Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. This episode is brought to you in partnership with my good friends at Adobe, who last year invited me over to their summit. Now, this year I could not make it, but instead I've managed to get a hold of their enterprise CMO, Rachel Thornton, to find out all about how Adobe do B2B marketing, what new products they're launching, and how AI is actually impacting marketing, to find out the fact from fiction. Great episode, there's lots in it, some really useful advice from Rachel. You'll enjoy it. Here it is. Rachel it's great to have you join me. No it's great to be here thank you. Well I had an amazing time last year at Summit. It was a truly spectacular production that you put on. I mean I guess the expectations must be very high given it is Adobe of course. But how has Summit been for you this year? Oh it's really been amazing. We've had 14,000 folks join us here in Las Vegas. We've had, I think, 40,000 people join us online. It's been a great lineup of keynotes, of customer speakers, of sessions. I'm sitting in our Adobe Pavilion, which is a place where you can get hands on with our technology as well as our partner technology. But yeah, I just I think it's been really great. We've had some great announcements that we've done. So, you know, good show overall. Great. Well, it's very I remember being very impressed when I was there last year. So congratulations on another fine show. Just to introduce yourself to everyone listening and watching, you've had a very impressive resume. You've worked for some highly impressive companies. Just give us a taste of your career and maybe if you can tell us what you think makes a successful CMO. Let's see. I've always actually been in the technology industry. So I started years ago at Microsoft, actually did what's known as field marketing. I think a lot of your B2B audience will know that term. I was there. I was lucky enough then to work at Cisco Systems. Then I worked at Salesforce. So that was exciting. Did a lot of great stuff there. Always marketing, you know, always, and also marketing often to technology people, CIOs, developers. I was at AWS then. And then while I was at AWS, it was nice because I was actually a customer of Adobe. So that's how I got to really know them and actually really know the Adobe team. So it was fun to come to this role. And I think really exciting because as a marketer to market to other marketers, you really do. You have to keep a high bar so that, you know, because you're dealing with folks who know the craft. And so it keeps you on your toes. I love your phrase, a marketer marketing to marketers, which is very meta, isn't it? And we're talking about that on a marketing podcast as well. So it doesn't get more meta than that. Maybe just what makes a successful B2B marketer, do you think? What are the key ingredients to a successful B2B? I think it's the same as a successful, whether you want to say B2C, consumer marketer. I think it's someone who is, you know, focused on the customer, is innovative. I really, you have to be creative. Even in B2B marketing, I think B2B doesn't necessarily mean it's just boring or stayed. It can be just as creative, just as innovative. And so I think, you know, being focused on customers, being keen to help customers solve problems, solve challenges, advance their business, grow their business. I think bringing to life great stories. I think that's true across any industry. You know, whether you're Nike or whether you're, you know, AWS or Cisco, it's like, how do you tell that story and get customers really excited about the possibilities, about the potential? So I think that marketers who can bring that to life, who can understand their brand and match, you know, what the customer wants to accomplish, what the brand promises and how you bring those two things together. I think that makes a powerful marketer. It really does. some of the data I've come across actually just really opened my eyes. I think Ehrenberg Bass had this insight that 95% of people are not in the market in B2B to buy what you're selling at any point in time. And it just made me realize that as marketers, our job is to appeal to a future buyer, isn't it? And buying cycles can be quite long, particularly in enterprise organizations as well, where the decision making takes time and there's lots of people involved as well. So it's really important, isn't it, to build the brand as well as sell the product? Yeah, 100%. And I think sometimes people, they don't always think about that. They don't always think about the brand concept in B2B, but it is very true. Enterprise selling cycles are long, you know, and sometimes they can be as long as nine, 10 months, maybe even a year or so. But you have to always be thinking, what is the story I want to tell the enterprise buyer? What is that buyer? What are the challenges they're trying to meet, you really have to understand and know your customer, you know, really start with your customer and what are they trying to achieve? And I think because the buyer may not be thinking about, you know, your brand or your product as what they need in that moment, you have to think, how do you stay top of mind? And that also, you have to think through, if they're not actively coming to me, how do I go to them, right? So how am I in the places where they are. So whether it's content, whether it's working with press, whether it's working with analysts, whether it's, you know, attending events, whether it's driving thought leadership, you really do have to think where are, where are my customers and potential customers going to be? And am I showing up there? So to your point, even if they're not in the market at that moment, my brand continues to remain top of mind, my content, my story, because then when they do realize, all right, I need to make this shift or this disruption in the market has happened. Now I need to go talk to, you know, Adobe about my content supply chain or brand visibility. So I think that's important, especially for B2Bs that you are thinking about what is your brand? How are you getting your brand out there? And how are you getting your story out there consistently and in a way that enterprises are able to sort of, you know, separate you from the pack, if you will, and say, yeah, I see what your value add is. And now I understand when I need this, when I have this need, this is where I'm going to go. I did some research