Inside Adidas: Culture of Curiosity - Chris Murphy

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olensky. 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 Chris Murphy, Senior Vice President of Brand Marketing at Adidas North America. For over 20 years, Chris has been shaping the voice of one of the world's most iconic sports brands.

0:37from building Adidas' first global newsroom and forging early partnerships with Facebook and Twitter to leading the U.S. loyalty program from 12 to nearly 50 million members. Chris has been at the forefront of digital transformation in sport. Since stepping into his current role in 2022, he's relaunched Impossible is Nothing, produced the award-winning series Running Wild Black, launched the first NCAA student-athlete affiliate network, and brought the You Got This campaign to life with a high-profile debut on the Las Vegas sphere during Super Bowl weekend. A lifelong believer that sport has the power to change lives, Chris focuses on creating marketing that feels personal while scaling globally.

1:19Whether working with icons like Messi and Mahomes or amplifying grassroots stories. Chris Murphy, my friend, welcome to the show. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Steve. You are very welcome. And I'm ready and amped to go. I'm a lifelong sports fan myself, and I won't ask you to predict the Super Bowl just yet, maybe at some point. And as I hold up my Eagles mug, then only you can see. Of course, of course. It was pure coincidence that I had this mug today, of course. Lovely. I want to start with creating a culture of curiosity, right? How do you design or intentionally, I should say, design spaces where every voice, regardless of role or background, has that feeling of empowerment to contribute ideas?

1:59Yeah, it's a fun conversation, actually. And I think back, I've been here for 20 years and have had some really great mentors, some great leaders, great partners, great colleagues, folks who have helped me and taught me along the way. And I'll never forget one of my former bosses who told the whole group, this is probably 18 years ago, told the whole group, he said, Hey, I have got a lot of great ideas, a lot, but it's not my job to come up with the ideas. It's my job to create an environment that is right for all of you to create those ideas. So we're going to change some things around here and make the environment better for creating more space, time, energy, effort, whatever you might say, to make it more hospitable to ideas coming from the group.

2:39And I always took that away. So that's an awesome way to lead. Right. Because I think I've got lots of ideas and I can go, I can dive straight into tactics. But I think if you can create a culture where the great ideas bubble up from your team, and that team is constantly coming up with those ideas, and you've created the right environment or the right spaces for that, I think you're going to be more successful. And so we talk about culture of curiosity. It's about creating spaces where people have the mind space, the time, the environment, the setup, all the things that allow them to be curious.

3:05And then formulate and come up with great ideas that I can then, as a leader, promote, make sure they get seen, make sure they get resourced against. And it goes without saying, but we're going to say it. There's words and then there's actions. Sure. Right. And as the leader, you have to do both. Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. I think if you were to ask my team, people on my team, and I feel... I will say this. I feel very lucky that... And obviously, you've met Jared, who leads our newsroom. I've been lucky that since I've been in this role, I've had my same front line. So my heads, my VPs, and senior directors have all been the same for a while.

3:41And if you ask them, do we create an environment or a culture that is a culture of curiosity or a culture where great ideas can be born and then get promoted? or I do a good job of funding them? Or do I do a job of promoting them to my boss, our president, or to my global counterpart, who's the head of global marketing? I think they tell you yes. And so I think that if you create a culture where good ideas get support and energy and effort, and then those ideas actually go live, and they create interest from a consumer, that consumer then does something as a result. I think you've done something from just talking about creating that culture to actually promoting and supporting and having the consumer see it, and then rewarding the team who comes up with those ideas.

4:22And there has to be this sense of safety, right? And that I can share my idea, no matter how ridiculous I may think it is, that I won't be laughed at, judged, whatever. Totally. So I think one of my favorite things is when people come to me and say, I've got a great idea. And I always come back and say, that's cool. Let's make sure it's tied to the objectives you have set for either this campaign or product launch. I mean, I think you know this and you've talked to a lot of people. We have a lot of bright, shiny, fun things in the world of marketing, especially right now. And it's really easy to get tactical and be like, oh, I've got this great idea.

