The creative revolution inside the worlds most dull category - Novartis CMO, Gail Horwood

16:31Janet Balis:And we brought a lot of that thinking to the media planning that we did, for example, for a superwoman, because it wasn't one and done. It's a platform that we are running. You know, we continue to support.

16:43Gail Horwood:That's really, really important, isn't it? If you take attention, please, how do you get the senior stakeholders outside of marketing on board? Because this is a good question. I can just imagine. The boardroom discussion. Yes, I know. If you were flying on the wall, what did that feel like, Gail? I guess the marketing team would be like, let's go. And then you've got to go to the boardroom and then go, I have an idea. Yeah.

17:02Janet Balis:I mean, again, I have very, very supportive leadership. And I think as you create, you tell a story internally and externally, you have to do your selling internally and externally. And it wasn't that it was a huge selling proposition internally, but it was something we'd never done before. Nobortis had never run a Super Bowl campaign, period, or something at that scale. And then we can all acknowledge we were going right into what we saw, the issue, the societal issue. And we wanted to be respectful, appropriate, and reflective of culture. And so we tried to make it as authentic as possible and not salacious.

17:38Janet Balis:So it wasn't done from a, oh, let's just show more shaking or et cetera. It was it was done from does this look like the world you live in? And that was truly what we were trying to. So once we connected those dots and, you know, you can only tell a story so much with storyboards, which it was a little funny when I had to show the videos. But I think we handled it appropriately. And that was the balance that we tried to strike, which is my goal wasn't to shock anybody or be risque. It was does this look like, you know, we had a woman in a coffee shop and many of us have experienced that. you know, somebody looking you up and down, like it was meant to be real, but, but reflective of, of the culture we live in and, um, you know, pay attention when it matters most.

18:21Janet Balis:And it all happened fairly organically when we really focused on that. And again, to, to make something that strikes that, that balance and that fine line, you really have to have a lot of discussions because you can imagine anybody getting involved in those discussions is going to have a point of view and it could go in a different direction. So we were very consistent throughout the process.

18:42Gail Horwood:I would love to have filmed that reaction as well. I think everyone can imagine, you know, what that's like. You write about the imitating real life because the scene where the camera even does that to kind of follow the bartender's.

18:54Janet Balis:The director that we chose was a woman that worked on that. Your attention, please. Had directed episodes of Ted Lasso. So that was another thing about creativity is we wanted a sort of upbeat, be more, you know, fun and humorous, but also serious because, you know, it's striking that balance. And we thought that that reel and that director did a nice job, but it goes back to every decision, creative decision contributes to the holistic experience. And you think these details are small, obviously, choosing a director is a very important piece of it. But even one of the scenes in Your Attention Please, the woman is riding the bus and at one iteration, she was riding a subway and we said no there are only subways in certain cities we want this to be reflective of broader community so she's going to be on a bus so like literally everything was intentionally discussed and and tried to reach the broadest audience with the right message

19:52Gail Horwood:it's a good example this of uh i guess what you might call the serious case for humor sometimes when you're actually trying to tackle something really important humor can be the best way of doing it because it's sort of it unarms people doesn't it and allows them if you can laugh then you're more open to kind of take the serious point.

20:08Janet Balis:Well, what I heard, because obviously I was very close to it, is people are like, where is this heading? What is going on here? What am I watching? And then, you know, oh, okay. But it brings them in. Yeah, it brings them in.

20:17Gail Horwood:And what was the reaction like after the Super Bowl?

20:20Janet Balis:Well, you know, we knew, it's funny, I happened to be at the Super Bowl, and of course when you're at the Super Bowl, you're not watching the Super Bowl, so I'm on a streaming platform watching it so I could see the ads, right? And instantly you started, we would get reports of social media, website traffic. So really, very quickly, we said, you know, find out more, find out your risk, or if you should get screened, or get an appointment. And instantly, we saw the traffic surge to our websites. Obviously, we had search and everything all set up. And I think one of the things that, sorry, I haven't mentioned before, is the close work we do with our advocacy partners.

