How to build a disruptive brand and win over the CFO - Vineet Mehra, Chime

24:41Now, you said something on LinkedIn the other day. We're in a golden age of marketing. And I was being interviewed by someone recently, and they said, how do you rate the industry right now? And I gave it a 5 out of 10. And the reason I did that was I think we're in a golden age of knowing. We're not in a golden age of doing. We have the tools. We have the knowledge. We have the capability like never before. I don't see much evidence that we're applying that and winning the argument in the boardroom for why marketing should be delivering business value. So why did you think we're in a golden age of marketing?

25:14If you think about it, we now have more capabilities as marketers than ever. And look, the tools are not perfect, but either are the tools from 20 years ago, right? Anyone waiting for like an AI tool to show up on your desk and just you hit a button and it's going to be perfect is wrong. By the way, Adobe didn't work like that. Salesforce didn't work. Nothing's ever worked like that in our industry. But why I call this golden age is a few things. I think the first thing is that if you think it, you can make it. I even look at my son. He's 13 years old. He has all these app ideas. His school was doing a flag football fantasy league.

25:51He literally went on to Lovable and made an app to help him draft his team, right? Using stats, right? It literally went from idea to an actual product within minutes, right? And it's a truly amazing moment where you can think it and you can create it pretty much right away. You think about the rise of in-housing now. We literally don't have, we're a very large brand building spender here in the US. We don't have a creative agency on retainer. We don't have a media agency on retainer. We buy our media direct. We do our creative all in-house. And it's Three, four years ago, I wouldn't have been able to do that.

26:27We had a large agency, a classic creative agency retainer model. We've now powered our in-house creative team with tooling that is unbelievable. A couple of my creatives are like a founder of this really well-known generative AI company called me and said, one of my creatives was his number one user in the US, right? Because he's literally creating things at scale in some of these AI tools. If you look at direct response marketing, right, what's the hardest thing in DR is to have the creative velocity to actually win with your direct response channels because you just need – creative fatigue constantly happens in those channels.

27:03We're producing 300 new DR ads a day now, right, with these tools. So the first thing is like if you think it, you can make it. The speed from idea to creative has gone up so dramatically. It's pretty amazing. And what that's doing is it's giving us the fuel then, those dollars, to invest back into growth, right? Because it's improving our overall blended paybacks in our business. And that's been a really powerful idea. It's just there's so many examples like that where I feel like our industry is just at the precipice of what we're going to look back on and say this was the best time ever to be a marketer.

27:43I talk with marketers all day. Many of them say the same thing. Traffic is down, leads are down, and they're not sure why, until they realize what has changed. Most of their customers now trust AI to recommend the right brands to them, and the first one that AI recommends, they go with. Visibility in AI search comes down to whether AI trusts your content, but most brands have no idea where they stand. So how do you show up when someone asks AI about the things that you sell? With HubSpot AEO. HubSpot AEO shows you exactly where your brand stands in AI search, and makes clear recommendations on what to do to improve it without having to guess.

28:21So when someone asks AI what to buy, you're already the answer. Try it for free at hubspot.com forward slash AEO. You're talking about AI there, and I saw some research from BCG that talked about CMOs are now in charge of the AI agenda. So a year ago, it was the CEO and, you know, CMOs were basically in the cost cutting bucket of, you know, how much money can you save with AI? It feels like we've shifted into an era where we're applying the tools to make marketing that's better. Where are you getting the biggest return on kind of AI investment? Well, look, it's happening across the whole stack, right?

28:59If we just take a big view, the first two, I would say, super use cases of AI, right, where it was just, it's truly working at scale. We're writing code, right? That's like one huge use case that's well known. And the other part was customer support. If you think about customer support, I mean, it was the ultimate AI use case, right? You're already building training manuals for offshore kind of customer service agents, right? They're already, you're all manualized, right? And you're literally hiring new people constantly. So it was a great example of where you could train an AI agent to actually respond.

29:33And so 70 % of all of Chime's customer support interactions are now done through an AI. So those were two use cases that were really powerful. And by the way, those aren't just cost savings. We're writing code and shipping products faster. That's both a growth benefit and a cost benefit. On customer service, yes, we've saved a lot of dollars, but our MPS scores are 15 points higher since we launched this. So I think this misnomer of like everything's a cost, I mean, in many cases, velocity is growth, right? And if you can increase your shots on goal, you're going to have a better chance of winning.

