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Lara O'Reilly speaks with Raja Rajamannar about the art of marketing.
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00:00An average consumer is bombarded anywhere between 3,000 and 10,000 ads every single day.
00:07The human brain cannot process that amount of data.
00:10So the brain has learned to tune out all these ads.
00:13So you're throwing ads at the consumers, but they're not even noticing it.
00:19This is CMO Insider, where you'll get candid takes from marketing power players.
00:24My name is Lara O'Reilly.
00:25I'm a senior correspondent at Business Insider.
00:28And I'm here with a marketing legend today.
00:30Raja Rajamana has run marketing at MasterCard for more than 12 years as CMO.
00:35And now he's switching into the senior fellow role.
00:38Thank you so much for joining us.
00:40Thank you very much for having me. Much appreciated.
00:42And I wanted to start with maybe a bit of an existential question for you, which is,
00:47why does MasterCard do so much consumer marketing?
00:50Oftentimes, when you get a new credit card or a bank account,
00:53you don't get to choose who your payments provider is.
00:56So I'd love to know what that involves.
00:58That is such a good question.
00:59It's, in fact, very existential, right?
01:02For us as a brand, the key thing is, when you are building your brand as MasterCard,
01:07you are a connector.
01:10So firstly, start with the places where consumers use their cards.
01:14The merchant should feel confident that when they see that this is a MasterCard transaction,
01:20that they will get paid for it.
01:22So it's basically trust and dependability and reliability.
01:26That's from the merchant side.
01:27Now, from the bank's side, I have to build my image with the bank.
01:31That, A, that this is a very, very secure, safe, efficient, and effective network.
01:37And they need to see value proposition beyond just pure functional elements.
01:44But we have to make sure that we get enough into the consumer's mind that when a bank gives them
01:48that particular offering, they're very happy.
01:51So we don't call ourselves as a direct-to-consumer brand.
01:54We are a B2B2C brand, which is we are marketing as a business to other businesses,
01:58which market to their consumers.
02:00And we try to fill this entire length of the chain.
02:04And as I mentioned earlier, you were the CMCO, I should have said, at MasterCard for around 12 years.
02:11And I imagine you've kind of left the brand on quite a high,
02:15but there must have been some challenges along the way.
02:17And I wondered if you could talk through maybe like one big challenge you had
02:21and how you overcame it.
02:22Does anything spring to mind?
02:23At the beginning, I quickly discovered that consumers associate MasterCard
02:29overwhelmingly as a credit card company.
02:33They say a credit card may make me spend money on things that I don't need
02:37and draw me into debt or that they charge me very high interest rates.
02:41And that makes automatically MasterCard brand as a negative brand.
02:46And you're a payments company.
02:48We are a payments technology company.
02:50We don't do payments ourselves.
02:52So I said, this is amazing because we don't issue a single credit card.
02:55But you ask a normal consumer on the street, they say,
02:58yeah, MasterCard is a credit card company and credit card companies are not good.
03:01So my biggest challenge was how do I change that perception?
03:06So we started getting into areas where we were trying to earn the consumer's trust.
03:12For example, we launched with a program with Stand Up to Cancer,
03:16where we said that when we run some promotions and you as a consumer spend at a restaurant using MasterCard,
03:24we will pay a part of that or we'll give a part of the profit that we make to Stand
03:30Up to Cancer Foundation.
03:31It started as a simple premise, but then it was profound.
03:34We raised almost $75 million so far for Stand Up to Cancer.
03:38And quite unbelievably, that group was able to get as many as eight drugs through FDA approval
03:46from molecule discovery to all the trials and eventually to FDA approval.
03:51We did this about three years back or four years back, I can't exactly remember.
03:55But MasterCard was one of the top four most favorite brands.
04:00So from a category which is considered to be negative to coming to be one of the top four brands
04:05in the country is a big deal for us.
04:07And now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn Ads, to talk about how to cut the ball spend from your
04:12marketing budget.
04:13Marketing leaders today are under more pressure than ever to prove real impact and concrete business outcomes.
04:20I'm joined by Keith Browning, Director of Global Brand Marketing at LinkedIn, to learn more.
04:25What makes LinkedIn uniquely suited to deliver measurable business outcomes, especially in B2B?
04:31LinkedIn is the largest professional network in the world.
04:34So we're built for this. We're built for B2B.
04:36So that means, firstly, being able to find the right people.
04:39So, you know, you can target by job title or seniority company, etc.
04:43But there's also the professional context component as well.
04:46So people come to LinkedIn to learn, to evaluate potential solutions and certainly to make buying decisions as well.
04:55And over your career, you've been quite successful at kind of challenging some of the norms,
05:00some of the kind of the marketing playbooks or the marketing theory that people often lean upon in this industry.