20:59Janet Balis:Because part of putting this ad together is really understanding the communities you're speaking to. And of course, we do a lot of insights gathering and research, but we made a decision to work very, very closely from inception. And that could be tricky because you're asking for opinions from a lot of people, but we believe that our advocacy partners can help us shape this in a way that is most meaningful. And that was what was exciting. Right from the start, we had a number of advocacy organizations say, yes, we absolutely want to be a part of this. But as the campaign rolled, and in the coming weeks, we had more come to us that we put on the websites.

21:34Janet Balis:And in fact, we did some lobbying in Washington as the only pharma company to ensure that there was access to screening. So working with a broader ecosystem, and you talked about the ecosystem in our case, we've even made that further with our advocacy community. We took the same approach with relax as a blood test.

21:54Gail Horwood:That's amazing. It's funny, it's a funny fact, I spent the last seven years being paid to watch Super Bowl ads. So I worked at System One, which does pre-testing and advertising. So I'd be in New York with producer James here, and we would find a bar and we'd literally be watching all the ads. So we'd, you know, flick through the game a bit, and then we'd go, right, we've got to pay attention. So when everyone else in the bar is calming down a bit, we're like, right, this is our moment. We've got to re-look at the ads. But the reason I say that is that I remember your ad because it was so surprising.

22:24Gail Horwood:It was, you know, because, I mean, Super Bowl is so competitive. there's between 70 and 80 ads and you can only really kind of remember five or six afterwards but yours was so surprising that is it kind of impossible high praise yeah yeah thank you um now we must bring ai into the room as well as it would be rude not to kind of thing but um this year i think i'm right in saying 40 percent of canline winners have used ai in the production of uh of the films and i mean it's only like a year or two since we were beginning to talk about maybe AI could have an impact. So I was intrigued to know from both of you how you're seeing AI being used in service creativity and what the pros and cons are.

23:03Gail Horwood:I just want to bring in something that I heard here at Kent Lyons because Jeffrey Katzenberg was quite artful in the words that he selected at one of the events I attended. And I will not try to replicate the words that he used, but he contrasted the notion of creativity and reasoning. and he actually presented the definition of both. So if creativity is essentially, and I'm going to paraphrase, he read a definition, he read it from a piece of paper that he had pulled and won for reason. If creativity is essentially intended to come up with net new ideas and everything that we just talked about, the nuanced human choices that Gail was just talking about, all the things that went into it, if that's for a completely net new idea, that can be combined in a creative process with reasoning, which can come from AI, which allows us to do things in a process where we are essentially going to be using logic to reason through things.

24:02Gail Horwood:And that too can be in a creative process, but it's towards a completely different endpoint where we're actually using logic to reason to what that should be. And so I think about, for example, in a fully integrated program, all the various permutations, for example, of creative with lots of different aspect ratios, hundreds of different permutations. That is in a creative process. But when we take the two pieces together, creativity and reasoning, they can work together. So I think the beautiful thing about this moment here in Cannes Lions is actually that I feel like there's tremendous optimism.

24:40Gail Horwood:I feel like the human versus AI moment, thankfully, has actually gone away, I feel like, from the dialogue. And we've arrived at a much more nuanced and sophisticated dialogue, which is how do we work to reimagine processes and actually think about how both the creativity and the reasoning work together and the humans and the AI work together in service of better creativity and obviously creativity and service in many cases. and certainly in marketing and customer experience and service to the business. How do we use those together? And to do that requires you to reimagine. And the last point I would just make on this is going back to the ecosystem point.

25:23Gail Horwood:So much of the AI dialogue focuses on technology and technology is not the hard part. Where I feel like most of the dialogue, thankfully, also has shifted is to what is the system for the business? And how do we artfully and purposefully start to architect the various components that we are going to need so that all the different parts of that ecosystem are actually accretive to growth? Because everyone's got an algorithm. And if you walk down this closet, I promise, Gail, if her badge was turned the right way and somebody could read her title, everyone had an algorithm that could optimize towards her goal.

