Kellyn Smith Kenny: Redefining the CMO scorecard

🎥 Oct 07, 2019 📺 Spencer Stuart ⏱ 0m 👁 612 views

Kellyn Smith Kenny, CMO of Hilton, talks about the importance of redefining success as a CMO.

About Kellyn Kenny

In a 2020 interview, Kellyn Smith Kenny, then CMO of Hilton, discussed the importance of redefining success metrics for marketing leaders. She argued that focusing on return on ad spend (ROAS) can lead to acquiring cheap but transactional customers who require repeated spending to retain. Kenny advocated instead for prioritizing lifetime value and brand building, stating that "if you can focus on lifetime value and brand building...you're going to be much better off." She described redefining "hero metrics" and achieving a holistic return on investment as crucial. Kenny also addressed the rapid pace of innovation in marketing, saying that "if you're standing still for a year, you're gonna find yourselves ten years left behind." She noted that more innovation had occurred in the previous half decade than in the prior two hundred years. To keep up, she emphasized the need for a blend of data and intuition, stating that "the answer is not in the spreadsheet" and that "the spreadsheet is never going to tell you what's gonna happen six months from now."

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Transcript (1 segments)

Kellyn Kenny0:00

We need to redefine the scorecard. That's really where I was going with the narrative. You get into a conversation with the CFO and it's ROAS, return on ad spend. We've actually done a nice job in the past year getting people to not focus on ROAS because it leads you to get the cheapest customer, but they're super transactional. You're going to have to pay for them again and again and again. If you can focus on lifetime value and brand building and the people who represent the most potential value to your organization, you're going to be much better off. But trying to redefine some of the hero metrics you were talking about, return on true return on investment holistically, is crucial.