CANNES—A year after the Association of National Advertisers joined forces with the Cannes Lions festival to help “marketers take their industry back,” they were back at Cannes to refine their priorities going forward. The joint CMO Growth Council initiative has boiled those priorities down to improving marketing academia, “upskilling and reskilling” marketing personnel and how to build a better CMO, says ANA President Bob Liodice.
“Everybody needs to grow. Everybody wants to grow. But if you read lots of reports, growth is substandard, is suboptimum,” Liodice says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2019 Cannes Lions confab.
Before joining forces with Cannes, the ANA’s Master’s Circle had already started to develop the Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing and #SeeHer, whose goal is to improve gender equality.
The three priorities that have emerged since then involve “reinventing the academic curriculum and marking students understand what the marketer career can be”; upskilling and reskilling “because most marketers don’t have the skills to compete in this world”; and how to build a better CMO.
“How do you build a CMO that understands the wide span of responsibilities and understands what is necessary to develop their respective organizations?” is the way Liodice explains it. “It’s a very, very complex job and no two CMO’s are alike. They’re like fingerprints.”
Asked by interviewer Joanna O’Connell, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, how to balance “taking back responsibility as a marketer with the role of your partner ecosystem,” Liodice cites the wave of change that has swept the marketing world.
“It starts with a stake in the ground that says it’s the marketer’s agenda, it’s the marketer’s money,” he says. “And when the marketers win everybody wins. Because you generate more resources that can be distributed to the agencies, media publishers, consultants etc.”
Liodice believes that in recent years, that vision had been lost “or at least it had been muted and in some cases almost disintegrated. I’d say over the past decade, that model had changed as the Googles and the Facebooks and the agencies all changed and totally disrupted what the ecosystem looked like.
“The marketers became almost paralyzed, did not necessarily understand how to react as they were dealing in an increasingly non transparent world. And in that non transparency, their ability to navigate and make the ultimate business decisions to build their brands and businesses was frittered away.”
As Liodice was being interviewed, the CMO Growth Council was in the process of figuring out how to prioritize “four big buckets” consisting of data, technology and measurement; brand innovation, creativity and experience; and talent, society and sustainability, which includes equality diversity brand purpose.
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of the CMO Growth Council Summit in Cannes. This series is presented by Teads. For more videos from our series, visit this page. Please find all our coverage from Cannes 2019 right here.