26:00Gail Horwood:I promise they all tried to sell it to her. Every agency, every media owner, and every other person, they had an agent for it and an optimization. But they don't work together automagically. So if someone like Gail or Gail doesn't deliberately build a system that works together, it won't. And so that's the new challenge is to put those humans and that technology to work together so that we get the best of human judgment and creativity, by the way, not just in creative processes, but in business, and do that together with AI and the reasoning. And that's the beautiful moment that I think we're in.

26:38Gail Horwood:There's some good data in your BCG CMO server, actually, that points exactly to this. Well, I appreciate you pointing that out. Thank you. So, 96 % of CMOs were saying they want end-to-end transformation. Yes. 42 % of CMOs were currently using it only to automate certain tasks. So there's this gap between what you described and what is currently being used. And I will just say, and I'd love to hear what Gail has to share on this, but what I would say is so many of the early experiments were exactly what you just said. They were thinking too small. They were focusing on existing processes and looking at a particular task.

27:18Gail Horwood:And I think that when you're looking at an existing task in an existing process, you're not going to get the value from it. There's not that satisfaction. And the kind of thinking that we were just talking about when you're building the full system, it's hard and it takes time. So the notion that there's an easy button, that is not the case. And you have to build towards it. And there's a systemic change that one has to build both culturally and over time. So, but Gail lives it.

27:47Janet Balis:I have so many comments. I mean, for me, and again, I started my career in a creative environment, but in print, if anybody remembers. Yes, we both did. Those magazines. Yes, we did. And I came up through rigorous brand guidelines, systems, you know, brand stewardship, tone, voice. We didn't have as many channels, but boy, was that rigorous. When I made the transition to brand marketing, while I knew about all the foundations of brand marketing and had read about them, but I hadn't practiced them necessarily in the same way because I was on the creative side of media. What I recognize is that brand marketers have gotten pretty far away from the work because they had outsourced a lot of it to very talented agencies, but their jobs became very different and they became very distant from the work.

28:41Janet Balis:One of the things that I learned, and again, I came up through e-commerce, digital marketing, performance marketing, and then moved more into the larger brand marketing, is you need both, right? And you need to actually understand how the work gets done. So one of the things I've done in our organization at Novartis is I brought some of the work in-house. There's no intention to bring all of it in-house, but bring the work closer to the people doing the work who have the insights, understand, and frankly, who have the ability to change it quickly. eliminate handoffs and translation of what we mean and outcomes.

29:15Janet Balis:And so that makes us more agile. Great news. AI will speed that up. I still believe in context, curation, taste, judgment, institutional experience. The models can't possibly or yet be trained on all of that. They may be someday, but there's so much nuance in all of those. And they're not logical or rational decisions, which is what the algorithms are trained to do. So in a really interesting way, I think it's creative activities golden moment, because we all have read the stats of how many ebooks, how much AI slop, people are tuning out slop, we're seeing a lot of players saying that you can target now against slop, they have algorithms that will help you identify AI slop, so you can target against that.

30:03Janet Balis:So I think we will see a pendulum shift, hopefully towards better creative based on, again, fine, foundations, tone, voice, all of these things in a new and contextual way. I love what you said about, there was a stat about what percentage of creative is done with AI. And I think all of the lead up processes, like, you know, we could not have done the type of creative that we put in the platform that we developed. all the nuances I discussed, an algorithm cannot or would not have done that, or at least not as they are today because we use them. But in the ideation, the scenario planning, the, you know, kind of bringing it to life so we could all approve it.

