00:00The CMO job is really now three things. It is really about incredible creativity. It is about
00:06great measurement and confidence in how money is getting spent. And it is about figuring out
00:11how to deploy technology to help you. That's a really tough basket of goods and not everyone
00:18has all three of those. And so I increasingly talk to people who recognize which of those
00:23profiles they spike on and therefore what they need to do to build their team. And it's exciting,
00:29but it's also a little bit daunting because it means we all have to own up to what the
00:33things are that we aren't particularly good at ourselves.
00:41The second thing that every CMO is thinking about is how to help their teams get excited
00:45about the opportunity that lies in front of them instead of afraid. It's a really easy narrative
00:51when you listen to the world and what people are talking about to believe that AI is coming for the
00:55jobs, but actually AI is coming for the stuff that nobody likes to do. It's coming for the iterations
01:02on the brief. It's coming for the handoffs and the sign offs and the checks. It's coming for the easy
01:08execution. And it's going to leave time for people to have more great ideas, to try more experimentation,
01:14to write better and more thoughtful things, to be exploring channels that they've never been able to
01:19explore before. But landing that message is hard because there's a lot of uncertainty and teams are
01:24nervous. Obviously at Bain, we spend a lot of our time working with clients on marketing transformations.
01:28And so it's exciting that this year we've actually started thinking about the marketing transformation
01:33of our own. And we're doing exactly what we tell our clients to do. So the clients that are winning
01:39at marketing and AI transformation are two times more likely to run a centralized process within
01:46marketing and four times more likely to be thinking about workflows. And so that's exactly what we're
01:51doing. We are completely reinventing the way that we go to market, starting with getting from a great
01:58idea to better output faster. One of the things that's happened that's interesting with our clients
02:05who are thinking about marketing transformations with AI, it's actually reflective of what's happening
02:10here in Cannes, which is people are no longer talking about AI for the sake of AI. So this is
02:15not,
02:15we have this great new toy or gadget that we want to play with. It's about what do we want
02:19to do,
02:20what's our objective that we're trying to solve, and how do we use technology to do that better.
02:24And there's great examples of this. Some clients are thinking very much about how can we spend
02:29more effectively and efficiently, and what can we use the data for to let us understand how to spend
02:35in ways that we never would have been able to measure before. Some are thinking about pushing
02:39creativity to new limits by being able to create things faster, dimensions that never would have been
02:45able to do get synthetic content into synthetic consumers hands and test it sooner. And some are
02:51thinking about personalization. So how can I take content that we've had years of the ability to do
02:57a segment of one, but we couldn't execute against a segment of one. And so how can I now actually
03:02take
03:02this technology and get better personalized content? Most companies are actually doing a blend of all of
03:07those things. But it's a real pivot to have people talking about using AI to solve a business priority
03:12instead of creating a business priority around AI. Keeping focused on the North Star is hard. We have
03:19a vision, all of our clients have a vision of where we're trying to land, and we have to keep
03:23coming back
03:23to that. And at the same time, we all have to remember that our teams are made up of humans.
03:28And so as
03:28much as the North Star is compelling, people, everyone, the first question that we all ask is,
03:33what does this mean for me? And so we have to find a way to balance the North Star, the
03:38vision of where
03:38we're going with being able to talk about how things will change now and how things will change
03:42in the future and getting people excited.
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