The Effective CMO: Uber's Lucinda Barlow

0:09Hello everyone, Rica Facundo here, Managing Editor of Wark APAC. Welcome to the Wark Podcast. I'm super excited to have Lucinda Barlow, Head of International Marketing at Uber. Under her leadership, the brand has won multiple effectiveness awards for the creatively bold and brave campaigns that move the needle. If you're listening to this podcast, you'll know that WALK is the home of leading effectiveness thinking. And now we're teaching you everything you need to know about the fundamentals of strategy. WALK Strategy Fundamentals is WALK's new digital course for junior or entry-level strategists.

0:47You'll learn from award-winning case studies and hear directly from top strategists and WALK's own experts, giving you the latest industry insights alongside proven practical frameworks. Sharpen up your skills to excel in 2026 with Walk Strategy Fundamentals. Available now at walk.com slash learning.

1:10Welcome Lucinda. Thank you so much Rika. So good to be here. So in my intro I talked about the rallying cry for bold and brave work. That is the North Star. Everyone wants that but I don't think we spent enough talking about the conditions of producing it. And if I think about the conditions that everyone's operating in right now, it's kind of scary, right? It's like, you know, stable budgets, long-term client relationships, organizational trust, those things are kind of under the spotlight and everyone is kind of like in defensive mode. How to be brave in this environment and is brave even the right mindset?

1:47Yes, I think it is. I think we're all working in this era of disruption, this AI-agentic era. It's not the first era of disruption that we've been through, but it's the biggest. And we think we've had the mobile era, we've had the internet era, we've had the cloud era. And each of those has required a level of change, of bravery, of pushing through. This one is another one of those. And it's easy when you face this disruption to get either stifled or distracted. but it is an opportunity I think where careers are made, where leadership is very important. You've got to have a vision for your North Star.

2:30Where are you going? And I think particularly with the context of AI, there is a lot of talk of productivity but actually that is not the goal. The goal is outside extraordinary growth and so I think one thing very important with bravery and leadership is to bring people along to an exciting vision ahead. I mean, for Uber, that is growth. We're a global company. Our mission is to reimagine the way the world moves for the better. And there is also disruption in how that happens. But it's really, you know, how do we get to an environment of incredible growth? That means you've got to be in the business of category creation.

3:15That means you're going to be changing human behavior. That means you're going to be breaking some really difficult challenges like inertia of how people get around and how they get things. And so really focusing your business, your stakeholders on that exciting North Star. And then you can talk about, well, we're going to need future demand and that is going to require creativity. It's going to require brand and all kinds of things that I'm sure we'll get into. So I'm an editor, so I love words and interrogating what it means. And I'm going to pick on this idea of bravery and if that's, again, the right mindset, because I'm based in Singapore.

3:53And I remember we hosted a future of strategy breakfast and had some very opinionated strategists talking about this idea of do we need to be brave, creative risk taking? I'm like, why are you going to go to a client, be like, let's take a creative risk? You're like, oh, no, run away. We're scared. Right. Right. So I'm just going to, you know, provoke a little bit about that. What do you what do you think about that point of view? Is that if a agency comes to you and says, like, yeah, let's take a risk. I'm like, oh, let's not take a risk. Yeah. Do you know, I think it is very contextual. I think there are some businesses where the culture is one of risk and bravery.

4:28And if you say that, people will get it and they will they'll rise to it. There'll be other organizations where they don't. And maybe it's a softer approach. We have an amazing CEO, Dara, and he talks about it in the framework of smart risk-taking. And so he caveats the risk-taking with SPART. So it's not risk at all costs. Let's just do anything because you could interpret it that way. We're going to be brave. That could be considered just plain stupid, right? But smart risk-taking means acknowledging that you're not going to grow without risk-taking. There is no such thing as certainty in this world, particularly when things are moving so quickly.

5:10The smart means you're going to take bets that matter, right? You're going to know what your goal is. You're going to be going for something that is, you know, outsized growth. You're going to be then looking at, what do I get out of this? Is this a one or two-way door decision? If this is a one-way door, okay, you're probably going to need to bring some people along and make sure you've got people behind you. If it's a two-way door, don't worry, you've got an option to go back. And then can you learn something from this? Because a wonderful thing about smart risk-taking is that you actually get a good learning that you can then accelerate your own organization's evolution.