30:45Janet Balis:Because I think one of the tough things in a regulated industry is everything obviously goes through a rigorous approval process. Sometimes the concepts are so novel, it's hard to imagine them for the approvers and the legal and regulatory and compliance folks to imagine them because it's just so novel. Don't blame them. This helps us understand and bring to life things in ways that we can move through approvals more quickly. So it's actually a benefit. We are rethinking marketing through an agentic workflow. I will say, and maybe I'm in the minority, the task level work has given a lot of people exposure to what the possibility of AI is.

31:24Janet Balis:So it's hard for people to go from, it's a cultural shift. It was a necessary step to go through. Yeah. And I really do believe that. I see that because if you're not, and I was always one of those people and how did I, I was an art history major who was a creative and crafter. Like, how did I get into, you know, digital marketing? What did I know about that? Well, I taught myself because I was interested in et cetera. So I think you can learn by doing, and I do think the task level work, as we've said, helped people move along the journey and know what's possible. I do think it's, you know, I say the technology has superseded, people can't adopt all this technology.

32:02Janet Balis:My own iPhone, I'm not using every feature. And I've been, you know, using it since whatever, 2008, when it came out, and I learned something new every day I can do on my iPhone, including Action Mode, which was featured in a beautiful piece of CanLine winning work this week in a beautiful piece of creative about Parkinson's disease and using action. Anyway, people are not using all the technology they have. Technology, it's wonderful and we are all in, but it's also, you know, we have to adopt it as it makes sense for our organizational needs and the goals and objectives that we have. And the last thing we want to do is create AI slop because we want to be trusted.

32:41Janet Balis:We are a trusted resource for medicines that can extend people's lives. So we want to make sure that trust is the center of that.

32:49Gail Horwood:You mentioned something actually, I hadn't clocked before in terms of using AI to create the concepts that you then want to send into the organization. Because I've been so often, and also the more crazy, the more creative, the more brave the idea, the more imagination is required to imagine what it could be. And if you're a creative person, you immediately go, oh, that's amazing. And then you go to the board and And it's literally like, you know, crickets around the room. It's like, oh, they don't get this.

33:16Janet Balis:It helps you bring it to life. It does, doesn't it? You can dimensionalize it.

33:18Gail Horwood:Because you can do it in a nanosecond. You can go, this is what I'm talking about here. And they're like, oh, right, we get it. So I hadn't thought about that. That's a nice little.

33:26Janet Balis:It's working well.

33:28Gail Horwood:And to go beyond advertising, do you use AI in product development as well to, you know, develop new pharmaceutical products?

33:37Janet Balis:Well, AI has been at the center of drug discovery for a long time. So, yes.

33:43Gail Horwood:Does it shorten the time scales to get things to market? Yes, it does.

33:47Janet Balis:And that's the promise of the future. It identifies more compounds, more molecules, more ways to solve the problems. So, yes.

33:55Gail Horwood:And I think beyond the pharmaceutical industry, just more broadly, I think as we think about marketing, it's going to be about how marketing, marketing is a beacon of lots of things that is to come. But what's beautiful about marketing going first is it's about the connectivity between different things. So for example, how does marketing connect to supply chain or R &D and product development and other things? Because eventually, and we're not there yet, but as agentic workflows and as agentic AI starts to permeate the full enterprise, and we're not there yet. That will allow us to trade off lots of different kinds of data and decisions across the enterprise and decide what the highest and best use is for scarce resources, people's time, capital, and our teams, and our attention.

34:46Gail Horwood:And so as we think about that, that allows us to make much more complicated decisions and scenarios than we could possibly do with dashboards and lots of meetings. So as that starts to emerge, there will be more fluidity. So in marketing, we're starting to see that there's a dynamism around how we can move money around and start to think much more dynamically across channels and teams, which is causing a lot of breakdown in the roles itself. There's a lot less around channel specialists. You're seeing lots of organizations talk about pods and squads and reimagine even the titles that sit in those organizations.