4:52This cool thing's happening in AI. This awesome tool is going to allow us to do X, Y, and Z. It's like, well, cool. Is it tied to the objectives you have set for the campaign? If it is, let's get after it. Great. If it's going to help you generate more engagement, if it's going to help you get after the sales for this particular product, or if it's going to help you promote this athlete in a new way, let's absolutely do it. So let's talk about balancing. So how do you balance curiosity with focus so innovation doesn't drift into distraction? Yeah, it's a great question. And so I was not... Earlier in my career, I think I was really terrible at processes.

5:24Just process in general. I was like, process can get in the way of me wanting to be... I want to move fast. I want to be agile. I want to get after the consumer. I want to do really cool stuff. And I felt like process got in the way of that. To the point that I think at one point, to the point I think at one point, when I was leading digital, I think I hired an outside partner to help build processes for the team. Because I was like, this is just not my thing. And I think over time, learned very quickly that as my teams grew and as a number of people who reported to me grew, that if you don't have process and you don't have operational excellence, that the opportunity and ability to be innovative, to have curiosity, to take time to ask questions and to think, that goes away because you're spending too much time.

6:04Like, when's my milestone? What template am I using? Does it have to do a PowerPoint again? Do I have to use it? I need a new computer. It's all those things that if you have a large team, if you don't create some operational foundations and excellence, the other stuff is really, really hard to do because you just don't have time. You're too busy doing all the minutiae and other stuff that just doesn't allow you to think about really cool, fun, interesting ideas. So I think over the years, I've focused a lot more on operational excellence. It's a huge part of what my teams have to do. What that allows them to do is not worry about when things are due.

6:37I don't have to worry about, do you have to create your own template? No, there's a template for everything. There's a lot of stuff that allows them, I don't have to worry about this over here. I can worry about writing great briefs, working with great agencies, coming up with great ideas, getting stuff seen and promoted, talking to great publishing partners. I can spend my time on the stuff that matters most and not worry about all the operational elements. So that's to your point, you have to have that great balance. And if you don't, I think you get really stuck in honestly just not having enough time to come up with great ideas.

7:06Which is the ultimate crime, right? If that's the case. And that balance, that line, to me, is constantly shifting. As a leader, you've got to follow that line. You have to. And honestly, it's hard sometimes. I mean, you think about the industry that Adidas is in, right? We follow a go-to-market calendar with product, right? Really important that we hit these milestones and follow these things. So we have a lot of milestones that we have to hit throughout the course of a season or half year or a year. And that's important, right? And you have to hit those. Some people allow those things to get in their way of their creativity.

7:35They go, Oh man, I can't be creative. I can't get good ideas if you're going to keep me inside of this box. I'm like, Hey, look, the box exists for better or for worse. You can make that box as big or small as you want. It can be suffocating, or it can be somewhat freeing because all of those things, timelines, templates, etc. are provided for you. Meaning you don't have to spend your time on it. So all you got to do is spend your time thinking about how do I come up with great objectives, great briefs, great insights, great data, and the great ideas that flow from that and then help me help you promote that.

8:02Is there one example or two that you can point to where this culture of curiosity and openness led to something really kind of innovative? Oh, gosh, I feel like there's quite a bit. I mean, I think you mentioned the sphere thing for the launch of You Got This a couple of years ago, we came out with it. But that is, when the sphere started to come up and come out, people are looking at it. And I'm sure anyone listening to this podcast was calling them like I was like, do you have a sales team yet? We're ready. Let's start buying some ads. I'm tired of the big... I love there's a big yellow smiley thing I keep seeing on the golf course all the time.

8:33When do we get to start running ads on this bad boy? So I think that during that time period, there was a lot of conversation happening. What I do love is that my team saw that very quickly, reached out to the sphere right away and started having really early dialogue. about that and came back and said, hey, we have an idea for how we want to launch the campaign, which was supposed to be a TV and digital campaign, getting a 30 and 60 spot seen as much as possible and said, hey, we want to take a risk. Because development, if you imagine, the development time period for the sphere is 10 to 12 weeks.