30:09And on the customer support side, it's not just cost. Actually, most of our members and people's customers just want to answer to their question. And if you can get into them faster, they're happier. And so that's also work. So those are the first two hero use cases. And now essentially what's going on is that it's across the full stack. You have synthetic consumer research that you're applying, which is getting me from sort of idea to learning much faster. I know you worked at System 1 for a while, right? The speed at which I'm learning with synthetic panels is so much faster. The other day, we just tested this out.

30:44We actually had an AI agent moderate a focus group. And one of the hardest things about running those kinds of groups was you'd spend days because you only had one moderator. Imagine running like 15 groups at once with a synthetic moderator, right? It's a pretty interesting idea. Into like you can geek out on things like onboarding funnels where you're moving from A-B testing, which was always limited by the traffic you could put through, to reinforcement based learning. And now you're sort of learning in real time without A-B testing being a barrier, right? So I can go through the entire stack and it's starting to really show elements of growth in so many areas.

31:24I'll give you another example, the creator economy. Whenever in our industry, there's a dislocation between attention and dollars spent, you know there's going to be innovation there. So the creator economy is one where we've been talking about for a while, but it's 80 % of consumer attention is in these social platforms, largely to creator and influencer content, but it's only 4 % to 5 % of marketing spent. Why is that? It's because this industry was so fragmented. There's no marketplace to trade. To make creator deals, you have to go one by one and make it all happen. Well, what's happening now is you have got companies like Agentio and others that are actually creating marketplaces that are using AI to match brands with creators at scale based on the chance that that creator is going to be successful for your brand.

32:11And the tool is getting smarter and smarter over time. The AI is even writing scripts now. It's unbelievable. So one by one from consumer research to onboarding journeys, to direct response creative, to creator marketplaces, all the way through to how you even optimize budgets across multiple wall guard channels. It's all coming together. Early days, I always say to my team, today's the worst AI we'll ever be, but it's actually pretty damn good already. And we're just at the beginning of, I think, what we're going to be able to do here. With that being true, what is the scarce resource or what is getting scarcer where the value is going to be created if everyone's going to have access to those tools?

32:54Well, look, the scariest thing about AI, and I say scary from the context of growing your business, because that's always going to be my mindset is essentially what AI is doing is making sameness cheaper, right? So if you and I have the same machine optimizing the media, building the creative, running the consumer groups, optimizing the funnel, what essentially could happen is just a giant sea of sameness. And we know that's literally the opposite of a brand, right? The opposite of a brand is like something commoditized, like a widget, right? And there is a risk that we all fall into this idea of a widget.

33:32So I think there's three or four things that are going to make, that I would focus on in an AI era to like make sure the AI doesn't commoditize all of us, right? The first thing is you got to get those, we call them golden data sets, right? We got to get those golden data sets absolutely nailed. And those golden data sets are the ones, anyone who's tried to onboard these AI tools knows that you have to train them all with context. Otherwise, they just miss the boat. Whether you give it like a brand brain and you train it with your brand, you train it with years of performance creative, you have to train it somehow.

34:04But what we're learning is that instead of training all these point solutions, first you as a company, and this is not just a CMO remit. I think as a leadership team, you have to determine the four or five golden data sets that are going to feed these different agents and point solutions that you're going to have. If you don't have that set up right, you're going to end up kind of succumb to each point solution sort of individual LLM or individual verticalized like specialized area. And you won't put your sort of differentiation into it. So first start with sort of what are your golden data sets so that what you're training these point solutions on is absolutely unique and fully sourced from your point of view.

34:45That's sort of bucket one. The second thing that's going to be really important is what we're learning in this era is actually while these point solutions gave much of my team what I call like Iron Man and Iron Woman suits, they're all doing their jobs like 10%, 15 % better. It's great, but it's not compounding growth yet. Because what happens is until you connect the dots between these point solutions and you literally do handoffs and the agents are talking to agents, you're not really going to get compounding growth. What I mean by that is these point solutions that made each point 15 % better, but we are not at the stage yet of compounding growth, which is probably why people are still a little bit skeptical.

