Why Rebrands Actually Fail - James Maddison

0:00The CMO Whisperer:Hey, welcome to The CMO Whisperer 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 today is James Madison, CMO at blockchain.com. And this is one of those stories where the path to the top doesn't exactly follow the neat little roadmap career counselors hand you in school.

0:39The CMO Whisperer:James has worn a lot of hassle on journalism, entrepreneurship, brand building, marketing leadership, and somewhere in there figuring out how to connect storytelling with growth in industries that move fast and rarely come with instruction manual. Now, before blockchain.com, he helped shape growth and marketing at TradingView and played a key role at Resi. Hope I said that right. He'll tell me. As the company expanded its presence in a crowded market. Now, he's leading global marketing at blockchain.com, operating at the intersection of finance, technology, culture, and consumer trusts. And if you've spent any time around crypto, you know that isn't exactly marketing on easy mode by any means.

1:21The CMO Whisperer:James, welcome to the show. Hey, Steve. Thanks for having me. My pleasure, my friend. We had some very intriguing off-air conversations to say the least, and I cannot wait. There's so much to cover. Okay, your path to becoming a CMO wasn't exactly those, you know, textbook. Here's the six steps you take, and then at the end, you got your title, right? Right. We're talking journalism, entrepreneurship, marketing, different industry. When you look back, that brought you here. What do you think those experiences like what experience helped shape you the most? What do you look back on and go, OK, that all made sense now?

1:56Yeah, I mean, I think there was a few moments I look back that kind of guided me towards ultimately where I am now. I originally didn't know anything about marketing. I wasn't interested in marketing. I actually wanted to be a war correspondent. That's what I went to college for. I was like, I'm going to be a war correspondent. I'm going to document all of this sort of goings on in the world and, you know, sort of put truth to power. And then my mom got a bit scared about that and I kind of pivoted into, okay, well, maybe I won't go to war zones, but I still could do adventurous places. And I left college and I had a small gig writing for Rock Climbing Magazine.

2:36and it was like you know it was like 400 a month which is what i was living on it was it was it was so little um but it afforded me this ability to like go and travel and i evolved into essentially wanting to become a professional explorer i thought i could make a living doing adventurous trips to remote parts of the world mainly around central asia and then writing about it making making documentaries, making TV shows, a bit like a Bear Grylls character. And yeah, so I did that. I did that for seven, eight years. And ultimately, as a result of doing that, I founded an adventure print publication or co-founded it.

3:16And then one of those investors was like, hey, we have this great idea where we can use adventurers to essentially market products. And we'll do like big trips up Everest. And then we'll make sure we have all the best tech so they can film it. and we'll make news events and therefore get a ton of coverage. Would you like to be a wingman to these adventurers? Because you kind of know the space. And ultimately that brought me to London here in the UK. And yeah, and then it set me into a marketing journey. That specific gig didn't last that long, but like I kind of fell into more from there and finance and then ultimately where I am.

3:52But those early experiences were very much shaped my style of being a CMO today. Yeah.

3:58The CMO Whisperer:So, and I know this, of course, like you do, journalism teaches you to kind of ask questions and get comfortable being curious, right? How much would you say of the journalist in James still shows up today in your current? Very good question. I think the journalist that still shows up today is very much focused around like, what is the hook? What is the angle? Now, with journalism, you're doing it like, what's like, what is the story? What is the angle that gets someone to read this, which is about the truth? Marketing is like, what is the hook that gets people to buy the products that they're not too far away, in terms of you still need to get that interest.

4:34So you still need to be able to compose the story. And then on a more tactical ground, like being able to copyright and writing from a very early age and then being able to play with language and know those differences and how that can show up in different forms is really, really, I find it a very useful asset in my day-to-day work and I work here at Blockchain because it just means you can craft those words or sentences that add copy so much more tightly than, you know, someone who's not related to the business that you've hired in this.

5:07The CMO Whisperer:free answer for example yeah it's it's i find i do the same thing you know with my journalism background and then marketing and you it's just a different point of view we have right how you look at things especially like a storytelling arc yeah absolutely i think the storytelling arc like understanding the thing that the thing that's going to pull people in but then understanding of the characters and the different factors at play and what someone's objection might be and then countering that objection because you're building i think journalism when it's at its best is making it is presenting the facts in a way that causes a light bulb to go on in the in the you in the reader's mind and that's quite it's it's quite a harmony of different things like a bit of like a quote from somebody a stat here it's that there you're stacking information together to make a an overall piece and marketing is the same way just So you're not maybe stacking quotes.