9:03At that time, it was. It's short now, but the time was 10 to 12 weeks. We're launching You Got This Spot with Patrick Mahomes. Super Bowl is in Las Vegas. You don't know that Mahomes and the Chiefs are going to be in the Super Bowl 10 to 12 weeks out. It's a massive risk to put him on the sphere during Super Bowl week if he's not in the Super Bowl. And so we made the decision and made the risk and said, we're going to go for it. Whether he's in there or not, he transcends just being part of a particular team in the NFL. He is the face of the NFL. He's big enough to overcome the fact he's not actually in the Super Bowl.

9:31And the team said, hey, we want to do this. We want to create something new and different. We want to launch this campaign, not by running a multi-million dollar I had during the Super Bowl. Instead, we want to launch on the sphere during that week at the Super Bowl. And I was like, that's a great idea. It's a great idea. Great way to come out and launch. And so I think that's a really good idea where there is this fun, shiny object, but it tied back to a key objective I had to do. And the team was willing to push on me to take a risk around showcasing an athlete and a partner that may or may not be in that sport moment that everyone's paying attention to.

10:00That was pun intended, rolling the dice. Yes, very much so. And luckily, I mean, I'm a huge Patrick Mahomes fan. I'm a giant homer. I kind of have to be a part of his life since the get go. But he had been there before and we believed he was going to get there again. And I think when you ask if I was going to give you an idea who's going to make it a Super Bowl this year, I would I would go with the Chiefs, Chiefs, Chiefs again. Yeah, well, we'll save that to the end. We'll get your your insight. Nice. So you just mentioned a few minutes ago, operational excellence. Clearly, that's very high on your list of priorities, right?

10:37Can you share for my audience who are leaders just like you, some structures or processes that you find essential to keep your teams grounded? But here's that lining and a balancing and allowing creativity to flourish. Yeah. And allowing agility, right? I mean, in marketing, you likely like me, you have a consumer who is very fickle and changes all the dang time and is onto some new platform or new publishing environment or following something or a different trend pretty quickly. So if you're really, really ahead from a planning perspective, that's great. And I think, you know, we have we have teams who spend a lot of time just on calendars and getting ahead of what does our calendar for this particular season look like?

11:16Where are we putting our dollars, energy, effort, etc.? And we do that as early as possible. And then when you're early and you're able to do that, that allows for teams to get in front of things. So I always tell people like, we have to be early for a lot of reasons. One, we are in a very competitive space, right? I'm competing. I'm an upfront media. Times come around. It's super competitive. Like you got to be on top of it to make sure you're getting the best places from a media perspective. If you're not ahead of it, if you're not planning for where you think the right product is going to hit, the right athlete you want to utilize at the right moment, you're going to miss those opportunities.

11:44Then you come back in a scatter market or after upfronts and you're buying crap media at an increase, right? At a higher valuation, which isn't great. So I think we talk about building out our calendars and our plans really, really early, even if it's as best as we possibly can. So that we can be a little more aggressive when it comes to things like media buying or forming partnerships with key publishing partners. We have some great partners in our earned media space. We have some great partners in the bought media space. The earlier we lock in time periods and moments and things like that, the better rates we get, the better placement we get, all those things.

12:16So we do a lot of planning when it comes to calendarization really, really early. Now we allow for agility. I don't put all my money into that. We put a good chunk of it, put a fixed budget in early, and then we sit back and we wait and see what happens. And that allows what we have, which is called flexible spending, which allows us to be more agile and aggressive as we learn, as we get closer to the point of launch or a key sport moment. That cannot be, there's not a mountaintop high enough for me to scream that about develop your plan, but you got to have that flexibility, man. And if the pandemic told us anything, that's among it.

12:49Yeah. Yeah. And actually, that's so funny to think about how much changed during the pandemic and how flexible we had. And we switched from, I mean, everyone here knows this because we all did it. Who's listening. But most of us were probably going like, hey, we're, you know, if you think about 15, 16, 17, 18, we're getting after large scale upper funnel media investments. And then COVID hit and it was like, how much can I fit into the lower funnel of my media plan? And what is my new, what is my new floor when it comes to ROAS? Right. Because we were diving down fast because we had a ton of inventory.