35:26So what we're doing now is we're calling this an AI factory. And this goes way beyond marketing. Everyone knows that marketing doesn't work in a silo. Growth, I always say, is a team sport. It requires multiple functions. So for instance, when you create a new concept, is the agent automatically routing that to compliance or legal for a bit of a review, right? Like how do you create this AI factory where you activity-based map literally the work that gets done in your organization? And what we're doing now is like laying this out, laying out our point solutions, and figuring out where humans need to go in the loop.

35:59And humans go in the loop based on how much taste is required in that moment. I'll come to that in a second. But the second thing that I would recommend everyone do is really not just invest in point solutions, but invest in this AI factory that connects the golden data sets into these agents and creates compounding growth because essentially you automate the job of the marketing workflow essentially. And that's really where you get compounding growth. And the third thing that I mentioned earlier that I really believe in is, so what's going to matter? you've got these data sets that are going to give your unique signal to your point solutions.

36:34You've got an AI factory that connects these point solutions. But the third thing you can't lose is where humans go in the loop and where taste matters. And so what I think is going to matter more and more is we're all going to hire people that have a unique sort of point of view on the world, a way to look at the world that says, you know what, that wall shouldn't be this green, it should be this shade of green, right? The little things that make brands stand out, where you look at words and say, that's just not articulated the right way, right? And that idea of human taste, I think is going to matter more than ever in a world where all of us have the same machines and sameness becomes a real risk.

37:12So if you can do those three things in this world, which is a lot harder said than, a lot harder done than said, I think you have a really good shot at creating a business that compounds growth, that does it more efficiently than ever, and really kind of stands out from the crowd. You're right about harder said than done, because one of the challenges in the survey we did was most CMOs in the survey only manage one of the four Ps, right? Most of them are managing the promotion P, not product position place. And that requires you then to work collaboratively across the organization to make things happen, So what are the kind of skill sets that a CMO or a senior leader in marketing is going to need to be successful with the kind of transition you talked about?

37:54Right. Well, one of the ways my own role has evolved, and this is probably the third time this has happened to me, is I now lead large chunks of our product and engineering organization. So I'm our growth and marketing officer. So more and more, I think what's going to happen, the truth is, is that functions are going to get less and less important. If anyone can think of something and create an ad, or if anyone, by the way, a marketer can think of something and build an app, what's going to more and more happen is as these golden data sets get democratized and everyone has access to the brand guidelines, the economics of the business at the company, and agents are literally doing a lot of the work, I think this idea of functions is going to more and more emerge.

38:34And so my suggestion to everyone is like get less attached to the title and the function you're in. Get much more obsessed with the growth you need to drive and the customer problems that you're trying to solve. And I think where you're going to start to see is the marketers, and it's not just for marketers, for any function in this world where people have a unique point of view or what I would call taste, are able to work seamlessly with these tools across any problem to solve. Those are the ones that are going to survive. And whether or not you even have functions in the future, I don't know.

39:15I think we're not too far away from that, but it's not tomorrow. But in the meantime, all I can say is get obsessed with thinking and creating. If you're a senior leader in marketing, role model, this is one of those changes that is top down. It's not bottoms up, I'm finding. If you're not in a room saying, I just made a whole suite of skills and clawed co-work that all of you can use. As a CMO, if I'm not doing that on the weekends, I'm not sure anyone's going to adopt. So I think at this moment, all you can do is get absolutely obsessed with these tools. Understand that as information democratizes and everyone has the same information, anyone can create anything.

39:55And so you've got to get really obsessed with the customer problem driving growth, and I think you're going to be okay. Love that. I heard an amazing presentation from the chief economist at LinkedIn. Yeah. And she was talking about what they're seeing in terms of skill set requirements on their platform. Yeah. And you might think, and it is growing, of course, AI, technical skills. But ahead of that, all the skill sets were growing, were things like problem solving, creativity, teamwork, leadership, all the things that you've just described. That's where all the growth is in demand in terms of skill set of the future.

