Forbes guide to being an influential CMO - Seth Matlins

0:28Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Uncensored CMO. Find out from him what makes a great CMO. And he has got the answers. This is a great episode. I really enjoyed this. Here it is. Welcome to the Uncensored CMO, Seth Matlin. It's great to have you. Thank you. It's so good to be here. Long time listener, first time caller. Well, and congratulations on the new podcast, of course, that's just gone live. How's it all going? It's going really well. I mean, what do we have? Like nine episodes as of this recording and the feedback's been phenomenal. But that's all about the guests. They've dropped real gems.

0:58I love the positioning as well. Why make it about CEOs? I think that's such an interesting position to take. The fact of the matter is, and there's McKinsey data that shows this, that 90 % of the CEOs of the world's largest companies, which is say even more CFOs of the world's largest companies, they have no marketing background or experience whatsoever. Yet oftentimes they think they do simply because they've been marketed to as if I could dance because I've watched Beyonce. And because they don't have this experience and yet are the ones who provide the resources, whether that's human time or capital to CMOs in pursuit of their mission, which is to drive growth, sustainable, profitable growth.

1:41They're really suboptimal stewards of those resources. They don't know what to expect, what not to end on what timeline. And as a consequence, not only does the CMO's job get harder, which is really saying something because I believe it to be the hardest job in the C-suite, but growth is diminished company by company. And then when you add up company by company, when you aggregate it at scale, global GDP is mitigated. And it's worth remembering that two-thirds of global GDP is based on consumer spending. So we're just kind of punching business and capitalism's evolution in the face. Yeah. Of course, unless you're Martin Sorrell, when you go, the CMO has got the easiest job it's ever been.

2:21It's so funny you bring that up. Somebody just sent me that Martin had, Sir Martin had said that at CES. I was like, oh, that's probably just a provocation. What's he mean? So I looked into it and I should give him the chance to defend himself. But what I saw was he was saying, well, it's such an easy job because now there's only four media companies you have to buy from. As if that was the extent of the CMO's job. I honestly, I don't think. I mean, if that's 5 % of a CMO's job, that would be kind of generous, right? It's a fraction. I mean, it's a small fraction. Would that it were as easy as he suggests, but I don't think he was well represented with that quote.

2:58One question I wanted to ask you, why do you think there are not more CMOs making that jump to CEOs? Because I had Chris Burgrave on the podcast last year. He has some wild data about this, looking at when boards appoint CEOs, what skill sets they're looking for. Yeah. Number one financial acumen, the last position, the literally the bottom position was marketing. And I just thought that's a bit insane, really, because as marketers, you know, we are the voice, the customer in the organization. We're looking forward long and short. You know, we're the ones looking forward. You'd think that CMOs would make an actual CEOs, but there's something broken that doesn't quite work there, isn't there?

3:35Well, I think, I mean, look, I think you've nailed it. It is broken. And I think there are many answers or many elements of the answer to your question. Amongst them is that a lot of CMOs don't have financial acumen. Amongst them is too many CMOs don't in fact understand, or at least don't act as if they understand that their job is in fact to drive sustainable, profitable growth. And that is measured financially, right? We can discuss stakeholder and shareholder value, but it is ultimately a financial metric. It's pretty easy on the bottom line. Not easy to do it, but easy to see what's happening.

4:12But then it goes back to the reason we created the CEO's Guide to Marketing, which is because they don't understand marketing, and again, oftentimes think they do, they undervalue it. And because they undervalue it, they don't consider it important. But I subscribe to the Peter Drucker quote, which, you know, the legend of management and marketing, which is that the enterprise has two core functions, innovation and marketing. And that we've drifted so far from that, which I think, you know, you referenced it very quickly, the long and the short of it. Marketing's greatest value is not what it delivers today.

4:53It's what it delivers today and over time. But today's CEOs and CFOs, let's have some empathy for them, are forced by the public markets and the capital markets to look at today, tomorrow and this quarter. They're not, by and large, thinking long term, which, by the way, I had a bunch of conversations with CMOs recently who come from private and or family owned companies who are planning for generations. When you look at the businesses that are thinking about what they're doing for generations, which obviously isn't biased towards the longer term, they tend to be doing really well. Yeah. You're so right, actually.

5:30Think like a family-owned business and you think generations is entirely right. It's ironic, isn't it, that marketing have done such a bad job of marketing marketing in a way, isn't it? You know, we need to look at ourselves and go, how do we market the benefit of marketing more effectively? I couldn't agree with you more. I actually gave a talk about this at our CMO Summit in Miami in 2023 that was titled Marketing Needs Much Better Marketing. And what I said to our audience of some of the world's most important, influential, and successful CMOs at the time was we as an industry, you know, sorry, I want to actually correct myself.

