1. 16 | Fall 2013 ANA Magazine www.ana.net
Change

2. www.ana.net ANA Magazine Fall 2013 | 17
ANA and its partners in the World Federation of Ad-
vertisers have sponsored an ambitious initiative
called Marketing 2020, an unprecedented effort to
leverage the insights and experience of thousands of
the most successful global chief marketing leaders,
brand managers, agency heads, and others, across
the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
The goal is to help marketers gain clarity — 20/20
vision, as it were — as they steer their organizations
through a transformative era, when buzzwords like
“social,” “transparency,” and “big data” have be-
come business imperatives, and marketers increas-
ingly find themselves pushed into the driver’s seat to
guide their company’s growth strategies.
“There really seems to be a paradigm shift,” ex-
plains Marc de Swaan Arons, founder of Effective-
Brands, a global marketing strategy consulting firm
that is leading Marketing 2020. “Given the dramatic
increase in focus on digital and social marketing, the
world has now changed sufficiently for marketing
leaders to take a step back and say, ‘What are we do-
ing to grow the organization, and how are we struc-
tured for that?’ ”
“So many times in marketing we get so focused
on discussions about things like brands and social
media that we fail to realize we’re all in business to
generate incremental growth for our respective com-
panies,” says Bob Liodice, president and CEO of the
ANA. “We fail to ask, ‘Does my staff have the ap-
propriate skills to compete effectively in today’s envi-
ronment? Are we organized in the right way to take
advantage of the opportunities before us?’ ”
The good news? A clear picture is emerging of
what the successful marketing organization of the fu-
ture will look like.
Read on for a look at some of the trends shaping
BY CHUCK KAPELKE
Focusing marketing strategy,
structure, and capabilities
for 21st-century growth
Die
What will it take to be a winning marketing organization in the year
2020, and how can marketing best focus and organize to support
business growth in the decade to come? To answer these questions, the
or

3. the future, along with tips that your company
can use today to set up the right strategy,
structure, and capabilities to grow during this
dynamic period.
Setting
Business Goals
Early results from
Marketing 2020
survey data sug-
gest that today’s
overperformers
(companies that
are currently outper-
forming their peers)
are far more likely to have
marketing organizations that
are explicitly aligned toward a clear
strategy. “Just knowing what your strategy is
turns out to be a major differentiator,” de
Swaan Arons says. “When we asked CMOs to
tell us their key performance indicators [KPI],
their number one answer is ‘business growth.’”
Ask Joe Tripodi, executive vice president
and chief marketing and commercial officer at
The Coca-Cola Company, about the top prior-
ity for his marketing organization, and he does
not waver: “The marketing function needs to be
leading the growth agenda for the company,”
he says. “We have a companywide ‘big hairy
audacious goal’ of doubling our sales between
2010 and 2020. We’re trying to double in 10
years what it took us 120 years to achieve.”
Yet Tripodi also understands that measur-
ing financial growth alone is not enough. “I’d
like to redefine EPS from ‘earnings per share’
to ‘economic value, partner value, and social
value,’” he says. “Those companies that are
ruthlessly focused on earnings will be left by
the wayside. It’s not just what you sell, it’s
what you stand for.”
› What You Can Do
While it can be tempting to set a strategy based
on ramping up clicks, likes, and retweets, the
key is to focus on business goals first. Work with
your marketing team — as well as the CEO,
CFO, and others — to clearly define the com-
pany’s business objectives and purpose, and
show the role that marketing can play through
your abilities to engage a growing global com-
munity of passionate fans.
Defining a Clear Purpose
Seventy-three percent of the marketing leaders
interviewed for the Marketing 2020 survey
agree that being clear about the company’s (or
brand’s) broader societal purpose will be an im-
portant characteristic of winning companies in
the coming years.
“We need to move beyond seeing people
as a head of hair in search of benefits or a pair
of armpits to be deodorized, to real people
with real lives, and focus on how we serve
them,” says Keith Weed, chief marketing and
communications officer at Unilever, who
chairs the Marketing 2020 Advisory Board.
“Marketing got lost in the mad consumption-
at-any-cost years. What we’re doing ... is
making marketing noble again.”
Marketers should lead the way in connecting
(or reconnecting) their brands to a societal pur-
pose, something that can serve as a lodestar for
new products or services that can help grow the
business. Think of Nike’s FuelBand, which tracks
users’ movements throughout the day. The band
makes sense within the company’s product line
because the Nike brand is not about shoes; it’s
about unleashing the athlete in all of us.