6:04You're stacking like, okay, this visual with this data point about trust and this data point. And you can go down like a website page, for example. And although the components are different, like you might be looking at UX and not text, you're still doing the same thing, which is you're crafting a whole piece, which is sending a specific message.

6:27The CMO Whisperer:Right, right. I want to get into risk taking with you. And I think you're very uniquely qualified to talk about, especially when you hear war correspond. You are the first one, by the way, in the history of this show and probably the history of all the thousands of interviews I've done. So congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. What would you say is the biggest professional risk you've taken where you're thinking this could be incredible or I might be updating my LinkedIn tonight? The biggest risk I've taken, there's two risks that are pretty much on par with one another. one was rebranding TradingView and the other was doing a big brand update at blockchain here brand revamps and rebrands are so dangerous right like we've seen we've seen all the stuff in the news and companies have got it wrong and then there's consumer backlash and everybody hates on it and then all of a sudden you know you you're pushed out so in terms of like professional risk certainly those two like i i think you have to you have to establish a hell of a lot of trust very quickly with your you know with the with the ceos with the with the leadership team multiple teams actually across the entire org who all have a a view or have some feeling about the brand because they've been working on it right like i've been you know i'm potentially lucky or unlucky i'm not sure but coming in at a point and then one of the first things i do is update the brand is one of the things the textbooks say don't don't do right you should get to know the company and all this sort of stuff and you should it's you're fortunate that you don't have any of the baggage of having created stuff but at the same time you don't have you're working with people who have created that work and have spent years with it and etc so it's a very you have to be very sensitive with understanding what people want and may have not been able to articulate and then being able to translate that into into a design and then if you can do that then people feel a lot more bought in but if you get that process wrong then yay you're out yeah from your from in your current role in a leadership position is that something you talk to your team about like i want you to take risks come to me with ideas like that yeah absolutely i uh with my team i do a lot of like i guess we do way more stakeholder management than any actual like technical skill training or anything like that because I think the best way for a marketer is like I tell my team the marketer is like a concierge or a very expensive hotel you get asked a lot of different requests from a lot of different guests let's say who all want things to a very high standard and they don't want to hear how much of an issue it is and the best way to affect change within an organization is to actually act like one of those top concierge at a hotel like which is that you you do have an idea of what you can and can't do and what the limits are and what's going to be good for your you know your bottom line performance the goal is to answer people in my and what i tell the team is like the goal is to answer people's requests but then do that sort of improv and and then bend it round so that they're helping to to also shape the narrative in the way that's going to be the most effective for the marketing department.

9:37But that is definitely, that requires a level of risk taking. You can't say yes to every single, you know, every bad idea. It would go really wrong. So you know how you have to say yes, but also move it round and position it in ways and take it and roll with it and go, oh, I think you meant this. And that can backfire. But that's the thing that you need to learn. If you learn the stakeholder management as a team, then that's how you can get the most change out of an organization.

10:07The CMO Whisperer:Do you think AI is having an effect more or less on whether people are more or less risk averse? I think AI has a polarizing effect on both ends of the spectrum. On the one end of the spectrum, you have people who don't adopt it and don't trust it and don't default to it. And those individuals run the risk of having lower productivity. Now, there is because in the day to day work, there's many things that don't require a full team member's brainpower. It's just a task that has to be done. And in those situations, AI is very, very useful. It's also very, very useful for upskilling the individuals involved.

10:52Like, OK, I need to learn how to shoot a film camera from the 1980s because that's the best way to get decent film photography, like decent photographic assets. It's the most cost effective to that, to the output. Okay, how do I actually shoot a film camera? And AI is really good because you can just, you can keep on taking photos and working through it. And then all of a sudden you've got people who have upskilled themselves to do very good work. So if you're shunning AI, you miss out on those opportunities. But likewise, if you embrace AI too fully, you kind of go down slop alley, which is like, right, it's made a website.

11:27It's made a webpage for me. That looks pretty cool. doesn't matter that it looks the same as like a hundred other examples on twitter because that's literally the way that it's going which is like this is this is the default design style of clawed design for example that is so you have to have a an ability to know when to pull back and not take suggestions so for for me and and for the team like anything that is like very publicly facing like no AI copywriting for example and if it's very publicly facing no AI design has to be done has to be done manually but the aim is to do all the other bits that are less visible with it but still have to be done do that with AI so that you've got enough time to now invest in the in the hero assets.

