CMO Club Awards Archives

How CMOs Take Marketing to the Next Level

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Drew Neisser

Last week I introduced my new keynote speech, Think Like A CMO as the brazen answer to the question: What’s the secret to success? My rationale starts with the extreme yet somewhat familiar sounding challenges that most CMOs (and the rest of us) face:

Bosses that may have unrealistic or significantly different expectations;
Numerous factors that impact results that are outside of one’s control;
Limited time-frame to achieve successful outcomes.

To overcome these obstacles, I then present successful CMOs as cool CATS (Courageous, Artful, Thoughtful, Scientific), an acronym that offers guidance for just about anyone looking to accomplish anything. Happily, the speech was well received. What also makes me happy is that the interview below with Anthony Christie, CMO at Level 3 Communications, adds more evidence to my growing stockpile. Christie, winner of The CMO Club‘s Officer Award, is indeed one of the cool CATS:

Courageous: Shifted the responsibility for customer experience into the global marketing department;
Artful: Developed CMO-CIO-CTO triumvirate to tackle cross-functional challenges;
Thoughtful: Launched a new branding initiative internally first, an effort that insured employee pride and commitment;
Scientific: Implemented a variety of metrics including brand tracking and sales performance.

And like his successful peers, as you will soon learn, for these CATS, there’s no time for preening.

Drew: Looking back over the last 12-24 months, what initiative under your leadership really worked well?

In Q4 of 2014, Level 3 completed the acquisition of tw telecom. My team was directly involved in leading the integration process from end-to-end. First the product management and development teams that I oversee have led the process of rationalizing our product portfolio and continued work to move to single instances of our products and solutions around the globe. Additionally, our marketing strategy, pricing and communications teams have been responsible for integrating targeting strategies, pricing approaches, voice of the customer activation as well as all internal and external communications related to bringing two companies together as one. A year into the integration process, the company has achieved our major milestones and are meeting stakeholder expectations.

Drew: I watched your recent corporate video and one of the lines that struck me was “you may not have heard of us but many companies have.” How important is it to your long term plans to have broader awareness of Level 3? If it is, how do you go about building this awareness while still driving leads efficiently into your pipeline?

We have a very surgical approach to targeting enterprises in our addressable market. Our business is B to B only and focused on wireline services to enterprise and wholesale unlike some of our competitors who play in the consumer wireless space. So, it’s not necessary for us to have broad awareness in the general marketplace. However, we are focused on simultaneously building awareness and filling our funnel through a mix of thought leadership, events, social media and hyper-targeted efforts that drive inbound activity and qualified outbound activity. And we have evidence through our brand tracker and campaign results that this approach is working.

Drew: Effecting change beyond the marketing department is not easy and is often met with resistance from other departments. How did you make this happen? Looking back, what do you wish you knew a year ago that you learned “the hard way”?

It’s critical to understand the needs across the enterprise and to look at change efforts from your cross-functional stakeholder’s point of view. In our case, we look at the functions of the CMO, CTO and CIO as a three-legged stool that relies upon each other to move the business forward. This relationship has become a deliberate part of our operating model. Separately, we learned the “hard way” that affecting change in improving the customer experience could not happen in a silo within one functional area of the business. We resolved this by moving responsibility for global customer experience out of the business process function and into the global marketing function as we believe that customer experience is intrinsically tied to brand and a comprehensive view of the customer journey.

Drew: Did any of your marketing initiatives involve employee activation? If so, can you describe what you did and how it worked? How did you get employees to care?

When we relaunched our brand, we actually built the foundation through the lens of our employee base first then evaluated it to ensure that it was also compelling for our customers and prospects. We also deliberately launched the brand internally before launching it externally. We built various programs and communications to engage our employees. These included a fun and interactive e-book, use of our employees in our branded materials including videos and posters, and ongoing communications and brand immersion training. These efforts helped to instill a sense of pride and to give them context for how important each and every one of their jobs are to “Own It” and be accountable to their contributions to the company with the end goal of enabling our customers’ business success.

Drew: When advising members of your team on cross-departmental initiatives, what do tell them to do and not do to ensure success?