5:48You can apply that to different things. So I would say use with caution. If someone said bravery to me personally, I love it. I'm up for it. But, you know, I think it is probably a good idea is with all words to adapt to your audience and to adapt to the situation. The other thing is there's different situations and times that businesses go through. There can be good times and there's wartime. And it's always much easier, I think, to lead during wartime because you have absolute single-minded focus on the goal. and everyone ignores silos and maybe the ways of them. Then they're like, we have got to focus on that goal.

6:36We're all going to work together. And they go towards that mission and that, you know, that end goal in sight, which might also be a little bit shorter term. In good times, people start to feel a bit more comfortable and perhaps they also start to diverge a bit into their different goals that they're going after. And it may be during those good times when things start to ease off a bit that you're like bravery, smart risk-taking, we have got to, you know, this is the future ahead. So I would say bravery is a wonderful and powerful word when used in the right context. I think I love that smart risk-taking because I think for some people smart is implied in it, but sometimes you need to mention it explicitly because, you know, risk-taking is not being reckless, right?

7:24And it's being very clear on the bets that you're making, like you were saying. But I want to talk about kind of the organizational aspect to that and also actually the personal stake that you have in that. So at WARC, we released a report called the Twin Pace Effectiveness Gap that tried to unpack some of these organizational barriers. And what really struck me was that one of the top barriers was fear of failure, cultural sensitivities and hierarchical decision making. Those were significant barriers. And in a climate where everyone's a bit scared and whatnot, to put your name behind something that you're betting, that's very hard to do.

8:02How do we navigate this? I mean, I know maybe this is not an issue for you, but for those who are listening, who are trying to, you know, get that confidence to put their reputation on the line, like, how do you navigate that? Oh, I think it's a very normal human characteristic to return to safety. I mean, the uncertain is a bit scary. And putting your name behind something in the face of uncertainty is always difficult. But I don't think you succeed without doing it. and well if you do you're very lucky you probably have a lot of tailwinds behind you and you are riding a wave and maybe you're thinking that it's you but it's probably the environment that you are in and so I think true leadership actually comes where you are having to make choices that aren't obvious and that have a certain amount of uncertainty behind them.

9:05And so there's things that you can do to make that easier. And I think bringing people along, explaining the journey, being very clear in yourself and with your stakeholders on the know-ins and unknown-ins, the risks. Here's what we do know. Here's what we're aiming for. Here are many risks. This is a great thing you can use AI for too, by the way. You know, I think it can. Hey, Clyde, like. Yeah, totally. I think it can find all kinds of things, your own blind spots of what you're not seeing. Be very clear on that. Okay. Are we, you know, clear on this decision? Actually, it reminds me, I used to work at YouTube and I had the great honor of seeing the then CEO at the time, who unfortunately has passed, but Susan Wojcicki, how she used to make decisions in the face of massive uncertainty.

9:58And I asked her how she did it. I had a wonderful conversation with her once and it still stuck with me. And I said, God, how do you make these extraordinary decisions? I might be investing hundreds of millions of dollars into something or you're into an acquisition or making a policy decision in an uncertain environment and so forth. And she said, you are not alone. you hire extraordinary people and you ask them the question very clearly what am I missing what am I what are you not telling me and you have a also a diversity of thought of experience around you so that people you don't just hire people who will say yes but who will challenge you you ask for them to challenge you and I used to see her do this and then okay this is what I knows what I don't know.

10:53This is the cost. And you make that calculation, you go for it. And you go all in. And once you make a couple of those big decisions, you feel more comfortable in it. It's also a sort of a muscle. And I thought that was interesting.

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11:51That's a good segue to talk about effectiveness and the importance of evidence and marketing science and helping marketers like yourself, senior leaders, make better decisions so that or maybe informed decisions rather that hopefully lead to better outcomes. How do we marry that kind of more marketing science, which is about the metrics, the numbers with bravery, which is a lot more softer, right? It's your gut. Firstly, just massive thank you to the industry, to WALK, to so many extraordinary researchers who I think have shone a light on and provided extraordinary evidence of the principles of marketing science.

12:36And I think we didn't have that even 15 years ago, you know, and so I think the industry has got to a very strong place. you know it's proved the importance of long-term brand building the importance of mental availability the importance of building future demand the importance of penetration the importance of the outsized impact that penetration has on loyalty and engagement and all of the benefits that come with that and so I leveraged all of that wonderful research shamelessly and it is never one and done I do it multiple times a year I have to internally educate evangelize Although I think that word evangelize is also a little bit of a dirty word because I think marketers can be too much.