40:28a lot less about the technical capability because that's obviously been taken care of, right? Absolutely. Could not agree more. And a lot of the things you talked about are things like taste and growth, right? And understanding how to grow a business. Yeah. And it's funny because actually, you know, people see this as a threat to marketers, but marketers are naturally good at that kind of thing. Problem solving, creativity, selling things in, working with other departments to make things happen. That's what we've grown up doing. We need to apply that, right? I 100 % agree. It's this idea of this ambidextrous, you know, business leader, not just CMO.

40:57And, you know, myself, I majored in music and economics, right? Like it's these folks that can like kind of go from sort of the art and just the things you can't describe to, you know, without like actually just having a feel for it all the way through to reading like a balance sheet and understanding what a growth equation of your business is and how your business actually makes money. If you can put those two things together, I think you're going to be okay. And there's lots of room for you. As you find me, Ryan, one of the first psychometric tests I did in my career was Belbin. I don't know if you ever remember that.

41:28No, no. I don't think it's used now, but I came up as a plant, which is the person that comes up with the idea, and monitor evaluator, which is the person that does the financial assessment. And everyone thought I was weird at the time. And I think, actually, that's perfect for this age. That is a great example. I think that's going to come in very useful. Indeed. Now, you're also on the board of Effie, aren't you? And I was just fascinated by that. So what can you tell us about what you've learned in that role that other marketers could benefit from? Yeah, look, I've been involved in Effie for almost a decade.

41:59I had the great pleasure of being the chair of Effie for many years, and now I'm on the Effie Foundation side. Look, it probably is going to be no surprise why I put so much of my time into an organization like Effie. It's because it's about marketing effectiveness. And ultimately, it's such a deep belief of mine, right? Like, I love Cannes. I think it's a great celebration of the creativity of marketing. But the honest truth is, you know, you can qualify for, you know, a canned lion just with minimal sort of distribution of the creative. Right. And I've always had a challenge with that. While I want to celebrate the art, what I care much more about is the effectiveness.

42:38And to me, Effie Worldwide is the symbol of like to win an Effie, you write a case. And that case is like scrutinized like crazy by judges in terms of before the campaign. what were the growth rates and after what were the growth rates. So it's an award case study that is not just about the art, artistry of it. It blends the creativity with the impact that creativity had. And to me, it just, that's going to win every time. And so, you know, it's, it's an amazing, it's an amazing organization. I encourage a lot of your listeners and viewers to, there's a whole case library where you can go through case after case after case to understand how different brands did it.

43:21And because there's such involved case studies with so many growth metrics, it's a great place to learn how to really move the needle for your business. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. I love Effie so much. I won a bronze Effie once and was really upset because I grew the brand 48%. Price went up 10 % and I didn't get a gold. It was only a bronze. I'm like, what do you have to do? Yeah. It's a tough bar now. The bar is very high, isn't it? Yeah. The bar is very high and those cases are no joke. They take a lot of time Yeah, they do indeed. Now, one thing I love is following you on LinkedIn because I find all your posts very informed and very well written and always, always great to read.

43:56There aren't that many CMOs that kind of spend time building a personal profile as well. Why do you build a personal profile and what's the benefit of doing that alongside a pretty demanding job? Look, I think there's two or three benefits. The first one is, you know, as a CMO or a leader of any function, if you're not obsessed with the talent that you can attract to your organization, That's the thing that matters. I can go back to every mistake or every failure I've had in my career. It came down to me not having the right person in the job that I needed to have at that time. And that's on me every single time.

44:31That's my fault. And so one of the biggest reasons I build a profile is so that people, when I make a call or I'm interviewing someone, people actually know a little about me, right? Because if you think about it, people go work for people, right? Not just companies. And if you can put those two things together and people feel familiar with you, they can do research on you, they understand your point of view on things, you can very quickly get to some sort of philosophical alignment. And you also become a bit of a talent magnet, right? Like if you look at my leadership team right now, probably the best leadership team I've ever had.

45:03They're all ex-CMOs, by the way, who choosing to work here at Chime with me so that we can create something amazing and they feel like they can learn. So the first reason is just to become a magnet for talent, right? And I just think that's all of our job, number one. So that's the first thing. The second thing is when you go to a brand like Chime, you got to punch above your weight. So I got to know that I can make a phone call to someone and my brand can get us a favor that maybe someone else couldn't, right? Because they know who I am. So there's the talent magnet on the internal side. And then there's the, are you a known quantity where you can kind of punch above your weight?

