BONUS: How This CMO Escaped the Broken Client-Agency Model with Taylor Morrison’s Stephanie McCarty

I am good. I feel like I need you to introduce me as I walk into every room because you're pumping me up. You've got the energy. It's so exciting.

Well, you know what? I think we're going to give the family discount. I'm a negotiator though. So, there we go.

It's a really great question. I think there probably wasn't this Eureka moment or straw, as you said. I think it was just gradually over time as I grew my confidence in what I was trying to achieve. It was a little bit like fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on you moment where, you know, I wanted as a new CMO, I wanted to trust the process, trust that, hey, these experts know things that I don't know. I really leaned in. And I'd say, you know, with the first agency that was supporting us nationally, I was a little underwhelmed by the results and the process, but I said, 'Hey, I'm going to trust the process and let the experts guide me.' And then I did it again and I was kind of forced to start at square one versus starting where I had left off. So it was a lot of time, energy, and resources lost. And after going through it a second time, I said, 'Hey, this third time I'm going to be more vocal. I'm going to make sure that the brief is crystal clear.' And then it was almost like they force you through this process whether you need to go through that process or not. And so after that third process, I said, I'm just not going to put myself, my team, and my organization through this. And concurrently, while we were working through that, we started building in some in-house support. I think the reliance solely on external support was not sustainable as the organization had very aggressive growth plans. And when I stepped into the CMO function at Taylor Morrison, we were kind of a hodgepodge where every division, we have 21 divisions that we support. At the time I think we maybe had 10. They had their own agency from a production creative perspective, which meant our brand was being introduced to consumers 10 different ways. It just wasn't. So we had to come in and say, 'Hey, who do we want to be? How do we want to represent our brand today and into the future so that we can grow? We build a platform that we can grow.' And so we started bringing a lot of those creative services in-house, which helped to show that we can do this. We've hired really talented people who fell in love with the brand, who only wanted to see the brand be successful. And we went from a team of two corporate marketers supporting the field to now we have a team of about 45 doing so. And that's insane. We don't really have any external agency support unless we feel we want a fresh perspective or we want that outside perspective. Because to be honest, that's the biggest thing that an agency provides is that outside perspective. Because yes, you bring in 45 talented creatives, you do get really close to the business, you get really close to the product, you know you don't have that lens anymore. Even if you take a break and you kind of come out of it for a little bit, it's just kind of part of the beast. So we do bring in some outside perspective just to help keep us fresh. And that has worked really well for us the last few years.

Some might say, 'Hey, did this CMO lose all of her emotional intelligence for a few moments and take it out on LinkedIn?' And maybe that's partly true. But I think after going through it and feeling so alone in those feelings, at that point I was like, what do I have to lose but to express it and see maybe I am the crazy one, or maybe there are other senior marketers out there that can relate and we can talk about together what works, what hasn't worked, what other strategies are available. And I was not prepared for what came. I think my opening line of that LinkedIn post was, 'Here's my beef with ad agencies.' And it was just the repeatability of going through the same rigmarole and this process and spending so much money and resources that I just didn't have. And the flood of responses of, 'Oh my gosh, me too. Oh my gosh, this is how I felt. It's broken. You're right.' My DMs, I mean, I had to put my phone in another room and walk away because it was just constant for probably a good week. And then there was a debate. There were a lot of agencies and people that worked in agencies or had a prior life in agency that said it was me, like you get the work that you deserve, which I think is a really shitty thing to say. Like it's supposed to be a partnership. We're supposed to be working together. I would never say that to a client or a potential agency partner. If my brief wasn't what it should have been, we should be working together to fine-tune that before any work starts. Don't just... Exactly. Where was that email? So, this isn't a finger-pointing exercise. I know today in 2025 there are several excellent agencies out there delivering great work for their clients. Not every agency is created equally, just like every client isn't created equally. I work in new home construction, residential home building. That is not the first category you think of when you think about really great ads or really great creative. Not everyone is in the market for a new home. Our average selling price is $600,000. That's not an impulse purchase. We also don't have the luxury of large budgets. We're a Fortune 500, $10 billion business. That doesn't necessarily equate to a large advertising or creative budget, marketing budget. So it was a process of trying to find the right fit, which didn't work out. But I do think that I have found so much knowledge and wisdom and camaraderie by just sharing experiences on LinkedIn. My background, I started as a journalist and as an executive communications professional for over a decade before I found myself in marketing. And so I have always taken on the voice of other people. And a few years ago I was like, what is Stephanie's voice? I'm so concerned on creating that for others and my executives and my CEO. And so LinkedIn was the perfect platform to test. And it was a little bit of like, what if people don't like what I have to say? And now a couple years in, I know I'm not everyone's cup of tea, but hey, with age and wisdom and laps around the track, I am a-okay with that.

