The great divide: how to overcome marketing silos

0:09Ann Marie Kerwin: Hello and welcome to the Wark podcast. I'm Ann Marie Kerwin, America's editor, and today we are going to explore another aspect of the say-do gap that is laid out in Wark's new report, The Multiplier Playbook. The playbook follows last year's blockbuster report, The Multiplier Effect, which lays out a case for integrating brand and performance efforts. Today is the latest in a series of podcasts where I'm talking with our partners about their areas of expertise and how marketers can achieve the multiplier effect. I'm thrilled to welcome Kate Price and Monica L. Hassan from Profit. Profit partnered with Hassan the Multiplier Playbook, contributing strategic insights and advice, as well as data from a survey of hundreds of marketers from North America to uncover how outperforming companies combine brand building and demand generation.

0:54Ann Marie Kerwin: In this episode, we're going to focus on how to break down silos in marketing teams and departments and how to unite creative and media. But first, a word from our sponsor. 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. You'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.

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1:48Ann Marie Kerwin: Welcome back. Delivering the multiplier effect through an integrated approach to brand and performance advertising isn't just about strategy. It requires the right organizational structure. The reality is that marketing departments are struggling to get aligned. Wark's survey of 200 marketers with the Association of National Advertisers found that 65 % of respondents report having siloed brand and performance budgets and roughly half operate with completely separate standalone teams. Only 8 % of respondents told us they strongly agreed their different teams understood what was needed to be done to deliver integrated advertising and practice, including the systems and processes they should follow.

2:28Ann Marie Kerwin: So how do we fix it? How do we restructure marketing departments to bridge the gap? To answer these questions are prophets Kate Price and Monica El-Hassan. Monica and Kate, welcome to the podcast. Hi, so good to see you. Hi, thanks for having us. Thank you both for being here. So let's start with the structure of modern marketing teams. So according to the survey data we included in the playbook, a majority of marketers are handling branded performance in separate standalone teams, while only 25 % told us they operate with a single integrated team. So why are teams still so structurally divided?

3:05Ann Marie Kerwin: And what is the cost of this separation? Kate, maybe you can talk to us about it from a strategic standpoint. And then Monica, maybe you can tell us how it affects how companies end up using media. I mean, I don't know if this is a strategic perspective, but it's sort of a people perspective. I think that what's really interesting about that divide is it's, as the digital function became more and more sophisticated, I think that there became a moment where the specialization that is required for some of that kind of performance marketing was such that it became separated. And the brand teams were seen to be kind of more traditional marketers.

3:51and the performance teams got to be seen as the more front-end, cutting-edge teams, and you could get data from that immediately. And I honestly think there's sort of a cultural divide between each of them and that each team maybe feels like the other team doesn't necessarily get it and that the performance marketers are seen as maybe more tactical, but they have the data immediately. So I actually think it's a cultural thing. but it's also a specialized skill thing. So I don't know if that's strategic, but at the same time, it's pretty deep felt. Yeah, I would echo that same sentiment from a media standpoint.

4:31You know, as we saw programmatic and social and search platforms mature over the years, they required that really deep, like hands-on keyboard expertise to really maximize the return and the performance of those channels. And so there was a focus on specializing in those areas. And naturally, I think that started over time to silo the brand and demand teams. I think that's where, you know, the different language started. There were, you know, highly algorithmic performance based acronyms, right, that all of the performance teams were really like focused eight hours a day, seven days a week or five days a week, not seven days a week.

5:15Well, I mean, who knows? And eight hours a day. I mean, that's, you know, that's probably not super accurate either. However long people were working, you know, there was a focus on, you know, drive the most cost efficient metric that you can in these digital channels. Right. And so that kind of, I think, took those teams maybe like a little bit away from the overall kind of brand goals a little bit. And so, you know, I think from a media standpoint, that drove a little bit more of maybe a cost management mentality on some teams, right, versus maybe more of growth driving mentality. And so a lot of the work that we do is really helping to kind of rebalance and recalibrate the whole team towards those larger outcomes as a whole.

6:10I think and I think Monica I and I will talk a little bit about more this later but that specialist mindset also has meant a loss of the generalist mindset which is really important to connect the two things together so well I think we'll we'll you know it's one of those things that the generalist has become, the generalist has become less prevalent. And the CMO has to take that entire responsibility, which I think is really hard for the CMO.