“What insight do you have about your con-
sumers, what is your purpose as a company,
and how can you deliver a total experience?” de
Swaan Arons asks. “We find that every success-
ful global brand understands perfectly — every-
where in the organization — what universal
truth they’re appealing to. If that’s not the case,
you’re in trouble.”
› What You Can Do
Find and define your brand’s purpose, if you
haven’t already. For some, this can be as sim-
ple as rereading your company’s founding
documents and discovering roots that were
lost over time. Another approach is to use con-
sumer research and turn a nugget of insight
into opportunities to deliver a total brand ex-
perience. A well-known example is Dove’s
Real Beauty campaign: Unilever’s marketers
latched on to research showing low self-esteem
rates among young women; from there, they
redefined what the brand stood for by rolling
out a global campaign to boost how people
feel about their appearance.
Inspiring — and Aligning
Survey data from Marketing 2020 confirms over-
performing companies are more likely than their
18 | Fall 2013 ANA Magazine www.ana.net
KEYINSIGHTS
• Business growth is
the top priority for
most CMOs.
• It’s no longer just
what you sell, it’s
what you stand for.
• The brand must be
woven into the
company’s fabric.
• Customer-centricity
should not be
ignored.
• Using data for
strategic insights
is proving to be
a powerful
differentiator.
• Balancing the
tension of global
and local brands is
a new necessity.
• Tomorrow’s CMO
must be able to
influence the CEO,
the CFO, and IT.
STRATEGY

4. 20 | Fall 2013 ANA Magazine www.ana.net
FIVE WAYS TO DELIVER
GLOBAL MARKETING
TO HELP COMPANIES build a global marketing organization,
EffectiveBrands has developed a framework that captures the
characteristics of a winning global brand strategy — the
universal truth, purposeful positioning, and total experience —
and the “how” that will help align the organization itself. “A
winning marketing organization can build on these characteris-
tics to deliver the brand around the world,” says Kimberly
Orton, partner and managing director for EffectiveBrands.
Here are five key drivers of global marketing effectiveness:
1. Connect Marketing leaders should create opportunities
for teams around the business to build interdependence by
organizing gatherings, setting up online forums, and establish-
ing benchmarks around alignment. For example, Sony has
held gatherings for its global teams with this agenda: “Talk to
us. Tell us what’s going on in your market, from the competi-
tive, consumer, and corporate perspective.”
“The servant-leadership mindset is listening and explaining
that you understand there is no global market, but rather many
very important local markets,” Orton says. “That allows you to
say, ‘I’ve heard you all, now this is where we’re going.’”
2. Inspire Marketing leaders need to make sure their vision
is not seen as an ego project, but rather is based on deeper,
local meaning rooted in the brand purpose that others can
embrace. Dove’s Real Beauty campaign was rolled out to global
teams through conferences, web chats, newsletters, and
personal interactions. “If you ask stakeholders in your organiza-
tion if they are inspired to orchestrate your strategy, will they say
yes? Because if they won’t, it won’t happen,” Orton explains.
3. Focus Leaders need to align the strategies and structures
of their divisions to achieve a unified goal. Dove created a
one-page document that said exactly what the brand was
going to do everywhere and what it would be in three years’
time. “When you ask local marketers to think about where we
are going to be three years from now — what are the mega-
trends, how are we going to win — the defense mechanisms
drop,” Orton says.
4. Organize Get clear about roles and responsibilities. Figure
it out together: What do we do, what do our agencies do, what
does Germany do versus HQ? “The worst thing that happens is
you’re three-quarters of the way down the road, and suddenly
someone steps in who wasn’t involved in the brief,” Orton says.
“Not sorting those out leads to ugly fights. What matters is you
define who does what.”
5. Build Make sure your organization has the capabilities for
marketing in the 21st century by investing in training to get
people the skills, knowledge, and tools for success. “Start
speaking the same language,” Orton says. “Get your marketers
into home visits, or use reverse mentoring. Choose the two or
three things your organization needs to be very good at to win
in your competitive market, and figure out what programs you
need to put in place.”
— C.K.
peers to engage with their employees and
consumers around their brand purpose.
In an age when every customer expe-
rience is subject to scrutiny and the
slightest hiccup can quickly find its way
to your permanent record, marketing or-
ganizations have to be proactive in en-
suring that their brand is woven
throughout their company’s fabric. That
means expanding the focus on your
products to include getting involved in
your company’s internal communica-
tions, human resources, customer service
training, and other facets of operations.