Well, it ended up being this reverse RFP process. I had so many creatives come to me and say, 'Hey, I love how you lead. I love your point of view. I took a look at your brand. I see what you're doing. I'd love to help.' And through lots of conversations, we have found a lot of freelance creatives who've come in, they've embedded within the system, within the team. They don't leave from above. There's no hierarchy. There's no we do the cool work, you do the grunt work. It's one team of how do we just make the whole ecosystem better and attract consumers to what we're doing because we are, within the category, doing some really cool stuff. And it's ripe for innovation and it's ripe for creativity. We have created this consumer expectation of promo, promo, promo, incentive, incentive, but not a lot of brand building. We've kind of flipped that on its head the last few years and it's paying off. And there's been so many creatives excited about it that want to be a part of it, which, being the brand leader, you're starting on an equal playing field and it feels good when they're coming to you versus you coming to them. The whole dynamic shifts from the onset.

Well, I think when I stepped into the CMO role, I took however much time it takes to really understand the lay of the land. How is the process today? How are we serving the organization? How are we serving our consumers? Where is there room for efficiency? As a first-time CMO, I didn't know what I didn't know. And so I just observed for about a quarter and said, 'Hey, I think that we can be doing this more consistently with more control over the brand and more cost-effectively.' Because what we were finding is, let's say we wanted to send out an email about some summer promotion and every division was offloading that to an agency. And instead of just using one template and saying, 'Hey, this is great. It's been vetted. We all approve of it.' Every field marketing manager was putting their spin on it. We always talk about internally as a joke like the Easter email. One division wanted a white bunny, one division wanted a brown bunny. And the agency is going to say, 'Yeah, let's make that bunny brown, invoice for $500.' And so it just didn't make sense for us to be, you just can't scale a business. And we've grown. We've doubled in size in the last six years. And so we started with creative. I was like, let's just show the organization what we can do. We brought in one graphic designer and we started doing, we said, hey, we're going to take care of these divisions in-house. We're no longer going to use any agency support and show the results in terms of how great the creative was, how quick and on brand it was, how easy it was to execute. There wasn't all this back and forth. And guess what? Because it was an in-house employee, there was no invoice at the end. And so once we started showing the organization what we could do with the right creative talent in house, the more they wanted that. So our graphic artist of one became a graphic artist of five and we started building this creative studio, bringing copywriters in, product designers, and promoted our first senior graphic designer into our creative director role. Vivian's now our creative director and she's been here for six years. And then we built the function around it, discipline by discipline. And we started where creative is a little bit easier. It's the visual side of marketing that you can see, you can feel, you can touch. And then we went into social, organic social, paid media. What if we stopped paying an agency commissions and all these fees and we instead used those dollars for real media dollars? And we weren't balancing through teams and dealing with the turnover. I was at the agency world for a short stint right out of college and so I know billable hours and billable time. You don't get the full focus of those people. It's just the way it is. But when you've got someone in house who's dedicated and immersed in the brand and the success of the brand, you see that in the deliverables. And so discipline by discipline, we went one at a time and said, we brought the organization along with us. We talked about the efficiencies from a dollar perspective. We talked about efficiencies in terms of time to market with creative, the effectiveness of the creative, and how essentially we had created one brand. We didn't have this brand that was manipulated across markets. And once the organization started feeling it, all of a sudden Stephanie's a genius and we're doing that. It's almost now six plus years into it. Now that we want to expand and try other things, we've built this expectation of continued leverage and efficiency. There comes a time when it ebbs and flows, and so we're trying to bring in more talent or outside talent to take us to that next level. You can't always be in efficiency gaining mode. But bringing the organization along almost made it, over time, feel like it was their idea as we did this one by one. And the way I think my communications background really helped was I was really able to communicate every step of the way and show benefits, where we failed, where we moved too fast, didn't move fast enough. And I think as marketers, one of the things that we forget to do is to market marketing within the organization because we're so focused on the customer, which is where our focus should be. But I would tell you that this is probably not any new news to any marketers listening. Marketing is a very misunderstood function. What works, what doesn't work, what you're focused on, how it moves the needle. Not everything can be measured. Not everything is a short-term win. And so I think it's made such a huge difference by communicating every step of the way what's working, what isn't, what we need to pivot. And in our industry where we're so dependent on what's going on in the market, in the macro environment, we need to be able to have that trust and credibility. And so doing it that way gave us that luxury and privilege too.

