Lightly edited for readability. Speaker 1: Welcome to the Business of Marketing. My name's John Horsley. I'm the host of the show today. We're recording live at Cannes Lions, and I have the absolute pleasure and delight of being joined by Christine Cook, who is chief commercial officer, Bloomberg Media.
Speaker 2: Good morning. Thank you for coming over here to BoBo Bistro.
Speaker 1: Yeah , you're welcome. Um, what would be really great as a, as starter for 10 is what attracted you to the world of marketing, media, advertising? What was it that caught your attention, brought you in in the first instance?
Speaker 2: I graduated with a focus on studying literature, history, and Spanish. I really loved language and narrative, and I trained to be a high school English teacher. And I taught just for one year and, um, my husband moved to get his PhD to New York City. And instead of teaching in New York City, I ended up getting a job in publishing, honestly, just to have a job. That was first, you know, second job. And I quickly realized that the transferable skills of narrative and communications had a broader opportunity for me, and then slowly also revealed that, um, like in 1997, I joined The New York Times, I had my first opportunity to manage somebody. I realized that leading teams was very much like leading students towards understanding things. And at, at this moment, the digital economy and websites were evolving, and they were in their more... way more simple form than they are today. But I was able to successfully translate complex and evolving things in simple ways for clients using communication skills, and then lead sales teams, motivating them like you would motivate students towards an end goal. It just so happened that this end goal wasn't understanding Hamlet. It was more understanding how to hit a revenue target.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Things I didn't know or hadn't even considered when I was studying, and, um, it's been an absolute joy. I was always a news consumer in addition to a big reader, and, um, when you study literature, you are finding the themes of what the author is trying to say through the characters or the scenes, and I think that's also allowed me to identify themes and industry trends, and that's really served me as I've moved, as the business has moved, and seeing where doors were opening, whether that was mobile or, you know, where I am now at the privilege of Bloomberg, where we're across nine platforms. So the cumulation of my entire career moving from web to mobile to TV, video, print, Bloomberg has all of those things. So, um, yeah, didn't see it coming, but really glad to be here.
Speaker 1: That's great. What a brilliant backstory. Um, you know, as part of that, you've obviously seen the, the World Wide Web, as it were, I'm not gonna say internet, evolve from kind of day one, really-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker 1: ... is what you're saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Um, digital media progress, um, mature a little bit more. We're obviously going into a-another transition of, of the web now. Um, along that way, you've sold premium digital media. I'm wondering how that's sort of transitioned over time and, and what buyers require now versus maybe three or five years back.
Speaker 2: It's probably not different in a lot of ways. Obviously, we have more choices, and it's the dynamics of how you measure or how you deliver either the creative or, um, you know, some aspects of it. But when you sell a premium environment... For example, I was at Martha Stewart. The consumer brands that wanted to be against Martha expected the salespeople to fully represent the brand. This means that you need to take the time to set the scene, how you communicate with your clients, just like the consumers receive the content. So you have to really reflect the brand, and when you do, you create that brand halo to the buyer. You represent what the consumer gets to experience. And I think that means that the sales team needs to take a minute. It isn't transactional. There's obviously highly transactional parts of buying media, which isn't the premium sell. And in highly transactional parts of buying media, it's a different kind of sales approach. Selling premium brands, you s- deeply need to understand the editorial point of view. You have to understand the rationale that the editors or the, um, in Test Kitchen, in the cooking examples put into it. Um, and at Bloomberg, what that means is not only do we have to read or watch everything that we produce, we have to have a point of view and understand the impact that has on the consumers that either watch or read us.
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, there's very much been a, a race to the bottom, as it were, in terms of digital advertising, um, CPMs, I'm gonna say, falling off a cliff. Um, and at the same time, you know, more opportunity in terms of selling premium as well. What is it that, um, publishers sometimes get wrong in terms of how they present and sell premium packages to their clients?
Speaker 2: I mean, it's interesting. I don't... One, you know, one aspect of premium is professionally sourced journalism. Like, what does premium mean? It could also mean premium photography or a high-quality video. You know, at Bloomberg, we have 3,000 journalists around the world, and many of them are, um, anchoring news desks in Sydney or in Tokyo. We have a China show out of Hong Kong or in our office Dubai, London, New York. And we've recently, over the last two years, invested in revamping those studios to keep them contemporary. That's an example of premium in our world, which is staying committed to quality production of video and an environment around that. I mention this because, um- That is worth maybe a higher CPM because of the context in which your advertising is showing up against that. If someone is getting it wrong, um, you're probably just trying to move inventory that doesn't meet a client's need. I mentioned I believe we're on nine platforms. I could sit here with you and try to force you to buy all nine platforms because that's my inventory. But if those don't work for you, if you really only need two, I need to continue to sell you those two.
