Oil and gas is pretty interesting to me because very large companies operated and actually still operate today without a CMO. This is how most CMOs last two, three years when they're hired, cuz they're always disappointing, cuz they always seem to not understand the business, and they bring marketing speak, but they don't bring that connectivity that helps grow the business. Passionate people who are engaged and love your company, they're worth everything. Look after them before you look after the brand. They are the brand. If you look in the industry, most of them are engineers or quasi-engineers who've kind of grown into the business. We came from an architectural background, which thinks differently than engineers, is trained differently. I mean, we bought over 300 companies. One of the weird things that happens with us is we buy companies and the people stay, which is the opposite of most other people.
How do you build it? How do you structure it knowing that you have 300 brands to deal with?
We just learned we're never—
Hello and welcome to The Hex Files. Today, I'm excited to welcome David Reid. In industrial markets, growth has traditionally been driven by technology, engineering, and relationships. So, where does marketing fit? Does an industry where everyone knows the customer really need a chief marketing officer? And can marketing actually influence innovation, commercialization, and business growth? David is uniquely qualified to answer those questions.
He serves as CMO and CTO at NOV, one of the world's largest energy technology companies, bringing together deep technical expertise with global commercial leadership. Beyond NOV, David is also the founder of Redeemed, an organization dedicated to raising awareness and mobilizing leaders in the fight against human trafficking. Today, we'll explore the evolving role of marketing in industrial companies, from brand and customer engagement to innovation and what it really takes to drive growth. David, welcome to The Hex Files.
Well, good morning, David. How are you doing today?
I'm doing well. How are you?
Well, I'm having a great day so far, and I'm looking forward to our conversation. Hey, I wanted to dive right into it and ask you: you've spent your career across technology, products, operations, and marketing. When you look at today, what actually drives growth?
Well, it's usually technology that drives growth. I mean, there's obviously market things we can't control, but always being ready for which market you're in, that's usually what drives it across our businesses: in a down market gaining market share, in an up market making sure you get as much as you can and that you're set to deliver on time, on budget starts to matter, and that you get good margins in those spaces. So it's really the market, but you look at the market, then you're ready for the market. So we constantly think in those terms.
So you mentioned kind of market knowledge and technology. So how do they go hand in hand?
How could they not? You know, I think understanding and knowing the market for us—a lot of our markets, B2B is smaller, which is great. You know, you can get to know people, you can understand them and their needs. For us, knowing the customer of the customer's needs is pretty important, where they're going. So, we actually spend quite a bit of time in that space trying to understand that relationship between our customers and their customers, and that helps us to be ready when the markets change.
So you're the chief marketing officer at NOV, and you've been at that position for many years now. Oil and gas is pretty interesting to me because very large companies operated and actually still operate today without a CMO. Do you think the CMO has become an important role in this industry, and can you tell me why in oil and gas a lot of those organizations still don't have one?
Probably what I do is not as similar to other CMOs. So, it's a lot more connected to the market rather than marketing, if that makes sense. But I don't know why people don't do it. They don't do it because there's not a lot of people existing who have fed that model. If you look in the industry, most of them are engineers or quasi-engineers who have kind of grown into the business. So that's kind of—I'm a bit different to that, which is helpful. I came from an architectural background, which thinks differently than engineers, is trained differently, and so the combination of the creative and the technical is very natural to me. But there's not a lot of people like me in the industry.
So in your opinion, what should a CMO in an energy, or oil and gas, and kind of industrial company actually do and own?
I think you kind of have to have been in the business. This is how most CMOs last two, three years when they're hired: because they're always disappointing, because they always seem to not understand the business, and they bring marketing speak, but they don't bring that connectivity that helps grow the business. So if you're not helping grow the business, then you're not doing the right thing. I don't think that's the intention of the role.
And so, yeah, I mean, I started in a repair workshop. You know, you can't learn more than looking at broken things and understanding what it really feels like to experience the product. That helps. And then I've written lots of technical papers over the years. Most people wouldn't have described me as a marketer, which is the best kind of marketer, I believe. They see me as one of them; I fit in. If I understand the business, understand the technology, travel the world constantly, know the market—so I can't just call someone or learn from someone on a phone or on a call. It doesn't work for me. I have to be there, so painful but real. Like you have to go out in the field. And I learned that in the product world as well: when you're developing products, you've got to go and talk to the people using it when it's new and understand what's good and bad about it. So I think all of those things kind of fit in.