6:44Ann Marie Kerwin: Yeah, well, Monica, you touched on this, the idea that these teams actually are immersed in this different language every day, day in and day out. They're like talking about their jobs using different vocabulary, which makes it hard to have, I guess, joint goals or understand where everybody is going. Can you talk a little bit about what happens when teams actually work on having a shared vocabulary across departments and why is that key to delivering growth? Yeah, I think it's really important. So I don't want it to come across like these individual roles of channels aren't important. There is an eye that each traditional channel has to play.

7:34There's a role that each digital channel has to play. And there's a reality of the real-time metrics that everybody needs to drive to, and those might be a little bit more specialized. But I think the most important thing is coming together as a team to talk about what are those bridge metrics that can really bring us together, right? Because ultimately, a marketing function exists to drive growth in the market. And brand and demand work together to do that, right? So there's a number of metrics that can be agreed upon that are influenced by the combination and multiplied by the combination of those two types of efforts.

8:25And so I think it's really taking a step back from the individual, at least from a media standpoint, the individual channel metrics and really saying, OK, what is this overall program? What do we need to accomplish based on the business situation that we're in? Align on the emphasis that you need to place across the different jobs to be done. I like to talk about jobs to be done as a joint team. I think, you know, you hear a lot out there in terms of, oh, the funnel, you know, the funnel is dead or the journey is getting compressed and this and that. And some of those things are, you know, somewhat true.

9:15I think if you put all that aside for one second, like what are the jobs that we need to do with our customers or potential customers, right? We need to drive top of mind awareness. We need to be there in the moments when they're ready to take an action. We need to break through a very crowded, competitive set. Right. There's so kind of I would say make it a little bit less of like a jargony conversation and more of just like a plain spoken. OK, what are we all setting out to do here together can help kind of break down those walls that more of the technical terminology can sometimes build.

9:57Ann Marie Kerwin: OK, so the playbook suggests that integration starts with a unified view of the customer. Yet a minority of teams actually have a shared understanding of where their growth is going to come from. So how do you get brand and performance teams to agree on which consumer behavior changes to prioritize? This one is such a fundamental, central tenet of marketing in general, right, is customer centricity. And I mean, honestly, the fact that customers aren't the complete forefront of what marketers are thinking about sometimes is surprising to me. I'm a little bit nerdy. And one of the things I was doing recently is I was actually looking back at the history of marketing.

10:45I realized that makes me super nerdy. and there's something called the Michigan School of Marketing as the discipline began in like I don't know something like 1905 and essentially the definition of marketing in 1905 was the art and science of understanding and changing customer behavior so that it delivered more demand like Literally, those were the words that they were using in 1905. And it was apparently, and again, I'm just going off on a sidebar here. Apparently, it was because this was the first time that supply was outstripping demand. So organizations had to find a way to make sure that they were delivering demand.

11:32And at that point, it was very much customer desire and customer behavior that sat in the center of that. You know, fast forward, you go to the 1950s and Potton Gamble, same thing. like that as they build customer behavior change. Anyway, that's an aside. So what we found in our studies was that organizations that were able to put together brand and performance marketing, which is everybody was just way more interested in the customer in general. And for me, it's the easiest way to join all of those teams together. It's almost like you can ladder up to like, what is the one thing that you can agree on?

12:17And just exactly as Monica was just saying, like the jobs to be done, well, the jobs to be done are customer centric. You know, what we're trying to do overall is change attitudes and desires of human beings, whether it's a B2B business or a B2C business or a B2C to B business or whatever it, which way around it comes. understanding that you're trying to engineer the uh the the change in customer behavior is what can align all of those teams and some of that is changing the desire and some of that is changing the specific behavior and and you know i have this sort of really simple way of thinking about marketing in general which is there really kind of just three things that you're trying to do as a market or what we're trying to do from a customer behavior perspective.

13:08And that's where either trying to get more customers or we're trying to get our current customers to buy more frequently, or we're trying to get our current customers to pay more money for what we've got. I don't know that's a very simplistic way to think about things, but the brand component of that is that brands sort of owns the pricing power right and that in the in a way that brands make things worth paying more for so if we can really have a strong brand component it helps everybody because it makes sure that our brands are worth paying more for anyway so now I've kind of gone off on my whole thing about customer centricity, but it's like, it's what the marketer owns that no other department can.

14:01So my diatribe, my rant on the customer, but if we can get the brand teams and the performance teams to really align around that customer need and the customer desire and the customer behavior change, that actually enables everyone to come together. It is the common goal, right? And so, yeah, let's align around the customer because I believe that that's the thing that actually pulls everyone together.