First and foremost, I advised them to approach these initiatives as though they were the CEO of their business. That inherently assumes cross-functional leadership and engagement. A CEO by definition cannot do the job on their own. It requires understanding and respect for cross-functional expertise. At the same time, the leader of any cross-functional initiative needs to gather stakeholder input and work toward a collaborative solution. And to remember that collaboration does not equal consensus. At some point in the process, the best decision for the business needs to be reached and implemented.

Drew: Looking ahead, what is the single biggest challenge that you’d like to overcome?

The biggest challenge I’d like to overcome to is to accelerate the alignment of my team with our partners in sales and operations to grow our business faster than the broader market and do that on a global scale.

It’s Not Digital Marketing–It’s Just Marketing!

Posted on March 11, 2016 by Drew Neisser

Over the years, practitioners have been inclined to slice up marketing into increasingly small operational areas. When I started way back when there was “above the line” and “below the line” with advertising being elevated and all other forms of marketing being lumped together into an unglamorous morass of “oh yeah that stuff.” From that morass emerged direct marketing then CRM then digital marketing then search engine marketing then social media, influencer, content, employee and most recently, account-based marketing. Add to this ever-splintering tableau books like mine which identified 64 discrete elements and you might imagine that there is no such thing as a unified marketing department anymore.

Well, that would be categorically wrong and don’t just take my word for it. Paul D’Arcy, SVP of Marketing at Indeed, the top site for searching jobs in the world, makes it very clear in our interview below from his opening statement. To generate over 180 million unique web visitors a month, Paul and his team at Indeed take a holistic approach in their efforts to bring job seekers and employers together. An approach that includes storytelling of the highest order along with continuous testing of new channels and optimizing existing ones. And though Indeed remains one of the fastest growing brands in the world, Paul still believes his team can double the impact of their marketing investment leaving little wonder Paul why was presented with the Growth Award by The CMO Club late last year.

Drew: What new digital initiatives did you try in 2015 and how did these perform? What were your goals and how did it work out?

We don’t think about digital: we think about marketing. I think the most interesting things we’re doing this year are very traditional. We’re trying to tell our story of helping people get jobs through strong, authentic creative that features real people. We focus on results — and results for us means bringing job seekers and employers together to help people get jobs. We tell this story wherever we can engage people whether that’s TV, social, online video, or on the printed ad engaging someone on their commute.

Drew: Were there any areas of your digital marketing that you were disappointed with? If so, what were some of the issues you encountered?

Yes! I often say that I want the mean return on investment of our investments to be high and for the median to be zero. This means that we try many things and that more than half will fail. But we scale investment on the things that work and see great results. If we’re not trying things that fail than we’re falling behind in a quickly shifting world. We find that we rarely get a creative strategy or new engagement channel right the first time. We always test multiple approaches to deepen our understanding and find the right way to engage our constituents.

Drew: A recent survey of marketers suggested that less than 10% feel they are leveraging data to the fullest extent possible. Why is this such a challenging area to get right?

We’re at a point where there is really, truly endless data available to us. Analysis (or programmatic use of data) takes skill, time, and work. We need to pick and choose the data we want to understand and commit to do the work to get the insights that make us better. There will always be blind spots, and data that is out there but that no organization has the time to pull it together, organize it, and analyze it. Picking the right data to analyze and understand is a very important capability. We love hiring people who are naturally curious because they always take us a step or two deeper into the data than we would have gone otherwise.

Drew: Marketing, especially data integration, often requires skills sets beyond the typical marketer. How have you been able to corral the resources and skill sets needed to achieve your digital marketing goals? Did this require new management skills?

We have chosen to build a team that blends, in equal parts, highly technical marketers, highly creative markets, and people with deep functional expertise. A large percentage of our marketers can code. We’ve had marketers move from our team into core product software engineering at Indeed. We have software engineers, data scientists, statisticians, economists, and mathematicians on the team. I think these skills — and the skills to lead and mentor these technical teams — are absolutely essential to building a great marketing function and measuring the impact of marketing investments.