6:04We are not an industry. We are a practice within the industry that is business, right? And I think even thinking about marketing as an industry is wrong. And I do it all the time, to be clear. But we're not marketing particularly brilliantly inside. If we start from the premise that most of the C-suite does not have that marketing experience, it's not their fault that they don't know what to expect. And as I tell my kids who are just learning how to adult, one of the most important things to do is manage expectations. And if you are not marketing internally, the odds of your success are much less than.

6:43Yeah. Chris, actually, another stat that absolutely nailed it. And I think I'm right in quoting it. I need to check, maybe check afterwards. But about 6 % of people in board roles have any marketing experience. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Which when you think about, you know, you are marketing to 94 % of the audience you're marketing to have no idea of marketing for the value it creates. It puts it into stark contrast, doesn't it? And what you see there, it's such a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle, right? Which is they don't understand it, think they do. They don't value it because they don't understand it.

7:21And oftentimes they think that they're the target when they're not, right? And a little bit more humility, a little bit more understanding and embrace of what they do not know would serve many a company well. Yeah. Now I'd love to get into talking about like the world's most influential CMOs and an amazing list you pulled together and you've done the same for the world's most entrepreneurial CMOs. Maybe before we get that, I just wanted to chat to you about how you got to where you are today. And I want to pick out, if I may, three little quotes I saw in your bio that just piqued my interest for different reasons.

7:55But the first one was, you mentioned that you've only ever held positions that didn't exist prior to your world. Yeah, I've never had a job that existed before I had it. That is quite a track record. Have you created the roles? Well, I certainly haven't created the roles each time, though each time I either filled a role that was new or had a role created for me. I have created the role a couple of times. It certainly wasn't by design. You know, it's only linear in retrospect. It wasn't kind of a plan, but it is a through line through my career. And yeah, I was the first at a lot of places. It takes a certain, I think it takes a certain bravery to do that.

8:33I know I, being inspired by that, I went back, look at my career and thought, how many roles have I done that genuinely were new? And that ended up being three. First one was, I was at BritVic, which is the bottler for Pepsi in the UK. Oh yeah. And I created a, well, we call it a seed brand team. It's basically managing all the new brands in a separate business unit. And no one had done that before. And it was quite scary because there was no expectation of like what success looked like, what made me successful were different to what made other people successful. There's no kind of rule book for how to do it.

9:04And, you know, it's quite a scary position. The second one, I did a private equity-backed juice takeover. I was the first marketer ever in the company. And I remember everyone was like going, what's this guy, what are you going to do? It's just like, what are you going to be like? And it's funny, my first job was design the company logo and design the new uniforms for the factory staff. You know, in their head, marketing was kind of like equivalent to printing stuff. That's what they thought, you know. So I had to go on a massive journey to go, let me explain what we're here to do and, you know, that kind of thing.

9:37And the third one, ironically, is my current role at System One, which, you know, the idea of having a CMO in a research business selling creative testing is quite an unusual thing. And again, the same journey of it, you have to kind of, you have to create a vision for what you're here to do. It's a very different sort of feeling, isn't it? It absolutely is. And look, I've been unbelievably fortunate in my career. I, too, have a beverage background. My first job, I was third person in the marketing department for Evian in the United States. Because I was the third person in the marketing department, I was therefore the first to become the special events coordinator.

10:13A very, very glamorous job. My job was to place Evian coolers and banners at tennis tournaments. And I remember the first week of my career, I'm there and I'm sitting in my little cubicle and the CEO of Avion comes by and he says to me, hey, what did you do to move the business forward today? And I was like, fuck, I have no idea. And I thought about it and I was like, I don't know, but I don't think I caused it to fall backwards. But I bring that story up, and it's a bit of a digression from your question, so apologies. But I bring that up because it ties to what we were talking about a moment ago, which is in that moment, the CEO of the company, who was a marketer, by the way, taught me one week into my career that even the guy placing coolers and banners at tennis tournaments is responsible for moving the business forward that day.

11:06And it's a lesson that I've never, ever lost. But I think, you know, I joined a number of agencies that hadn't had practice areas in what I was practiced at. So I started, I don't know, I think I've started six or seven practice areas inside two of Hollywood's biggest agencies as it related to marketing. Yes, just happenstance. But it is interesting and it taught me an incredibly valuable lesson, which is the difference between being an entrepreneur and being entrepreneurial. and it is a massive massive difference and i am much more the latter than the former i well that's really interesting because actually my that really jumps to my second point which i picked up which is you talk about the scars of lessons learned as a failed entrepreneur so unpack that a little bit more because i like the distinction you've just drawn there well yes so when i left as cmo of live nation.