13:19We had very few channels that were open. And I had to drive as many sales as I possibly could. All that upper funnel media work went away for a while. We just dove to the bottom. And I think the ability to switch that very, very quickly with our media agency partner, who was built for upper and mid funnel work, not a lot of lower funnel work. The conversations and partnerships we were having with our friends at Google, our friends, the conversation we were having with Meta and Twitter at the time, changed really, really fast. And the companies were able to adjust their budgets and their conversations with this company quickly were the most successful.

13:52Now, think about two years ago, everyone's doing the opposite. Oh, we got to get back to upper and mid funnel spending. Brand still matters. You got to pull that money back up. So you then have to go back and convince all the people who for the past three years had become rather addicted to that lower funnel media drug that it's like, hey, we still need to do this other stuff. This creates new consumers and even better data to pull off of on the lower funnel. You've got to switch it back. And that wasn't easy either. Because you got used to this great ROAS lower funnel. I can see last click attribution.

14:24Boom. Done. And I think companies are able to ride that wave quickly, dive into the bottom, get after that lower funnel, and then come out of COVID and be like, all right, we got to go back to where we were before. I think those have been the ones that have been most successful. And I think we've been really lucky to have... I have a great global counterpart who runs marketing globally, who also is on that same wave with us, have a great finance partner who understands the important and value of upper funnel brand marketing and a great leader in our president here who also understands the importance and value of upper funnel media and marketing.

14:56So we've been lucky that we've been able to do that. But your point, if you weren't agile during that, if you couldn't convince folks otherwise, you either got stuck up here when everything was... You're trying to sell inventory or you're still right now probably spending too much money on lower funnel media. So you just alluded to something that I think is very, very important. That's relationships. You mentioned your counterpart and your president. And it's a really good dovetail into what I want to ask next about how do you avoid bureaucracy, right? In when you're striving for that operational excellence and discipline and not putting words in your mouth.

15:27But to me, at the forefront has to be relationships. Yeah. I don't mean this. I don't know if you bleep out swearing or not, but I think I tell my team all the time, like, just don't be an asshole. You can say whatever you want on my show. I mean, it's not... I think sometimes in our industry, our industry is super, super competitive. It's hyper competitive. And I love that because I'm a super competitive person. And so I appreciate that. But you don't have to... Just because you're competitive doesn't mean you have to be an asshole. And so I think sometimes in our industry, we have partners and people and otherwise who aren't nice to agencies, who aren't nice to publishing partners, who aren't nice to media partners.

15:59Here's my money. Get it done because I said so. And I think if you can... Again, I think to the conversation earlier, if you're early with your plans and you're open with those plans with a lot of your partners, they want to make time and effort energy for you because you're giving them an idea of what's coming really, really early. And they're building their editorial calendars themselves. They're building their marketing calendars themselves. They're building their yearly plans themselves. If you can be open, nice, honest, give them some insight early, you're going to be better. If you do it in a nice way as well, where you're not a jerk about it, they're likely to give you better placement anyway.

16:30So I do think when it comes to those relationships, I think, again, being really early and being buttoned up, operational excellence helps. They love it when you're on time, on budget, and you're nice about it. You're likely going to get a lot more out of your partners than you would otherwise. I'm laughing because you and I both know it's so, I'll say it, fucking simple. We both know, you know, and I can say it because I talk to brand CMOs all the time. You're the exception. I promise you that. And I think, again, I appreciate you giving me credit for that stuff. And I think it's taken a long time being here to figure that out.

17:08And again, having some really good bosses, some really good mentors who... Marketers, we want to noodle with stuff. I want to mess with stuff all the time. It's our nature. We're creative people. We want to fuck with stuff. But consistency and frequency, consistency and frequency, we hear it all the time. That's what works in marketing. And I want to play with it so badly. if you can avoid that, right, be consistent, be frequent, create some operational excellence underneath that, you're going to be successful. You're going to be successful. But it's really hard to do because you want to mess with stuff.