14:30Ann Marie Kerwin: Part of what makes everyone align around the customer would be if marketing departments were planning together and setting their plans up at the start as a together unified team. But your research actually found that there's a gap in planning. 74 % of overperforming marketing organizations use integrated planning compared to 47 % of those companies that aren't overperforming. We called them laggards, which maybe they wouldn't like to be called laggards, but that's what they are. They're lagging behind. So, Kate, what does integrated planning look like in practice and how does it benefit organizations?

15:13Yeah, I mean, I think marketing strategy and planning have become even more important the more the channel fragmentation and the new things that marketers can spend money on. So the idea that everybody needs to get together and figure out, you know, where resources are going to go is critical. And I think that, you know, every marketer that I know, and we've seen this in studies as well, is that the need to do more with less just happens over and over and over again. I think there's a gardener study that just says basically like 73 % of marketers actually believe that they need to do more with less at this point.

16:06So the decisions of what to do and what not to do are very important. um so how do you actually go about doing that and i actually think it's it's it's first of all it needs to be prioritized like i remember over the course of the last 10 years or so there's a lot of people who said oh no planning's not important anymore the world is changing so fast that's not actually like we just need to be doing real time and we need to make sure we're making decisions immediately immediately yes and um in a world where we're all laddering up to jobs to be done, Monica, we have to make sure that all of our activities are pointing towards those jobs to be done.

16:48So for me, that means getting people in a room to make those choices. I actually don't think it can be done in silos. Like you can't have like a group in one place pushing towards one set of goals and a group in another place pushing towards another set of goals. So a clear, structured approach to planning that starts with business goals, turns into what are our customer jobs to be done, figures out what the strategies need to be against that. And, you know, if we've made a decision that we're all about acquisition, then what are the strategies that we need to deliver against that? And then we can start moving into what are the activities.

17:33And it may sound a little bit old fashioned, but like some of that kind of core understanding of moving through that process, I think is critical. And then there's the practical components to it. And I actually have seen the best approaches is when people get in the room together. It's very, very tempting in this modern day to try to do everything remotely, to try to do everything asynchronously. But this is the moment where meetings matter, where coming together to talk things through, to roll up your sleeves, to disagree. Like one of the most important things that we can do as teams is to disagree for a moment and debate and figure out the right path forwards.

18:20So when I'm thinking about planning, I usually recommend that there are about three core big touch points that the teams come together to have strong to be. One is that situation assessment, like really understanding what's working, what's not. And in the modern world, the cultural and outside in factors that are driving our planning need to be really thought about hard. I mean, we know just in the last six months, like cost of goods has gone up a lot. The cultural things and the cultural pressures, even in a B2B component, they all need to be thought about. So a moment in time, everyone comes together to think through situation assessment.

19:07What are those core issues? I think then there's another moment that people have to come together to really think through, okay, what are those really important jobs to be done? and as a result what are the big moments that we're going to be delivering against then teams can go off and they can like figure out what are the what are the individual plans that people need to need to have to deliver against those jobs to be done and then coming together at the end to make sure they all connect together in the way that they need to and that the measurement systems all work together so planning super important i'm very passionate about it customer-centered planning it's even organizations that really talk about needing to bring brand and demand to closer together sometimes the reality is like the budgets that they're given are still segmented and i think a lot of that stems from you know the particularly the performance marketing elements of a plan you know there are certain expectations for them to drive a certain amount of revenue or certain CAC or certain cost per lead or whatever have you.

20:19And, you know, that's kind of the thing that the organization says, okay, you know, we have this goal for next year. So we have to put this amount of money to performance marketing because that's what directly attributable performance, that's what we need to do. That's what we need to invest to get the directly attributable performance we're looking for. And then if we have some money left over, like maybe we'll give it to brand. Sometimes that's just the reality of an organization, But what we have found effective and kind of flipping that on its head is having one of these integrated planning sessions that Kate was talking about involving the client side teams, the media agency, as well as the creative teams.

20:59get everyone in the room together and really take a look at the budgets that were maybe dictated or originally assigned and then pressure test them right and bring in outside in information to say are these the right investments still right what do we think that adding brand in this particular market might do to jumpstart the demand right do we not need as much brand in this particular market because we've seen more traction in terms of driving some of our preference or, you know, product of choice goals. So now we can start putting things more downstream. Does nobody know who we are in a certain market?