45:38So when I first joined Chime, we were a small little business. Today, a lot of people know us. But you better believe that I called in some favors in my early days because everyone's like, chime. I can pitch on this business or this business. Why would I do that? And they kind of take a bet on you. And then the third reason really is all around, I really care about our industry. You'll probably notice most of what I post about is thought leadership and ideas and where's the industry headed. I think our industry is just filled with so much noise versus signal. And it's just full of buzzword bingo.

46:16And sometimes it can be a giant grift. And how do you sort through all of it? And what I try to do to the best of my ability is because I care about this industry so much, right? This is why I spent my time with the Effies. I just want this to be a great industry. And so I'm really motivated to kind of do my best, from my vantage point at least, of cutting through the noise and trying to share what I think is actually important based on everything I'm reading and seeing. And, you know, once in a while people come up to me and say, hey, that really helped me with this problem I had. And, you know, that's just my little way of trying to give back to this industry that I care a lot about.

46:51No, thank you, Matt. You always write beautifully. It's always informed. It's always applicable. I appreciate it. So it's really good. Thank you. And I think that's a really good bit of advice, actually, is that the best way to grow a following is to become as useful as you possibly can. And then you create value and people want to follow you and the right people follow you as well. Yeah, this is not about – I think a lot of folks think this personal brand building is about showcasing your accomplishments. You know, a corp comms team is going to want to do that for their executives. That's all fine and that's good.

47:21But that's not what it's about. I think if you really take the tact of sharing what you're learning, I think that's the most authentic way to grow your following and actually helpful to people. Couldn't agree more. One question to round off. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given in your career? Yeah, it's the best piece of advice I've ever been given and something that I think is more important now than ever. I had this, you know, I was like a hotshot, right? Like came out of school, flying through my career, getting promoted every six months, traveling, you know, going all over the world.

47:55I remember I had a boss sit me down. I was sort of probably maybe seven, eight years in, six, seven years into my career. And he said, bloom where you're planted. And what he was really trying to tell me is stop planning for the next five things. If you just, the job you're given today and the problem you even have to solve, if you kill it, if you just go all in and make that happen, It doesn't mean you don't need a network and all the other things that matter in your career. But if you focus 80 % of your time on growing your business or solving the problem you've been given, and you just bloom where you're planted, the next place will come.

48:28And that is so important. And today, I talk a lot to my own organization about this idea of how career paths work. I think careers are going from ladders to jungle gyms. And what that essentially means is get in a job, kill it, and move to something really different that widens your experience set. I think the days of like just going vertically, I think there'll be room for that. But in the world we're painting right now, I actually don't think a vertical career is the way to go. I think think of your career like a jungle gym of experiences and bloom in each one of them and the rest will sort of take care of itself.

49:03That's great advice. You're right because the most successful people I meet have pivoted a number of times in their career. Yeah. And they've done it intentionally as well because they want to expand their horizon, learn new things, challenge themselves in ways they haven't done before. Right. Yeah. I mean, think of like, you know, they'd send me to India. I'd be like, yes, I'll go. Singapore, yes. Switzerland, yes. You know, I would just say yes to geographic experiences. Then I all of a sudden said yes to Silicon Valley and learning tech. I think I've taken four pay cuts in my life, you know.

49:32It's not about that stuff. It's about build as many experiences as you can. And then at some point you're going to be drawing on all of them. that's going to be your superpower. Absolutely. Vinny, thank you, mate. It's been a real thrill and love this conversation. So nice to spend time with you and thanks for coming to New York. Absolute pleasure. Thanks, man.

50:09just launched Uncensored Renegades with the fabulous Cori Marchesotto. She is one of the world's best CMOs. She's an absolute rock star. Every week we pick one topic, spend 20 minutes trying to fix it. So check out that. It's in your feed, Uncensored Renegades. And finally, I want to give a huge thank you to my sponsor, System One. They generously provide so much support for this podcast. It would not happen without them. So big thanks and lots of love to System One. I'll see you next time. Thank you.