17:37I want to mess with stuff. And it's hard for me to pull back and be like, hold on. We have objectives. We have a plan. We know what we're trying to do. We got to stick to the plan. Again, allowing for some agility within that. But I think you're right. It's hard to do because by our very nature, marketers want to mess with stuff. Without question. I mean, we overcomplicate everything. Totally. Yeah. We love it. It's great. It's got to be a medical term for this. I'll research that. I'll get back to you. Or we'll coin something together. You and I will coin a term. Because clearly it's rampant and it's been around forever.

18:08All right. I want to go back to something we talked a little bit earlier. We just kind of skirted a little bit about connecting the dots between, hey, this amazing idea, right? To the business case, right? How do you ensure, again, as if you're talking to a room full marketers, because that's what my listeners are. when someone on your team comes to you with this really, and your passion is flowing, right? And then you kind of have to like not put the brakes on, but go love it. But yeah, that's a tough one. Honestly, I mean, you mentioned a word that's so important. I think you mentioned the word passion and I know we, I love passionate people.

18:41We, we are in the business of making people believe. And I mean that in a couple of different ways. I have to make and work to help make my boss, my CFO, my global marketing counterpart believe. They have to believe in the plan that I have to help us win in North America against our competition with the consumer that we care about. My team has to make our consumer believe that we are the brand that they love and the products we make are the ones they want to buy. So we're in a business of belief to a certain extent. You can't do that if you're not passionate. You got to be passionate about this stuff.

19:10You got to be passionate about marketing, about athletes, about sport, about culture, about music, or just generally, you're a passionate person. Maybe you're passionate about hiking. It doesn't matter. But I usually try and find a way. And it's, you know, you try and ask questions in interviews of people, you try and get an idea of what are you passionate about? Because if you're passionate in this job, you're going to be more successful because you're in the business of making people believe both internally, as well as externally from a consumer standpoint. I think then to your point, you take that beyond that and you say, okay, how do I put in place the building blocks for that so that when someone comes in this office and says with a lot of passion, this is a great idea.

19:45I simply go back and say, Hey, does this or does this not match back to the objectives you set? I think you make a great point before too. We live and work in a very subjective space. Feedback is, I don't like that blue. Oh, I don't know if I like the color that that model is wearing. I don't know if I like the hair. I mean, we get into that really world of subjectivity. The more objective you can be in this business, the more successful you're going to be. So I don't want to kill your passion. I don't take it away. But if it's not tied back to the objectives that you've set, then we're not going to do it.

20:14And that makes it very, very simple. And then you obviously have to do, we do a lot of work here around how to properly write and set objectives because objective, it's like one-on-one stuff, but objective strategy tactics, I know it's silly, but if you don't spend time on that and coach your teams on how to write effective briefs, how to set objectives effectively and do a good job of it, it doesn't work. So we talk about objectives all the time. I know that, I know you talked to some folks on my team setting this thing up. Laugh at how often when we go through meetings, I spend on what are the objectives for this particular campaign?

20:44What are the objectives for this launch? We talk about it a lot. Because if you don't set those objectives correctly at the very beginning, and the briefs you write, the tactics that come back in, you can't measure them effectively. If we're in a subjective, subjective world, the way to combat that is to set great objectives. When I was first starting out a billion years ago in marketing, and I'll never forget it. One of the lessons I've always held close was, I think we're saying the same thing, but you're saying objective. It was, what's the end result? What do you want? And work back from that.

21:10Yes. And if what you're doing doesn't ladder back to that, throw it away. Don't worry about it. If you're passionate about it, it's easy for me to say no. And you should be too. You should have no problem pushing it aside because if it's not getting after your end goal or the objectives you set for this particular campaign or launch or whatever, don't do it. Exactly. How do you determine, this is a very open-ended question, but, and you may mean this word by objectives, but KPIs. Sure. Again, you're talking to a room full of marketers. Hey, how do I help my team to find KPIs? Yeah, I think we're also lucky here that we have some great data people as well.