12:13The CMO Whisperer:I know like early in your career there's a lot of value in doing everything yourself right and I think we all go through that and then eventually you move at least you did from being the person executing to leading teams and building systems right so how do you recommend or how did you navigate that transition from doing everything yourself to now leading teams and building systems well i think i still do everything myself to be honest in the sense that i am building systems and i have building teams but i still important copywriting i copyright i do the design i do the photographic i do the video editing i do the color grading like like there is a full well Well, like the full realm of production, like is something that I invest in.

12:51If I don't know it, I try and learn it so that I'm capable of doing as many different things as possible. I think and then the goal is you can then from a position of knowledge, you can then educate team members up. And of course, there's always going to be specialisms that you don't know. Like I'm not a performance specialist, for example. So like we have a performance specialist in house who has a greater breadth of knowledge than I do in that area. But the ambition with and what we're doing at blockchain.com is that we're moving, especially in this, you know, fast evolving tech world and where we're getting with LLMs and all of that is that we're moving to a world where we have smaller teams who are more capable across the board.

13:32it's if you can do many things yourself then and you've got support whether that's from an llm or whether that's from some a few team members aided by llms then you can the more that you can do or the more that each individual individual person can do the less you have to have a meeting to say hey can we do this how would i do this okay here's the brief i've written the brief okay now i'm going to internalize the brief okay now i'm going to go with this freelancer or whoever is going to go make the asset now that asset isn't like my vision so we've got to have another meeting about why it's not like my vision and why it's not going to work and then they got to do revisions and you you can get you can cut out like four or five hours of back and forth if you just know the skill set so what we're what i'm trying to get to with the teams is is these people who are genuinely capable of being able to craft great copy uh have a knife design know about like product experience and you and know about distribution channels because if you know how to make all of that if you know how to put words on a page and promote a product in the best light and make sure that those flows are you know there's not something really silly like there's no call to act you know there's no button to click on the next that you know next stage of the process if you can do all that you're very far along the way of being able to move very quickly which is obviously something that we we're very focused on in a crypto tech finance industry it's blockchain we want to be at the forefront of all of this new developments and this is kind of how this is rolling out in the marketing department at the moment so you mentioned the rebrand anybody who's

15:09The CMO Whisperer:been through one can commiserate can relate yeah it is a herculean task what are some things you learned or surprised you about the process i think the thing that surprised me about the process is how willing people can be to take risks, especially if you look at blockchain, the last three brands that I did, Peter Smith has been the co-founder for 13 years. Lane, the other co-CEO, has been involved with the company for eight or nine years. They've been around the company for a very long time and they put the trust in me very early on, within five months, to completely change what they'd held on to for years.

15:52And I think that that's always surprising. Like, I think if you can give good rationale, and this happened very similar in TradingView, it was very early into my tenure at TradingView. If you can give good rationale as to why you think a brand update is necessary, and it's not always necessary, and you can speak about it articulately, and you can show the vision of what it could be and what you sense is there, I think people are quite forgiving if you make errors along the way. They'll put you back on the path. But that was definitely the surprise. I thought it was a one-off at TradingView and then I did it at blockchain.

16:24I was like, okay, right. If you've got the guts to have the vision, people will cam back you so long as you make your case clear.

16:32The CMO Whisperer:I remember early in my career, I was in an ad agency and we were doing a rebrand. It was a small company, but it didn't matter in the sense of when you peel back the onion and you start realizing just how many different things are affected by a rebrand, right? I mean, like an email signature on a pen. like i wanna it's just there's so many different things that i think the general public i guess nor should they need to understand but we as marketers do yeah it's there there is so much and there's always so much i think the thing that i tell the team is that the consumer doesn't really notice like the consumer will notice your main assets they'll notice your like profile picture change they'll notice your home pages change uh they'll notice if your app logo changes a hell of a lot your app logo they people really notice when that goes goes different but they're not going to know or care that much if your about page is not updated at the same time as your as your home page so generally the the philosophy is to be make sure you spend all due care and attention on the assets that are going to be seen and then waterfall out as you can to the to the other areas that haven't been done yet.

17:48Don't try and make everything happen at the same time. If there's, you know, an old logo running at the same time on a somewhat important page or on some merch, like it's not the end of the world. It's okay. And that frees you up a lot more to not have everything perfect.