Drew: With the plethora of digital marketing options, channels and content available today and increasing quickly, how do you decide where to “place your bets” in terms of marketing spend and choices?

We test first and scale the things that work. The key is to test as many things as possible. For us, this is complex because we’re in 50+ countries and it’s important to understand not just what works, but where it works and doesn’t work. We focus all of our teams on trying as many things as possible and measuring the impact. We encourage people to fail. But, as more programs do become successfully and scale, it does become hard to start with new programs with big potential but that start small. To help with this, we have a dedicated campaign lab team that reports to me directly and that focuses on testing large quantities of ideas that start small and are likely to fail.

Drew: What is the single biggest marketing challenge that you’d like to overcome?

I think we can still double the impact of every marketing dollar that we spend. As a relatively new brand, there is still so much that we don’t know. We have a long list of documented things that we don’t know and we’re working to create the measurements and experiments to answer these questions. I’m incredibly excited for what we’ll learn as a team in 2016.

CMO Insights: Global Sponsorships

Posted on January 10, 2014 by Drew Neisser

Here is the 2nd part of my extensive and enlightening interview with Aon’s Global CMO Phil Clement. This part covers Aon’s highly effective global sponsorship of Manchester United and the impact that program has customers, partners and employees. I have no doubt that just about any marketer will find what Phil has to say instructive. So read on…

Drew: It seems that Aon’s sponsorship of Manchester United is a big part of your marketing program. How does that fit into your go-to market strategy?

We’re in 120 countries, and in every country we have additional stakeholders—vendors, governments, regulators—and we have community groups that we interface with. Having a globally established brand is important. The Manchester United sponsorship has been a big part of that because we can use the same team, same language, same sponsorship material, same explanation for what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and why we’re doing it across the world, because Manchester United is understood in every country.

Drew: In light of that, how do you measure the success of your programs?

Manchester United merits its own type of point system. We focused on three objectives. Because we are a company that has grown via 435 acquisitions, we called the first one Aon United, and we measured that by employee survey. Do [our employees] believe we have an important and engaging brand? Are they proud to work at the firm? We did extraordinarily well. Pride and whether Aon has a strong brand were the two highest responses in the survey. Prior to the sponsorship, the brand one was the lowest, and pride was not nearly as high. We know from our research that positive brands automatically have higher engagement.

The second way that we measured it was in marketing equivalency. We took some of the sponsorship fee and applied it against that. Then we used third party, almost public domain-type measures on the value of the advertising on television and in media, PR, online and in chat rooms. The third measure was client engagement. We looked at renewal rates, new business and crossover efforts. We counted the margin on that business, divided it by half, and did a calculation on whether or not it was a better investment than stock buyback. Everything else—like the fact that our recruiting lines in India went from 25 to 1,000, wrapping around the block—didn’t go into the calculations. The fact that employees were wearing jerseys to work, you can’t count that.

Drew: It’s interesting that this program had such a powerful effect on your employees, and ultimately they are your greatest brand ambassadors. Were you conscious of that going into this sponsorship?

It was very conscious. There’s always a gravitational pull that takes apart companies that have grown through acquisition. So, it’s extraordinarily important to provide additional substance to why you work together, and also excitement and symbolism to gather around. Manchester United has certainly done that for us.

Drew: Do you have a brand police? Does corporate have to approve local activities?

I have to approve any sponsorship that is above $25,000. Anybody that is good at one profession doesn’t make good sponsorship decisions without the help of others. Our sponsorship strategy is that we want to be the only sponsor there. We want to make sure that it’s consistent with our messaging and that we can talk about 6 pillars that we use in all sponsorship activity: Risk, Talent, Health, Retirement, Data & Analytics, and Access to Capital. We also have pretty good ideas on pricing, which would merit an intervention.

Drew: Does social play a role in your business?

Our core client base does not use social media to get information, because there’s an aversion to talking about your health and benefits policies on social media. They look for things like articles on what it means to have an aspiring manager. It’s a mix of having the right content in the right places and realizing that the decisions of our clients are not driven by social media.