13:19They're sort of evangelists at heart. And sometimes we have to just, you know, we've got to tailor to our audience. But that internal understanding of the power of brand-led growth and the power of marketing effectiveness is something I think we have to do quite often. and with new stakeholders or even new times where, okay, they get it once, but maybe you've got to keep reinforcing. And there are real constraints in any organization. You have, you know, budgets are not limitless. You've got to make very hard trade-offs. Are we going to be building future demand or are we going to be fixing this problem or, you know, in a closer geo or whatever it is?

14:02So internal education around marketing effectiveness is very important. And don't assume that anybody outside marketing is reading any of that in their spare time. It's just they're not. And so it is a big role of marketers in any organization to bring their organization along. then I think that what I bring with that to make it very powerful and very real is examples of when this has been extraordinarily successful. And you have to have long-term data there. You've got to show what happens not just in one campaign, but what happens month over month and year over year, the long-term outside extraordinary growth that you can drive when you do this properly, when you build a very strong brand, when you establish a strong competitive moat, when you have, you know, price protection, you have all these things that come with the benefits of brand building.

15:03You're able to flex into new industries or new services, but probably even more powerfully because maybe there's all sorts of other things that can be explained. Oh, well, that environment of that country was actually, you know, the consumers were different or something, you know, There's something that could be considered. But you then look at where it went wrong, where you didn't invest, where you didn't go after driving new category growth. And you see the stark difference between the two. So I think having the good examples and having the bad examples is really important. My next question is about translation.

15:38So I love that you love work. We love work. There is a group of us who are marketing science nerds and everything, but our job is to translate that to everyone else who, you know, it will go over their head. Mental availability, what's that, right? Can you give some tips on how you translate that to other stakeholders in your organization, maybe from the C-suite level, whether it's like your CEO, your CFO, or if there's any other stakeholder that we need to engage, like, I don't know, legal, for example. It's a great point. I am definitely guilty of using a bit too much jargon like salience and mental availability.

16:15I think what is much more effective is actually just bringing it down to earth, like asking, you know, your stakeholder, okay, you know, like think about your latest purchase decision. You know, why did you make that? You know, why did you buy that bag? Or why did you take that airline? You know, what was it? There was, you didn't go do a huge investigation into absolutely every, you know, every, every possibility and every brand you could have chosen. So I think keeping it very real and very simple is really important. I think having very simple examples too of perhaps, oh, you know, all of the top brands have done, show up here, they do this in this way.

16:58You know, there's a reason why brands actually invest in sponsorships. You know, like this is not brand new. There is a reason, I think, just normalising this, probably making it feel safe. or fear of missing out, if you're not doing it, what is the opportunity that you're missing out on? I love that. Tap into the human psychology of it, whether it's safety or is it like FOMO. I want to be like that brand. How do I be like that? Yeah. One other thing, actually, there's the effectiveness piece, which is sort of long-term do we invest in brand or the split between brand and performance, say. Another is actually with how your brand shows up.

17:42And I think that is something that marketers should just own. We are experts in it. We should be very confident in making those decisions. I don't think we need to be bringing our stakeholders along and asking for their... We have to bring them along, but we don't need to ask for their permission, right? That should be our expertise. But you will get questions as a marketer. You'll be, you know, why do you do this crazy, you know, I don't know, kung fu film? Or why don't you just put a promo on the side of a bus? Or why don't you, you know, I think there is a sort of a deep curiosity, borderline skepticism around why is the irrational, the entertaining so used instead of, you know, what is very, in many business people's mindset, they're very rational.

18:32They're used to dealing with numbers. That is the language. and it feels like a total no-brainer to a marketer. But again, this is something I certainly have to defend. But the incredible power of the illogical, the improbable, the deeply entertaining, that is what emotion, humour, relatable storytelling, tension is what actually embeds in people's memories and builds a long-term association with your brand so that in that future moment, three months later, they will think of you. But if you just provide rational proof points or, you know, or promos, for instance, you're not going to stick. And that is something that I have to quite frequently remind people of and show them too with evidence.

19:27I mean, I love that Kung Fu campaign. I'm curious, since you mentioned it, Like when your stakeholders, like, I don't understand that. Like, why? Do you just conveniently like, thanks, okay, thanks, bye, ignore them because, you know, they don't have a say in that? No, I don't. Not at all. Not at all. Because obviously we do need to also ensure it's their P &L. So yeah, how do you manage that conversation then? So we show the results and we're very clear on how we measure. Like we look at long-term brand uplift because that is what is going to actually indicate future demand. we look at also short-term impact.