18:05The CMO Whisperer:Right, exactly. There's a challenge of marketing financial products, right? And it feels different because you're not just selling features or benefits, you're really asking people to trust you with something that's deeply personal, right? Talk to us, how challenging is that balancing act? When you market a financial product, right? It feels different because you're not just selling features or benefits. You're asking people to trust you with something that's deeply personal, right? And there's that balance. How do you manage that balance? I think that marketing financial products is one of the hardest jobs you can do as a marketer because marketing marketing finance is not like marketing consumer goods or or anything which has got its own visual like physical identity anything that's a physical product half the battle is yeah there's a lot of there is a lot of distribution tactics there's a load of really like tricky bits to work out but like you have a great product that you can put in situations whereas something like crypto or more broadly money it's a kind of abstract concept so how do bring that to life in a way that gives you the trust without going to, oh, we're a trusted brand.

19:15And you'll see that so many financial brands, whether they're older banks or whether they're newer fintechs, they default to, you can trust us because trust and freedom for the world is the two things that fintech companies try and promise. And those messages are really important. like financial freedom is is a really and it's our mission as well it's a very important goal and security is a very important facet but you can't just say hey trust me hey we're going to make you more free because that's that's you know let's start saying like i'm funny like you kind of have the proof has to be in the pudding so a lot of what you have to do is find ways to create a feeling of not only like that this is a secure and reputable company but this is a different company This is a company that has something else to say.

20:06Blockchain, what we do is we try and speak to the user wherever they are. So we've run some advertising campaigns recently, run a big advertising campaign in LA. We ran and we've run a large one in the UK and one in Dallas as well. And we've got a few more planned. Each one of those campaigns, a lot was individually customized to the location that it was in. Now, to some extremes, like the copy on the billboards on Santa Monica Pier was different from like on Hollywood Boulevard because the user was in a different, like the viewer was in a different location. So what we're trying to do is say like, hey, we understand you personally.

20:48And as a result of that, this is why you can trust us because we understand you. So that intense level of localization is one example of how you can take something that's quite an abstract concept like cryptocurrency or money and you start to build in distinctive assets that speak to your user group specifically.

21:09The CMO Whisperer:So people we all know have, there's an emotion, there's an emotional quotient here with money, right? We have an emotional relationship with money. It's fear, security, status, whatever the case may be. But talk to, how much does psychology end up influencing, if at all, in your marketing decisions? That's interesting. I think psychology plays a huge part in the overall brand identity that I'm creating, which is that we want to have, we prioritize super fans over like just people being ambiently aware of blockchain.com and trying to speak to a very specific audience. So you have to understand what's important to that audience.

21:46Now, in crypto, it's predominantly male. You know, it's up to 90 % plus in some instances in some countries, male. they're around the ones who have funds are 35 to 55 going on a little bit older you have a very clear demographic of users and who they are and you can make some good logic you can make some logical assumptions about the sort of and you also know they're investing in cryptocurrency so you've got enough data points to know that actually there's there are certain types of messaging such as the the more libertarian freedom messaging associated with crypto and being like the master of your own destiny like that comes across in our in our creative more than other other other routes that we could do because we we believe that that will be most attractive to the the psychological profile of our consumers what we don't do so much is like lots and lots and lots and lots of customer research some people are very very customer research orientated as marketers i would say that i'm not so much i i i see that you can very easily get led into non-cohesive decision making based on the latest round of customer profiles and that's not to say that we don't look at data we do like we look at and see what's working and what's not but we try not to like we try to keep a clear vision of where we want to go and where we believe it's going to be best reflective in the in the customer psychology it makes sense so you you touched on briefly about

23:23The CMO Whisperer:the billboard campaign in the US and the UK. But I want our I want my audience to hear more about that because it's just incredible. And I want to hear about the thinking behind it, how it's doing, how long it's going to run. Tell us, you know, about this campaign. Sure. So we had two main campaigns running at the same, roughly the same time. The LA campaign is just finished and we're just waiting on the results. So we should have some more on shortly. And the UK is going to be running for nine months. We won't know for a little while the efficacy there the la campaign so basically actually let's start the macro the macro view on the on the marketing strategy uh advertising strategy is it's a year of red we are we changed the the red color which is distinctive there's no other major red cryptocurrency brand and there's very few financial brands they're more likely blue etc so we're claiming a distinctive asset for ourselves, one that's quite bold and full of energy and sort of reflects this zeitgeist of more risk-taking today than let's say there was in the past.

24:26So red is the dominant color. And then on each of these billboards, there is a different just copywriting and then the blockchain logo and then a sign-off. So in LA, we have a long-running campaign in America, which is Invest Like an Icon. This is perfect for LA because it's about, you know, everyone wants to be a Hollywood icon. And what we do, what I did was we took like slogans or sayings or things that might be related to LA culture, Hollywood culture, and sort of subvert them slightly to make a point that we're making. So one of the ones that was up on Sunset Boulevard was, you know, you'll never work in this town again.