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2: Premium should be in the relationship that I have respecting what you need. Um, but I think it also requires that I update you without selling you. I need to continue to come in and check in with you. You know, "John, you're just buying podcasts. I'm glad you're happy with that, but by the way, we just launched a live event. Let me tell you why." I'm not just necessarily selling you that, but I need you intellectually to understand why my editorial team thinks it's powerful to do live journalism in addition to audio. And now you're gonna see a theme, and I don't know if it's all premium publishers but it's me, it all gets back to education. It's where I started. It's informing people, not always selling. If I give you the right information, you're gonna self-select what you wanna buy from me as opposed to me trying to-
Speaker 1: Sure
Speaker 2: ... shove something down your throat.
Speaker 1: I love that. I mean, the best salespeople don't sell. Yeah. They build relationships. They build understanding. Um, they really get under the skin and the core of the client, um, and they con- they consult.
Speaker 2: Well, that's right. You bring up the other part. I mean, there's a huge obligation to deeply understand why whatever you're selling was created, and my point is, you know, professionally sourced business journalism from around the world. So it's, it's a lot to consume. But you're right. You also need to deeply consume the content of the people that you're working with. And, um, you know, you're sitting right now in a studio that we've created at Bobo Bistro. It's the third year we're here, and this studio was created for our brand studio team to sit down with 15 of our top global, um, brand officers and CMOs. Our head of studio sits down with these people for 45 minutes and has a conversation like you and I are, and th- that team knows everything about our client's business because, one, we work with these people, and we tell their stories, and we understand how they should position thought leadership. And I think, you know, this is also part of the barbell that you see. In media, you can have fast and quick. You can have a headline. You can have a picture on Instagram. But I think that there's this other incredibly powerful part, which is a longer narrative, is really deeply listening and capturing and getting to the essence. So the studio could have, like, a quick hit, five minutes to answer two questions, but instead they spend 45 minutes meandering through to get to an essential two minutes or 30 seconds in that. And so I think that, you know, premium reflection on what we do to support ads as a complement to what they consume when they consume Bloomberg. So one other thing it just reminded me in that, let's just talk for a minute about how people consume Bloomberg, which also has a wide range. I mean, sometimes it is a social post, um, and we do a lot of live events. We have, um... We see that there's more times being spent now watching longer videos, so series, 30s, whereas if you just read the trades, you would think that everything was video shorts. That's not to say video shorts don't exist, but I think we do ourselves a disjustice to make it so that content production would seemingly only be brevity. 'Cause when we do longer pieces in Bloomberg Businessweek as an example, which is an in-depth profile on an executive or an industry or a trend, we see that those sometimes are the largest drivers to paid subscription to our website. So those are interesting signals that you wouldn't necessarily see if you just looked at what the trades often talk about.
Speaker 1: Sure. And you also have audio elements as well, don't you?
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1: Your own podcasts and, and various other audio formats.
Speaker 2: Yeah, podcasts. Well, b- we've had Bloomberg Radio for almost 35 years, and then obviously as the technology has evolved into pods, we saw pods, um, getting listened to on video platforms like YouTube, and so we've added cameras to most of those. And so almost all of our podcasts, um, also have a video companion. And one thing, um, we're really excited about is Odd Lots, which is one of our more popular podcasts with Joe and Tracy. Um, we added cameras to them, so then there's been a lot of watching to that. And then they've taken their show on the road, and now people are showing up, um, to see them live. And then we've added merchandise on top of that, so now we have this fandom that has expanded, including people wearing baseball caps with Joe and Tracy's logo on it.
Speaker 1: That's so cool.
Speaker 2: It's very cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. But, you know, that's experimentation, too. They... And, and, and longevity of consistency. They've been doing this podcast for I think close to 10 years. Um, and it's been in the last two that there's been this acceleration and this organization's willingness to keep investing in different ways of telling business stories.