Our colleagues have found that the most effective way of connecting a 22-year-old colleague in India with someone in the U.S. is to provide a forum on Facebook or our internal platforms. We did a program a couple years ago called Pass it On, which focused on getting our colleagues to pass on their knowledge. We had three teams; one flew to Australia, one to Africa and one to South America and we handed off footballs through three routes back to England. Every time a ball came to your city, you did things to celebrate the culture with clients, colleagues and the community.

Drew: As CMO of Aon, what are your New Year’s resolutions? What do you hope to accomplish next year?

A couple things. Over the last 8 years we’ve done a really good job of developing an awareness of our brand. We also need to develop an understanding of what we do. Because we’re loosely affiliated with insurance, and people understand the insurance as consumer insurance they, don’t really get what we do. Internally, I would like to be more connected with my colleagues across the globe. I’m hoping I can create a global dialogue around what I think is the best profession in the world.

Final note: It’s easy to see why Phil was a recent CMO Club Awards winner.

CMO Insights: Marketing Leadership

Posted on January 8, 2014 by Drew Neisser

Ask any brand manager of a global company, and they’ll tell you that no two geographic regions are alike. Now, imagine coordinating marketing efforts across not a few, but 120 countries! This is Phil Clement’s reality as the Global CMO of insurance and risk advisor Aon. The company has a presence in nearly half the world’s territories, but has managed to uphold a consistent brand image thanks to a sponsorship of Manchester United, thoughtful content creation and some key employee surveys. After winning the prestigious President’s Circle Award at this year’s CMO Club Awards, Phil graciously agreed to elaborate on these efforts and more. This is part 1 of our extensive (and fabulously instructive) interview.

Drew: Can you provide a quick overview of AON in terms of your role in the insurance industry?

We’re predominantly in the B2B space. If you’re a hospital and you want to build a new hospital in New York, you would hire us to advise you on maximizing the health and benefit plans of your employees. We help people access what they need to address risk and help their people.

Drew: As a risk advisory, what role does marketing play for Aon?

Generally speaking, people are quite articulate and well-versed in the risk they might face. Our marketing needs to make sure that, when they are concerned about those issues, we come to mind and folks want to engage us in solving their problems.

Drew: Besides Aon’s sponsorship of Manchester United, tell me about some of your other marketing initiatives.

One of my favorites is our best employer survey. What we do in about 100 countries is identify who are the best employers. It’s a two-part process. The first is to identify what the local economy believes are the best qualities of an employer and then rank the companies against that criteria. The process of doing the survey, doing the ranking, emailing the report and having a media partner distribute it is very affordable. It’s difficult for us to move the needle if we do one good idea in one geography. When you’re sifting through $11 billion in revenue in 120 countries, one percent improvement in one country can get lost. Getting something like the best employers program to work globally has been wonderful for us.

Similarly, rather than producing 100 reports on benchmarking and data, which we may have done in the past, we pick a few that cut through the noise. One would be our risk map, where we publish a map that is color-coded based on equivocal risk. What’s the likelihood of a change in regime? If you’re doing business around the world, this map becomes an important tool, and it also suggests that we’re experts in understanding risk. Those are two of my favorite ideas.

Drew: Both of those would go in the bucket of content marketing. If we zero in on the risk map, have you looked at it from a global SEO point of view? Are you doing other things around risk and trying to own that word?

The nice thing about the word “risk” or “HR” is that we’re already number one in most of those spaces. What I started working on eight years ago was defining our spaces and making sure we had the presence to be number one. Our SEO strategy is consistent; we want to make sure people can find us.

Also, the best employers and the risk map live up to an acronym that I created called CUTT. When it comes to content, we want it to be Compelling, Useful, Timely and Transactional, meaning it captures people’s attention, it’s something that people feel they can use and reference, and it directly correlates to our business. A lot of marketers are good at hitting one of the four. It’s a constant challenge to get teams to think about hitting all four.

Drew: What does it take to hit all four?

Just consistency, and asking yourself, as a team, is this compelling? Is this useful? Is this something that they can put in their box to be read during Christmas vacation and it’s July, or is this something that they need to react to? That last piece requires a deep understanding of what your services are and why you market them, so you can give clients an in-road to want to work with you.

