and very thoughtfully and values driven around generative, especially as it relates to humans. So this is, you know, again, for me, I'm in a human business, although we use technology to enable it. And I'm incredibly cautious and skeptical about recreating humanity through AI. That's a really good, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but parenthetically, what I heard you say is, we all have a responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen.

19:56I absolutely agree. I think that there are rules and rules and regulations will provide, I think, some, but probably very broad guidance. And I think as marketers, we have a responsibility as culture creators, as trend establishers, as impact drivers, that what works is not always what is right. And I think this is one of those areas where we really have a deep responsibility to be honest with and to have the discussion and probably hopefully a very heated discussion because that means that it's an important one around what works and what's right. Yeah, and you mentioned Dara Treseder, the CEO of Autodesk.

20:42She feels the exact same way. We all have a joint, united responsibility. I totally agree. I mean, I really, when I listened to that portion of you guys' conversation, it was, you know, both reinvigorating and again, not surprising coming from her, knowing her as a human being, and we're not all recognized and rewarded for the same things. And so I do think there's like a collective call to arms that we probably need to take here. Without question. Without question. All right. It's time to have some fun. Wait, what? This is where my listeners get to learn about my guests on a personal level. Cool.

21:21I call it the random five. It's just five random questions. All right. It's just fun. But again, it gives a glimpse into your personal side. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Here we go. And these are, by the way, I have this huge repository of like a thousand questions. I randomly pull five for each guest. Okay, cool. Can't wait. If you could time travel to any decade past or future, where would you go and why? Oh, man, this is such a good one. The answer is not going to be comprehensive for all the implications of choosing this. I don't know. Like the Roaring Twenties just felt like people were just having a blast.

21:56And there was so much creation. There was so much culture. There was so much going on there that at first blush, I'm going to go with that. There's no wrong answer. I know. But like there's also I'm like, I'm conscious of like there are other like my my personal acceptance in the 20s would be very low of being a gay man. I'm like, I'm not sure that it would be like. So like there are other implications, but just surface level. That's extenuating for sure, but we'll leave it at that. Yeah. OK, next question. If you could switch lives with anyone for a day, who would it be and why? Honestly, nobody.

22:33Here's why. like if I it becomes a rabbit hole of life so like I am so grateful for the life that I have and really try to make the most of it with everything that you know the good and bad that has come with it that I'm gonna go with no one I love it awesome next if you could teach a class on something outside of your usual field what would it be something around cooking and hospitality I like cooking. It drives me gives me so much peace to do. And cooking for people is a love language for me. Whether they receive it that way or not is different. And yeah, I would that would be something that I would love to do.

23:13So I have to ask, do you have a specialty? My friends and I would say like people who have been close to me in life would say my specialty is kind of like chopped, which is taking what's in the in the refrigerator and making something that you actually want to eat out of it. And for my grandma, I would say, I would have to say Italian cuisine is like a specialty. Understood. Okay. Two more. What's a book, movie or TV show that's had a significant impact on you? I'm going to go way back and say, stand by me. Okay. And why? I think that there was something in it about where I was in life. And again, being in Flint, And loving my friendships, but also I think grappling with the sort of whole, like, I wasn't the same as everyone else, you know, but not totally sure why.

24:00And having that coming of age story where friendship and discovery were sort of blended together and like, it's going to be okay, you know, sort of message really stood out for me. And it's always been one of my favorite movies if people ever ask. Okay. Last question. What's something you've always wanted to try but haven't yet? And what's holding you back? I would say like taking a literal huge leap. And whether that's out of a plane or off a bridge on like bungee or like parasailing. And death is the reason why I haven't. That's the ultimate holding you back. I mean, I'm pretty black and white on some of this stuff.

24:49That's the best answer. What's holding you back? Dying. Okay. Yeah, just fear of death is definitely it. Well, listen, my friend, we're up against it. I knew this was going to fly by. You are an absolute treat. I cannot thank you enough for coming on my show. No, thank you so much, Steve. I really appreciate it. And please keep doing what you're doing, because I think the honesty, transparency, and realness of this conversation is incredibly needed. And I applaud it. Thank you, my friend. Well, that wraps up another episode of the CMO Whisperer Show. I hope you share this episode with your friends.

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