Speaker 1: Yeah. One of the f- things that I find incredible with audio and certainly with our show as well is the amount of attention that you earn, uh, in terms of duration. So, you know, our show is sometimes half an hour, could go up to 50 minutes, and people are listening to at least 90%, if not more.
Speaker 2: Exactly. And y- so you experience the same thing that I'm talking about. But, um, I... And I think that, that we are, we're craving, um, deeper understanding in a world that has more for us to consume and, and a faster pace of change. And, um, yeah. We w- we all still like narrative
Speaker 1: Yeah. Um, I also feel that, you know, if I'm a brand or an advertiser, okay, you can buy media anyway, uh, anywhere, you can buy reach, that's not a problem. So, and I, I think I probably know the answer to this, by the way that you're talking anyway, but what is it that attracts those brands to yourself? Are they looking for reach? I'm not sure that they are. I think they're looking for the right audience.
Speaker 2: Um, trust and trust is first and foremost, especially in business to business. Bloomberg reputationally, and justifiably so, is seen as neutral, fact-based. We cover the markets. Anything that we cover, um, we have a lot of people relying on the information that we're sharing. So that creates a halo of context for the brands that decide to work with us, so trust and context. Now, I am deeply proud of the fact that while I don't have a consumer-level scale, given, you know, consumer general news reaches broader audiences than business news by default, but we have more business video than pretty much any other publisher globally. So while I don't have, you know, a platform scale, like a Meta, for example, um, we have pretty large reach as our video coverage has been expanding. So I, we talked about TV for a second. We launched, uh, three years ago a separate channel that streams globally, Bloomberg Originals. So while Bloomberg TV is live market, open market, close around the world, Bloomberg Originals is more of our series. But even beyond that, we do produce, like, portrait video for social. We, um, have content that goes out on LinkedIn, and, um, all of that collective video is just massive, and so I think we've seen brands coming to us for that opportunity. High trust, well-edited, professionally produced video content, and the context for them to create a halo for their brands.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Let's look at the other side of that coin, as it were. So why is it that many advertisers are a little bit wary of news publications in, in terms of where they're looking to place their advertising?
Speaker 2: In general news, um, in particular, I, I could speak more intimately about what's happened in the United States over the past, um, but I think it goes anywhere. Um, brands have gotten burned, um, where they found themselves in situations... To be honest with you, most of it actually happened on social platforms, and they found themselves in awkward situations out of context.
Speaker 1: Mm.
Speaker 2: And because of that out-of-context placement, unfortunately, that created all of these block lists, which have been incredibly punitive to news organizations. It's shocking still, and this gets said so many times, but it's worth repeating, that a news organization, when using the name of a president or a prime minister, pretty much means that there will be no ads on that page because the name of the president or the prime minister is on a block list. And how on earth is a news organization gonna cover the news of the day that impacts economics, impacts businesses and supply chains? That's a thoughtful leader. That's someone who cares about policy. But because out of context on social platforms that are algorithmically delivered, brands have been caught in a compromising position, and we still haven't quite rectified it. I will say there's progress. I think they were blunt instruments that were used in the beginning, and I have to give credit to many brands who have realized that they were... It's not even about the news organization. It's really about them missing great inventory, right? I'll give you another example. So if you get into the video space and you see the popularity of streaming right now, right? So Netflix or, um, the Warner Discovery, HBO, Disney, all of these. They have a split model. You have a premium model where you can buy ad-free, or you can have ad-supported. So that's great. You probably... I don't know. I, I'm ad-free on a lot of those.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 2: And I'm, I'm in the ads business. Um, higher net worth individuals who can afford to be ad-free are now having a majority of their video consumption time ad-free. So if you're a marketer and you look at the last 20 years, a significant amount of the inventory for high net worth, high consideration audiences, which isn't all of the audiences that brands wanna reach, but for a lot, you just lost a lot of inventory. So I think there's places like Bloomberg in a business context where we create this context. It isn't algorithmically driven. You have a sense of what the video before or after is gonna be around your ad, and I think that that's been, um, something that we've seen a lot of success around.
Speaker 1: Sure. Yeah. I mean, out- outside of obviously serving ads, et cetera, if you stream video, other, other content anyway, and I'm just thinking of the context of that, um, the, the types of people who are consuming, um, and I would say not quite more often than none, but, um, at times there is also no need to serve the ads as well because that content is already monetized.