quite recently, actually, interviewing 75 CMOs to find out what their biggest challenges were. And I was quite surprised at results. I was expecting to see, I don't have enough money. I don't have enough resource. I can't get enough talent. The number one thing by far was dealing with the people and stakeholders. And it was quite fascinating. I mean, you obviously work in a large organization now, and you've worked for some very, very big ones in the past as well. How important is it as leading a marketing function to be able to kind of engage other parts of the organization to deliver just exactly what you just said? Oh, it's critical. With B2B especially, you're always partnering with your sales organization. You're partnering with your product team, with your engineering team, because you have to understand that entire life cycle. You're bringing in the view from what does the customer need? What's the voice of the customer? You're hearing from sales, like how are customers reacting to product? What's happening when you're having that conversation about the product or the pitch? And then working with engineering, working with product to understand, are we bringing in what the customer is looking for, what the customer challenge is? And then how are we then communicating the product back out to the customer, touching on, hey, this is what, you know, you said you were challenged with. This is what you were looking for. And then making sure that you are understanding product, understanding, you know, ICP, if it will, you know, ideal customer profile and having the product really tell that story. I think that for a marketer, you have to be able to work across all of those teams because those are your big stakeholders in the effort to, you know, drive business, drive engagement with customers. But I also think with marketers, especially now, working then with your CIO, your CTO, working with your team to understand what are the technology investments we're making so that we can do effective marketing, so we can build great customer experiences, so we can build great content, distribute that content, analyze and understand that content. So you have to be sort of in lockstep with your CIO or your CTO on what do we want our investment roadmap to be or investment in internal product roadmap to be in order to make sure we're delivering for customers. That makes a ton of sense. Now, we're having this conversation while you're at Summit. You've got 40,000 people in the room. It's incredible production. I just wonder from a kind of B2B marketing perspective, what's the role of big events like the one you're hosting now? How important are they and how do you kind of justify the ROI on something like this? I mean, can you even work? Oh, so I will say I can answer both questions confidently. Yes, they are important. What is what is so great about, I think, in-person events? I am a little biased because I've done a lot of them over the years. But people like to get together and and in real life talk with other people. They like to learn from each other. They like to hear, you know, if I'm a CMO and I have this challenge, what has someone else in my industry done? Or maybe in a slightly different industry but a similar challenge what are they doing And I think nothing beats the chance to have those face conversations I mean we see it in the buzz and the energy and the event whether we see it in our community pavilion. We also do an executive forum for our CMO customers. So the conversations there are very rich, but you also see it in fun places like in the hallways, as people going from session to session, you know, they bump into each other, they have conversations. I think in fact, if you talk to people, they'll say some of the most valuable things they have, or there's hallway conversations while they're here. And in terms of the ROI, absolutely. In fact, one of the other important stakeholders for any CMO is their CFO, and that understanding, like, what is your investment? So for every dollar, every incremental dollar, what are you bringing in, in terms of whether it's new customer opportunities, customer acquisition, customer retention, customer loyalty. In B2B, obviously, there's a focus on pipeline and revenue. So I partner closely with my CRO, and we look at this event as how do we get all of our big customer deals here, how to get our big customers here. And then how do we literally measure what was sort of the pipeline we came into the event with? How did it progress? How did it close? So absolutely, we have a formula for making sure that the investment here generates the ROI. and then making sure we're telling that story back to the CFO to say, you know, this is why it was the right investment and this is what it generated for our business. It's a reminder, isn't it? People buy from people still, even in the age of AI, we're still buying from each other, aren't we? She reminds me. So one of the presentations I heard at Summit last year that really blew my mind, actually, it was very interesting, was the Coke CEO. And he was asked, you know, from a marketing perspective, where are you placing your bets? And the obvious one was, well, we're leaning into AI, we're experimenting, we're trying to learn how far we can take personalization. The other one to our conversation was we're putting a lot of money on experiential in person because we kind of think two things are happening at once here. We are using technology like we never have done before, but people are also, you know, love to have real experiences with brands and experience them in real life. And you see that, I can't remember what the exact data point is, But the amount of money being invested in trade events and shows has increased significantly, particularly post-COVID, I think, as well. It sort of proved to us, didn't it? Now, I've mentioned AI. And of course, it was a real eye-opener for me actually last year just to understand because you guys are at the forefront of AI. I mean, I have to say just being at the conference for three days, I learned so much. I think it's the first time I came across the word agentic, which seems a bit wild that in just one year, you know, we've gone from, you know, agentic AI to what we, you know, what we're seeing today. What have been the biggest changes in the past 12 months when it comes to how we're using AI from a marketing perspective? I think there's been sort of two big changes, both internally for