35:23Gail Horwood:But eventually, as we're talking about here, you're going to see that in other functions as well. That's such good news, isn't it? I mean, because as marketers, we've lost a lot of the four P's and we've sort of migrated only to promotion in some cases. And we've also divided up marketing roles into what used to be a digital role and a traditional role, whatever. And we fragmented ourselves. But this is a solution to that fragmentation in a way, isn't it? It is. And the thing I like about it is it hopefully will also shift us from AI being an efficiency conversation to a growth conversation. And by the way, I'm not anti-efficiency.

35:56Gail Horwood:There is efficiency to be extracted. However, as that value gets extracted, the opportunity to create profitable growth by trading off decisions and saying, I actually want to spend less here so I can spend more there because I'm going to get a better return on that and it creates growth faster. That to me is very exciting. Again, not just in marketing, but across different functions in the company so that you responsibly architect the company to be agile and create growth.

36:22Janet Balis:So I think as you think across big organizations, I'll just speak within marketing and our agency partners, there's so many silos of information. And if somebody actually had all the information, they'd make a better decision. And today that's done through dashboards and meetings and follow ups or intuition. Sometimes you look at data and you're like, I think there's something missing here, which by the way, is still an important skill set. But what I've noted is, and for me, what's exciting is what, if I have a question, I now don't need to ask three people, I can sort of ask an agent and get so again, that's the near term, like, great, I can get the answer.

37:03Janet Balis:So I'm not bothering somebody. It's an easy answer. But I had no way to access that information before. So there's a lot of information locked up in our systems. And then I talk a lot about and I've talked about for years before the AI era, data literacy. And if you know what's in your data, you can hypothesize different things. If you don't know what's in your data, how could you? So literally, I've been obsessed with metadata and tagging and fields and what data are we collecting about our campaigns, about our work? And the average person doesn't have a good understanding of all the aspects of their data.

37:40Janet Balis:They certainly know performance data, etc. But But the more we become, and again, this is all about bringing the work closer to the people doing the work, the more we become familiar and become literate about our data, we can ask better questions and frankly, recognize when things don't look right. You know, if you don't know what you don't know, then you've got a problem.

37:58Gail Horwood:That makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Janet, you work with lots of different businesses helping implement the kind of change with AI. What's your advice on how to deliver the change? Because I think everyone's going to listen and go, well, of course, we want to do more of what you just said before. How do you lead through change? So I try to avoid the phrase change management as a general rule, but that's a personal preference. I know it still is out there and it's still necessary. And I only do that because I think it's laden with the meaning that that phrase has for so many people, which is that it happens after you've made decisions.

38:34Gail Horwood:And I think we're going to be in a mode of continuous learning, continuous change, continuous building up, breaking down, rebuilding as the technology continues to roll out. And so we have to become accustomed to that. It needs to be a new muscle. But I think one of the things I like right now just as a framework is the notion of this deliberate, purposeful system that we're building. So there's really intelligent top-down, I'll call it, building that's happening where you're rolling out intelligently in phases the things that you want to build. And by the way, supporting it with the right learning and bringing the people along with that.

39:13Gail Horwood:But I also think you want to unlock the bottom up, unleashing the democratization that unquestionably so much of this AI moment enables for so many people to do things that they just couldn't do before, like what Gail was just talking about. I think we're all feeling that in every role in our personal lives and in our professional lives. If you lean in, when you experience it, it's exhilarating. And then you want to do more. And then you want to share it with people. So I think there's bottom up. There's top down. And then I call it scale up, which is when people, for example, build an agent that's wonderful that was bottom up or the connectors and skills start to emerge.

39:52Gail Horwood:the notion of sharing it with others when they're vetted, because you don't want everyone sharing everything because then you end up with a little bit too much cacophony out there. The notion of putting it into a marketplace for people to share. So I call that scale up. So top down, bottom up and scale up and making sure that all ideas are embraced because there's so much creativity that comes from lots of different sources. So something as simple as a lot of the clients that I've seen are doing something as simple as making sure that they have a means to capture all the ideas that people have for great agents and then sifting through those very systematically just so that the people who are, I want to hone in on this phrase that Gail said, the people who are close to the work, they know best where the most interesting problems to solve really are.

