Lions Live 2020: Four CMOs discuss four future actions that will deliver growth

On the fifth and final day of Lions Live, four CMOs explored four proposed future actions that will deliver growth.

 

Marc Prtichard, chief brand officer, P&G, Mathilde Delhoume, global brand officer, LVMH, Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communications officer, MasterCard and Julia Goldin, EVP and chief marketing officer, Lego Group, focused on one area each.

 

Pritchard went first. 

 

Fostering sustainable societies

 

Society and sustainability

 

On day four of Lions Live, Pritchard spoke about the efforts P&G have made to face Covid-19 and eliminate racism. 

 

Adding to that, Pritchard called on the industry to make a real difference, by saying, “We reach everyone on the planet multiple times with our advertising, content and the media on which we advertise. We reach every person on the planet with our products. So, our industry can make a real difference in terms of driving equality and inclusion. So, I want to outline four things that we can do.”

 

1: Eliminate racism, bias and stereotypes in all our advertising and content. That means we want to ensure we have a 100 per cent representation of all humanity - gender, race, ethnicity, religion, socio economic status and age. We'll measure that through a gender equality measure. We'll publish our results as an industry.

 

2: Eliminate content that's hateful and discriminatory on all broadcasters, publishers and digital platforms. We don't want to have advertising on or near content which is demonstrating such activities. 

 

3: We need to have equality in our representation and economic investment throughout what we call our creative supply chain across our brands, companies, agencies, suppliers as well as behind the camera production crews. Since the population of the world is 50-50 men and men, we'd want the same ratio. Across areas like the USA, we need multicultural representation which includes Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans. We expect every company to look at their country and where they live to reflect the population fairly. That will also require investment in those businesses. We'll measure this too.

 

4: Stop climate emergency. Use voices to drive a behaviour change through our brands. We can impact this and develop ways to do this. 

 

Driving more human brand experience 

 

Mathilde Delhoume, global brand officer, LVMH, stated one motto and three priorities to drive more human brand experiences. 

 

The motto was to reframe marketing and shift it from B2B and B2C to become BFH (brands for humans). 

 

She then listed the three priorities:

 

1: Redefine the CMO role. We want the CMO to lead the entire company in understanding humans and deliver brand values to people’s lives through acts not just ads. All these are fuelled by creativity and innovation. Covid-19 has been a catalyst to put the CMO at the forefront as it was the moment when brands could help humans with meaningful acts. We can do the same force on multiple projects.

 

2: Fostering authentic human connections. Going into deep insights and combining them with big data. Don't be just data crunchers, become data alchemists. 

 

3: Get a universal measure of brand value. We need to protect our brands against short termism and we have to provide them a holistic measure of brand value. 

 

Harnessing the true promise of data and tech

 

Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communications officer, spoke about the importance of data and tech as he believed they will be the real drivers for growth in marketing in the near future. 

He spoke about three mandates that the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) will be focussed on:

 

1: Implementing industry wide data and tech standards

 

"A zillion martech companies are here. There's no universal standard of comparing one with the other or evaluating our own performance. It's very fragmented. We have to get universal standards so that we can compare apples to apples. In doing so we have to leverage the wonderful work that's already being done by other organisations such as Media Ratings Council, Alliance for Audited Media.”

 

2: Cultural transformation empowered by data and tech

 

“Take the best practices from the industry for CMOs to navigate and steer the transformation in their respective workplaces. Data is just not the priority of CMOs, nor tech or IT. You have to democratise it and make it accessible to everyone while having all the precautions. This is something which will be critical and what we're doing for this mandate is to heavily leverage ANA's newly formed division of tech and data. We're leaning on that and taking advantage of it.”

 

3: Create an industry road map about how we're going to navigate in a cookie less world.

 

“Transparency and access of data must be a continued focus for the industry. Consumers are very touchy about their privacy. There are already legislations which are coming around the world with a view to protect a consumer. As an industry it’s important for us to communicate the value of data back to the customers itself. You can serve them so much more efficiently and effectively with this. You need to have transparency though.”

 

Unlock the full potential of talent and make significant changes in the industry

 

Julia Goldin, EVP - chief marketing officer, Lego Group, spoke about how CMOs can help unlock the full potential of talent. 

 

She said, “For talent development in marketing organisations you have to see how the events that happened recently have had a major impact. It's a wake-up call for the fraternity. We need to make sure that the talent is also diverse. We have identified two big actions - in how we recruit and develop our talent. Each company can do this. We can achieve this fully if we all work together to make sure we're diversifying the recruitment force. We need to create universal benchmarks throughout the economic systems. Diversity doesn't come easy in the organisation. Over the last few weeks we've had global campfires to embrace what it actually means. Transform developed marketing capabilities in order to develop marketers and enable them to have long term career paths. We have to see where we are post Covid. We have a real role to play as CMOs of companies by helping educational institutes develop curriculum.”