Drew: Do you have a team in place that is focused on content development, and has that team grown?

No. What we have is a responsibility that is injected into all roles. We have an HR model centered on five principles, and those are the same principles we use in our leadership model. Employees are evaluated by these, and they’re part of our brand as well. One of them is the value of business results; whether you’re facing clients or not facing clients, you have to understand what drives their business results.

Drew: If you don’t have employees only focused on content, do you not see Aon as a publisher of content, in a sense? It sounds like you have two big tent poles and content between.

That’s fair. I’m certainly not looking to solve the world’s problems in publishing. If you were a risk manager for a restaurant chain, our newsletters on food contamination and food safety—what’s being done preventively and what’s being filed as problems and claims—might be your most valuable reading. That’s all we aspire to.

As a CMO with 120 countries and 32 industries, how do you stay on top of what might be of interest to the risk manager at the restaurant in Rome?

First and foremost, you realize that you can’t. We just try to educate and share ways to solve problems, ways to look for the information, and try to create as much enjoyment of the challenge as possible. A lot of stuff, like the Manchester United sponsorship, came out of the center. We distribute assets that people can use, but there is always local jazz, where people improvise or do neat, creative things.

That being said, we have metrics, reports and a weekly dashboard that help me understand if something is going right or wrong. The thing that drives performance over a long period of time tends to be somewhere in the middle. We spend a lot of time working together. My favorite thing is to roll up my sleeves and work in geography on a project with a team. I prefer that to studying a report because we learn more from the perspective of what’s going on in other places.

Drew: You’ve been the CMO at Aon for eight years and must have been part of / witnessed some major changes, right?

We were around $19 a share when I joined, and we’re well over $80 now. We’ve been one of the highest performing stocks in the financials services through some pretty rough times. We sold about a third of the company and bought a new third. We went from number 2 to number 1 in every space. I’ve got a group of colleagues on the executive management team that I really believe in and my CEO brings out the best in everyone.

CMO Insights: Innovative Marketing

Posted on January 6, 2014 by Drew Neisser

Converse is the creative world’s favorite party guest, which may be why it has so many friends—over 37 million on Facebook, to be exact. Just how did the sneaker brand get so popular? Not by being the life of the party, but by practicing good people skills and good social etiquette, says CMO Geoff Cottrill. Rather than stepping on toes and dominating the social conversation, Converse lets its audience guide the dialog, knowing that the brand belongs to those who wear it. Geoff shared these insights and more with me during this year’s CMO Club Awards, where he won honors for innovation in marketing—and after you read our conversation, you’ll understand why.

Drew: Have you been able to link your innovative marketing activities to the kinds of business metrics favored by CEOs?

We are fortunate to have a massive and loyal following who is willing to post content on our behalf. To know that we have millions of friends on Facebook and hundreds of thousands of photos tagged #Converse on Instagram is humbling. But for us real success is defined by our ability to build meaningful relationships that are true to our core values, spark creativity and inspire advocacy.

Drew: The Converse page currently has more than 37 million likes – one of the top 10 most popular pages on Facebook. How did you build such an active following on social media?

As a global brand that speaks to personal style and expression, social media presents itself as a natural forum for us to communicate with our consumers. It’s absolutely a focused part of our overall communication efforts but at the same time we understand that we are not leading that communication, nor do we want to. We are a welcomed party guest. We keep it simple. Be interesting, think creatively, think globally, believe in what we are saying, and take a step back to listen and watch.

Social media is a tremendous vehicle to learn about your consumers, what they like (or don’t like about you), what they are interested in hearing from us, what they’re doing in their lives, and what they are saying to each other. This brand belongs to the people who wear it.

Drew: We love your campaign to support up and coming musicians by giving them free recording time and promoting them via social media. How did you decide to get involved in the music industry?

