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Tag: CMO

  • Delta CMO: All 85,000 Employees Are Brand Ambassadors

    Delta CMO: All 85,000 Employees Are Brand Ambassadors

    “I have the opportunity to serve as Chief Marketing Officer, but 85,000 people are all brand ambassadors,” says Delta CMO Tim Mapes. “All 85,000 members of the company are selling, they’re promoting, they’re providing a brand experience in what they do each day,”

    Tim Mapes, Chief Marketing Officer of Delta Airlines, recently discussed how Delta uses its army of employees in its marketing:

    All 85,000 Employees Are Brand Ambassadors

    One of the dynamics of being in this role of Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Delta Airlines for ten years, when I think the average used to be 23 months, is the fact that Delta is such a values-driven organization and values transcend time. Marketing’s role within Delta is really seen to be everybody’s role. I have the opportunity to serve as Chief Marketing Officer, but 85,000 people are all brand ambassadors.

    All 85,000 members of the company are selling, they’re promoting, they’re providing a brand experience in what they do each day. That’s very much conscious on our part. We share that view with everybody that we’re all having a net impression. I say often within the company, everything communicates.

    Whether the flight attendants are happy, whether the coffee works, whether the lavatory is clean on the plane, whether the flights operate on time, all of that in your customer experience is a part of the net impression you have on your impression of Delta at the end of the day.

    Delta is Using Data to Drive the Customer Experience

    When you carry 185 million passengers a year and we know where you’re going when you’re going, whether you’re a Sky Club member, whether you have the American Express co-branded credit card, all of that data is resident in Delta.

    Taking that in and knitting it together horizontally, not just so that we in the loyalty program can know that you as a Diamond flyer prefer to sit on an aisle seat and like gin and tonics,  but also that the last three flights you took had your bag misdirected, so we’re able to say up or down what type of experience are we delivering.

    Prosperity Coming Out of the Roots of Austerity

    I think one thing that’s fascinating about Delta is you’re talking about a 90-year-old company that nonetheless in the last 10 years has experienced the best in the worst year in the history of the company. So 9/11 2001 you’ve got obviously all the fallout and the impact of that on travel and then experiencing record profits more recently.

    We’ve been paying our employees profit sharing in excessive of a billion dollars a year each of the past four years so even in a short decade of time you’re seeing prosperity coming out of the roots of austerity and problems.

    Delta CMO: How Cool is That…

    I grew up watching really two programs that I can consciously recall. One was Mr. Rogers. People think about puppets and silliness and kind of milk toast Mr. Rogers bless his heart. The transcendent qualities that he taught in terms of respect and that you’re special just the way you are, from a hospitality perspective and a diversity and inclusion, he was way ahead of his time. In a way, with kindness and grace that the company and all of our world would do well to have more of today.

    The other was Bewitched because I got to watch Darrin, and this as a kid, but he just looked like he was having fun in advertising with a great social life and great personal life. I just thought wow,  advertising art that actually generates commerce. How cool is that…

  • Twitter Ad Chief: We’ve Never Been More Clear About What is Our Superpower

    Twitter Ad Chief: We’ve Never Been More Clear About What is Our Superpower

    Twitter ad chief Matt Derella is at Advertising Week in New York City spreading the message that Twitter video advertising is the best platform to reach valuable audiences when they are most receptive. He says Twitter has never been more clear about what is our superpower.

    Matt Derella, Global Vice President, Revenue and Content Partnerships for Twitter, discussed why Twitter is valuable for advertisers on CNBC at Advertising Week in New York:

    Twitter Video Ads Now Generate Over 50% of Revenue

    If you look back to our previous quarter our ads business is incredibly strong right now growing over 27 percent year-on-year and its broad-based all around the world. I think that’s because we’re continuing to innovate and bring new products to bear. Video, in particular, is now over 50 percent of our revenue and marketers are getting great results from using it.