I think a good example of that would be the basics of copywriting. We brought in a small copywriting team and they're writing about every community. We have over 400 communities across the country and you can only say so many things about community design and layout and amenities in a way until you just start seeing the same words and the same phrases. And so bringing in some fresh copywriters, not to take anything away from our copywriting team, but to say, 'Hey, let's shake some stuff up. Let's see how someone from outside the industry views how we should be talking about our product.' So that's one example. Also, organic social. We started from the ground up and we're like, hey, we're just going to test and experiment. I think social media is all about testing and experimenting. But the platforms change so much, the way demographics are using them for entertainment, to be educated, to discover new products. What should we be doing? How do we fit into some of those conversations? Right now so many brands are being as ridiculous and crazy as they can be. But when it comes to buying a home and selling the emotion and the agency and the safety and the sustainability and your largest expression of self, how does that show up in mainstream media? And so sometimes it's just bringing in other people who have that experience and expertise to say, 'Hey, here's some guidance. Here's a plan to follow here.' Maybe it's just an audit of what we're doing and what our competitors are doing, where the white space is. And so we don't presume for a second to have all the answers. But it's been a very successful process. I think so much of it in hindsight is I didn't have all the answers either when we were trying to build it out. So much of it was seeing a problem and saying, 'Hey, there's a way I think we can solve it.' And just following that intuition and gut because there's a good chance that it could have totally failed and I would have been like, 'All right, I was wrong. It's a client agency relationship forever.' But I really feel like we now have the best of both worlds. We've got a team dedicated and so immersed in the brand and they can produce stuff that's on brand and super creative and great really quickly. And we can be in service of our divisions who are moving homes and selling the American dream. And now it's just like how do we continue on the brand building side to lean into some experts that could really help to guide us or help us in our experimentation phase. So I feel very lucky to be in this position now. It's been a long time coming.