The responsibility should be for the business. Now, whether you're actively responsible for it or not is an influence game. But you don't have to be responsible for it all. You don't have to have everyone listen to you. And you have to listen more than you do tell. And then you just respond and say, "Okay, where's the opportunity? How do we communicate with these people?" You know, if you've never actually communicated with your customer, then how are you meant to really know how to communicate with them? So, it's learning what works.
For me, I mean, I've kind of grown into these roles cuz being more of a creative than a technical, even though I understand the technical. And so then it's more understanding the interrelationship of everything and being able to throw away all the rules and go, "Okay, what works?" I don't care about what everyone does. I know in our marketing group, I tell them, "We're not interested in what anyone in our business does. They're not the best at doing this. We're going to go look at the best in the world, and we're going to compete with it and compete with ourselves," try and constantly improve. And improving doesn't mean it looks cool. Doesn't mean it feels good. It means that it works. It grows business.
You mentioned looking at what's best in the world. The world is big, and the market is big. Do you have a specific kind of example or role model? Is it in the B2B space, or are you actually looking abroad and looking at the Amazons of the world?
Like, I mean, we built a role as a storyteller. We had an engineer who was good at writing music and making films, which is a very interesting combo, and probably was in the wrong job and studied the wrong thing. So I took him to Disney originally. I have friends in Disney and Pixar and all these places just to learn—I wanted to learn more how to manage someone like that, but also how do they engage people. So they were great. They walked us through how you get funding from your leadership, which was surprising. They showed us things where, like, this is completely fake, but we use it to get the leadership engaged, and when they get engaged, we get funds. So it was one of the most important things was learning the importance of funds: people will invest if they see value and if they get connected to it. And so that was an interesting learning.
So there's that. And then there's other businesses. Loads of people invite me to CMO dinners and presentations, and I've been to a couple, but I realized I'm not like them, and I learned the really good CMOs don't go to those things. They don't need to. So I just started making dinners and lunches with people who I wanted to know. So brands outside, all over the spectrum, just to see what they do—airports, sports teams, food products—just sitting with people and asking, "What do you do?" In some inside of our business, our customer's customer had some of their marketers, just got them all together and worked out what I needed to know. And that's what I've learned: if you spend your time building relationships with people who can help you—the first job they gave me was chief sales officer, which is very odd. I'm not really a salesperson, but I turned it into kind of a strategy job.
Immediately gathered people around the world. A software company built us an interface so that everyone I knew in all these large brands could have a place to talk, which in those days didn't exist, right? So we had a digital space where friends and families around the world that I knew who were in great brands just got together and helped me do my job every day, which was great. But I think finding the best of the best—I happened to have started in Silicon Valley, living in Santa Cruz area, and in the '80s all my friends moved into really great brands and products, and so I had them available. And I had family members all over doing interesting things, so I just got them all together. And that's the idea: building connection and relationships. Sometimes you have them already; sometimes you need them. I had some intelligence people from the government that were just useful to have to talk to and ask questions. And so it doesn't end, the curiosity. And as I've traveled the world, I have good networks everywhere. So always learning, always gathering, always tweaking, like how do you do better at this? Never satisfied.
You know, I do attend some of those CMO conferences and such, and I agree with you. What you get out of it is sometimes not what you're expecting. You mentioned getting some good ideas from various people. Do you have an example of something you got out of it and you could implement?
So many. I mean, most of them, sometimes correction. Early on, everyone believed we had some great stories of things we'd done: the big oil spill that happened in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, we were the company that fixed everything, and everyone was like, "You should do some PR." It was an interesting conversation. I'm like, "We don't do PR right now. Everything on that vessel that sunk was ours, but we're not telling people that. They all are thinking BP, Transocean—those are the brands and the names they know, not us." But everything—I was part of the design, so I actually did a lot of the offshore design of equipment, so I knew the rigs in and out. But they were all advising you should get positioned. I'm like, "It's oil and gas. People naturally don't like us. We don't." So that's a good conversation to wrestle through and say, "Maybe we're wrong, maybe we should." But then they all got there and they're like, "No, you're right, you're right. If you look at it, people are looking to throw stones more than they're going to love you." So as long as we're—because we have very strong positions in all of our brands, and it's not because the general public knows us. People don't know NOV at all, which is great, because the people we've got a high market share with, we get the talent we want. So all the arguments that people would give you traditionally didn't work. So that was good to start with.