Speaker 2: Try to reframe that. Let me see if I can follow where you're going.
Speaker 1: Okay. So if you're working with a partner and you've sold them a package-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker 1: ... um, that might include video and various other formats-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker 1: ... then there's obviously no need to serve ads on, on top of, uh, those formats.
Speaker 2: Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I think, um, where you're... W- I think if I'm following where you're going, we, um- When we sell a cross-platform package, right, it could be a page in Businessweek magazine or ads on the website, um, very often we will put, um, studio-produced creative in between vis-a-vis like thought leadership or other things that we do produce. Um, I would... I think right now about 60% of the campaigns that we work on with clients around the world use our studio in one way or the other, and sometimes that is they have existing white papers or research papers that they've created, and the studio will go in and turn that into display ads or articles that we put, um, on our website and... or maybe create a bumper in a video spot with a data point because our audience is interested in, like, factual proof of, um, efficacy on whatever position a client is taking.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Is that where you were going?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. Um, I'm also thinking in terms of, uh, the types of clients that are, are doing white papers, reports, research-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker 1: ... et, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And, uh, I mean, s- this has been really interesting 'cause the studio came up with this product, they call it Spotlight, because they realized that, um, especially in a business-to-business world, no matter if you're in a technology category or a finance category, there's, like, these infinite libraries of these research papers that really smart people within those companies have put together, and they just don't really get the light of day. So they would go through, and they've been able to pull out and make that into more, um, interesting factoids that invite deeper, um, curiosity, and, and they've-- they can do it, like, really quickly. And that actually, I think, creates better context for those ads because if you're watching or reading Bloomberg, and then the studio team has, like, pulled that out, then you have this easy thing as opposed to, like, an abrupt and different creative experience.
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. Do you feel the consump-
Speaker 2: Can you believe I just mentioned creative and we're in Cannes?
Speaker 1: Here we go.
Speaker 2: I was like we just got to creative.
Speaker 1: Do you feel the consumption of, of such content such as, I don't know, a research report, for instance... I'm just thinking a few years back would probably have been a 28-pager, an awful lot of depth and detail. Um, it would've been blended with, uh, numerous surveys, et cetera, lots of data points within that. Do you think people's consumption habits have changed? Do they still want that long-form content, or are they looking for something that's more snackable or perhaps serialized?
Speaker 2: It's an and. I, I, I think it's, um, it's... I think it's both. You, um, you have different scenarios where someone is on their journey, so I think that, you know, sometimes you tease it out with a factoid or a, a little tight POV. Um, the other thing that we're seeing is, I said POV, we did s- recent research, um, looking at the last three years of thought leadership that we've produced, so we produced thought leadership on thought leadership. It's kind of meta.
Speaker 1: Yep. Makes sense.
Speaker 2: Um, and what really resonated and is increasingly becoming the most productive and asked for is us helping our clients create a point of view and have a human. S- sometimes we have, like, the, the business case studies where, like, someone's talking about what worked on them working together. But having a human forward, often telling a video story, really does draw people in equally as much and then sometimes more than the display factoid, you know, 35% conversion or whatever the thing that the client is. I think that's interesting because there's so much content that it gets commoditized. If you're, um, if you're in the banking industry, and you're doing wealth management, it's very challenging to tell a wealth management story differentiated from a Singapore bank, a Dubai bank, and an American bank, as an example. So what we really try to dig in is help extract the ethos of what makes them particularly different, and that gets to what is that point of view. Is their point of view a customer relationship? Is it a conversion on yield? I mean, you know, they're all gonna have... They need to have something a little different, but without us showing them how they may start to all look and sound the same because of our environment, th-they don't, they don't know, and so they really rely on us to help extract that unique and differentiated point of view.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's making me think of, of, uh, I know this isn't a word, but I'm gonna use it, sameism.
Speaker 2: Same, sameism. Yeah, I think slop has been used-
Speaker 1: Yeah
Speaker 2: ... a lot, which I like your sameism is a little tidier than that.
Speaker 1: It is similar. Yeah. So the idea that, okay, someone might go on an AI, and, you know, I need a white paper, blah, blah, blah, blah. A competitor of theirs is o- on an AI, "Oh, I need a white paper," blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 2: That's right. That's right.
Speaker 1: And you just get something that's incredibly similar.