05:06I mean, one example is you've kind of famously declared advertising dead.
05:11And at one point, you cut your advertising budget by 70%, which is kind of unheard of.
05:18Most marketers are crying out for more budget each year, not less.
05:21I always think of myself as a consumer first, before I consider myself a marketer.
05:26As a consumer today, do I like advertisements?
05:30I hate them.
05:33They are an interruption to my experience.
05:36I'm watching a beautiful video of maybe some animals in the wild or I'm looking at some Bollywood songs, whatever
05:44it is, right?
05:46Suddenly, in less than five minutes, my experience has stopped and I'm shown a stupid ad that I don't care
05:53about.
05:54And then I'm looking at when is the skip no button appears.
05:58Do you have an ad blocker?
05:59I have an ad blocker, but ad blocker does not do the blocking of some of these streaming companies, right?
06:04So, and if I don't, the choice is either I pay money to keep the ads out or I suffer
06:12the ads.
06:12What does it tell you?
06:14That advertisements are disliked by consumers.
06:16So much so that these platforms are telling you, hey, you know what?
06:20If you don't want these ads, you pay me money.
06:23That's like blackmail.
06:24An average consumer is bombarded anywhere between 3,000 and 10,000 ads every single day.
06:31The human brain cannot process that amount of data.
06:35So the brain has learned to tune out all these ads.
06:39So you're throwing ads at the consumers, but they're not even noticing it.
06:43Why would advertising be the right model for us to communicate?
06:46The need to communicate with the consumers doesn't go away.
06:50But the way we are communicating is not great.
06:53And if I'm getting some results, how do I know that these results are happening because of my campaign, advertising
06:59campaign?
06:59It could happen in spite of it.
07:01It could happen because the gasoline prices have come down and consumer behavior.
07:05So the attribution mechanisms are extremely weak.
07:07I know the platforms are telling you that the ads are working.
07:10That's what they have to tell, right?
07:11Yeah.
07:12To sell more.
07:13But for us as marketers, we need to understand, is this attribution model really reliable?
07:18So I cut down my advertising budget by 70%.
07:21It is true till now.
07:23It's not just done once.
07:25We have taken permanently 70% of our advertising dollars out.
07:29Nothing happened to the business that is negative.
07:32But you reinvested those dollars?
07:33I reinvested those dollars into other areas like experience, experiential marketing, for example, or new platforms.
07:41We started something called Priceless.com.
07:43We have invested in other areas.
07:45And that actually has given us disproportionate returns.
07:49Now, for example, as a result of it, if you look at brand Z, in the past, we used to
07:55be at number 87.
07:56So brand Z is a kind of a measure of how much consumers like brands, right?
08:00They rate the most valuable brands in the world.
08:02Most valuable brands, right.
08:03Right.
08:03MasterCard used to be the 87th most valuable brand.
08:06Today, it is the 12th most valuable brand.
08:09So we have been outpacing our competition whose budgets were substantially higher than ours big time.
08:15And that trend continues to date.
08:17And do you think that's maybe why marketing has a bit of a trust problem in the C-suite?
08:22Marketing has a trust problem for multiple reasons.
08:25Now, I managed P&Ls and businesses before I became a CMO.
08:29Now, in those roles, marketing used to report to me.
08:31And I would ask them, OK, your budget this month, $20 billion.
08:35Tell me what exactly is it getting me for the business?
08:38Their answer is my awareness has gone up.
08:41My net promoter score has gone up.
08:43My brand predisposition has gone up.
08:46Or my reach has increased.
08:47Right.
08:48None of those are on your balance sheet.
08:49I don't care.
08:50Yeah.
08:50I want business results.
08:51Tell me what is it doing.
08:53Either the top line or the bottom line.
08:54In a credible fashion.
08:56Don't give me some marketing mumbo-jumbo.
08:58I would get really impatient, right.
09:00And that literally like deer caught in headlights.
09:04That is a big problem.
09:05Marketers talking their own jargon, their own language.
09:08And looking at themselves as marketing specialists, as opposed to business drivers.
09:14A number of CEOs were interviewed in terms of their confidence in the CMOs and the marketing departments.
09:20Shockingly, more than two-thirds of the CEOs have said they have zero confidence in their CMOs and in their
09:27marketing departments to drive profitable growth.
09:30Now, that's a disaster.
09:31The CMO role in many companies has been downgraded to report to somebody who reports to CEO.
09:37So, like the chief growth officer or the CRO.
09:41Right.
09:41Chief growth officer, chief revenue officer, chief customer officer.
09:45Now, if you take away customers' revenue and growth out of marketing, what is left behind?
09:51Right.
09:51Right?
09:52It's really fluff.
09:53So, the issue is that marketers did not market themselves well.