    I was just on stage here at AdWeek sitting down with the head of digital at Nestle and he’s talking about the fact that two of his biggest brands,  DiGiorno and Lean Cuisine, Twitter was the number one platform among social platforms for return investment. As long as the results are there we’re going to continue to grow our business with our customers and continue to earn their trust.

    We Want to be Really Transparent About Political Ads

    Well, being completely transparent, I think Jack Dorsey (Twitter CEO) modeled this when he went to DC and actually talked to the regulators and the congressmen. We want to be really transparent about what we’re doing. There are some serious issues facing all services that are global in nature like ours we’ve taken some very tangible action just in the last few months.

    You’ve heard about our Ad Transparency Center. This is a searchable database where anybody can go and see all the political advertising on Twitter and who is funding it. We’ve also introduced labels around all the political advertising so they’re clearly demarcated so you know and have trust in where that message is coming from.

    Lastly, just on spam, we’re doing more than we ever have. Two times the amount of spam is being taken off the platform compared to just a year ago. This is what we’re talking to marketers about and content partners about to continue to get better.

    Brands Can Target Very Specific Conversations

    A big part of philosophically how we designed the platform is so that control goes in the hands of the advertiser. We have targeting that allows you to target just specific conversations. If you’re a brand who wants to connect with the NBA and all the conversation having around that that’s something that our tools allow to do.

    I’m in charge of content partnerships and our content business has been flourishing. We’re helping partners grow their business. One of the great things about how we designed it is that marketers can actually choose the specific content that they want to align with and ensure that brand safety and brand alignment that’s so important for them.

    We’ve Never Been More Clear About What is Our Superpower

    The primary driver of everything we do is to help serve that public conversation that’s so unique to Twitter. Great content, whether it’s the World Cup highlights, that we had every single goal here in the US from the World Cup with Fox, is a great place for us to get video and bring that public conversation around it and it’s great for consumers. It also happens to be terrific for marketers who want to align with that passion here at Advertising Week.

    I think for Twitter we’ve never been more clear about what is our superpower, we have the most valuable audiences when they’re most receptive. If you’re going to launch something new Twitter is the place to start because we have those valuable audiences when they are the most receptive. That’s the message we’ve been going with and we have the data to back it up. I think we have a very defensible position going forward with marketers.

    We have to focus on the long-term and really what’s been incredibly encouraging is hearing from some of the most important influential CMO’s around the world supporting us as we make the decision to focus on the health of the service in the long term. Some of the decisions that we’re making, the hard decisions that might impact short-term metrics, but ultimately it’ll be the right thing for the platform.

  • Successful CEOs Understand The Customer Journey

    Successful CEOs Understand The Customer Journey

    Ryan Deiss is the co-founder and CEO of DigitalMarketer, a highly successful online community and learning platform for digital marketers. Ryan recently talked about the challenges of going from founder and Chief Marketer to CEO and offered some great advice for those of you who are in the process of building a company. Below are some highlights from a recent podcast:

    You Were the Rainmaker

    Any successful founder who now finds themselves as a CEO, or if you’re a CEO who came up through the ranks, it’s because more times than not, you were the person who could make the cash register ring. You were the Rainmaker. You could by just own force of will dig in there and make the sales happen, which is why as your team grows it’s very hard to turn that off.

    As a founder, even if you don’t enjoy marketing, you’ve got no choice in the early days of your business. Your first job is to create the product, and then as soon as it exists, even if it’s kind of crappy, it’s like okay we’ve got to sell this thing.

    If you’ve experienced any success whatsoever as a founder, as an entrepreneur, a small business owner, congratulations! It’s because you’re a marketer and it’s because you’re pretty good at it. Turning that off and handing that over to someone else is one of the more difficult things I’ve had to do in my career.

    Making the Shift to CEO

    When you make the shift into CEO or any type of leadership role, it means you have to take on more of a strategic process and more of a strategic approach. It means that the work is going to be done through the efforts of others, so you’re not gonna get that thrill. But if you don’t do it you’re going to be stuck. If you don’t do it your company is not going to grow because it’s only going to be as strong as you are and it’s only going to be able to do as much as you have time in a day.