Speaker 2: It is. It-
Speaker 1: A million words when maybe 10 would've done. Uh, but what y-you're talking to as well is the art of storytelling, story arcs, et cetera, uh, and narrative.
Speaker 2: And origin story. Yeah, a narrative that helps to reveal, like, why are you in this business? I mean, you mentioned, like, using AI, but, uh, there's so many companies that also wanna help other companies transform through AI. But you... I mean, how many people are gonna say that same thing? So we really try to dig in and help get to reveal data points that are, um, either an origin story, a point of view that the company has, an approach, you know, a, a destination, so that they have differentiated stories when they are across our platforms.
Speaker 1: Sure. Do you feel that the client side have matured over the years, uh, in terms of what they ask from you and why, and the outcomes that they are expecting, uh, um, and what they're looking to achieve?
Speaker 2: I've been at Bloomberg for three and a half years, so that isn't a terribly long time, you know, generally speaking. But within that time, um, I do think we've evolved in that way that clients are using us more. I mean, we've always gone forward with thought leadership, and we've done proprietary research. For example, the past two years, we did proprietary research on corporate reputation because it was the beginnings of this journey of thought leadership, and we realized, wow, who owns corporate reputation within a company? And boy, oh boy, depending on company to company, it's either nobody knows, five people own it. And think about the chaos of what that means to your brand if you don't really know, you know, who is owning this. Well, we evolved the corporate reputation research into the thought leadership research because they were kind of connected, like how are you expressing your reputation through your thought leadership, and that what kind of got to the second set of research. But, um, the other thing that we've noticed in having conversations with our clients here, because I mentioned we're using this studio to have these interviews, is that, one, what are the clients calling themselves? So we can say what used to be the chief marketing officer, but we're seeing that a lot of people are now, or at least who we are speaking to, are chief brand officers, which I thought was pretty interesting because they're elevating the importance of brand, which felt derivative of that focus of reputation. And brand really has the superset of the operationalization, which might be your data and measurement. It is your creative strategy, it is your marketing and media strategy, and it is your comms strategy. Um, we also have been seeing people with titles, uh, chief mark- uh, chief communication and marketing officer is an interesting evolution from, you know, about five or seven years ago was... it was like the CMTO, the chief marketing technology officer. Um, all of these derivatives around a function that is getting increasingly more complex and kind of excitingly ready to move to the CEO level, running the company, because they, um, have such a plethora of things responsible. I know I've already mentioned a bunch of research, but there's one more I just wanna share with you. So, um, we've showed up at Cannes this year trying to practice B2B and not just talk about it, and what that means is that we've been in partnership with, uh, four agencies and three trade publications to share the space and share conversation, and one of the agencies was Lippincott. And we did a brand study, uh, we did a research study with Lippincott understanding what were CMO challenges, and we interviewed 500, over 500 people with CMO or CMO-like titles. And, um, we got rid of a North American bias. We worked with NewtonX to help field this study, and it was equally represented across Europe, Asia, Middle East, and North A- and North America. And what came out was the titles. The titles are all over the place. They're changing. Chief growth officer, we started to see that kind of a change. And when you looked at, um, the different things that they identified as challenges, you could kind of cluster it in a two-by-two matrix. One, in the upper left-hand corner, were revenue drivers. These were typically B2B-oriented marketing leaders. They have high influence in their companies. The forces that they're fighting against are driving pipeline for their organization, so they get a lot of f- funding, and they're responsible for revenue driving. To the right of them, in the upper right-hand cor- qu- if you'll allow me on a two-by-two, um, were transformational leaders, again, still in the marketing, and they're investing in AI, they're investing in infrastructure within their companies. They get a lot of funding. They're getting a lot of, um, uh, control or access at the leadership table of driving the business. When you move down over the midline to the lower le- and, and they actually are mostly those transformational leaders tend to be more B2C-
Speaker 1: Mm
Speaker 2: ... than B2B and the revenue drivers. In the lower left quadrant, these folks are in organizations, what they're fighting against is the internal bureaucracy. So it isn't about them so much. They might be as talented as the other two, but within their organization, they're just spending all of their time working through cross-functional matrix bureaucracy, can't get budget, having a hard time. In the lower right were marketers that were maybe newer to role, um, don't get budget, and were fixated on trying to talk about marketing metrics. And so I thought that dynamic was really interesting because I feel like we're running into definitely more of those revenue drivers in the upper corner, being in B2B, and seeing their titles change into these other areas, which isn't just the CMO, so to speak.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, of course. I mean, we've recently had John Rodowski on the show. Uh, he's chief brand-
Speaker 2: No doubt
Speaker 1: ... marketing officer, Ernst & Young. Actually, one of his quotes I thought was great, which is, um, "Brand is the engine of the world."
