00:00I think you're going to see this more and more emerging is that in tech, you're going to start
00:05to connect the product and engineering teams with the marketing teams to start to break down the
00:10silos in these functions. The reason that's that's so important is the consumer in the end
00:16doesn't really understand, right, this is a marketing initiative or this is a product
00:20initiative. In the end, I'm not sure how you can even build your brand without really connecting
00:26your product's value proposition with the brand story you want to tell.
00:35AEO and GEO are huge parts of driving growth in a business and for getting your brand known today.
00:42It all falls under this category that I would call organic growth, right? There's many ways to grow
00:47your business and there's obviously the paid media route that so many people know so well,
00:52but organic growth is a really important mechanism where you can build your business through just
00:58organic searches and more and more those searches are happening in these answer engines and they're
01:03taking a bigger and bigger share of where discoverability is happening. So what's happening
01:09now is there's this whole slew of companies that are creating tools and measurement mechanisms and
01:15platforms to understand what the sources of information are that these answer engines are pulling
01:22information on your brand out of. And we're all getting smarter and smarter because of these tools on where our
01:28brands need to show up. For instance, at Chime for the financial category, one of the things that we're finding
01:34is
01:34that areas like Reddit, YouTube shorts, and a lot of these like paid subscriptions like Business Insider, Politico, some of
01:43these kinds of publications, the information,
01:45are more and more becoming big sources of these answer engines and where they're pulling a lot of their information
01:52from.
01:52The other thing that's really important is these own platforms like your own brand blogs, your website, what kind of
01:59information that you're publishing that's helpful to people.
02:01And it's very important to understand exactly where these answer engines are pulling from.
02:06What's happening now, though, is not only telling us the measurement and where the information is coming from, they're also
02:12starting to tell us what's the next best content to create in different categories.
02:16So what that means is marketers can get more and more intentional now in this world of AEO and GEO
02:24in terms of where exactly to build out your content engine.
02:29So, for example, you may learn that the topics that are most important in the answer engines are something like,
02:36what's the best credit card for me? How do I save the most money?
02:39And how do you intentionally create content there, but not just generally for the web, in the exact destinations from
02:47where the AEO engines are pulling from?
02:48So we have this amazing ability now to not just understand what's feeding the answer engines, but also the topics
02:56that brands need to create content on.
02:57And I think the marketers that are going to win in organic growth in this next era are going to
03:02be the ones that are very intentional about where they use this content and where they create this content.
03:08And that's really where the world's headed in this space.
03:11Recently, my role expanded from chief marketing officer to chief growth and marketing officer.
03:18And the honest truth is, I think the best CMOs see their job as growth.
03:22They see their job as allocating capital as efficiently as possible to drive as much growth as possible.
03:29And the way we allocate capital is brand, direct response, organic growth, all the different areas that people know well.
03:36By leading a product and engineering or at least a piece of the product engineering organization in a tech company,
03:42it allows my role to be able to define the value prop while also telling the story of the brand
03:49concurrently, ensuring that we stay ahead of our competition and we continue to win in the marketplace.
03:54My advice for people that want to be a CMO in the future.
03:57I've got a few things.
03:58Number one is speak like a CFO.
04:02It is so important that as you go up through your career, you don't just understand sort of the minutiae
04:08details of marketing.
04:09That's important.
04:10But you also have to think at an enterprise level.
04:12Understand the P&L of your business.
04:15Understand the unit economics of your marketing.
04:17What are the payback periods of your dollars?
04:19And be able to go into a room with your board, with your investors, with your management team and be
04:26able to connect everything you're doing to the P&L of the business.
04:30That's step one.
04:31The second thing that I think is really important is the career ladder is dead.
04:35It's no longer about a career ladder.
04:37The way you're going to build your career is no longer going to be vertical.
04:40It's going to be horizontal.
04:42So I talk about building a career jungle gym for yourself.
04:45Jump around different parts of an organization.
04:48Go from a marketing role in direct response to a brand role.
04:52Jump from a brand role in brand to maybe a financial analyst role and really understand how to read a
04:56P&L.
04:57I think in this world of AI where knowledge is essentially a commodity, I think most people can be successful
05:04in most roles.
05:05The key is to understand how those functions work so that when you get to the C-suite, you've had
05:12enough horizontal experiences in this career jungle gym to be successful and draw from them and talk as a true
05:18enterprise leader when you get to the C-suite versus just a marketer at the table.
05:23And I think that's what's going to set you up for success.
05:27I think we've been fortunate enough to get like that to be a big leader.
05:27Thank you, everyone.
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