Chief Marketing & Communications Officer, Accenture
Stop Forcing Marketing Into False Binaries ft. Jill Kramer of Mastercard
Marketing Vanguard continues its Cannes 2026 series as host Jenny Rooney sits down with Jill Kramer, Chief Marketing and ...
About Jill Kramer
Jill Kramer, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Accenture, has spoken about the evolving role of the CMO, emphasizing the importance of staying close to new trends and technologies. She has stated that marketers should not "freelance out" their understanding of trends, but instead "get hands-on" and maintain proximity to technology and techniques. Kramer has described a personal shift from being "incredibly intimidated" by data to now viewing it as a primary tool, saying she "can't wait to get my hands on it." She has also discussed generative AI, suggesting that marketers should move past worry to consider "what might be possible" with the technology, and has described AI as a "critical component" in personalizing communications at Accenture. In 2022, Kramer announced Accenture's investment in nature-based carbon removal projects, stating the company is "making significant progress to be net zero by 2025." She described the program as promising to "physically remove over 13 million metric tons of carbon" over 20 years through reforestation and sustainable agriculture. In other interviews, Kramer has advocated for accountability in culture, stating that "culture is moving back toward being accountable for what you stand for, what you say, and what you do." She has also commented on B2B marketing, arguing that creativity should not have a "lower bar" due to complexity and that technology and data can give creative teams "more time to be creative."
Transcript (40 segments)
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Jill Kramer0:00
AI can make it better. AI can draw our focus back to the core creative idea, back to the insight, back to deeply knowing our customers and our consumers in a way that we owe them to know them. I think that but it can make sure we're really focused on big ideas instead.
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Jenny Rooney0:24
Hi everyone and welcome to the Marketing Vanguard podcast live from Cannes. I'm actually doing vidcast with my special CMO guest here today. I'm Jenny Rooney with Adweek and I'm thrilled to be joined by Jill Kramer at MasterCard. Jill, welcome.
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Jill Kramer0:37
Thank you so much for having me and what a great spot, even though we're a little bit sweaty. It's a little toasty. But it's a great spot to be together and I'm very happy to be here.
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Jenny Rooney0:46
Well, I was we were just remarking on the fact that we were together at the Marketing Vanguard Summit in Chicago last month but this is sort of a fun continuation-ish of that extraordinary conversation that we had. So
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Jill Kramer0:58
Great conversation and great learning. That Summit was really good learning and, you know, being new in role, I'm very much in a learning mode and same thing I'm looking for here, but that was an important part of my journey. So I'm grateful to you for that.
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Jenny Rooney1:13
Well, I did not know and I didn't tell her to say that but I appreciate that tremendously because we love that feedback. I mean, that's what we hope to have.
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Jill Kramer1:20
All want to be provoked to think a little bit more. We're so forced to be so responsive and reactive and anytime you get the privilege of having a minute to think, it's a gift. So
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Jenny Rooney1:33
Excellent. Well, that's wonderful to hear and thank you for being a part of it because obviously you dropped some incredible pearls of wisdom as well. So let's talk about Cannes. I mean we're here.
Is this your
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Jill Kramer1:44
Second. So my first time was four years ago. I was on the inaugural B2B jury.
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Jenny Rooney1:48
Okay.
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Jill Kramer1:49
Which was fantastic. It was soul-gratifying. And to watch other people defend passionately work because they so believe in the idea and the courage and the conviction of the team who did it, I loved it. But in my essential role, it always overlapped with other important meetings. I never quite got here. So it's nice to be back and to be back looking through a different lens with MasterCard.
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Jenny Rooney2:15
While Cannes keeps celebrating creativity at the highest level, while AI is quietly reshaping how creativity gets made, are we in a genuine golden age or is there something more complicated happening beneath the surface?
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Jill Kramer2:30
You know, I think things are always a little bit more complicated than we want them to be, but I think it's an important decision point for marketing, for businesses, for brands, and for key leaders in the space. I mean, you sit, I sat in the award ceremony last night and you look at the work, you look at how our jury presidents talk about the work and why they were advocating and recognizing it. And it's just such an ultimately human craft, but AI can make it better. AI can draw our focus back to the core creative idea, back to the insight, back to deeply knowing our customers and our consumers in a way that we owe them to know them. So I think that but it can make sure we're really focused on big ideas instead. So I think it's both things. You have to use the tool for where it best serves you, but you have to also recognize the art that always will be an art.