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And that really, really kind of stuck with me, and I like his way of words and the visual language that he uses when he talks and how he communicates.
Speaker 2: A hundred percent. He's smart and effective and efficient.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Um, other people I've spoken to over the last week Um, CEOs, but, you know, uh, CEO and global transformation officer within that one title. Um, people who are aligning comms with marketing. Uh, I had a conversation with, uh, a woman who'd sold her agency to a larger group, um, and within the last two years she's now become their global president. A super smart individual. She was on the show a couple of days ago, and she was talking about titles as well. So, you know, chief marketing, strategy, technology, communications offi- you know, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And also unrealistic expectations of a board. So, um, people who are members of a board, the CFO might have an opinion, the CEO, you know, the COO, et cetera. Um, marketers are generally not on the board. You know, it's about two and a half, perhaps 3% if we're lucky, are on boards of directors globally, uh, and they're not represented.
Speaker 2: I heard, um, from, I, I believe it's MasterCard, where they require anybody who is going to be on the trajectory for growth into the CEO's position is required to do the CMO role, or whatever derivative-
Speaker 1: Mm
Speaker 2: ... that might be called, before being considered in the pipeline for the CEO, and I thought that was pretty radical.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: If you think about a required rotation of experience before taking the CEO position to have to hold the marketing position. You know, there's a lot of times where a CFO or an, an operator or a financial person goes into that role, which if they don't have to understand truly what is under the role of the marketer, then it'll make their growth stifled, I believe.
Speaker 1: Sure. I mean, something else that we're seeing in the market as well, and you're probably seeing it yourself, is a swing. I- in the last 10 years, uh, marketing has been very much about demand and short-term return, um, and there's a, a groundswell at this point in time towards, um, long-term brand building. Uh, that I believe is partly driven by AI and the proliferation of that, um, and the fact that people will be searching in, you know, answer engines, um, looking to shortlist potential, uh, brands that they would like to either buy into or in a B2B scenario. Um, yeah, so, you know, they're searching that way, whereas, you know, if your brand's already existing in their head, you are on that shortlist, and that can only get there through the art of creating great content and brilliant communications.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Um, there's a couple of things. Another thing that came out in that study that we did with Lippincott is exactly what you just said, which is, um, people in the marketing function feel like they're in a situation where they're into short-termism in the variety of ways that you said.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The other thing that is impacting that, that you didn't bring up, is what has the last six years been like in the macroeconomic landscape?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, you know, COVID happened, that messed up supply chains and a variety of things. It spiked spending in certain categories, and then when we came out, tanked it. You saw layoffs and turnarounds that disrupted, you know, massive hiring to support that supply and that change. On the heels of that, you have some pretty big tariff swings that did impact businesses, and now with the, uh, conflict in the Gulf, you know, packaged goods companies dealing with the cost of plastics in their production, which really hits consumer prices. All of these are horrific yo-yos for a marketer, so of course it's short-termism, not just because of a quick search. It's short-termism because they can't plan more than six months-
Speaker 1: Of course
Speaker 2: ... before something else is spinning. So I think there's likely a desire for a longer term, and then a need to be able to pivot. So reframing that so that there's a balance of maintaining a ratio on brand through those things, 'cause we know that through struggles and chaos, the brands that stay on at the highest level have a better likelihood of recovery on the other side, to your point.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You already wanna be higher up in the consideration, so if you scrap all of your brand awareness and marketing and communication because something's happening and you try to come back up again, it's, you know... Y- you were halfway up the mountain, you went down, you gotta get halfway back up before you get to the top. If you can find a way to stay at half or a quarter without going all the way down, your success on recovery is gonna be accelerated.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, totally. I mean, you, you see, you know, when we've been in recession, um, businesses, they invest, they market heavily, they advertise. They come out with so much more market share, uh-
Speaker 2: Yeah, and-
Speaker 1: ... at the end point.