20:03Did our brand impact actually through a market level test, through causal impact, through our digital channels? We can also see conversion lifts that we've done. We can see brand lifts that we've done. So we show all of the data very clear from creative testing to long-term brand health, to brand uplift in through the campaign, to causal uplift in terms of could be first-time trips or incremental rides trips for us. And then we also look at, are we actually penetrating the category? So we're wanting to move people from hailing a taxi on the street to ordering an Uber. And actually, often it's a taxi.

20:47It is an Uber taxi on the Uber app. and but it's just you get it in a more seamless way and we can then also see the long-term impact in that category penetration so the way that we show the effectiveness is through a lot of data and I think you've got to bring to your own marketing conviction please trust me this is why we are doing this extreme entertainment my god that taxi campaign did well you know it's a incredible creative testing scores across all areas because it had such breakthrough power. It had, and for the listeners, in case you don't know, the Kung Fu, Kung Fu means effort in Cantonese.

21:36And in Hong Kong, there's this habit that people have that they've done their whole lives, which is running around the streets, feeling very busy, trying to hail a taxi, but it's futile. You'd be much better to just stay in the one place, calmly order an Uber, and the taxi comes to you. And so we showed this with a campaign called Skip the Kung Fu, and we're on our second phase of it now. It was a great way to shine a light on this unseen enemy, which is the futility of you just dealing with this crazy situation in your own streets. I love that Kung Fu campaign. And we'll talk about the work in a bit.

22:18But I just want to call out what you said, which is the conviction behind it. Right. So it's like, trust me. I know what I'm doing. And so, OK, fine. Let's, you know, let's give it a try. But then make sure that you have the results to show that so that, you know, they can bet on you again and your budgets get bigger, hopefully. Yeah. And the other thing I would say is that that trust also comes when you show the results when it didn't work. I think it's very important to not just show the good, but actually also to show, do you know what, this aspect of the campaign didn't work. We're optimizing it here.

22:52We tried this. You know, it didn't work. And so be very clear with the good and the bad. Yeah, the transparency, right. And again, especially in an environment of fear, like we talked about earlier, right, where you feel like, oh, you need to kind of hide what you're not doing right. That's actually in itself is kind of a brave thing to do. But actually, if you just explain things clearly and you align and you just keep updating and you work together and everything, you know, that's kind of the way to move forward. Let's talk about the work. And so I'm based in Asia. That's why I love this Kung Fu campaign.

23:25And I'm very big about this idea of localization and cultural relevance and stuff. and I know that you've run like localized campaigns at scale. I think it's 19, is that correct? I've done lots and lots of campaigns on the delivery side. We've got a couple of platforms like Get Almost Anything that we've been rolled out in 10 markets. I've done a lot of local campaigns on the mobility side. I'm going to be talking this week of runs in 19 markets. Lots of local campaigns, which I love. But let's look at that through this efficiency and effectiveness conversation because some would argue 19 campaigns, that is inefficient use of resources.

24:04Isn't it more effective to just have the usual, you know, one big global brand campaign and you adapt here and there? And as we know, at least APAC, diverse market, other pockets of the world like that. How do you manage this tension? Is that even the right way to think about that as a line item on your production sheet? Definitely, it is a very important factor to think about. The 19 campaigns was actually an unusual time about 18 months ago where the mobility business needed outsized growth and was very open to brand building, brand-led growth. and our mobility business has really grown through geo-expansion, through new product features, through category penetration, like bringing taxis onto the platform.

24:55But we didn't have one clear playbook of how to do it, of how to drive growth in, say, under-penetrated areas. or, and it was an unusual time. And because we didn't have one playbook that worked and there was a lot of demand, I started with, I think it was, I don't know, five or six markets and they were all very different. Pretty quickly, everyone wanted to do it. And so we ended up, there was some similarity, but we also ended up with these 19 campaigns. I would not do that again. I would definitely start with, now that we've also got an incredible bank of learnings, I now know, okay, there are two extraordinary ways to go in here for different jobs to be done.

25:42We can localize these two ways and tweak them. And that is what we're doing, particularly in EMEA. APAC markets are very different. You know, if you think about Taiwan, Hong Kong versus market like Australia or market like India, the transportation modes are different. The cultural context is unbelievably different. So ultimately, there is such power in being truly local because you really build a very strong connection. You also have, if you're trying to break inertial habits, you do have to really point out the pain points that people are dealing with in their own cities, and they're quite different.