40:36Gail Horwood:And so the notion that someone from the outside, and I'm going to say like a consultant, is going to come in and know what that work looks like is not the right idea. The right idea is to make sure that you're really listening and synthesizing that and then And we can take that and partner and bring the best of, you know, how do we now look at this at scale and bring the best technology and the best strategic thinking and insights and really apply the AI together with the strategic insights and put that together. But I think those things need to all work together at this moment to drive the change.

41:04Gail Horwood:And there's some boring solutions to solve. I mean, we had Tarang and Corey from Elf here yesterday. So inspiring. It was great, wasn't it? Oh, my gosh. I just want them to write a book, do a podcast and everything else. Listen to the podcast if you haven't already. Definitely. It will be available. It was so good. It was great, wasn't it? But it did make me smile when Corey was saying that, you know, most of our teams spend eight hours on a SaaS day doing their expenses. And she's like, surely AI could solve that. You know, so some of it is about 10. And she called it a big problem. And then if that's our biggest problem, wait a second.

41:34Gail Horwood:Yeah, on the list of problems. Exactly.

41:35Janet Balis:There are, we started auditing some of the work done to traffic assets across networks and agencies. We're a big company. We're working with a lot of different agencies and networks. And somebody said it's, you know, 10 years of man hours across people to do this. And clearly AI is going to take that work away. And that's really exciting. So there's a lot of inefficiency, let's be honest, in all these systems. For years and years and years and years, we were all told that sold the promise of an integrated marketing stack, Martech stack. And for big companies, if you're not a startup, you start with something.

42:18Janet Balis:There's always technology in play. You inherit things or there's new things. So you can never have that perfect stack. Now we're moving to an era where everything's unbundled, actually, and you have to decide and curate your stack. So I'm excited for this moment where we can start to curate these things and theoretically if we have the right data infrastructure, the right connectors, etc., we will eliminate all this crazy and expenses is a great example of scheduling a meeting. Why does that have to be so difficult? Can't the agent just ping around and put it in? There are boring problems and exciting problems.

42:53Janet Balis:They both need to be solved. It takes up a lot of organizational time. And, you know, there is a future in which some of these things will just be completely agentic. But including in healthcare, you know, we're already seeing there's a story in the Wall Street Journal where in Utah you're seeing for certain more routine conditions, whether it's cholesterol or diabetes management, prescriptions are being refilled agentically, which to me sounds like heaven. But to some people sounds like hell, you know, they don't like that idea. But for me, it means, oh, well, then my practice, the doctor will be able to spend more time actually talking to me rather than refilling a prescription.

43:32Janet Balis:But, you know, there's both sides.

43:34Gail Horwood:Yeah. Yeah. And I totally get that. You two have worked together for quite a long time, I believe. Known each other for a while. So I thought, Janet, I'd ask you, what makes Gail such a good CMO and what could other people learn from her? Oh, there's so many things I love about Gail as a CMO. and I've known her in two past roles as well where we work together. I think, first of all, Gail is inspiring and visionary and very future forward. She pushes her team to go ahead of where anyone else is. But what I love also is that she's also hands to keyboard and actually really likes to know how things truly work.

44:09Gail Horwood:And if I can say it, you like to geek out a little bit on that part, which makes it very practical because it's not theoretical and is so outside in in sourcing all the best and most inspiring people, no matter where they are, for her own intellectual curiosity, but also bringing that in so that the whole team gets into it. And I think if you see Gail's excitement, you're going to come on board with that. And there's unquestionably, if you're working with Gail, you know that she is going to challenge the status quo but she's challenging the status quo because she wants to make it better for everyone and she's so deeply committed to any of the companies where we've been it's been about the company being better and just deeply committed to creating more value for the company and for the team and for all the people who are working there and making it a better place for all of them to work so that's those are some of the reasons why i mean that very genuinely so thank Thank you.

