The Better Question
A career built inside the creative industries, from Saatchi and WPP to global brand at EY, and a belief that inspiring your own people is where brand growth begins.
"don't be shaped by the future, shape it."
John Rudaizky is Global Chief Brand and Marketing Officer at EY, where he leads brand and marketing for one of the world's largest professional services organizations. He is known for creating the award-winning Better Questions platform and for arguing that brand building at scale begins by inspiring an organization's own people.
Rudaizky traces his start to a university market stall and a school full of creative people, where a love of selling met the pull of the creative industries. He chose advertising over the city and joined Saatchi, which he describes as the rock and roll agency of its time, later running his own agency and working across WPP. In 2014 he moved to EY to transform the brand, a decision he says many questioned before the rise of the consultancy in business.
At EY, Rudaizky built the Better Questions platform with Steve Dunn and Dave Allen at Brand Pie, landing on the line that the better the question, the better the answer, the better the world works, since tweaked to the better the prompt, the better the answer. He has worked through a relaunch under CEO Janet Troncalli around the strapline shape the future with confidence, and he points to the ambition set by former chair and CEO Mark Weinberger, who he says wanted to double the size of the business with distinctive brand at its heart.
brands are the engine of the world
"So I, I believe it's an and, not an or."
Rudaizky refuses to treat creativity and technology as rivals. He recalls that people declared the end of creativity when digital first arrived, when it was simply a new format. For him the magic is always the marrying of the science and the magic, with AI as another set of tools in human hands.
"it was about a business strategy, not an, not an external marketing campaign."
Rudaizky argues purpose only works when it is embedded in how a business operates rather than bolted on for communications. At EY he found a purpose, building a better working world, that had to be meaningful across people, clients and society. He treats it as a driver of talent and trust, not a marketing wrapper.
"what we've seen is that emotion sells."
Rudaizky insists B2B is more emotional than consumer marketing because a client is betting their career, their mortgage and their home on who they choose to work with. He points to EY's film Generations as emotive storytelling that outperforms the traditional rational sell. Bringing consumer instincts into B2B, he says, has worked.
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