I think developing technical leaders has been—it took me not that long to work out that it's human beings that matter. When I first had the guy making films, my friend at Disney was just so helpful because I just didn't know how to manage someone like that. And the guidance was, for creatives, they guard and protect creatives, which is really interesting. So I learned the same. Most people think executors and the people who can do the project, manage the project, execute, get it done, but they don't think that their creative is their most valuable asset, which it is. So protecting them has been one of the best pieces of advice I've ever had: create environments for them, create environments for people to engage with them who can fund you more, serve the upper leadership well. All leaders are creative, so give them something to connect to and to share with people.
In Disney, they had a wall that was all—they were in the middle of Frozen, I think, at the time. They created this storyboard with like little squares on it of scenes that were almost hand-drawn, and you would see the scene develop eventually into the actual scene. The guy I brought there was staring at that wall for ages while I was talking to my friend, and he eventually said, "What do you think you're looking at?" And he goes, "This is your process. I wanted to understand your process." And he goes, "This is a total fake. This isn't our process. This is to stop people walking in this room and talking to the creatives. It makes them look at the wall. Someone outside makes these. This has got nothing to do with our—our process is not as structured as this is. But this gives people an experience and a story to tell, but it's not how we do it." And it was really interesting for us to go: storyboards are really interesting, not because we need them to do the work; we need them to communicate to get buy-in.
So we actually—I came back and did some physical art with everybody. We all just sat around and made some art with no purpose. Eventually, it actually became a show that we did that was highly engaging and different. Everyone just painted, but I got to see their physical skills. And from it, we developed a leader who basically does what I call performance art to get engineers to do things they would never do, because she draws in front of them and it just blows their minds. They feel engaged. There's something that happens seeing something being created in front of you.
So, yeah, lots of things grew out of that learning that made it highly valuable. Then I had to learn that I was doing too much focusing on the creative, so that everyone else felt like people who weren't creative were trying to be creative when I needed them to be structural and delivering and managing process. So there's a lot of learning in that.
But, yeah, it's really how do you get output? For us, what we learned is we could never have bought this from an agency and got the kind of results we get. And all of our team coming out of the operations with creative skills—not all, but a lot of them—which really, really helped that connectedness to product. And so we ended up making film pieces that people in the industry were like, "We never realized." Like, they're showing love between a person and a machine, showing things that you wouldn't imagine, uncovering ways of filming and ways of capturing and motivating that people didn't have these emotions about work or about production, but they managed to dramatize.
And the other great piece of advice at that time was to always give your top creatives—to never have them repeat what they're doing. So I would create kind of more of a production system behind them to do the same thing again, but never ask them to do it twice. Ask them to create every day. And so they've come up with all sorts of things. And sometimes we do things that are not to do with a product, which—one of my bosses came once and asked about a film we released. It was downtown in a cinema. It was nothing to do with our business. And he's like, "This is a terrible waste." And I'm like, "Well, I don't know. Is it? I mean, how are you liking what we're doing?" Like, "Well, we love it. It's unmatched." I'm like, "Yeah. So, sometimes we got to do these things, you know? We got to do creative projects that are not anything to do with our business."
And so, did you manage to do that in kind of a structured way, or is it more something that is almost inside the corporate culture?
Well, a corporate culture isn't a thing. I don't know that humans work like that. But we certainly have a cultural group that knows discovery is important. And it was really after that we started a film process. How that film came about was we just were questioning, and we did a lot of interviews of former CEOs and people just trying to learn how—because we're made up of lots of small companies. So, we were telling that story, and it led to another story. Another thing we learned was that stories are just—they're not something you make; they're something you discover. So, we were in this discovery process, and it led us down a road, and it just happened to not be core to the business.
On my 30-year anniversary, they made this—they clearly had spent a few days filming this very funny piece for me. And just knowing when I saw it, just knowing that they knew they could do that—we run quite a structured system of how many hours we put into everything, but they all knew they could stop and make a creative piece that was hilarious, that involved the whole team. And of course, all our actors are our people. That's the one thing we learned: we never need to hire—not never, we have hired actors from time to time—but generally our people are actors, because this new generation acts every day on their social media. So we've learned that. And so our resources are usually just our own people, which is great. People are always asking, "Where'd you get these actors?" You're like, "Well, those are our people. They all have day jobs, but they love doing it when we take time out."