45:08Gail Horwood:Well, maybe to round off then, for both of you, have a think about what is the best bit of advice you've ever been given in your career? Well, I'll tell you the worst advice I was ever in. Oh, let's do worst. Yeah, this is fun. So it was actually, we both worked at Time Inc. And I won't name the name, but someone said to me, your career will be evaluated based on the number of people who report to you. So when you have a lot of people who report to you. So I'm just saying, in this future world, if anybody's trying to evaluate their career based on the number of people, it doesn't matter. like and it definitely doesn't matter now so I love like we all need to be super egoless and super light and airy about it because in this connected world I think what matters more is the impact and the curiosity um that that we bring to things and the dynamism with which we actually look at our past legacy and actually abandon whatever we've done and actually reinvent ourselves to the future people challenge themselves I think they're the most interesting If you're looking at yourself by the number of people and the headcount that report to you, probably the wrong way to evaluate your success.

46:10Gail Horwood:It's funny because I've often answered that question as I love the Greg Cohen quote of what would you do if you weren't afraid, which is amazing. But you've given me a thought, what would you do if you had no ego? Because actually, how many of our career decisions depend on our ego? Because we want the title, the brand name above the door. We are, aren't we? We are. But it unlocks a different thought, doesn't it? say if you took ego out of the room what decision would you make i'm doing it now i'm working at bcg i mean it i get to do the i get to do the work i love i really do i think you know it's funny

46:42Janet Balis:going back to and i had such a formative and amazing experience working at several of what we would now call legacy um companies or they were in print but i worked at conde nast for almost 11 years. And this is all before the devil wears Prada and the devil wears Prada too. But one of the leaders I work for, along the lines of what you're saying, like advice that you sort of question, like, what are you talking about? Said, you're not doing your job if they don't fear you when you walk off the elevator. And I'll never forget that moment because that's just not who I am as a person. I don't like to, you know, I'm not above things and looking to, and I had to like contemplate that.

47:28Janet Balis:And I'm like, oh my gosh, am I going to have a career here? Can I be successful here? And it was like a throwaway comment. I wasn't, it wasn't like a career advice, but it's just, that was the world we worked in, in those days. And the world has changed dramatically. And those organizations ran that way and were very successful. And we learned a lot working in those organizations. And then we learned a lot about the kind of leaders we wanted to be and the ones that we didn't want to be. So I remember being, you know, recoiling when I heard that and it's just never because if people are afraid to tell you what's going on, then you've lost the room, lost the plot and probably are not developing the best product, solution, service, etc.

48:10Janet Balis:So the most important thing, and this actually ties back to AI, is to have that dialogue about, you know, what's happening and what isn't working. Because if you're just assuming everything's going on and they're not going to tell you because they're afraid of you or don't want to bring. So having that candor and that ability to just tell it like it is and have that conversation. And I know we've always had that relationship, which in your new role, I appreciate that you'll give advice and I can tell you what I'm trying to achieve and we can have that dialogue. I think this moment requires unprecedented curiosity, but I think the word that matters more than anything is humility.

48:51Gail Horwood:And if you're not vulnerable with your partners, with your friends, with your colleagues, with the ecosystem, admitting what you know, what you don't know, what you're trying to work through together, this is a moment where you have to problem solve together. together, by the way, with technology, I love sitting there and working with technology as part of our team as we're solving problems. I love working with our clients. But this is that moment where if you think you've got the answer, you're going to come in and the goal is to be the smartest person in the room. It's not going to work.

49:24Janet Balis:Well, by the way, even if you have it next week, it'll change. It's going to change. Because there's a new announcement. You're like, okay, that's no longer relevant. I got to move over here. So got to be agile. Ego at the door. Brilliant.

49:36Gail Horwood:Thank you both. That's absolutely perfect way to end. And what an interesting conversation. Thank you both. Pleasure.

50:05Gail Horwood: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.