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Jenny Rooney3:31
Yeah, absolutely. No, I love that. So, McKinsey just confirmed brand building is back as the number one CMO priority going into 2026. After years of being overshadowed by performance marketing, does that feel like a vindication and what finally shifted the conversation inside your organization?
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Jill Kramer3:50
You know, MasterCard, I can say as a 6-7 month veteran, they are a very brand centric organization. And I think the decisions that they've made over the past several years reflect that. But I do think, you know, there's always pendulum swings. It's not a bad thing that we learned to talk the performance talk and we learned to make sure back in the day when I worked at BBDO, the mantra was the work works. You know, at MasterCard knowing what I do after 6-7 months, it's always been a company and a culture that reveres its brand and loves its brand. But I do think a lot of companies and a lot of cultures were on that pendulum swing from brand to performance.
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Jenny Rooney4:31
Yes. But it's never one or the other. It's never one extreme or the other just like it's not creativity or AI.
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Jill Kramer4:36
But how did the narrative get so oddly bifurcated? Like I don't understand.
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Jenny Rooney4:40
There was always a time maybe when marketers wanted what we did to be so magical that there wasn't necessarily the transparency and the accountability always and that, you know, creates a whiplash effect to the other direction and you can merge that with the transition to digital media and there actually is data behind it. I mean, I think about my early tenure at Accenture where everything was static out of home posters in airports to the ability to target very specific buyers with our vast catalog of capabilities. Of course, there's going to be a difference. But you never want to go all or nothing in every area. And you know, you hear that conversation out. I 1,000% agree with that report. I think companies and marketing leaders are all saying the same thing. That's a truism. I think though we stand to do it again in other channels. This channel is dead. This channel is the only thing. It's not search. It's LLM. So for some reason we keep trying to do the polar opposite argument instead of yet well everything we do is actually in the gray area. It's in the soft emotional middle but yet we let our craft be talked about in exacting terms. It's kind of a weird thing if you think about it. Marketers are not good marketers, so that's the problem. Are they not? Marketing has a marketing problem as we've heard before over the years.
No, it was interesting. I talked to a CEO recently of a company who has multiple retail brands and she really admitted, you know, as a CEO there had been less attention paid to brand and an investment in brand strategy and investment in brand building and that they had really pivoted so far into performance marketing that they had lost ground and that this is the CEO who's admitting it and saying I need to embolden my CMOs with frankly more ability and budget and wherewithal to go further with brand building and brand marketing. Maybe that was the purpose of that journey, right? CFOs and CEOs now have more skin in the game, more of a stake in our success and that's maybe the right outcome. For sure. So tell me about a creative bet that made some people in the room uncomfortable and whether it ultimately paid off and it can be here or elsewhere. And it's interesting though Jill because you're so new in seat at MasterCard, you're probably thinking about this day in day out. Time is everything, context is everything, so you want to start to make creative bet, take some risks, make some big bold moves, but what needs to happen for you personally to be able to get to that place?
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Jill Kramer7:20
Well, you know, I think there's so many things about that concept. First of all, creativity takes place in many parts of our process, so I think one of the biggest creative bets that I reflect back on these six months is that in my third week I asked the entire team to come together to take a look at re-prioritizing to a couple of things that even that early on we could all say we agree with the most important thing and could we work entirely new ways against those couple of priorities. And I do look back at that and I'm like, what were you thinking? It was literally week three. And yet it did work. It worked not only for the team to say, yes, these are important to all of us. Let's have a different conversation. Let's collaborate differently. But it also worked for the business for every facet and every different stakeholder I had at the leadership table to go, yeah, that makes sense. And I say that because that was more maybe strategic creativity, but sometimes prioritization is the greatest enemy of creativity. And so having that rigor in that place, so that was a creative idea the way that we brought people together, being able to say, let's come away with just a couple things. Taking that back to the business so early on. And part of that was because I wanted that purity of view before it went away. And then that has now led to new work that we're doing that's awesome that will be, I hope, strong bold bets against a really iconic platform that the early creative strategy decisions helped create that potential for that.