It's a good question and it's definitely an art that you learn through trial and error. Every executive team is different. So I think you need to know your peers, know your audience, which is key to any successful communication or marketing. But when I look at my executive team, which I'm very blessed to be a part of a great leadership team, it was really painting the vision. Imagine a world where we could do X, Y, and Z. It so happened to cost less than the world we live in today and it was more efficient and more on brand. And what if we could do that? And it was really creating this vision, reacting to the reaction I was getting like, 'Wow, gosh, yeah, that'd be great.' And imagine if our field marketers could be more focused on executing, more boots on the ground, and not facilitating revisions with an agency. They're less project managers and really effective at generating traffic, foot traffic to communities. Well, let us focus on the turns and the heavy lifting on all the templates and everything you need for a promotion or a campaign so they can be more effective. And so it was talking to every division leader and saying, 'What if you could get 20 more hours out of your marketing team locally without hiring someone else? Wouldn't that be great?' And it wasn't positioned in a way that was manipulative. It was just showing someone a different way of doing it, and doing it in a way that was very delicate and with patience and grace. And then saying, 'Hey, can we try? Can we get that permission to try to support you in a way that we feel might be more effective and might help you reach your business goals faster?' And so those small wins really added up and built the credibility without that being the overall game plan. It was kind of just this byproduct of I didn't have all the answers. I really did need them and their support along the way. And it was taking little bites. It wasn't I'm going to flip this whole marketing regime and engine on its head, which I think some CMOs get that rap of they're going to come in and fire every agency and create a whole new team. And maybe sometimes that's necessary, sometimes it isn't. But because we took those baby steps, it didn't feel invasive or it didn't feel like too much. But again, that all comes down to as a marketer, knowing your audience, knowing your leadership team, knowing the boundaries of what they might accept at one point or another. And then building on it. And so now, our success is like how do we just keep raising the bar and trying to do better and do more. And that's the hard part and the exciting part. When you just keep raising the bar on yourself, how high can you go? But every new market dynamic or macroeconomics throws something new at us and with a larger team we can navigate that a little bit more swiftly, which again builds on that confidence. There was a point in time where marketing got the finger pointed at it for either not having their stuff together or not understanding or not being able to move faster. And I'm proud to say that today, even in an environment that's a little bit challenging for sales, it's nice to not have the finger being pointed at marketing. So we've worked really hard to build that trust and credibility by going about it the right way.

I think that's human nature, right? Everyone wants for them. And I think in most businesses too, there was this sense of loss. They felt like they lost control. And so it was really like, you're not losing control, we're just moving it. But your team is still very much involved in what's getting built, how we're executing it. It's just we're bringing in experts to do it. And if you can trust the experts, so it was this, you're not losing this control. We're moving it. We're going to have others play in this space to support you. And so I think this is where my comms background really helped because the words you use, the way you communicate it, the tone, the timing, it is an art, but I think it's a lost art. And when the environments are hard, it's easy to just go into your bubble of I just need to be in customer acquisition mode. But we sometimes forget our internal customers, which always backfires. So you can't lose sight of that.

Oh, it's a great question. What one thing I love about my job as a CMO is no days are duplicative or are the same. I think as the team was being built, I was a little bit more hands-on. But I think it's a balance of helping to create a strategy with your leaders and your key leaders and then empowering them to execute, knowing that you're there to help remove obstacles or to brainstorm. I love a good jam sesh and brainstorming. I also don't want to take the creativity out of the team or make them feel like because Stephanie had an idea we have to execute on that idea. Nine times out of ten their ideas are way better than mine. And so I think the most important job and the thing that I take so seriously is hiring. It's hiring, it's promoting, it's firing. Getting the wrong culture fit can completely paralyze a team. And I talked at PCBC with Kevin about our social media team. I don't approve every post before it goes live because I don't want to be a bottleneck. They are empowered to test, to experiment, to try what works, to shift the strategy as a result. And I try to lead in that way. Where I see gaps or opportunities, that's where I feel like it's my job to come in. But it's really creating the structure for creative people to just thrive. And I feel like that's what I owe them and that's what I spend most of my time. And I spend most of my time with my peers getting them to understand what we're doing, how it's helping to move the business forward. And asking them, how can we be of service to you? What more can we be doing? And then coming back to my team and figuring out how does that fit into the strategy? Do we have bandwidth? So I hire great people and I let them do their job. They make me look good, I make, it's a full circle experience. And I found that through trial and error, that's the best leadership style. And it's such an entrepreneurial industry and business that I don't think I could lead the department any other way.