12:01I had an idea. I had several ideas. And I wanted to see if I could turn them into businesses. I had not yet learned the difference between being entrepreneurial and an entrepreneur. I was just a god awful entrepreneur. First of all, I was the worst client I've ever had. And, you know, a career spent client side agency. I've had hundreds of clients. I was the singular worst. It was as if I had forgotten everything I had learned. I thought my ideas were so wonderful that I wanted to own them entirely. So I sought no outside capital. Not only did I not seek outside capital, but what comes with the right venture capital is advice.

12:40And I was doing it. I mean, honestly, like I could, I could list a thousand things I did wrong. It was very expensive in terms of time and capital, but it led me to here. So, you know, all good things. All good things. Yeah. It's funny. A lot of people worry, don't they, in that, that phase, I'm having to give equity away in my business, sometimes quite a lot of equity and people worry about that. But some of the VCs I've worked with have been incredible. The talent they bring in, the resources, they know exactly what's going to happen next. And what is almost like a model to scaling and then selling a business.

13:12And you just get on this rocket ship with them. And then better to have, you know, 20 percent of something worth a lot than 100 percent of something that doesn't exist. I had 100 percent of something that does not exist. Yeah. Tough lessons. Yes. Yes. The third one that piqued my interest, actually, which are lovely. And I hadn't seen this, you know, kind of articulated in the same way before. But you talk about the ability to make unexpected connections between fields. And I think partly why I love doing the job I do now. And I know we do similar sort of roles, really. But we meet lots of people and we go to lots of events and we connect lots of people.

13:46If you start to see things differently because you can go, oh, there's something over there that solves that problem. If you apply that solution to over there, it's quite magical, isn't it? I can almost remember the moment that I kind of became aware of it. And I mentioned that my first job was client-side at Avion. My second job was agency-side. And I started a consulting practice inside a huge sports marketing and management company that no longer exists. It was called ProServe at the time. And our first two clients were a deodorant company and a company called Apple. And this is like mid-late 90s, so it's a long time ago.

14:24Apple then was not the Apple of today. And I remember flying home from the meeting with Apple, and the remits couldn't have been more different. I turned to the guy who I was with, who was my boss at the time, and I was like, it's unbelievable what this deodorant and this computer have in common in terms of both their objectives and their challenges. And being on the agency side, and I think it's the great privilege of being on the agency side, is you get to see so many different businesses and brands in so many different circumstances that not only do you get the diversity, right? But you also recognize the commonalities and that ultimately we're solving for fundamentally the same problems over and over again, regardless of category, regardless of maturity, regardless of stage.

15:14The size of the problem may vary, does vary, but being able to connect those dots, being able to extrapolate from opportunity or experience A and apply it to solving a problem for category B is really something I've learned how to do. And I think that's where creative agencies can be absolute masters, aren't they? Because they can bring that perspective. Actually, a little bit of a tangent, but I recently met the inventor of Bailey's Irish cream, which is 50 years old and i met the actual guy that invented it and it's inspired because they wanted to create um they wanted to export an irish liqueur and create something new and the inspiration was from butter so at the time the brand called kerrygold which is kind of a classic irish butter and it is you know it's all green and natural and and so on and if you look at the design of kerrygold and the design of bailey's you go aha i see exactly where that came from but He'd just done the redesign and won.

16:12He took all the kind of the cues and authenticity of Ireland and the dairy expertise and said, well, what if a dairy company made a liqueur? And then this time there was no such thing as like a milk liqueur, you know, kind of thing. So he took the whiskey, but mixed it up with the dairy category. And then out came Bailey's. And then, you know, the rest is history. The Spirit's history. Look, I think it's, you know, Avion, at least domestically, right? You know, the European consumption of bottled water is much different than the American. Avion created the portable bottled water category, right?