Speaker 2: I'm, I feel like I'm just pitching the whole Lippincott study here.
Speaker 2: But there was something else that came, uh, well, we just talked out, about it over lunch yesterday, so it's very, it's, like, very much top of my mind. But, um, the, I think the, um, the thing that they were talking about that was super, super important was, um, staying close to cultural moments, and this goes for B2B or B2C. And when you think about that, um, it's the spontaneity to respond to what's happening, and you can do that in an exciting way. Maybe you're excited that Taylor Swift is gonna get married, which is, like, driving a whole bunch of industries, so for some people are trying to respond to that.
Speaker 1: Industries.
Speaker 2: Well, now you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Um, or it could be something heavy, like what we went through in COVID, where it's a cultural moment, and y- you know, how do you show up and talk to your consumer base and have a point of view and let them know that you're still there? Well, what came up in the study is that, um, it's very difficult for some brands to be able to stay close on cultural marketing because you have so many approval layers-
Speaker 1: Mm
Speaker 2: ... to go through, depending on your brand. And like sometimes it's taking three months to get it approved, and the thing that you are aligning with, I live in New York City and I happen to still be very excited that the Knicks won the basketball tournament, which they haven't done in 50 years, and this has been huge for New York City. I mean, this moment of energy and enthusiasm. But like if you need to wait and you don't get your campaign out until four months later, you kind of are in the wrong part of the conversation. I mean, I think we're still gonna be really excited, but it will have evolved to something different. So the, the challenge that came up in that study is how do marketers operationalize culture marketing? And if you do, do you suck the spontaneity and connection out of it? I mean, it's an interesting challenge, but, but I think consumers want this recency and connection, whether it's a consumer brand or a B2B brand. I mean, both are relevant.
Speaker 1: Sure. I mean, it's all about relevance, isn't it? Of course.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I don't know many banks are gonna be jumping on the Taylor Swift thing, except for the credit card companies should because I will tell you, whatever she does, everybody's gonna buy 100 of.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You also talked, I've just made a note, you talked to brand reputation just a moment ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Um, and I'm thinking executive reputation. So is there a greater investment at this point in time? You, you mentioned thought leadership as well-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker 1: ... in, you know, really putting a, you know, a, a bit of personality, um, and turning executives into the thought leaders of the business and the faces of the business, where in the past businesses have been fairly faceless. Um, and reputation has been a- about the business. I believe that there's a bit of a shift in terms of building up, um, the executives to have, um, yeah, to, to be representing and to be more accessible to individuals.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a good time to be in the communications field because I think comms people have a lot of opportunity in front of them for that reason exactly because part of trust, especially in a B2B world, is having trust in the leader, knowing who they are, and hearing what their point of view is. I mean, you heard me before talking about point of view, and for us, we see this show up particularly at live events. So yes, you can go do an interview on TV. You can have a, you know, segment where you talk about your earnings or whatever your offering is. But, um, Bloomberg has 12 events globally around the world, and we see particularly if there's an executive change, a merger, a company coming together, an increasing demand not only for the executives to be on stage and to share, but a real desire from the investment community or other business partners to actually see who are these people that are running that company. 'Cause I can read about you, I can see you on TV, but we will never be able to deny the power of humans literally being like you and I are right now. Um, I have a better sense of who you are, even if we did a Zoom call or had a phone call. This opportunity to be face-to-face is so powerful, and I think is part of a premium that people are flocking towards.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I, I agree totally with that statement. Um, do you feel that the, the role of the CMO is changing slightly, i.e., S- um, sorry, the CEO, um, that CEO, CEO should also be the chief storyteller within a business? Uh, and also leadership within the companies that they represent, again, are being trained to become much better storytellers, you know, so that they can bring their function along the journey and things are much more connected, and then how they represent themselves to the outside world.
Speaker 2: Yes on storytelling, but, uh, the caveat to be that it is authenticity. So if you have a CEO, um, the story that they should tell is about their business vision, not necessarily always the product suite. So for example, if you had a CEO of, um, you know, an HR software company, and that HR software company, their, you know, value proposition was ease of use in the software. I don't necessarily think that CEOs should be... I mean, of course they should be able to articulate that. But if they had a vision that they were gonna scale to the Global South because that was the market opportunity that was being underserved, their business vision on how they were gonna do that, if they had a sense that they needed to employ like all women or whatever their b- only use Microsoft Excel, whatever their thing is, that their business driver, that's the story the CEO should tell. And, and I think sometimes maybe they don't feel permission to do that. They feel like they need to talk about what the products do. But, you know, I, I think understanding the direction of travel and the raison d'être is f- in their mind of where business growth is gonna happen is, are stories that they should own, which is why I also said that I think the comms people... And, and that, that comms marketing, you know, duality is interesting because you do the consumer or the product over here, but the executive point of view is, is slightly and should often be slightly different.