So I think the first thing I ever saw was we had an animation that we needed to do, and the team were like, "Hey, this animation isn't going to get done for this guy Scott." And I'm like, "Well, this guy Scott works for the CEO, who asked him for this, so you don't get to not do it." And they were like, "Oh, well, what are we going to do?" I'm like, "I don't know. I'm sure you'll come up with something, but we have two days." Couldn't do an animation. So, they made this fake ad. It was for an internal communication. And so, they took two popular ads of the day, repeated the joke of it and the technique, and just made this very funny, engaging piece. And I'm like, "How long did that take you?" Like, "24 hours." I'm like, "Okay, every month I want you to produce one of these fake ads about our products." And they did. We had no purpose; ultimately, we did a live show that became the ads that ran in between when we were changing people on the show. But everyone's like, "How is—" It's that level of not knowing that's really important: curiosity and excitement. And we don't know we're going to do it, because if we do all our work in a month, we know we can produce one of these quickly, and we all love doing it, so let's do that. And it becomes a part of the structure and the system.
So I think it's looking for unconventional ways. We started with what we called Friends Day Friday once every couple weeks, and one of the members would bring their family in and make a breakfast that was from their tradition or whatever that is. After about a year of that, I asked people, "What's the most efficient thing we do?" And they're like, "Is it our production software? Is it our—" they were coming up with these ideas. And I'm like, "No, Friends Day Friday, because it saves us time. Because when we're all being human and we understand each other—we don't have to love each other all the time, but we do need to respect and understand each other—that takes away all of this thought pattern of, 'Who are they? I don't like them, they don't like me,' whatever the stuff that happens. When you humanize people, we produce better, we're happier, we enjoy working with each other. So when you build that in, it's an efficiency driver, even though it seems very soft and, 'Why are we doing this? We're just having breakfast together.'"
So it's a lot of testing and trying, and they all know that's the environment. They all know they can try anything crazy.
And you usually see this type of initiative in smaller groups where you have one office, one place and you can do these Friends Day Fridays. How are you able to actually scale that to a larger organization? Because NOV has places all over.
They just know. In Europe, we had scattered people, and we've moved into one larger group in one city. So Plymouth in England won; that's where it ended up being. They had probably three or four people already, so they had a little community. They were part of one of our businesses, and so we just kept building that out. So when we'd lose someone in Denmark or Holland or Norway, we'd be like, "Okay, well, let's rebuild over here." And that's because isolated people—it is really hard. What they'll do is they'll build into the culture of the place they are, so we still have some of that, which is okay. And so what we do when we gather them, like in Europe, we get everyone together; we'll bring them in from the different countries.
But it is harder. It's harder if a person's isolated off in a business. But once you do it, once you gather people, you invest in that. Sometimes we'll bring some of them over here. Those things are so valuable: the human interaction and relationship. I mean, we still on Mondays get together, the whole team, on a call for 30 minutes. And sometimes it's 5 minutes, sometimes it's 10, but we see each other and we connect. That's still a part of the culture. It grew out of COVID, but no one wanted to stop. They just like getting together and seeing each other and catching up a little bit. And so it's all open to change or try something else or do something else. But usually there's a few people in the group who—that's their skill. I don't come up with these things.
So we never really came back to the office, which was—the whole company was forced back to the office, and I'm like, "Well, not my team." So my boss came to visit me one day and said, "You know, your team is the worst." And I was like, "The worst at what?" "The worst at coming in. We log in the building when people come in, and yours are the least attending." I was like, "Well, how is their work?" "Well, their work's great." And I went, "Then why are we even talking? Does it matter? I don't care when they do the work." They're only required—we did have a lunch. We kind of tried to set, "Here's a lunch once a week that we all go to." And it turned into what's now called the Yap Bar, which is a 30-minute to an hour getting together at the coffee spot on Thursdays. Today, everyone just gets together, and they take pictures of each other and send it around, and you just build this culture of doing those kind of things.
And then we'll go see, like in the summertime, the Plymouth crowd will be here. We are by the water at lunch just doing something fun, going out for afternoon tea. They'll do stuff and they'll share pictures and culturally know that's cool because that's who we are. We have an opposite effect inside the company because we're all small companies. So people will do really kind things for someone, like someone in the group—they'll either save up some money to help them with something, or there was a tornado ran through somewhere in Oklahoma, someone's family's house; the whole plant shut down, they all went up and started working on repairing the house.
And they all, though, in the company—we find that they all think they're the only people, because this is a big corporation. They think they're the sneaky only group who's human, but they're all that way. They all have it in them; you find it everywhere. We had a weird learning inside the company that the culture is the same—not identical, but similar traits, like everyone describes it the same way. We actually caught it on film, which was great because we studied it and everyone was kind of saying the same things, and then our film guy ran around maybe seven or eight parts of the world, and people finished their own sentences. It's the weirdest film, cuz we never taught them to say that. We never had a company, "This is who we are," but they all said the same things about the company. It was fascinating.