21:39But the people that know us really love us. So do we just need to like prime the pump, you know, and have those integrated conversations and And make a case, if that's required, to do some reassignment of the budget or at least find opportunities to maybe test your way in to some of those new go-to-market approaches that you think are going to be required to be successful. And I think the creative team, I mean, I'm speaking from a media perspective. So having the creative and media teams together, I think when I think back to how do we get these two teams on the same page, I think talking about the messaging that's going to go to market in all of the different places and what are the message, what are the value propositions that we need to communicate?

22:30I think that really helps, at least for me, crystallize how all of the channels in the ecosystem are going to work together. And it starts to make you see opportunities for brand and demand to connect, right, kind of in that middle to make sure that the whole communication flow makes sense and is also driving acceleration through to, you know, a desired outcome. And so I think a combination of all of that can be really effective. And I would just encourage people to, you know, feel free to pressure test, go out there and pressure test. You know, if you're given a budget and you say, well, this is how my organization works, you know, we've seen it successfully done where either through testing or through just a data backed business case, there can be some adjustments made for the most appropriate full funnel plan.

23:32Ann Marie Kerwin: That makes me think of an example we had in the playbook where we introduced this idea of making your own weather. This was inspired by Laura Jones, CMO of Instacart. And she came into a company that had a very divided, almost only a performance team. She had to cobble together a brand team. So she used their first Super Bowl ad as a tentpole moment to really force her brand and performance teams to row in the same direction. And the alignment was built around this big budget creative and perhaps the most important media moment of the year. What advice would you give to brands that want to achieve this kind of alignment between creative and media, but they maybe don't have the luxury of doing it around a Super Bowl ad?

24:19Yeah, I think every brand can find some kind of moment to rally excitement around with their teams, right? So certainly a Super Bowl ad does that for a team, but I've seen it done at much smaller scale and still have the same, I think, end benefit. So for one of our clients, we activated a U.S. Open sponsorship program. this is a b2b sass organization and we found that tennis was really a passion point for our core buying audience and you know the golf golf was also a passion point but as you probably know it is so saturated i mean i can't believe how many logos they fit on some of those shirts it's it's saturated it i would say leans to a certain we had kind of a c-suite audience that was more of what we called a pace setter so somebody that was a little bit more willing to take calculated risks on new technologies you know didn't really feel tied to legacy systems and so because of that little psychographic tweak that we made to our audience profile we found tennis really popped versus golf.

25:37So then we entered into a sponsorship with the U.S. Open where we had patches on some of the players' uniforms. We had out of home in New York City around Grand Central to get viewers and attendees on their way out to Flushing Meadows. We had a whole digital program, linear TV sponsorship elements. It was a really powerful program. And it was done for kind of lower costs, right? We kind of, it was more of a guerrilla sponsorship package that we put together. And it got everyone excited on the marketing team. But beyond that, it gave everybody kind of a unified focus on, okay, we have this sponsorship.

26:28How do we take our core messaging and kind of apply it to this particular situation? How do we have the sponsorship become bigger than just the core elements? How do we have it live on? How do we have it kind of live in all the big and small places in the marketing plan? And so there were a lot of organic social elements that were created around it. There was a lot of sales enablement and hospitality that was created around it. And so we saw incredible results from the program, not only from a brand affinity standpoint, but also in terms of downstream impact on organic searches, site traffic. We saw MQLs during this time period in the New York Metro decrease.

27:26MQL volume increased, cost per MQL volume decreased. So we were able to then also kind of show more of the performance marketing teams, like the power of brand, right? Because we all saw the correlations and the indirect impact, if you will, on those activities. And so it was, again, a tentpole moment. that creatively was inspiring to for everyone to think about how to integrate it into what they were doing. And then it also just really proved the brand and demand multiplier effect, those types of moments for any client, again, big or small, I mean, you could that you could even do something at a local event that you have a booth at right and do a little bit of an amplification around it, and really generate some excitement and, you know, come up with a creative strategy that again lives in all like the big and small places um and so i i i wholeheartedly agree with um the woman from instacart on creating your weather and and in making these pivotal incorporating these pivotal moments into your marketing plan as as reasons to really rally everyone around what you ultimately hope um catches on for more for more long-term integration I think it is a tremendous way to rally everybody internally, as well as make more out of the money you have from a consumer or customer perspective.

29:05Funny, one of my first brand assignments, I grew up on that in CPG on the client side, and I worked in cold and flu. So what's great about cold and flu is that there is actually a weather effect. And we used to actually track, you know, we had a few years ago, we had our own algorithm about we tracked all the data and to see when the cold and flu was going to go up. But the idea that you can pull all of your or a big chunk of your resources into a single moment was very powerful because it kind of pulls the whole organization together. but also forces you sometimes to look outside in in a way that is important.

