OK, we just had a fabulous lunch. Thank you both so much
for joining. I think it was about 60 people in our cabana.
So John, CMO is the superhero of the C-suites. Tell me a bit more
about that. The superhero—I was going say the super, a good,
good way of describing the CMO role. The important thing for
the CMO is to represent the consumer where decisions are
made in organization. That's really important, and they play
that role uniquely. And the second thing they've got to do
is look at the long term as well as the short term. I think it's
absolutely critical that they are bringing insights but also
guiding the organization about where they're going to go next.
And I think those
two roles in particular are critical for a CMO to be
successful.
So being able to see into the future, but also connect with
the current. Totally, do both those things. Balancing the long
and the short is one of the most important jobs of every CMO. And
there's so much pressure to go short and short term results.
But the ones that win are the ones that are able to play the
long game and bring the organization with them on that
journey. And so that's superhero skill set. That's quite a bag of
tricks. Sophie, what are the key skills that you think every CMO
needs to do to succeed in that role? Well, CMOs need to be
change leaders, right? And to do that, building on what people
have talked about as
soft skills but are more power skills, there's three, I think.
What we see is the incredible skill and success of anybody who
understands how to work on their listening potential. Yes,
consumer listening, but also listening to those inside the
organization to understand how to engage and tell stories with
them. Which leads on to the second one, which is, of course,
in the future, the differentiating point for
successful leaders in any business, and particularly CMOs,
is to be exceptional storytellers. To connect with
human, memorable stories, to bring things to life. It's such
a skill and such an important one.
And then the third one is the ability to condense and contract
and collate and curate down to just three things every time
someone asks you a question. There's so much to talk about,
but if you can choose the three most important things at any
time, that's a really good skill. Amazing. Thank you. And
John, here in Cannes this last couple of days, any kind of key
takeaways, key learnings that you've had that you think you're
going to be wanting to kind of put into your podcast to
supercharge those superpowers of our CMOs? Well, look, we're here
to talk about
creativity, aren't we? And creativity is so important, but
creativity is more than the creative. Now we're celebrating
the creative here. But actually creativity transforms
businesses. And I think it's the ability to take an idea and
execute it that can create so much value for an organization.
And as Mark says, we leave that creative process and we should
be able to tap into the power of creativity, but also demonstrate
the value of creativity. And one of the things that I really
admire about Cannes Lions is that they're leaning on
effectiveness much more than they ever have done. In fact, I
was chatting to the CEO this morning who is telling me the
most
packed out sessions of all of them are the effectiveness track
ones. And I think that's really important because it shows the
value we create for organizations and the
transformation that we deliver. So more creativity, but more
evidence of what it can do I think is the key thing. Amazing.
CMOs supercharging the C-suite for growth. Thanks so much.
Thank you.