“Who gets hired at the stores, how
people are trained, what they’re told to
say — that’s where the rubber hits the
road,” says Elisabeth Charles, senior
vice president and chief marketing offi-
cer at Petco Animal Supplies Inc. “No
matter how much great marketing or
advertising we do, it can all fall apart if
you go into the store and it’s dirty,
products are out of stock, or people are
not friendly to you. We have to have the
right products, the right store experi-
ence and engagement model, and then
the right marketing to get people there.”
Some companies, including IBM,
have started measuring employee en-
gagement as a KPI. “We’re going to have
a much greater degree of collaboration
with human resources,” says Jon Iwata,
senior vice president of marketing and
communications at IBM and a member
of the Marketing 2020 Advisory Board.
“It will be more than messaging to em-
ployees; it will be actually influencing
the criteria of hiring, onboarding,
management, training, development,
recognition, and reinforcement — the
rituals and practices that define any cor-
porate culture. We will be partners guid-
ing the cultures of our companies.”
› What You Can Do
Marketers can help build the connective
tissue within their organization by doing
what they do best: delivering great inter-
nal communications and finding fun, cre-
ative ways to get people on board. For
example, marketers at Dulux, a brand of
paints owned by Netherlands-based
AkzoNobel, have taken about 80 percent
of the employees to local communities to
paint neglected structures in vibrant col-
ors (and has seen its market share rise).
“That’s not just inspiring people — it’s
about giving direction and making clear
to everyone in the organization the effect

5. 22 | Fall 2013 ANA Magazine www.ana.net
Keith Weed has been the chief
marketing and communications
officer at Unilever since 2010
and has led the global company’s
marketing organization to a period
of unprecedented success. He also
chairs the advisory board for the
Marketing 2020 initiative. We asked
him for his insights on the evolution of the marketing
organization.
Q. How is the role of brands going to change?
A. Brands are going to become increasingly important in a
cluttered media world. They will evolve to become channels
in their own right, a destination for content, attracting people
to more than just the products themselves.
Q. Do you think any new key performance indicators will
emerge in the future?
A. We want to have growth that is consistent, competitive,
and profitable, but we also want to have responsible
growth. We are in a world of constrained resources, and
we need to decouple growth from environmental impact.
The industry that calls people consumers is going to come
into the spotlight when the things we consume start
running out.
Q. What trends are shaping your marketing organization?
A. The area of big data means that marketing will have a
much more joined-up approach with the IT function. The
whole role of data has yet to be really unpacked. It’s really
exciting because consumer product goods brands like
ours are going to have a direct path to consumers in a way
that wasn’t so in the past. The retailers have always had
direct data about consumers, and now in digital we’re
getting a direct connect.
Q. How does local work with global marketing?
A. It is important to have clear roles, and do the right type
of work in the right places. The worst thing you can do is
get duplication and friction with two sets of people doing
the same stuff, which burns resources and spirit. We’re
going to become more global and more local; it’s not an
either/or.
There are things we’re going to do that are more
standard around the world, but we’re also going to tailor
more to individuals. That’s the tension: He who pulls it
off will be the most local of the global, and that’s the
huge prize.
Q. What are some of your biggest challenges?
A. Building brand love and the need to break through the
clutter have always been there, but they will be there
even more so in a cluttered world. What will change is
this real-time aspect, the community management. It’s
no longer a set piece where you can spend nine months
preparing a 30-second ad, and you can’t just keep
serving up the same content; it’s like a person going to a
party and telling the same joke over again and again.
People will laugh the first time, but by the third time, they
start avoiding you. The [goal] is building quality, always-
on, cost-effective content. Right now you can choose two
of the three.
Q. What do you hope to get out of Marketing 2020?
A. I learn by listening to others. I find it inspiring to hear
what other companies are doing. I feel we’re 1 percent
done. I don’t for a second suggest that we have all the
answers, and I’m happy and willing to learn from others,
hence my interest in being involved. And I’m continually
thinking about how we tweak the organization because the
world is changing so fast.
— C.K.
QA WITH UNILEVER’S KEITH WEED
that the company’s products have on its con-
sumers and the world around them,” de Swaan
Arons says.