29:54And I've worked across a number of different categories across the years that you can always find some kind of outside in. You know, people have their Cinco de Mayo executions. They have their July 4th executions. They're not just those holidays. and in B2B also, you know, we know that open enrollment in healthcare can be really important. So I totally agree with Monica. Like the Super Bowl moment is, yeah, it's like a big one, but I think almost any kind of company can find their moment to make sure that there is internal alignment around something, but also something that is relevant to customers and consumers.

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31:23Ann Marie Kerwin: One of the things that came out of that Instacart example was Laura Jones told us that it really gave her a moment to show the board that there were other metrics that they could look at that proved the effect that they were having. So I want to talk about just the importance of having shared KPIs and understanding the goals that teams are going for by the metrics that you're using. We know performance teams often get the credit for financial impact because that's the last sort of mile of getting the money in. And brand teams often struggle to prove commercial value. So can you talk to me about like how important it is to set up shared KPIs and what does that do for an organization?

32:11You're absolutely right in that whenever there's a conversation around driving commercial outcomes through marketing, it tends to be pretty narrowly focused on performance marketing. What we have found success in, or I guess a measurement approach that we have seen and we recommend to our clients to make sure that we are allowing for the full realization of the brand and demand multiplier, is really to set, I think, shared metrics are very important. I think ultimately, though, they all need to, you have to show how they're ultimately going to contribute to the commercial outcome or the growth that you're looking to drive, right?

32:56That's the core reason marketing exists, right? That Kate talked about is changing a customer behavior to drive your business. And so it takes some patience, right? To allow brand investments to have the effect on your business that we know that they have longer term. And every industry is different, right? So every sales cycle needs to be evaluated and this needs to be customized for every type of business. But I think it's, you know, talking about, you know, you can only sell to people that are aware of you, right? So we found effectiveness a lot of times in saying, okay, you have your total adjustable market.

33:43of however many people. If, you know, take an awareness number from a recent brand health tracker and say, okay, if we only have 10 % awareness, right, we're missing out on 90 % of the market and quantify that in, you know, in dollars and say, listen, you know, this is an opportunity that we're just not even, we're not even playing in this whole world because of our awareness level. So that's been successful a lot of times, A, in selling a brand investment. But then you also have to show, okay, once we move the awareness needle, then what, right? So it's almost cascading over time horizons, expected time horizons, when you can start to see the downstream impacts.

34:30So we will plot out with clients how the different investments in the different channels, how we believe they will drive commercial outcomes over time and when the appropriate milestones are to check in on that. So near term, we can look at more of those brand health metrics, right? We can look at share of search. We can look at, you know, LLM share a voice. But ultimately, we are going to need to show that brand drives commercial outcomes. And so then you talk about, okay, when's a realistic time horizon for us to start seeing the impact of brand based on the sales cycle? Okay. What's the measurement system that we need to set up to be able to show the lift of brand, right?

35:22And so then you start talking about, okay, how do we set up a holdout group, right? Exposed versus unexposed. Do we set up a test market, right? Work with the teams to understand the right approach and then say, okay, what is really going to convince my leadership internally from a business standpoint? Is it opportunity pipeline? Is it customer acquisition costs? Is it average lifetime value? And then start to track that over time. And you might not see it the first month. You might not see it the first quarter. But over time, we have time and time again in the research, you know, in the multiplier effect report and playbook show that, you know, the impact of brand and demand running concurrently compounds over time.

36:18You just need to give it time, which is easier said than done. But I think the education and bringing stakeholders along so that they don't get nervous or freak out when they're not seeing those commercial returns as quickly as they might be used to seeing with performance marketing is like half the battle. I do think it's a little bit about confidence and I write in that a really great marketer has the confidence to help their stakeholders up, down, across on what good looks like and when. And I actually think the other piece, and it was sort of unsaid in what you were saying there, Monica, but like setting them ahead of time.

37:06It is of no use to start a campaign and then start to think about how you're going to measure it. Making sure that like we all walk into any campaign or any advertising, know exactly what good looks like before we begin. And having aligned that with all the key stakeholders. And then it requires confidence to be able to make sure that people are clear that we are going towards those goals, even if the immediate short term isn't seeing what you might want. So anyway, I think confidence and planning ahead is, again, goes back to plans, is an important part of that. Can you tell we're planners?

