Hello everyone. Can you hear me? Okay. Good morning. After the thundering over the deafening sound of the thunderstorm that we're experiencing right now, does everyone have a bucket? Because we may need to bail ourselves out if this starts leaking in a few minutes. Well, wonderful to be here. Thank you so much, Dan, Don. Nice to share the stage with you as always.
So I just want to make the first comment. As it turns out, yes, I am for sale. I'm like the NASCAR of moderators. So if anyone wants to sponsor any future panels that I'm on, I'm available. But Don, thank you very much for the jersey. Much appreciated. Huge lifelong Man United fan. So I'm feeling pretty good now. Just to give you a little behind the scenes on how we prepare for these conversations. We have these prep calls, right? We get in with Don's team and we talk about what we want to talk about and they send me notes and topics they want to cover and discuss. I take all of that feedback and basically throw it out the window and come up with my own questions. So this is going into a fairly blind conversation with these guys. But I am very trusting because these are two of the smartest people in the industry, particularly in terms of how they think about brand, marketing, the technology landscape, and the impact AI is having on the function of marketing. So we're going to be talking a lot about these different topics over the course of the day. The general topic is about brand resonance. I'm not even sure I know what that means. But let's drill into something that I do think is interesting, which is to think about the playbook of marketing or the playbook of thinking about brand marketing specifically, Don. In many ways, much like I tossed out the questions that you guys gave me to talk about today, I think the brand playbook is pretty much being tossed out at the moment. What do you see as the most disrupting thing that's happening right now that's impacting your organization?
Wow, that's a big question. A couple things. First of all, I think this traditional compartmentalization of marketing into brand and performance is done. Your brand has to perform, right? You have to sell stuff. So there's no such thing as performance marketing and brand marketing that are separate. It all has to work together. So I think that's all breaking down. I think people are starting to view that differently. That's one thing. I think a second thing is because now it's not just about one layer of an organization. It's really multi-layered. So you've got people and now you have systems and tools and workflows that, in the advent of this new technology inflection point, you're going to have to figure out a new recipe of how you get stuff done and what that output is. That's changing everything. I think the playbook can be rewritten a little bit on what modern marketing looks like and what are the forces coming at us that we have to think about now. How do we get our story, our message, how do we show up in the world in an advent where SEO could very well go away? Because if you're just going to ChatGPT or Perplexity or whatever agent you're using and you're searching there, how does a brand show up and guarantee they show up in the right way? That model of buying the search terms and being first on page doesn't exist anymore. So there's a lot of things happening that is causing us to have a headache really, and we're going to have to work our way through this.
A headache or a migraine, I don't know which it is. But in your career, have you ever experienced a time where being a steward of a brand has felt so disorienting?
No. But I've also never had a point in my career where being a steward of a brand or multiple brands has been more exciting.
Right. So Don is a steward of a brand. Dan, you run a big organization that's very much built on being creative first, being technology-driven, with thousands of people within your organization that are thinking about and leading the creative process. So in many ways, you are a steward of creativity. Similar question for you: what do you see as the biggest and most disruptive thing that's impacting the creative process right now?
Yeah. Well, first let me say what is not changing. What is not changing is the idea of brand storytelling and brand resonance. That is a perpetual thing. I hear some feedback that that is a thing that will never end. I don't believe it will never end. And I think that often gets lost in the myriad of technology around it. Now what is changing is the definition of what creativity means. Creativity, at least in our field, historically was often how you make things. Literally what you're making and how you're making it. And creativity is changing to really be what the definition always is, which is how you solve problems, ask the right questions, solve new problems, and find new ways to reach people. As Don mentioned, we are going through one of the biggest attention shifts of our lifetime. We saw it with the internet, a bit with social, and this is just tremendously different. So how you combine experience and storytelling to create a new way to get to your customer and own your customer is tremendously different. And it's not about the things you make, it's about how you reach them. And that is tremendously different because it's not a playbook of copywriter, art director, planner, distribute. It's a lot more complicated than that.
We sit on these sessions all the time and sometimes our frustration is that the people on stage often talk in general terms or platitudes and never really get to the point or speak in specific ways. I want to drill into something with both of you that I know is a problem within both of your organizations. I want to open up and have an honest conversation about why it's a problem and how you're navigating through it. Because it's easy to talk about the technology, AI, and the opportunities it presents, but in many ways, the technology is the easy part. People are the problem. Culture is the problem. Don, within your organization, you're restructuring your entire marketing function, right? You're implementing the infrastructure layer, the workflows, and you're trying to orient the people around that. But that's really hard to do because culture is often so embedded within an organization. So how are you navigating that?