So you mentioned a few things that are very interesting. First, you said NOV is not doing any branding, and we surely don't do any PR. Tell me, if you're looking at any CMO or any marketing thing, they would have a silo around public relations or media relations. So tell me what the reasoning is behind it.
It just didn't have value. The thing we kept looking at was when you start down that road, you've created that road. So now crisis management—every crisis that comes up blows up because you've done PR work, and the reason you convince yourself to do it was usually, for a B2B, you'll scratch under the surface and they go, "Well, it helps us get good people." It's like, we don't have a problem. We have good culture, so we don't have a problem getting good people because people meet people from the company, they like them, they want to know more about the company. There's a natural attraction to the company. Our reputation is pretty good.
Now, we do a lot of social media. We don't do any advertising, but we do a lot of social media, and we try and generate that out of our employees, which most people who study it look at us and go, "How are you getting so much positive out of your employees?" And we just didn't stop them. There was a time when all the lawyers got involved and said, "Please shut down everyone on social media. It's too dangerous." And I said, "No." And they were really shocked. We did originally have three or four pretty bad things happen, but then it kind of stopped.
I remember the lawyers coming to me and saying, "Hey, we have this person. They released—" So we buy companies; we don't tell people that we buy companies, which is also an odd behavior of ours. And so we bought this company, and someone got excited and made a post. And so the legal department was like, "Look at this. That's against their employment contract. They've released something we don't want to release to the world, so we want you to fire that person." And I was like, "No, because if we do, then everyone stops posting, and I need them posting because I can't buy that. I can't buy that feeling safe to say things about the company in public. We're going to go talk to the person. That's what's going to happen, and they'll stop doing it. And then we'll tell people, 'Hey, make sure you don't do that.'"
It's the same as brand management around the world. Like the more extreme: we go to Argentina, we had some crazy brand things happening. We had new brand guidelines, and it's Argentina, you know? So I went around and took pictures. I was very encouraging to them all. They put the Argentinian soccer team on the side of their trucks, which I'm sure isn't legal, but it's Argentina. They love their soccer team; it's Messi. They were pretty excited about it. So I took a picture of me pretending to be in this huddle and just being positive about it. And so I came back to the team and I said, "Look at them." They're like, "Oh, this is horrible." And I went, "It's not horrible. These are crimes of passion. These are people who love the brand. If they have the wrong thing, it's because we didn't communicate it well enough. They're trying to do the right thing; they just didn't have access. So it's on us. We never blame someone who's doing a logo wrong. They're doing it because they're excited, and they want to do it, they want to show it, they want to have it on things." If anything, we have too many logos on things. So you have to allow a certain amount of freedom, as well as then a constant aligning, because the brand book says, you know, it doesn't even work if you do that.
end of the world. And so you become the most hated people in the company when people are doing it because they love the brand and they want to get it right. So assuming they're bad people is like the worst position to put yourself in as a brand manager when you have passionate people. Same as stopping them in social. It's like let them go out there and get it wrong, and then let's train as much as we can. Let's do lots of, "Hey, I know you want to do it. Here's a good way to do it," you know, and encourage: "You know, that's really exciting that you did that."
We have a brand we bought years ago, and it has this alligator holding a piece of pipe. And it got, you know, it's gone. It doesn't exist, but it started turning up on trucks. I found them in Argentina and I'm like, wow. [laughter] I haven't even seen that logo in years. So, I mean, it's all cool. You're like, who cares that there's an alligator with a piece of pipe? They're excited, you know? So, you know, let's give them things. So even old brands, like we encourage people to make t-shirts, hats, and stickers forever on the old brands. I mean, we bought over 300 companies and someone came from one of those companies. One of the weird things that happens with us is we buy companies and the people stay, which is the opposite of most other people. And then they love their old brand.
I came into Varco and we became NOV. When we became NOV, it was like there were people going around shops looking for someone who had the old brand stuff and just taking it away. And I kept lots of it; I still have it up in my office. I'm like, that's ridiculous. Like, we should love the brands we came from. I was up in the north of Norway and they're like—I said, "Do you have any old logo stuff?" And they're like, "Oh, no, no, we got rid of all of it." I'm like, "No, I want to see it. You should do it. You should be excited about it." And then they were like, "Oh, well, actually we do." You know, I collect stickers from them because I know they have them, you know, because they love the old brand, whatever it is, and they should love it, you know. So I think it's just thinking differently about it, and passionate people who are engaged and love your company, they're worth everything. Look after them before you look after the brand. They are the brand.