Speaker 1: That's also ma- making me think about B2B brands developing a personality as well. So I mean, look 20 years back, let's take tech companies. They all kind of look the same. Um, and I'm feeling that we're kind of at the cusp of something at the moment where B2B is starting to learn a bit from B2C-
Speaker 2: Yeah
Speaker 1: ... um, and develop a brand voice and personality. You made me think about that when you were talking about, um, uh, like people type software, et cetera. I was thinking of Workday actually when you were telling that story.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh, and again, you know, they've, they've obviously done their rock star stuff. They did the, uh, Super Bowl. Um, they- They go on tour with bands and, and whatnot else. You know, at, at the end of the day, they're selling an HR technology.
Speaker 2: Right. Well, and you know where else you see this really popping up is the brands surrounding, um, F1 as an example, because it gives them an adjacency to show how their software and systems are doing something pretty foxy around race cars and in those, um, scenarios.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons that, um, B2Bs, tech cos sponsor F1 is for their partner channel, so the partners can bring along their clients, their prospects, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Well, the entertainment has always been part of it, but the stories that they can now tell out of it, you know? So the-
Speaker 1: Absolutely
Speaker 2: ... consulting firms who are helping the F1 become more sustainable and the things that they've had to do, those are applicable to a million industries, um, or the software companies that are doing the compute for the data around the track. I mean, just to, for, for people to be able to dimensionalize other use cases besides their own company, I think often is inspiring to understand you might be able to do something in your company that you weren't even thinking about using their service for. So, um, y- you know, I wanna go back to something you said actually in the beginning, which occurred to me mentioning that if I'm s- what, you were talking about premium publisher sales, and like-
Speaker 1: Sure
Speaker 2: ... uh, we, in B2B, we, we have a sales team that's focused on industry verticals because we think it's important for them to understand the industry that their clients are working in and apply that to what we do. And the trap where I think people get it wrong is if you go into a bank and you only show the bank case studies on what other banks have done. I think you should go into a bank and show them what the luxury clients are doing-
Speaker 1: Mm
Speaker 2: ... or the auto companies are doing or the telecommunications companies are doing, because how those other industries think about leveraging assets and communication challenges can inspire similarly to the F1 story, other ways to show up, and I think that's when things get exciting.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, it's about the art of the possible. Look, I'm gonna bring thing, things to a kind of a wrap now. It's, this has been a fantastic conversation. One area that I always like to end on is advice. So if you've maybe got some advice for a younger individual, they could be perhaps at the start of their career, perhaps they are, they've graduated and they're looking to get into the world of media, marketing, advertising, or perhaps creative as w- we hear at Cannes, uh, what piece of advice would you like to offer them?
Speaker 2: Well, I think it's ki- I would take it back to narrative and be bold enough to have a position about your vision of where you wanna go. When I started, I, you know, I shared with you I thought I was gonna be a teacher. My first job, I will admit, I was really just happy to have a paycheck. When I went to my second job, I started to realize where I was curious because the business was evolving. By co- time I got to my third job, so I went New York Times to Financial Times, you know, to Martha Stewart. When I got to Martha Stewart, I realized that I wanted to accumulate different experience, not just rush title up. I think when you just rush title up, obviously to, you think you're gonna get more money. You rob yourself of your later career because if, if you wanna have a long time professional career these days, you need to acquire multiple aspects of experience. The more narrow you are, I think it's, it can be damning limiting. The business just continues to pivot, so I would say go horizontal, horizontal, horizontal, horizontal as long as you can because, I mean, I've been doing this for a very long time. If you just rush title, you're just too narrow and you don't have the dimensionality to be ready for whatever pivots the market might take.
Speaker 1: Fantastic. Thanks. You've been such a great guest on the show today.
Speaker 2: I so appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for coming to our space.
Speaker 1: You're welcome.