One of our goals as a brand is to give back and help inspire a new generation of musicians. We talked to a lot of musicians and it became apparent that studio time was costly and unaffordable for many emerging artists who had turned to home studios and their bedrooms to record. By opening Converse Rubber Tracks, it’s a way for us to say thank you to musicians all over who have helped us become the brand we are and to provide a place for new artists to have access to resources they may not be able to afford. It is Converse’s way to invest in the future of music.

Drew: Marketing seems to be getting increasingly complex in terms of ways to spend and ways to monitor. Has it gotten more complex for you and if so, how are you dealing with that complexity?

We don’t see it as being complex because our philosophy hasn’t changed. We strongly believe in building goodwill in communities and creating long-lasting brand ambassadors for the brand. It’s not just about selling sneakers.

Drew: A CMO has a lot of choices in terms of where they invest their time. What have been your top priorities in the last 12 months?

In the next few seasons, Converse sees a huge potential of opportunities within avenues such as our wholesale accounts and securing key leadership positions with these important retailers through exclusive partnerships and product offerings. Another category with tremendous opportunity is young men and to truly get after the young male consumer from a head-to-toe perspective, encompassing footwear to apparel to accessories. The plan to reach them will be through the re-launch of the CONS segment, targeted specifically to their street culture, sport-inspired lifestyle.

Drew: Have there been any big surprises in terms of what’s worked really well and what hasn’t?

Our consumers are always surprising us! But we see these surprises in a truly positive way because we can always do better and are constantly seeking improvements.

Drew: What’s your perspective on content marketing?

Our philosophy on content marketing is built on driving meaningful relationships that are true to our core values, spark creativity and inspire advocacy. Whether it’s about showcasing a musician that has just recorded at Converse Rubber Tracks in Brooklyn, a showcase we put on at SXSW, a street art exhibit in Beijing or a Three Artists One Song collaboration – we focus on developing stories that are compelling for our consumers.

Drew: Converse has been in business since 1908. How do you balance respecting the tradition of the Converse brand with innovative marketing?

Converse has a long history in music. It has been worn on stage by legendary punk bands in the 1970s and adopted by kings of hip-hop, new wave, rockabilly, grunge and others throughout the decades. Musicians and creative people are our core audience, and we need to do everything possible to foster this community. We want to be useful to the community and never take advantage of it or overstep our place. We want to bring cultures together and celebrate music. In other words, we want to be in it, without getting in the way.

Drew: How do you evaluate/measure the success of your marketing?

We believe that success is not measured in the traditional sense (i.e. ROI). The number of deep relationships we can foster with the creative community—not media impressions, and content views, measures success for the brand.

Drew: Do you agree with that notion that marketing is everything and everything is marketing? How do you as a marketer impact the entire customer experience?

Marketing is not everything and everything [is not marketing] to Converse. It’s has always been the brand’s intention that our products and consumers drive the marketing, not the marketing driving our product. Our approach to the consumer experience is to invest and grow our connections to consumers. As a brand, Converse is on a mission to own “sneakers” and this will be communicated across all our messaging. We want the word “sneakers” to become synonymous with unleashing the creative spirit.

CMO Insights: Keeping It Personal

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Drew Neisser

Think of customer service in today’s airline industry, and “human” may not be the first phrase that comes to mind. JetBlue, on the other hand, has been putting faces to names for quite some time. Marty St. George, SVP of Marketing and Commercial Strategy, caught up with me during this year’s CMO Club Awards and clued me in to the strategy behind JetBlue’s marketing operations. For starters, the airline keeps it personal by shunning a corporate persona and getting the whole crew involved—literally—by treating the planes’ staff as an extension of the marketing team. After all, the flight is the most important customer touch point of all. Not surprisingly, Marty is a very bright guy and has a lot of good advice for anyone who is smart enough to ask for it. So I asked and you’re the beneficiary assuming you read on…

Drew: CEO David Barger famously posed the question ‘How do we stay small as we get big?’ to the JetBlue team. As CMO, how do you take on this challenge?