09:57They did not learn themselves the new things that are happening.
10:00And now with AI coming in, it could be even more devastating if these people don't quickly educate themselves.
10:06Come on top.
10:07So, some technologists will now be running through some bunch of agents, the entire marketing department, which is not how
10:14it has to be.
10:14So, AI threatens those marketers, I guess, for myriad reasons, right?
10:18One, because the thing that used to be hard to spin up, you can now make a thousand creatives in
10:24two seconds on Meta or whatever.
10:27And also, with AI, I imagine that that means the CFO and the CEO can very quickly kind of unpick
10:33these fluffy marketing metrics that they're being thrown at them.
10:36So, what's a marketer to do, I guess?
10:39So, there are two things.
10:40On the one hand, AI is probably the single biggest threat, but it is also the single biggest opportunity for
10:47marketing to seize and regain control of the function properly.
10:52Now, AI, yes, you're right.
10:53You can give a prompt and it will create 10 creatives, 20 creatives, 100 creatives in a matter of few
10:59minutes.
10:59You might be a gigantic Unilever and I might be a tiny corner shop.
11:04Now, both of us give the prompts and we get the output.
11:07Your output looks exactly like my output.
11:08So, what happens is the small companies are able to effectively now compete against the large companies.
11:14Before you realize, it becomes a sea of sameness.
11:18Everyone's output looks exactly the same.
11:20And because marketers are also…
11:22And do you see that now already?
11:23Do you see it when you scroll through your feeds?
11:25You wouldn't believe I was doing this exercise just about a week back.
11:29I was seeing how many campaigns are using Iceberg as a mnemonic.
11:37Right.
11:37It was more than 100.
11:40Suppose AI gave you a particular campaign which shows Iceberg.
11:45You accepted it.
11:46You ran with it.
11:48Now, when I come in and say I want a thing, it will first refer to its training.
11:53It has learned something from you saying that Iceberg works.
11:56It gives me Iceberg.
11:57I don't know that you have run the same thing.
11:59I say, yeah, this looks good.
12:00Accept it.
12:01Before you know, hundreds of people are using the stupid Iceberg.
12:04And then reinforcing it because hundreds of people are using it.
12:06You are reinforcing it.
12:07The system is learning.
12:08So if this person asks for something like this, that a lot of it is below the surface, let me
12:13give you Iceberg.
12:14Before you know, everyone is running with Iceberg campaigns, which is ridiculous.
12:18Now, that is the biggest opportunity for marketers where, when there is a sea of sameness, original creativity matters.
12:26Innovation and creativity are going to be the biggest differentiators in this age of AI.
12:32Because at the end of the day, it is a human-to-human connection that sells your products and brands.
12:37It is not just efficient and effective communication by itself.
12:41The communication is effective because it is connecting behind the scenes or below the surface.
12:46And now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn Ads, to talk about how to cut the ball spend from your
12:51marketing budget.
12:52LinkedIn's Cut the Ball Spend campaign urges marketers to rethink how they evaluate performance and where their budgets actually drive
12:59impact.
13:00I'm here with Keith Browning, Director of Global Brand Marketing at LinkedIn, to learn more.
13:05How do you define bull spend in practical terms?
13:08So I'd say bull spend is really wasted advertising spend.
13:12It's any investment that leads to a great-looking dashboard.
13:15So the numbers look good, the arrows are going in the right direction.
13:18But really, it's not actually doing anything to drive the business forward.
13:21So it doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
13:23How does LinkedIn help marketers reduce waste and increase efficiency in real terms?
13:28At LinkedIn, you don't have to pay for attention from people who are never going to buy from you.
13:34A mass reach works great if you're selling breakfast cereal, not so much if you're selling CRMs.
13:39That's really where LinkedIn is different.
13:41And do you think that's kind of why we're seeing more of a rise of kind of two trends in
13:45marketing?
13:46One being influencer marketing and kind of co-creation with creators,
13:50and the other being kind of live events and experiential in this kind of sea of sameness we all want
13:56to be doing different things.
13:57That's so true.
13:58So the rise of influencer marketing is basically influencer is working as a filter to me as to what I
14:06should even bother or care to watch.
14:09So you're utilizing that mechanism smartly.
14:11So influencer marketing, I think, will continue for some good time.
14:14Till such time, probably, that everyone becomes an influencer,
14:18and everyone starts creating using AI, which is not too far down the line.
14:23The other part of it is experiences.
14:26Experiential marketing gives you the opportunity to immerse the consumers and tap into all their senses.
14:32I call it multisensory marketing.
14:34Tap into all their senses.
14:35Once you give that experience to the consumer, the consumer will talk about it
14:39and becomes automatically an ambassador of your brand.
