‘We need to swing back to that balance between existing demand and future demand’: Top CMOs list marketing priorities over next 12 months

Leading CMOs have argued that the industry has tunnel vision on existing demand, and they hope to see a refocus on the ideology of the short and the long, as well as better and more strategic adoption of AI in marketing.

At the IAB Australia Leadership Summit on Wednesday, Nine’s CMO, Liana Dubois, featured on a panel alongside Leandro Perez, senior vice president and Australia and New Zealand CMO at Salesforce, sharing their thoughts on the trends of the past year, and what they hope to see in the next 12-18 months.

Dubois said the past year-and-a-half has seen “too much of a swing” to short termism and performance based metrics.

“Marketers are wanting to capitalise on existing demand right here and right now,” she said.

“And I worry that we have, in this environment, been put into [that] position. But the reality is, depending on the category you’re in and the life cycle of your products, only 5-15% of your customers might actually be in market today. The other 85-95% might not be in market for a month, three months, six months, 12 months, or even five years.

“So we’ve really going to start bringing more balance back… we need to swing back to that balance between capitalising on existing demand and building future demand,” she said.

Dubois hopes to see marketing budgets return to scale in the near future, not because marketers are greedy and like to have big budgets, but because marketing fundamentally exists to deliver against a business strategy, and that’s not possible without a good budget.

“Whatever your organisation’s business strategy for growth is, marketing obviously exists to deliver directly towards that, and that can’t be done by slashing marketing budgets,” she said.

“To any CMOs or marketers in the room, if you’re having that experience, I feel you.

“I am searching for any glimmer of green shoots and hope that we might come out of a global economic crisis and cost-of-living crisis at some point in time.”

Perez said a way this can be done is by utilising generative AI more, to grow the top line, while also compressing and reducing the bottom line costs.

“[CEOs] see an opportunity… growing more money, making more money, while actually spending less,” he explained. “They’re trying to work out how they can reduce costs, meaning how can they do more. And it isn’t with productivity gains, it’s actually by deploying agents, or AI.”

The CMOs described AI as a shorthand for efficiencies. Perez said it could lead to doing more creative, faster because its simply the person to agency communication. By using AI, marketers can remove all that – the simple questions, signing onto a brief, getting the information needed for that brief – it could all be done autonomously by nature.

Drawing on a example from Mecca, Perez said the beauty retailer has nailed this idea.

“Mecca is one of our flagship customers, and they deployed this AI tool called ‘Miss Mecca’. Historically, you would have someone on the other side of a chat line on a website, right, but Mecca branded ‘Miss Mecca’, where customers can now get 75% of their questions answers,” he said.

He said this allows for customer service to be more creative, meaning there’s a better customer experience – showcasing Mecca as a great example for how businesses are using AI to reinvest in the things that matter.

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