The payoff is that everyone in the organi-
zation becomes a de facto member of mar-
keting, a brand ambassador with feelers out
for ways to better serve the customer. “Once
you get other disciplines to understand what
you want to stand for, they can apply their
expertise in ways that you, as marketers,
never could think of,” de Swaan Arons says.
“It’s about inspiring the rest of the
organization to apply their expertise to a
common purpose.”
Establishing Roles
and Responsibilities
To minimize tiffs and turf wars between the
central and divisional (or global and regional)
levels of the organization, marketing leaders
should focus on bringing absolute clarity to
everyone’s roles and responsibilities. »

6. 24 | Fall 2013 ANA Magazine www.ana.net
As a case study, consider the experience of
Larry Light, chief brands officer of InterConti-
nental Hotels Group, who during his first year on
the job led a brand-based restructuring of his
company. He renamed hotel general managers as
“brand managers” to reinforce their role in serv-
ing the brand; rolled out a companywide brand-
measurement tool; linked executive bonuses to
brand performance; and most controversially,
created a system that gives local managers and
global leaders shared ownership of the company’s
brand standards on a 50/50 basis. (See “How
InterContinental Hotels Group’s Larry Light Is
Revolutionizing the Global Marketing Organiza-
tion,” page 28, to learn more.)
“The number one challenge in companies
like ours is, how should we be organized?”
Light says. “Everybody always goes to the org
chart first. What we really should be doing is
saying, ‘What are our goals? How will we de-
fine success? What will be our process for
achieving that success?’ Only then can we con-
sider how we can organize to deliver that pro-
cess most effectively.”
› What You Can Do
Use your brand strategy as a framework to de-
fine responsibilities and establish incentives
based on business performance. Also make
sure that performance is measured in the same
way at every level of the organization, and
check progress often enough to keep everyone
aligned. “If you were driving from New York
to Chicago, you would probably check on a
regular basis whether you’re on the right road,
but in business, we sometimes only check our
progress once per year,” says Light, who as
part of his restructuring, implemented
monthly rather than annual performance eval-
uations. “We need to do it with sufficient fre-
quency so that if we get off track, we still have
time to course correct.”
STRUCTURE
The Networked Organization
Tomorrow’s successful marketers will have to
balance the tension of global and local brands,
and facilitate the creation of a common platform
of creative that is consistent yet customizable for
the local level. The doctrine that “global” comes
from headquarters is being turned on its head in
the digital age, as Marketing 2020 team’s inter-
views with CMOs hint at the emergence of a
new model: the networked organization.
As an example, Coca-Cola has begun using
“global centers,” regional divisions given respon-
sibilities for packages of content meant to be
shared. For instance, Germany was given respon-
sibility for developing content around Christmas,
based on the division’s past performance. “Global
used to be at the highest on the food chain,”
Coca-Cola’s Tripodi says. “But now the real op-
portunity is going to be the networked entity. It’s
going to be all about finding where the people are
who do the best work, let them do it, and let it get
socialized around the world.”
IBM also has been shifting toward a net-
worked model. After the company purchased
Unica, a maker of automation software for
lead nurturing and marketing, the company
set up knowledge centers in Romania and In-
dia. “We had the choice of putting Unica skills
in every country or creating these centers, and
we decided to go [the latter route],” Iwata
says. “You get a lot of really good work done
in these parts of the world.”
› What You Can Do
Enable local teams to contribute and share in
the development of marketing’s outputs. Set up
digital spaces where teams can share and col-
laborate on materials that can be customized for
use in other markets. “We deliver 80 percent of
the solution to the field and let them customize
the remaining 20 percent for their market,” Tri-
podi says. “The cost savings are enormous, and
the level of quality has actually gone up.” »
“The industry
that calls
people con-
sumers is
going to come
into the spot-
light when
the things we
consume start
running out.”
— Keith Weed, Unilever

7. A Commonwealth of Partners
Many of the CMOs interviewed for Marketing
2020 conveyed that they see the traditional
model of a single agency of record becoming
increasingly untenable, and they are settling
into a role of coordinating a platform of part-
ners, in-house and out. “The concept of a one-
size-fits-all shop is rapidly becoming obsolete,”
says Gannon Jones, chief marketing officer for
PepsiCo’s Global Nutrition Group. “The idea
of finding the best in class in each area and cre-
ating a commonwealth or multidisciplinary
team is the model that is emerging.” The re-
search from Marketing 2020 supports this
trend, as overperforming marketing organiza-
tions are more likely than their underperform-
ing competitors to have five or more agencies
(55 percent compared to 33 percent).