16:52They took something that had only been sold in jugs and they put it in a different package and priced it at a super premium price and off it went for a while. It's not unlike what Liquid Death has done 30 years later. same you know there's a great winston churchill line about you know old wine new bottles that's all liquid death did that's all avion did that's all a lot of categories do or brands within categories do um and it actually speaks to the power of brand when you do it right or the import and power of brand when you do it right in fact i got very lucky really early in my career my very very first branded project was to launch a kids drink in the uk called fruit shoots and the insight was just that what it basically at the time the only drink kids could get were in these cartons with little straws that you put in and they'd spill every as soon as you squeeze and they spill everywhere and and i was i was in response with the trade launch i wasn't on the core team but i did the kind of trade launch when we got to market but the basic insight was from sports drinks they went and looked at how the cool kids were all drinking gatorade effectively and the younger kids were looking up going well we want a bit of that but of course it's sugary it's too big so we basically created a small sports drink about the size of a carton and it's by far the biggest success i've ever been involved in it took 18 months just to catch up with the demand from a production point of view and went on to be one of the biggest you know soft drink successes in kind of uk history but from a basic insight of going what can we take i mean i was within the category obviously it's you know sports drinks are also drinks but just looking at how another category is solved for a need.

18:24Look, I think you point to something that actually points back to why there are so few marketers on boards and in this CEO's chair. It's because organizational design has bifurcated and trifurcated the things that marketers do best. And if you think about the import of packaging innovation, right, new categories, new brands, existing categories, that has kind of been in too many cases removed from the remit, the consideration set, the scope of responsibilities from the marketing group who are exactly the people to a point you made earlier, who are best positioned to certainly be of service to that because they're best positioned to understand consumer customer insights.

19:11One of my favorite quotes is Ritson where he said, your primary job is to be the voice of the customer in the room where decisions get made. Yeah. I'm like, that is bang on. Because at the end of the day, there should not be any more powerful voice than the one that represents what your customer thinks and feels about your product, right? You know, I think a guy named Jeff Cottrell, who is CMO at Topgolf and Coca-Cola was a client of mine and has been a friend of mine for a long time. And he taught me something that Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks, taught him, which is in, you know, around the boardroom, they always left an empty chair.

19:46And that empty, around the table, rather, they always left an empty chair. And that chair was for the end user. Right. Like kind of an Elijah thing. If you're a Jew, you might get the Passover reference. But it's important that they're always in the room. And yet it's equally important. And Ritson is, of course, 100 percent right. But it's equally important that we never lose sight as marketers of that tired but nonetheless true Henry Ford quote, which is if I had asked the consumer what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. And finding the balance between that is everything. That is absolutely spot on.

20:23Yeah, both those two things exist as equal truisms at once, don't they? Now, one of the cool things you do, of course, at Forbes is create the list of the world's most influential CMOs. right so i'd love well two questions really wrapped up in one but i'd love to know how you come up with that list but secondly really more importantly what makes an influential cmo so excuse me when i got here um and it's exactly three years ago today i think when i got to forbes i was the first um practitioner right first marketer they hired for this and and the cmo network preceded me i think for something like 17 years there were iterations of it and kind of moments within it.

21:04When I took a look at the methodology behind the world's most influential CMOs list, it was obvious to me that, first of all, I should say, it's incredibly difficult to measure influence, right? And so what we had to do was look at the methodology and look at the proxies we were creating for influence, but that also required a definition of influence. And so our definition of influence is, is it's got two fundamental layers, which is how are you influencing the results of your business? And by the way, that too is very hard to isolate. So we create proxies for that. And then how are you influencing the marketing community writ large?

21:47Because so taking the second one first, because we're looking at your influence across the marketing community, which then influences global enterprise, there's become more of a link between the size of the business than perhaps there had been before because the size of one's platform does matter, right? World's most influential CMO list maker goes from company X, which is the largest maker of widgets in the world to a new category that is a startup. It's unlikely they will have the same influence despite being the same marketer because their canvas, their platform is less so. I think the list prior to my coming was leaning into metrics, and it's an entirely data-driven list.

22:33We work with Sprinklr as our principal partner and LinkedIn as a secondary data partner and literally analyze something like 8 billion data points across seven or eight different kind of categories that I cannot remember now. But again, we're creating proxies, and what I noticed was it was a little bit too much of a popularity contest. And just because a given CMO has a big LinkedIn following or a big Insta following, that's not a platform that may be a platform for influence. But then we do the qualitative work. So how are you using that platform? We also did the work to make sure that the CMO who is not a particularly active promoter, right, not a particular is not penalized for that.

23:15We also, and I'm kind of talking about some tactical things, recognize, you know, we'd been measuring for sentiment. And it was just last year, so that was my, when I first got here, we really couldn't change methodology. We were just too far down the road. So last year was the second one where we continued to evolve methodology. We recognized that positive sentiment was not necessarily the sole indicator of influence, because oftentimes negative sentiment about something done influences the community very broadly, right? It teaches us what not to do and how not to do things. so we factored that in two years ago we started really looking at financial results and obviously you know you don't want to look at EBITDA you don't want to look at profit measures because that's typically outside the CMO's control so we look at revenue measures and then we look at revenue measures within categories right so if we have a handful of luxury marketers who have made the list or a handful of automotive marketers we're comparing them to their peers not to outside of category.