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Jenny Rooney8:59
Absolutely. How do you think about splitting your energy? And again, this is interesting for you because you're newly in seat. Splitting your energy between actual marketing leadership and the internal work, the budget cycles, cross-functional alignment, making the case for your team that come with that role. So it's that balance, right? Making sure that you are staying up here, building sort of foundationally the company culture, you know, in lockstep with your C-level peers, but also making sure that you're on top of what's happening internally.
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Jill Kramer9:35
That's a happy place for me because that's always the way I work. And I learn it's like waves. There's the 30,000 foot view and then sometimes I make people really uncomfortable because I'm like, can I do that project with you? And then it goes, now I see things differently. And then I come back up. That just has been the way I've always worked my entire career. But I do think right now in this moment, leadership cannot be a step away because of the technology change. You have to have your hands on because of the speed of decisions. You can't wait for someone else to get you up to speed. And finally, because of the accountability that you have to have, you can't be two steps away. So I think the leaders that will thrive right now are leaders that can go high and can go deep and they actually love the process of both.
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Jenny Rooney10:16
So then therefore, what's a leadership habit that you had to intentionally move away from to become more effective and what has replaced it?
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Jill Kramer10:25
Yeah. So, I learned a lot from my time at Accenture because I came in as the head of advertising, then brand, then CMO. So you have a different posture at a company when you have worked your way up the ladder. I'm also an agency person, so I always have that service orientation. And those two things probably worked a little against me in terms of making sure that the volume of things that I was personally invested in and doing. So it's a good thing about changing jobs as you say, you know what? I'm going to reset on this. These are all the things that helped me get here and this one will be a barrier if I do it again. So really going in and trusting, it doesn't hurt that the MasterCard team is exceptional. So trusting those individuals, knowing that the best thing I can do is enable them, talk to them, listen to them, prompt them, push them a little further when necessary, but I don't have to rebuild it. I have to advise on it while still doing the projects that I'm going to keep close to my heart and do with my own two hands.
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Jenny Rooney11:30
That is the way, you're building your own, I mean you have reputation, but you're building your own reputation now at MasterCard.
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Jill Kramer11:36
You know, new whole new game.
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Jenny Rooney11:37
Be mindful of that for sure. If a sharp 25-year-old marketer asked you today whether to go brand side, agency side, or just build something themselves, what would your honest answer be?
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Jill Kramer11:47
Say both. Because I think that when you go both sides, the key is in understanding and empathy. And when you've sat on both sides of that table, you see things differently. I mean, all of my agency years, I would think, well, these clients are crazy. Why did they change that? Why did they adjust? And you have no idea the machinations that are going on behind the scenes that those teams are trying to keep up with. And conversely, when you're on the brand side, you're like, the agency didn't get it right. And it's like, wait, did we ask ourselves what we did wrong? What was missing in the relationship?
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Jenny Rooney12:20
It's any relationship. And then when it comes to like build something on your own, more power to you. I say if you have that vision in your head, you go for it. Yeah.
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Jill Kramer12:30
So all of the above.
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Jenny Rooney12:31
You're on the Croisette, surrounded by some of the best work in the world. What's one conversation you think this industry is still avoiding, but really needs to have?
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Jill Kramer12:39
We have to stop the conversation that we have on the extremes. We really do. We have to stop with this is in, this is out, this is the best thing since sliced bread, this is dead, you know, and we have to
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Jenny Rooney12:54
Marketers love to talk. I mean, that's what the test would do.
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Jill Kramer12:57
We have to talk more about the work. Like I enjoyed every minute. I was so jet lagged and I was so tired, but I was alive in that awards presentation listening to the work be presented and just be inspired.
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Jenny Rooney13:10
Well, thank you. You inspire me. Thank you for being here.
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Jill Kramer13:13
Thank you for having me.
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Jenny Rooney13:14
I hope to see you again very, very soon. And in the meantime, thanks for joining me. Enjoy the rest of your week and I'll talk to you soon. Ciao.
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Jill Kramer13:20
Well. Thank you so much.
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Narrator13:23
Thank you for listening to Marketing Vanguard, part of the Adweek Podcast Network and Acast Creator Network. You can listen and subscribe to all of Adweek's podcasts by visiting adweek.com/podcasts. Stay updated on all things Adweek Podcast Network by following us on Twitter at @adweekpodcast. And if you have a question or suggestion for the show, send us an email at [email protected]. Thanks for listening.