Of course, overperformers were also far
more likely than peers to say that creativity will
be important in the future. According to de
Swaan Arons: “What they said was, ‘We need
our creative partners to think bigger, to apply
creativity to a bigger question.’ They see that
creativity will only get more important to cut
through the clutter and offer something that
drives share and growth. You need creativity
for your communications but also to help think
through total experience solutions. That’s
where agencies can start competing with tradi-
tional consultants like WhatIf and Ideo.”
› What You Can Do
Build a team inside and out that can play in uni-
son, and provide enough direction that every-
one is clear on the tune they’re playing. To find
the right team, consider hiring out projects on a
project basis to see what different agencies can
offer. “There’s lot more project work going on
today, versus retainer,” says Nancy Hill, presi-
dent and chief executive officer of the American
Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s).
“People are using [project work] as a way to
date agencies.” Moreover, she adds, “everyone
should be clear on the definition of the project,
the scope, and the compensation.”
CAPABILITIES
Big Data Mastery
The ability to use data for strategic insight is
quickly proving to be a differentiating capabil-
ity: Winning companies surveyed through
Marketing 2020 were far more likely than
their peers to say that they can leverage big
data to support their marketing strategy, and
that they have the ability to manipulate or
leverage data to service their strategy.
“I don’t think there will be a marketing
intelligence department five or 10 years out
that doesn’t have some degree of predictive
analytic capability,” IBM’s Iwata says. “We
will have to build the capability to under-
stand and engage customers and prospects as
unique individuals based on what we know
about them and where they are in their jour-
ney, and how they prefer to interact with us,
by device, time, or channel.”
Walmart has established its own research
center, @WalmartLabs, that brings together
marketers and technologists. It has developed
tools like “The Social Genome,” described as
“a giant knowledge base that captures inter-
esting entities and relationships in the social
world” that can determine whether someone
who tweets “I love Salt!” is talking about the
movie, not the seasoning, and can scan Face-
book postings to know who should get a cou-
pon for gourmet coffee.
“It feels like we’re just scratching the surface
on what’s possible,” says Stephen Quinn, execu-
tive vice president and CMO of Walmart U.S.
“What’s going to be a massive add-on [to our
existing use of big data] is to merge our data
26 | Fall 2013 ANA Magazine www.ana.net
“If the
consumer’s
engaging with
you, you’d
better be able
to engage
back.”
— Nancy Hill,
American Association
of Advertising Agencies

8. 28 | Fall 2013 ANA Magazine www.ana.net
CASE STUDY
IF THERE’S AN EXEMPLAR for what it takes to overhaul a
legacy model and unify a global network of marketers, it
might be Larry Light, who during his first year-and-a-half at
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has redefined more than
300 job positions and forged a new, customer-centric model.
“I call it a transformation, but around here they are
calling it a revolution; it’s been a shock,” Light says. “We
defined our purpose. We have a new mission statement. We
have a new attitude. We’re retraining, changing job descrip-
tions, changing metrics, all around a simple idea: that the
future will belong to bigger, better, stronger brands.”
BIGGER, BETTER, STRONGER
“Bigger means outpacing the competition,” Light says.
“We want to grow share, not just size. Better means
improving the quality of every aspect of the guest
experience. We’ve defined the whole journey,
from awareness and consideration throughout the guest
experience. And stronger is being the preferred alterna-
tive. All ties should break in our favor. We shouldn’t have
to build preference by being cheaper.”
Light worked collaboratively with his teams — and with
human resources — to develop what he calls a brand-
business scorecard designed to be usable by every one of
IHG’s 4,600 hotels. Each metric was scrutinized to make sure
it would endure over time. “We said, ‘Will there ever be a day
that we believe we won’t care about brand preference or guest
satisfaction or employee engagement, or when we won’t want
bigger market share or profit?’ We used those questions as a
filter, because if we have metrics that we believe will change
every few years, the odds of producing durable, enduring,
sustainable, profitable, growing, healthy brands is zero.”
Light also rejected the doctrine of “thinking globally and
acting locally,” which he calls the “two-box” model. “The
local people are not proud of what they accomplish, and the
global people don’t feel accountable for results because
they always blame it on the poor execution by the locals,”
HOW INTERCONTINENTAL HOTELS GROUP’S LARRY LIGHT IS
REVOLUTIONIZING THE GLOBAL MARKETING ORGANIZATION
he says. Instead he has
implemented the
“three-box” model.