Marty: Every leader at JetBlue takes full ownership of that challenge. There are elements of the JetBlue experience that naturally lend themselves to helping us stay small. We don’t ask our people to do anything that we wouldn’t do. (For example, when we are flying on a trip and we arrive at the gate, we ALL clean it, not just the flight attendants….on the holidays, many of us work at the airport helping customers during the busiest days.) But specifically as CMO, I am focused on making sure that our mission and values come through in every communication we do, both internal and external. When we start looking like a faceless conglomerate to our people, we will have lost the battle.

Drew: JetBlue operates within a notoriously difficult industry. Much of your success has come from effectively connecting with your customers. What steps do you take to better understand and communicate with your customers?

Marty: I am very lucky, in that our founders gave us a mission and a set of values that are core to our DNA. Our mission is to inspire humanity, and part of what we try to accomplish is that personal connection between the brand and our customers. Our customers feel personal ownership of the brand, and they are very vocal about the things they love, and the things they want us to change.

Drew: Innovation is a sexy word but not as sexy to a CEO as ROI. Have you been able to link your innovative marketing activities to the kinds of business metrics favored by CEOs?

Marty: Luckily we have a CEO who recognizes that innovation is part of the brand personality of JetBlue. We report brand metrics to our board, just like we report financial metrics and the board expects us to push the envelope.

Drew: What is the biggest marketing risk you’ve taken at JetBlue? How did it play out?

Marty: There have been a lot of them, but I think the biggest risk was the “Election Protection” promo we ran in New York during Fall 2012. The simple idea: if you’re one of those folks who says, if my candidate loses I’m moving to XX? We will give away 2,012 free tickets out of the country. It was risky because election promos are inherently risky; voting is a sacred duty, and there are many examples of brands commercializing the election to their detriment. Luckily, we played it perfectly and got more buzz than we ever imagined, and zero blowback. ( http://www.mullen.com/election-protection-from-jetblue-make-sure-to-vote/ )

Drew: How do you evaluate/measure the success of your marketing? Are there some channels that work a lot better for you than others?

Marty: Two key methods; first, on a macro level we look at brand metrics for us and our competitors. On a micro level, we measure every dollar we spend digitally and translate it into a cost-per-booking. We share our metrics with our media partners and expect them to help improve campaigns and targets to get our CPB lower.

Drew: Has marketing become more complex for you and if so, how are you dealing with that complexity?

Marty: We deal with it by keeping up with technology, and by finding partners in that space who can help keep us current. In fact, every year we have a “digital day”, where we invite current and potential marketing partners in to pitch our entire team. We’ve found several exciting new technologies and channels that way, just through an open “casting call”.

Drew: Content marketing is hot topic at the moment. What’s your perspective on content in terms of its effectiveness? Are you increasing your investment in this area?

Marty: I think “content” is a concept that’s going to become obsolete very soon – rather than focusing on content as a means, we focus on engagement as the end. Content is one of many ways to create engagement, but certainly not the only way. We have done some innovative programs (like Getaway with it – http://www.google.com/think/campaigns/jetblue-getaways-get-away-with-it.html ) but we do it with the goal of engagement.

Drew: What have been your top priorities in the last 12 months?

Marty: My top 3 priorities are talent, talent and talent. We are always looking for brand evangelists. It’s easy to find people who can do the work, but it’s much tougher to find people who treat the brand like it’s their baby.

Drew: Have there been any big surprises in terms of what’s worked really well and what hasn’t?

Marty: We did a promotion called “Carmageddon” – when the 405 Freeway was closed in LA, we flew for a day back and forth between Burbank and Long Beach. When the team brought the idea to me, I said “I can’t imagine this getting buzz but feel free to do it, if you can do it cheaply.” For about $10,000 in spend, we generated almost $10mm in impressions. We had captured the moment in a fun, creative way.

Drew: Do you agree with the notion that marketing is everything and everything is marketing and if so, how have you extended the boundaries of your job beyond the normal purview of the CMO?

Marty: Absolutely agree; and luckily at JetBlue we all recognize that the experience is the ultimate manifestation of the brand, and our people learn this on day 1. How? Every month we hold an orientation for new Crewmembers at our training center, and many senior leaders attend. When I speak at Orientation, my first line is to welcome everyone to the Marketing team – since everyone who touches a customer owns a piece of the brand.