26:31The physical external pain points of transportation in cities are quite different. You can go down this other route, which is actually what the UK did, which is where you show a human constraint, some kind of characteristic that is holding people back. It could be their own bloody mindedness, their own stoicism. That you can do to great comic effect, and it can be very powerful. And I think if you find that right insight, that can also translate very well across markets. And I'll give you an example. We've just got running at the moment our World Cup campaign, and that is running in 17 markets around the world.

27:08And it is one campaign. It's the first global market that we've done, got global campaign we've done. And it features Gordon Ramsey, who is again, it's quite unusual to find talent who is pretty well known everywhere. You're always going to make compromises when you go global. And within that, we found this wonderful insight. The campaign is called Who Could Cook at a Time Like This? And the insight is, you know, people are there cooking away. And then, but this incredible moment is happening in culture and this tension of the games. And Gordon Ramsay is the perfect talent to play this, comes in and sort of insults these people who are cooking.

27:49What, you're building a sea bass? You know, this moment is happening. And so it shows this behavior. I guess it's not so much an insight, but a human behavior that people recognize. Yeah, why the hell am I doing this? It's very funny. It's translated very well. And that is very efficient. If I'm understanding those two approaches correctly, the ones, at least I'm going to generalize, the APAC one is, felt a lot more problem solution and then maybe adding the emotional meaning on top of it. And then the one from that you just mentioned was kind of there's the emotional aspect there that's what you lead.

28:25And of course, you're solving a need state. Is that kind of a right way to think about it? Yeah, I think it's a good way to think about it. And I'm talking about this today. What I have discovered in driving behavior change is that you need three things, but there are good and bad ways to do these. Behavior change is hard, but it is a core job of marketing. And particularly if you're wanting to drive outsized growth. you've first got to challenge your audience. You've got to jolt them. You've got to say there is something you are doing that is stupid and or could be better. If you only show them benefits, it's like loss aversion.

28:59They don't care. It's not a big enough motivator. You have got to really shine a light on an unseen enemy hiding in plain sight that they have suffered through every day and they are dealing with it. They will recognize. So that I call a jolt and there's good ways and bad ways to do it. So creatively and strategically, you can come at it in different ways, but the jolt is very important. Get attention, show people something you are doing could be better. That gets attention. Maybe you also get them to try something, but it doesn't create long-term behavior change. In order to have a chance at long-term behavior change, you've got to embed in people's memories.

29:40And I think that that requires sort of storytelling. It requires specifically dramatic tension. And it's that tension between the new and the familiar that is super interesting creatively. And it's where humans, like we are wired for that tension. We can feel it. And the tension that doesn't work, the weak tension is anything that is literal and dull, anything that's playing it safe, anything that sort of lacks connection. and so much advertising and certainly so much advertising that is AI generated is all in that category. It is very hard to create that tension just automatically. And it takes craft and art and deep human understanding.

30:29And so talk about risk-taking, you could say playing it safe. Well, that is a big waste of money. The powerful tension is that which is, again, you can have extreme entertainment like Kung Fu. You can have unexpected humor, rug pulls, escalations, surprise. You could have also just beautifully emotional, relatable storytelling. Again, different ways in. And then the third factor that you need is time. You need to have long-term campaigns, consistency in your message, and also to kind of accelerate social norming, you need creators also help build that. They can actually make that time faster just because people start to see others around them or creators who they have an affinity with exercising this behavior, whatever it is.

31:22So those three things, particularly from these 19 markets, we have codified so many learnings from them, but I cannot take those learnings and put them into like an AI engine and say, make this, turn this into a brief, check, check, check, do this. It would be a disaster. It requires human creativity to bring that together in a beautiful way. That's a hard one insight that Claude or whatever your preferred platform can't do for you. Unfortunately, we're at the end of our conversation and we spoke a lot about the importance of taking smart, risk-taking, especially in today's climate of fear and whatnot.

32:01So if we can give our listeners one practical advice to become smarter with how they're making decisions, what would it be? The one thing I would say is bring a creative spirit, which means a curiosity. It means an openness. And it does mean embracing something that might be a bit scary, but smart risk taking in order to achieve great impact and growth. And that's a great place to end. Thank you so much, Lucinda, for your time. Thank you, Rika. All right, that's all we have time for today. Thanks to all of the guests for their time and expertise. Make sure you don't miss an episode by subscribing on your favorite podcasting platform.

32:41And to check out the rest of our content from CanLions, check out Wark.com.