Well, people hate change. They just hate change. It's uncomfortable, right? So you're kind of fighting the forces of that. But we had to stop thinking of people over here, tools over here, processes in the middle, and then trying to integrate everything. It kind of looked like this weird chart. And because things were breaking as the tensions that Dan just brought up start to become real and new, things were just breaking. So I decided to take a step back and I actually talked to a couple other CMO friends, one of them being Jonathan Adshack, the CMO of IBM. He was explaining to me how he's rethinking, not reorging but restructuring, how marketing operates within the context of IBM. I thought that was really interesting. So I took some of those insights and instead of having people over here and tools over here and processes in the middle, I flipped it on its head and built a layer cake model. First, we're starting with a systems architecture. I've got many smart people on my team with some help from others building a systems architecture which will include things like AI tools, our martech stack, content supply chain, Workfront, all those amazing things. And then on top of that, we're designing new workflows that have to exist for us to be able to reach our audiences with context and relevance in this new world. On top of that, I'm going to organize my people around that. Some things that people do today will change or go away, and those people will have to do something new or different. That's okay. There'll be upskilling involved, retraining, whatever you want to call it. I'm also creating some new positions I've never had at a leadership level in my organization because I want to shift the influence nerve center of marketing. Traditionally, because I work for a technology company with a ton of engineers who are all linear thinkers, the nerve center has been product marketing and comms. We launch a product, we do a press release. That's really all they thought marketing was. I don't want the nerve center to be product and comms. I want the nerve center to be creativity. So I'm shifting that balance and putting creative studio in the center, having creativity serve as the nerve center of my modern marketing organization. Because to your point, we're all storytellers and we have to do that in the most creative way possible to get our job done. By the way, this could all fail miserably. I wake up in a cold sweat every night thinking, 'What am I doing? This is going to suck. People are going to hate me.' But we have to do something.
Well, you know what, Don? You said something last night at dinner that I related to. It seems like the whole world is downsizing, like how many people can we let go so we can orient towards automation and efficiency? And last night you said, 'I'm not trying to do any of that. I'm trying to scale my organization.' That's a different mindset.
I'm under-resourced, understaffed, under-tooled for what my organization needs to do to support the business. So I'm using this whole exercise to scale.
I said yesterday in my fireside with Toto, the world moves at the speed of TikTok. I can't keep up with that. My team can't keep up with that. It's almost impossible. So that's the purpose. But there's a lot going on and we're really leveraging partners like Code and Theory and others to help us on this journey.
I want to stay on the people and culture thing for a second, Dan. For those that don't know, Code and Theory famously has around 2,000 employees, split into half engineering and half creative. It's been the case since you started the company back in the early 2000s. It's left brain, right brain. When you think about the restructure or reorientation, even the upskilling you have to think through in terms of your engineering teams and creative teams, how are you navigating this moment? And is upskilling real, or is that just another one of those terms people love to throw around in the age of AI?
Yeah, I'm going to be honest. I think upskilling is absolute bullshit. It's easily said, and I try to figure out what other people mean by it. A lot of people aren't going to want to do it.
A lot of people aren't going to want to do it.
Exactly. They're not going to do it.
And the problem I have with upskilling is that just learning a new tool isn't upskilling. Upskilling should imply a next level an individual should go to. It's actually pretty easy to get people on new tools. They either have their job or they don't. They need the tools. Most professionals are capable, well-educated people who know how to learn a new tool. That is not a challenge.
But a lot of them are scared.
No, it may be a cultural thing. And the reason they're scared is because current technology, the current AI landscape, falls into two buckets. Bucket one is isolating you. Like using ChatGPT or Claude, you work alone in it. Lots of people would agree it flattens ideas, but you're just sitting there alone. You're not working with other individuals. It's not how we're meant to engage as people. Or the other bucket is it's automating you. It's how can we do more tasks that you're doing? You don't need to do it. And we go to the argument across the stages: 'Oh well, they'll have another job.' Okay, well what is that job? I don't know because I haven't thought about it because I've just been focusing on implementing automation software. So where is the trust of culture if you're literally isolating or automating people? Since I'm in an organization that is basically people selling people's value to give value to clients like Qualcomm, I have to really think about what human value is. How do humans work together and multiply human ingenuity? To me, that is upskilling. A designer knows a lot about typography and taste. I'm not going to train them on that. Every professional could get better, but how do I multiply that? That is upskilling. Not a new process for them to do, not a new tool for them to implement. It's how can I create engagement with them and other individuals? Because I'm a believer that creativity is that indescribable thing when humans come together, and we don't even know why we get these magical things. That's what makes good relationships as partners, as companies, and within organizations. So I am laser-focused on what the human should do, how we can enable the human to do work with other humans, and how we can take what they're bad at and make them better at that. What are humans bad at? Listening. How many times do we talk and I just don't hear you? AI is pretty good at listening. Humans are bad at remembering. What if AI can remember at the right time and place? Humans are bad at asking for help and being vulnerable. We did a dinner last night about vulnerability. What if AI can push that vulnerability because we know it's so hard to give a performance review or say you don't like an idea in a meeting? AI is incredible at that, and people actually trust AI for those things. So if you put the human first, you get a cultural change. If you put the technology first, you get people that are very scared.
I agree with you, Don, at change no matter what you do.
So our philosophy in this restructuring is human-led, technology-powered.