    As your company grows and you have to take on more responsibilities you have less and less time. That’s why so many companies grow and do really well and then they seem to peter out and flounder. It’s because they never make that transition from the tactical to the strategic and that’s what CEOs need to learn to do.

    How to Move from the Tactical to the Strategic

    You start by hiring people to do the work that you hate to do and you suck at, that’s where it always begins. So in the early stages, building a team is really really easy. However, when you start needing to scale and hire for the roles that you’re good at and enjoy, that’s when it becomes difficult. For me, I really enjoyed marketing and I like to think I’m pretty good at. In the beginning, I tried to find someone who was this all-in-one marketer, who could do everything that I could do and then some.

    What I found is that person just didn’t exist, and it’s not because I’m so amazing, it’s because I had a lot of experience doing this type of marketing that we were doing and also that I had so much tribal knowledge. If you take somebody even with more experience, because they didn’t have the direct experience and all the tribal knowledge associated with the specific company, they are never going to be as good as I was right from the beginning.

    Hire, Train, Retain People… and Don’t Run Out of Money

    If you think about the role of a CEO at its core, it is to hire, train and retain great people, and don’t run out of money. As your team begins to grow, you may really love diving in and doing all the tactical aspects of marketing. But if you’ve got a marketing team there’s going to be issues that are going to suck up a lot of your time.

    You’re going to spend time talking with accountants and finance people, whether you like it or not. You’re going to be dealing with legal and all the other operational aspects of a business that maybe you don’t want to deal with. But in many cases, you’re the only person who can deal with it, and so a lot of the day-to-day, blocking and tackling, that goes into business and into marketing, in particular, you simply don’t have the time to do.

    CEO’s Should Understand the Customer Journey

    It is just taking more of that 30,000-foot view. So along with the roles of the CEO, hire, train, retain the best talent, and don’t run out of money, I would add to that, understand and seek to optimize the customer journey.

    I think as a CEO that’s one of your critical documents if you want to still be involved from a marketing perspective, it’s that customer journey. You need to understand that because if you don’t know how strangers become customers, then you don’t know how the growth engine works in your business. How can you responsibly influence that growth?

  • T-Mobile Hires New Chief Marketing Officer

    T-Mobile Hires New Chief Marketing Officer

    T-Mobile announced this weekend that it has appointed Michael Sievert as the company’s new chief marketing officer. Sievert began his new position today.

    Sievert has 20 years of marketing experience with companies such as Clearwire, AT&T Wireless, Microsoft, IBM, and Procter & Gamble. He has twice been cited as one of the 35 most influential marketers in the U.S. by Advertising Age. Sievert was most recently the CEO of Discovery Bay Games, the maker of tablet gaming accessories such as the Atari Arcade peripheral for the iPad.

    Acting CMO Andrew Sherrard will resume his duties as senor vice president of marketing for T-Mobile’s contract business. Sherrard has been serving as acting CMO since spring 2012.

    “Mike is a unique creative genius, and his track record as a disruptive force in tech and telecom couldn’t be better suited to our plans to redefine wireless as America’s un-carrier,” said John Legere, president and CEO of T-Mobile USA. “This is a critical and incredibly exciting time for T-Mobile as we race forward with our network modernization and LTE launch in 2013, ramp up investments in re-launching our brand, and begin to shake up the U.S. wireless market.”

    Since the proposed merger with AT&T was halted by the U.S. Justice Department last year, T-Mobile has been building out its 4G LTE network and positioning itself along with Sprint as a U.S. wireless carrier that offers truly unlimited data plans. Though T-Mobile is the fourth largest U.S. carrier in terms of subscribers, its recent merger with MetroPCS puts its subscriber number closer than ever to the third largest carrier, Sprint.

    (Image courtesy T-Mobile)