Well, the even larger team, it was a full five years. From one designer to two was probably the quickest. I think from two to five probably took another 12 to 18 months. But I think with the designer, when we brought in our first designer we were going into proxy season and annual report wrap season and our ESG report. Those documents, which are somewhere between 30 to 80 pages, to outsource is low six figures. Out the gate, not even talking about quality. And so we said, 'Hey, we're just going to do it in house. We're going to do our whole 10K wrap. We're going to do our ESG in-house.' So we had our designer lay it out. We had our communications and copywriters write the content and we produced this incredible document for investors and shareholders that our CEO and team was just, 'Oh my gosh, we did this inside. We didn't pay an outside consultant to tell us what we already knew. We didn't pay a different designer to try to rebrand and reconfigure.' And so it was just those little wins that I was like, 'Yeah, we just saved $150,000 minimum.' And so it was just finding those opportunities to let those designers really shine. And that might not have been the designer's most exciting job to do. So they might not have been jumping out of their seat to do it, but it was finding the creative opportunities and the results that mattered to the people who could help me do what I needed to do. How do I get them to see what one can do? How do I get them to see what two can do? And it was really being very selective of those opportunities which opened so many more doors as a result.

Yeah, it's a great question. I probably don't have all the answers, but I think something we learned as we started to build these mini teams within the larger marketing and communications function was to see those natural leaders kind of present themselves. And then it was building out like, okay, we kind of created each department in, I don't want to say in a vacuum, but insulated. How do you bring all these marketing leaders together to really start developing integrated programs and campaigns? And like every department or organization, things tend to sometimes fall into silos. It just happens. I don't think it's intentional by any means, but it's making sure we're bringing the right people together, seeing where those natural leaders are coming out and shining. And making sure everyone has a platform to have their voice heard. So my team knows that I have an open door policy. They can come to me with anything big or small. They could just come in and tell me about their day or their weekend, pick my brain on a personal or professional matter. And so I think just creating that environment where people feel safe to do their best work, they're safe to say whatever's on their mind, generates loyalty to the organization, loyalty to our mission and what we're trying to do. And I think to our earlier point, really empowers creatives to just focus on being creative. And the result of that tends to be really inclusive leadership, thoughtful leadership, open minds, which I think in a creative, fast-moving industry like marketing, I just don't know how you could be successful without it.

It is a superpower. My goodness.

There's a lot in there. That was multiple questions baked into one. You're tricky. I would say the briefs have, as we've built our team and we've become more grounded within the organization, we have a clearer understanding of the problems ahead of us. We have a clearer understanding because we are at the table alongside leaders who are making business strategy decisions. We know where we need to flex and where we need to pivot. I think having now tenured people within the in-house agency and the creative studio, the briefs are, we get to a completed final brief much quicker. There's not the education process. We throw a lot at the brief to see what sticks, what feels right, and then start pulling things out that maybe dilutes it or is too hard so we can have a very clear focus. So to your first question, yeah, we get to clearer, more actionable briefs quicker. I'd say the biggest advantage is time to market. We can come up with a great idea. We have content strategy meetings weekly. We can come up with a great idea and execute it in a matter of days. So the process is much faster and I think the speed of culture, the speed of marketing, I don't know how it can get any faster. It's super fast today and it tends to keep speeding up. So that's a huge advantage. I'd say the disadvantage is sometimes you just get so close to the product that you realize, like every industry, we have our own industry jargon and somehow someway industry jargon will make its way into a campaign or it'll make its way into something and we have to stop and say, 'Oh, wait. That's our language. That's not a consumer friendly term. We really need that outsider perspective on, hey, this is something we're offering. We think the cool part of that is X, but with that outside perspective, they're like, 'No, no, no, it's not X, it's Y. We really need to lean into that.' And so it's really making sure that through everything, the consumer is at the heart and bringing in that outside perspective just to sharpen our own tools is great because we can't, we're not hiring new people every quarter. There is some turnover, minimal turnover I would say in the last six years, which is great. But I think it's just sometimes losing that outside perspective. But we've now created mechanisms and we've created such a safe space that as a creative I can say, 'I'm too close to it. I can't see it anymore. I need help.' And that's not a sign of weakness. That's a sign of, let's inject some fresh perspective. Let's go get, call it what you want, a consultant, an agency, a freelancer, someone who's excited about this work too, that will just show a different way of seeing it.

Sounds good. Thank you.

My pleasure. Thank you.