24:19But influence is, you know, is oftentimes an internal metric, right? Going back to the very reason we created the CEO's Guide and so much of the conversation we've had, which is if you can't influence your C-suite colleagues, your CEO and CFO, you're probably not going to have much influence externally. That's such a true. I mean, often when I'm talking to people about what is it like being a CMO, a lot of people ask the question. And I always tell them you'd be surprised at how little marketing four p's you actually do that a lot of the job is managing politics and persuasion yes right it's navigating the organization way an organization an unfortunate necessity but a necessity nonetheless yeah and i think you talked about influence comes from the stage you're on in case if you're on a big stage there will be a lot of politics and there'll be a lot of persuasion to do typically yeah and you have to it's a bit like the kind of gladiator quote win your crowds and you win your freedom sort of thing but you know that that that i think is true you have to in a big organization, you have to come up with a way of a bit like having your own media plan, isn't it?

25:19You have to kind of work out who do I need to talk to, what the message needs to land, how do I get everyone, you know, on my side to get the permission and freedom to do the job? There was a book that was popular in the United States, like, I don't know, 200 years ago, I'm being hyperbolic, of course, and it was called Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned in Kindergarten. And just, it goes, you know, it's what I'm teaching my kids about adulting. It's what we talked about before, manage the internal relationships, manage expectations, meet people where they are, not where you want them to be.

25:48I mean, it is just be a marketer internally. That's huge. And I think that tension between the internally, external and realizing that winning the battle internally buys the freedom to win the battle externally. And if you lose the battle internally, it doesn't matter what you do externally, you're out. Yeah, you have to earn the permission to have your expertise trusted. Yeah. Um, nobody ever, you know, I had Andrea Brimmer on the podcast, who's the CMO, um, at Ally financial. And we talked about this, she talked about this, which is nobody ever asks challenge. No CMO ever challenges the CFO on their cap table, on their accounting processes.

26:26It's like, why does the CFO feel they're in the position to challenge the CMO? Yeah. Everyone's a brand manager. Everyone's a brand manager. But actually, and we had another guest actually, just Kofi, who's the CMO at DoorDash, who makes the point, and I think it's an important one. Everybody is in fact a brand manager, which is to say that everybody in an enterprise has the potential to influence the trajectory of brand and business by what they do and do not do. Tactical example, actually I think it's more a strategic one. And it's why I've always thought customer service should at a minimum matrix into the CMO because customer engagement.

27:06When I'm dissatisfied, you have my full attention as a customer. And typically it's not reporting into the CMO. Right. Typically the information flow may be inadequate, but everybody influences brand. whether it's you know the assistant to the assistant marketing manager who's at home talking about her job or his job with their friends it all adds up it's interesting i totally think that's a really powerful insight because twice in my career i've had customer service reporting to me as the marketing director both times the problem i had on the brand i knew instantly yeah and my brand tracker took months yeah it was like this rear view mirror like six months later oh you had a problem like you know you had a quality control problem six months ago but my customer service line ringing hot and getting getting the complaints through to me that's when i knew and you know at a visceral level and you know it's not like reading a report in a you know 50 page report you're literally hearing from the consumer exactly what they think of you yeah it's so powerful it's everything i fought very hard to get it inside my remit when i was cmo at live nation because it reported into tech because it was delivered on a tech platform that's just the wrong way to think about it and it's it's a i think it's a problem that exists pervasively i would say be careful you wish for though yes sir 100 you know you you really what you really want are the ability to influence the responses and the insights not the control that's it yeah yeah 100 so what would be the tips in terms of advice to a cmo to create influence what are the things they should be doing to build up their level of influence based on the sort of We are very careful not to provide too much advice such that the system can be gamed because we really do try and find, you know, get as close to on point as we can be.

28:59And by the way, if anyone has thoughts on how we can get closer, I'm always open to that. We're always open to that. But I don't think there's anything more influential than a job brilliantly done. That isn't to say, by the way, that every brilliantly done job rises to the level of awareness. Sometimes it's just brilliantly quiet. Sometimes it's that small thing you've done, that little incremental thing you've done that wound up yielding exponential return, which is why it is very hard to measure influence. I think we do a pretty good job, but, you know, I wouldn't tell anybody that it comes down to anything other than first and foremost, doing your job brilliantly or at least being perceived as doing your job brilliantly.