THE THREE-BOX MODEL
“The first box is global
vision,” Light explains.
“This includes the
mission of the brand, and asks, ‘What is the space that this
brand wishes to dominate in a niche segmentation?’ About
80 percent of the responsibility for getting that right is held at
the global center.”
Box two clearly articulates each brand’s identity and
standards, down to details such as what quality of sheets
are used. “Box two is the most important and most difficult;
it is what has caused the revolution,” Light says. “Box two
says there has to be 50/50 collaboration between global
and regional. People find that very difficult. They say, ‘Who’s
responsible?’ I say, ‘I’m not even making it 51/49. We’re
going to lock you in a room; you’re jointly responsible. You
will sort it out.’ Everybody jointly agrees that these are the
boundaries of the sandbox within which all action will take
place. That document becomes the guardrail that says,
‘This is how we will bring the brand to life.’”
Finally, box three is about delivering results. “Results are
created locally, but global leaders are still guardians of the
framework, and they have a responsibility to make sure what
we’re doing is consistent with the vision they helped create.”
This shift toward a three-box model has led to newly
defined job roles: The global and regional teams are now
“brand leaders,” while the hotel general managers are
now known as “brand managers,” to reinforce their
connection to the brand. “We’re retraining all our general
managers, because the brand experience is created in
the hotel,” Light says. “Nobody calls my office to make a
reservation or ask for room service.”
— C.K.
with other databases, for example, from the me-
dia world. Looking at the connections between
those data, that’s just starting now.”
› What You Can Do
Work with your marketing team and outside
experts to determine how your business can ask
the right questions from available data sources.
And invest in creating a culture of learning to
help your team grasp the potential of data anal-
ysis in the modern age.
The ANA will be expanding its training in
emerging areas such as big data, and compa-
nies can develop their own innovative

9. 30 | Fall 2013 ANA Magazine www.ana.net
approaches. SAP, for example, has set up a
regular forum called Marketing and Commu-
nications Live, where outside speakers come
in to discuss cutting-edge topics.
Diageo has brought more than a thousand
of its senior executives from all functions to
Facebook to immerse themselves in the digi-
tal world, and Anheuser-Busch InBev started
a garage-training program at Stanford to en-
courage senior executives to experiment.
Unilever’s Weed also has been relentless in
making his marketers more digital: He has
enlisted training companies like Hyper Is-
land, which specializes in data and digital;
sent people to Facebook and Google to learn
from the inside; and embarked on a “sheep
dip” to get everyone at Unilever up to speed
in what Weed explains as “a massive training
program around the world that everyone has
gone through.”
Cross-Platform Social
Media Engagement
Tomorrow’s marketing organizations will have
to sustain conversations with consumers across
evolving social media platforms. “If the con-
sumer’s engaging with you, you’d better be able
to engage back,” says Hill of the 4A’s. “If
you’re not able to have that one-on-one conver-
sation, you’re not a brand that is going to be
around for a long time.”
A model for success came from the 2012
Barack Obama reelection campaign team,
which was praised not only for its ability to
run models to predict voter behavior but also
for how its digital team pumped out tweets,
videos, blog posts, and emails to build the
movement in the first place. By Election Day,
President Obama had amassed a base of 34
million Facebook fans in the United States,
who in turn were friends with 98 percent of
Facebook’s U.S. population — a powerful re-
source for sending out messages, recruiting
volunteers, and fundraising.
“We knew that if we could serve them
with the kind of experience that keeps them
feeling invested, we could serve the entire
country,” says Teddy Goff, digital director
for the campaign. “And [our Facebook sup-
porters] could do it more powerfully than we
could, because people are skeptical of politi-
cal rhetoric, but one thing people trust is
their friends.”
Goff says that one of the keys to his team’s
success was a structure that eschewed bureau-
cracy and empowered people in the campaign
to act at the fast pace of social media. “We
were empowered to approve our own content
with an honor code,” Goff says. “It’s not that
we didn’t collaborate, but we had a structure
that was built for speed.”
› What You Can Do
Do what the Obama campaign did: Build a
strong digital team that gets the most out of
every major social channel. “If you were to
ask a CMO at a big company to restructure
from scratch, they’d want something like we
had: a digital department that works with
other teams and has its own approval pro-
cess,” Goff says. “It not only allowed us to
speed up, but it was beneficial in terms of
orientation and incentives and the kind of
personnel we were able to hire.”