25:10Like blockchain invests like an icon, which is taking that sort of negative Hollywood producers saying like, you know, you're out of the city. And then saying, well, you're never going to need to work in this town again because crypto is great. Like you've taken control of your financial freedom. That's like the more kind of slightly more hybrid humor, I guess. but then we were like a whole range through to we had a roadblock that we needed to use and it was just before which is basically all the inventory that we had which is some of the biggest in the US we had the opportunity with our media buyer to essentially turn it on for I think it was two or three hours straight and there'll be no other ad shown it would just be this and it was just before Coachella and we're like well what are we going to put on that that is that that is going to be seen because most billboards is it is not seen it's not it's not as like people classify it so it was like we kind of was coming up with all these kind of clever things and i was just like all right we'll just put your mom on on the billboard as big as we can the biggest billboard this is like the size of a city block almost like and it just says your mom and then small invest in crypto i maybe you should too like blockchain.com and i didn't i had to like drop that a few places internally just to see if i was going to get in trouble if i just

26:29The CMO Whisperer:went ahead and did it but yeah no my my my bosses are great uh and they said go for it absolutely go for it uh love and so we so we did it and that was just like those are the things that we try and do as well as the localization so like the santa monica pier like oh the like santa monica in general like there'll be things like the name of a restaurant and we make a pun on the restaurant So you could see the ad in relation to it. When you're only using text and a red background, you can do many, many different things. So like very individual customization is super easy to do. And it's the sort of thing that elevates the campaigns from being passed by to actually being noticed.

27:08And then you get the brand awareness, which is what we're trying to get at the moment. It's very much a brand awareness campaign.

27:14The CMO Whisperer:The copyright in me is just, I'm loving, I'm loving, loving, loving this campaign. mean i'd love that you'll never work in this town again so the double entendre is just so good yeah i thank you it's it's it's kind of it's probably like the british roots coming up and i have to like i i my my boss lane is always like right like yeah you gotta bounce it out mate like you just gotta you just gotta bring it back down because sometimes you know it doesn't work in every place and so it's but yeah it's good when it when it when it works it really works oh it's it's it's marketing 101 it's like know your audience and you're in LA you're in Hollywood so but speaking of that it's a good segue to this this last topic I want to talk to you about and you've you've used this idea of the CMO as the film director right yeah and and I love it because I started picturing marketing as a movie set so unpack that whole idea for us about the CMO as the film director well if you think about your if you think about a film director and you think about films now Now, there's different ways to shoot it, of course, but like the traditional kind of author film director, the ones that we kind of know and the names that we recognize, they have a very specific view for what they want to achieve out of essentially a story that's been packaged up and being sold.

28:29And whether that's like Steven Spielberg or whether that's J.J. Abrams or whoever you want, they will work with every department. They'll work with the producers, which obviously, you know, they have to get people on board if it's their film. They have to get people on board. But you have to get them on board. You have to manage up. You have to manage to your costume designers, your cinematographer, your art director, et cetera. And all of that comes through to this single point, which is the director. And the director, especially when they're at the most powerful, has a say of how everything fits together in a cohesive view to make a cohesive story.

29:07I think that like marketing and the way that I operate is very much like that is that I have a vision of what I want, want the company to look like, act like, behave like that I believe will drive the most effective results for us. And so I try to retain as much visibility across as many areas as possible. And I try to do as much as I can myself, aided by my team, to bring that to life. Because you're making the set, you're making it. If you have one person who's got the idea of what it is and how that brand identity can come out, it all fits together. It doesn't feel like your social posts are completely different from your advertising, which are completely different from your product experience.

29:51like it doesn't feel like that you know with some of our competitors let's say like okay it's a new advertising season so we're going to hire a new agency now that that the brand messaging is completely different from how it was before and the look and feel it's like there isn't a through line whereas investing that power in one or you know one or two you can get away with a select group of empowered individuals you you create a vision and a product over a timeline which is what is most important because you need that longevity for the consumers to see it understand it get it like it and and ultimately keep buying with you so i would assume to play out this

30:33The CMO Whisperer:analogy the the ceo is kind of the head of the studio right yeah well let's see what a cfo i you can play it however you like there are different like different orgs i've worked with ones where the ceo is definitely like the director and you're just like the assistant director like and then And there are other ones which are very much more, yeah, like they're the executive producer who backs your vision and is more standoff, but ultimately wants results. Or they're the head of the studio. And if you're not going to do it, you get fired. All of these are kind of true and not true, depending on who you are.