37:50Ann Marie Kerwin: Yeah, exactly. How many times have we said the word plan in this conversation? Well, if you're at a marketing department that does have siloed teams and you're looking to change the way you operate so that you can have a more integrated approach. In the playbook, we lay out a couple different organizational models. Like we talk about product led teams or integrated beauty brand structures. So we know there isn't one size fits all. But are there guiding principles that a CMO should be thinking about when they are looking to tackle organizational design, how to make their teams work better together?

38:34I mean, I'm going to keep this really, really simple. And some of it is it cannot just be the CMO who is responsible for pulling the pieces together. I mean, imagine how hard that is, you know, as a CMO to be entirely you're the one that has to pull everyone together. So we need to have those really deep skills in performance marketing, in understanding what it means to build a highly creative brand communication. But we also need to have the generalists who are pulling it all together. So for me, whatever the structure of your team, making sure that the CMO has the support of multiple people who are able to help kind of pull the whole teams together, I think is the most important component of it.

39:30So that they're not alone in doing that. And having to deal with, you know, the different silos of it. So having people who are more generalists who are able to pull things together and then making sure you have those kind of rhythms as an organization when people are going to come together. And then, you know, organizing your teams underneath that.

39:54Ann Marie Kerwin: Well, we are nearly out of time. So I just want to throw one last question to both of you. If you, for the CMOs who are listening or the senior leading marketing teams listening, what would you do tomorrow morning if you wanted to start building an integrated team? What is a step that somebody could take to start on a journey of bringing their teams together? I think for me, it's maybe do like a synergy audit, right? Just to do an assessment of your team and think back on, you know, the past year. And I would literally take a whiteboard and just plot out, you know, when were the big planning milestones?

40:45When were the big reporting milestones? Pull up those materials. See how integrated everything looked or if it was super siloed. and start thinking about how to plan out the next year in a more integrated fashion. So we talked about it a lot earlier, but I think a huge unlock is just an in-person planning session, everybody together, internal marketing team, and any agency partners that you have for the campaign. and just kind of release everything you know to be true about the plan to date and take a step back and really have that north star like determine that north star that everybody needs to be marching toward and do more of like a tops down planning session then I think a lot that I've seen tends to be bottoms up and they both have value right you have to kind of meet in the middle.

41:47There's a moment to bring that in in those conversations because you don't want to complete throw away all of your historicals and everything you have worked to build. But just for a moment, just kind of clean slate it and have all the voices at the table to think about how to structure the next year. And if it's not an annual planning cycle, maybe it's the next reporting cycle right like where are the ways you can start to bring in those shared metrics if those don't exist and challenge the team to i don't know create a come up with a few stories around how you know the brand part of the marketing plan is affecting the demand part of the plan and just start those rituals and just start that thinking on you know the every day until you get to the next planning milestone.

42:42Oh, Monica, I love that thought about putting everything up on a whiteboard. It's so illuminating, right? Sometimes everyone puts all their pieces up on the wall, and then you're like, ooh, yeah, I see how that is all disconnected. I've seen so many teams have that visceral moment where they're like, ooh, so much what we're talking about now. Yeah. And it sort of does have to be like a visual thing. um my one thing is customer customer customer customer like it's all around like what is it you're trying to do with your customer quantifying that how many people how many customers do I need to be changing the behavior of and that and what's going to make them change their minds um and that's it honestly so we'll do those two things together Monica right we'll we'll have what's the customer what behavior needs to change and then we'll put it all up on a wall and we'll be like oh my god are all these things together actually doing that right um yeah and move the

43:38Ann Marie Kerwin: pieces around yeah exactly so it seems like both of you are like do better planning is what i'm taking away from this do better planning and think tops down i think those are kind of the two the two things right yeah and you know take off your marketing hat and put on the customer hat like Kate kept saying, right? And like, if you are go, if you are interacting with your brand, you know, is a positive experience? Is it one that makes you is a driving urgency, right? Is a driving brand affinity? If not, how can we better orchestrate or build the marketing ecosystem to do that, right? I think we get so just caught in our own worlds that sometimes we just have to remember that we're not the customer, but we need to be thinking about how they're, interacting with us and how they're viewing us every day.

44:33Ann Marie Kerwin: Well, that's great advice. Thank you both. And thank you both for joining me today. I really appreciate having your insights in the multiplier playbook and joining us for the podcast. So you can find more of Profit's insights in the new multiplier playbook on work.com. Be sure to subscribe to the work podcast so you don't miss any episodes and thanks for listening.