14:42And if you invest your money in amplifying the message of that particular ambassador
14:47to reach more and more people of that individual only, you will get a tremendous reach.
14:52And this was a big hypothesis we started with, but then it got proven extremely well.
14:58So much so that now a massive amount of our budget is behind experiences.
15:02You even have like restaurants.
15:04You have...
15:05We have restaurants.
15:05You do live music.
15:07There are 10 passion areas.
15:08For example, you have got sports.
15:10So sports is one huge ocean.
15:13Likewise, we've entered the music.
15:14We've entered the culinary, tourism, shopping.
15:17Each one of these areas, we curate experiences.
15:20And that has done a lot more for our brand than any campaign has ever done for us.
15:26What's an example of a new skill that maybe you've only had to learn relatively recently
15:32that now is kind of table stakes for marketers in this era?
15:36I wrote this book called Quantum Marketing five years back.
15:39And in that, I outlined that there are 24 technologies which are coming at us.
15:43AI is a huge one, but augmented reality is coming.
15:48Multiverses are coming.
15:49Even though they're going through their winter right now, they will come right back.
15:53Blockchains and cryptocurrencies are going to play a significant role.
15:573D printing and so on.
15:58So each one of these, you need to really understand them, not as a technologist,
16:03but they should understand it enough to see the possibilities.
16:07The rate of change which is happening is unbelievable.
16:11So for example, AI, every week, there is something new and something big that's happening.
16:16There's a lot of overwhelm, right?
16:18If you're going to an event like Cannes this year and you're being pitched a Gentic this
16:22and AI powered this, how do you figure out what's real?
16:25So I take the help of AI.
16:28Okay.
16:29So I go to AI and say, look, I'm being overwhelmed.
16:32It will do the filtering.
16:34So you don't have to be overwhelmed because your point is so valid, Laura.
16:38Every single day, there are so many emails which are coming.
16:40Everyone is sending.
16:41The vendors are sending.
16:42And then there are news articles.
16:44And even if you subscribe to the so-called experts in this space, they have got tons
16:49of material and under which there are links that you keep going.
16:52It's a rabbit hole after rabbit hole after rabbit hole.
16:54When do you do your real work?
16:56I use Notebook LM.
16:58I like reading a lot, but I just don't have the bandwidth to read everything.
17:03So I give tonight whatever the material I want to be reviewed.
17:07And tomorrow morning, I switch on the podcast by Notebook LM.
17:11So there are two people who are talking very naturally and they tell me everything I need
17:15to know.
17:15It's stuff like that.
17:16Or if there is a book, new book, which has come, I'll say, hey, is there anything interesting
17:21in this book that I need to understand?
17:22I hope our listeners don't get any ideas and they listen to this from start to finish.
17:26No summaries allowed.
17:27I hope so.
17:29Just while we still have you, I wanted to leave our listeners with a little bit of advice,
17:36particularly people who are just starting out in their marketing careers, or also people
17:40who might be thinking, maybe marketing isn't for me.
17:43I know that there are some stats out there that marketing isn't the most popular degree
17:47course out there right now.
17:48Exactly.
17:49That's true.
17:49Why is there a good reason to go into marketing in 2026?
17:54So I think if you are scared of AI, you should be very scared if you're in other functions
17:59than marketing because they, functions like finance, IT, even human resources, a lot of
18:07functions like payroll and all these things, they are totally automatable and AI can do
18:13a fantastic job.
18:14When AI creates the sea of sameness for all companies, how do companies differentiate themselves
18:21and succeed in the marketplace?
18:23Marketing is going to help them.
18:25So this is the golden era that we are about to enter as far as marketing is concerned,
18:30number one.
18:31And if you want to see the world, marketing is by far the best.
18:35And lastly, I would say that there's always a joy when you see your thoughts taking shape
18:41in front of you.
18:43Marketers do it day in and day out.
18:45They're thinking up of a campaign, they release the campaign, and they're looking at the impact
18:49and how consumers are actually reacting to it.
18:51It is absolute adrenaline.
18:54If you are into video games and you are competitively playing against others, marketing is a live
18:59video game.
19:00Literally, you're playing with brutally aggressive competitors and with constraints, with all
19:06kinds of hurdles thrown in your way.
19:07It's such a fun space and it's a real one.
19:11Now, basically, it's not just some abstract things that you're putting together.
19:14I think marketing is as human as it can get.
19:17You don't get that in payroll?
19:19No.
19:19Roger, thank you so much for joining us on the CMO Insider podcast.
19:23Thank you again, Laura, for having me.
19:25Much appreciated.
19:26And thank you for joining us.
19:28If you enjoyed this conversation, please do like and subscribe.
19:31And if you want to read more marketing content, news, scoops, analysis, you can go to businessinsider.com.
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