A culture of empowerment needs to start
with a degree of risk tolerance at the top, Goff
says. “Digital has got to be respected at the
senior level; there has to be one person who
doesn’t have to fight to meet with the CEO
every six months, but who reports to the CEO,
and who thinks about and gets digital. It’s that
important in almost every business context.”
LEADERSHIP
The Winning CMO
It will take a certain kind of chief marketing
officer to lead the development of a winning
marketing organization in 2020. In 2006, an
“Digital has
got to be
respected at
the senior
level. It’s that
important in
almost every
business
context.”
— Teddy Goff, 2012
Barack Obama
reelection campaign

10. 32 | Fall 2013 ANA Magazine www.ana.net
In conjunction with Marketing 2020, the ANA School of Marketing is enhancing its
training programs to help the marketing teams at ANA member companies equip
themselves with the skills necessary for business success in the coming years.
“We will be focusing on topics relevant to the marketer of the future, from digital and
social media to optimizing agency relations to brand management,” says Nick Primola,
senior vice president of the ANA School of Marketing.
The training courses will also be more interactive and directly applicable to the
daily lives of marketers. “Rather than just a one-and-done workshop,” Primola says,
“the learning will be extended through ongoing activities that feature actual experi-
ences and insights of their marketing peers and many of the industry’s most
progressive thought leaders.”
Visit www.ana.net/schoolofmarketing to learn more about the training courses
offered by the ANA School of Marketing.
ANA TRAINING ENHANCEMENTS
LET’S HEAR
FROM YOU
What is the biggest
change you have made
to your marketing
organization? Email
your response to Ken
Beaulieu, senior director
of marketing and
communications at
the ANA, at
kbeaulieu@ana.net.
ANA survey found that only about 38 percent
of marketers worked closely with the CEO to
drive business strategy; as of 2013, that num-
ber had risen to 60 percent.
“We’ve seen a decade of movement where
the marketer has gone from the profile of the
big spender who didn’t have a lot of respect in
the boardroom, to having a shared sense of
responsibility and accountability about the ef-
fectiveness of that spend,” EffectiveBrands’ de
Swaan Arons explains. “The marketer is the
only one at the table who really gets this new
world, who understands this transparency,
this 24/7, always-on economy, and is being
asked by the CEO and peers to show the way.”
The ability to combine big ideas with big
data is a prerequisite. “I don’t think you’ll
be able to escape the logic side with big
data,” Unilever’s Weed says. “Those who
are purely the creative loveys won’t become
CMOs anymore.”
Another hallmark trait will be the abil-
ity to exert influence within the C-suite and
inspire organizational change. “You have
to be creative, analytical, very strategic,
and influential, and you have to understand
and represent the customer voice,” Petco’s
Charles says. “You have to be able to influ-
ence the CEO, the CFO, and work with IT.
You have to be a jack-of-all-trades.”
Successful CMOs must be inclusive
servant-leaders, who can listen to what busi-
ness units or local market teams are asking for,
rather than issuing directives from on high (for
more about this concept, see “Five Ways to
Deliver Global Marketing,” page 20). At the
same time, CMOs have to take a stand, buck
norms, and push change to do what’s right for
the customer. “Ideally, you create alignment
without compromising the best direction for
the brand,” says Lisa Cochrane, senior vice
president of marketing at Allstate Insurance.
“You have to be bold. You can’t be afraid. It
helps to be proven. But you have to be deci-
sive, based on what’s right for the customer.”
“If you’re the chief marketing officer, you’re
working with other disciplines, and you’re an
orchestrator,” de Swaan Arons says. “What
profile does that sound like? Ultimately it’s get-
ting much closer to the CEO job profile.”
Moving into the next quarter and the next
decade, regardless of whether advertising is de-
livered through people’s wearable devices or
beamed directly into their brains, the fundamen-
tal truths of the digital marketing landscape —
the need for transparency, customer-centricity,
and mastery of data — are unlikely to change.
As a result, the marketer’s role will only con-
tinue to be more valued within business than it
is today — which creates greater potential for
tomorrow’s marketers to step up to the next
rung of the ladder. ■
“You have to
be creative,
analytical,
strategic,
influential,
and you have
to understand
and represent
the customer
voice.”
— Elisabeth Charles,
Petco Animal Supplies Inc.