marketing teams and then externally for your customers. I'm excited about the potential for AI to help amplify the impact of teams. That's how I think about it is like, how can now my teams be freed up from some work that was, you know, it was maybe time consuming or repetitive or rote. And now how can I basically say, great, now I have, you know, my team of agents that can do that. And now I can take my marketers and think, what are the new strategies? What are the new campaigns? What are the new ideas we could generate? So I think it really does amplify your team and amplify the innovation and creativity of your team and help them get, you know, campaigns, content, creative. out there faster. Really for the first time, because you can combine the data you have on your customer with the ability to map content and experiences and touch points onto that customer data, you can build really rich, robust customer experiences. What sort of held us back in the past was one, did we have the right data foundation? But two, if we really wanted to personalize that customer's experience with a brand, did we have the right content? And content would be a bottleneck if you had maybe a campaign you created, but it took you months to get that campaign out the door because, you know, doing the creative ideation is one thing, coming up with the core of the campaign and then the assets, but now replicating those assets, producing those assets across multiple channels, it took time. And so you were perforce limited on just maybe the number of campaigns you could do, the number of segments you could create. And I think now with AI, you can basically say, all right, I have this campaign, like we have this product, Adobe Gen Studio. It can be your end-to-end content supply chain, creating campaigns, ideating campaigns, but then critically producing the assets at scale, which really allows marketers not only to do content that gets really focused on the individual, like on your key customer, but you can experiment much faster, right? Because you can create the assets faster, you can experiment with what's working, what's not working. So I'm excited about that because, you know, every marketer I know is always keen to say, how do I reach more customers? How do I really give them great experiences? And I think the unlock with AI to help scale personalization is very rich. I think externally, as we think about customers and as marketers think about the traditional work streams that they've relied on to reach customers, I think there's been a lot of disruption with AI, with Agentec. If you think about the concept of brand visibility, like how my brand shows up, it used to be you really focused on SEO, right? That was, you understood how that work stream worked. You knew the content. You understand, you know, what you needed to do to make sure you were ranking. As search traffic has shifted over to LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, as a marketer, you now have to think, what's the content I own that shows up? But more importantly, where are the other sources of content that are feeding those LLMs and how are we showing up? Especially in places where it's less about owned brand content and more about your customers or community talking about you. Like Reddit's a good example. You know, you want to make sure that you're understanding your customers and your community and then your own content to make sure you show up well in search, in brand discoverability. I also look at content supply chain like we just talked about. customer experiences. So we talked a few minutes ago about in-person events, but I do think now with AI, you're able to build much richer customer experiences across a lot of different customer touch points, including in person. So we can see it's not just this is a standalone event for us, right? This is actually part of a broader experience as we look at maybe new customers who've come in early or recently, I should say, what have been the touch points they had with us up until this moment where maybe they're at Summit for the first time. And then post this event, what are the follow-up things? What are the other experiences we're giving that new customer to get them really excited about Adobe and get them into the product? For current customers, they may know us, but when we expose them to different products, different solutions, including the new products we launched here, this event in the context of a bigger journey just gives us a chance to tell a much deeper, richer story. And AI not only helps us create that right content, but really understand the signals back and forth from what has the customer done? How do they respond to a piece of content or an experience? And what's the next thing we need to give them? You're so right to talk about discoverability as well. I remember learning from SEMrush last year where they produced this discoverability index. So you're absolutely right. Not only is it about where are people, where are the LLMs learning from, and also what kind of content and how genuine it is and what kind of authoritative content has. It's incredibly important, isn't it? One eye opener for me was the power of LinkedIn. I hadn't expected LinkedIn to be such an authority, but it turns out that, you know, the last five years I've been putting into LinkedIn has paid off. Don't forget to use kind of LinkedIn as a B2B channel, but not just that, but also feeds the LLMs. How has that changed your own marketing strategy? What have you had to do differently to become more discovered? The emphasis on community, like Adobe has a rich community. We have the Adobe Experience League, which is a lot of our B2B customers are a part of that. We have our Adobe Champions. These are people who are, if you will, power users who love the product, who share their love of the product. But more than ever, the nurturing of that community is critically important. because with brand discoverability, you really need to think about it as, what are my customers saying when I'm not in a room? What is my community talking about about Adobe when we're not in that room with them? And you want to make sure that you have a high degree of confidence that it's going to be positive. And you do that by having robust community, having robust community engagement. So if there's a threat on Reddit and people are talking about brand discoverability or customer experience, our customers are sharing what they know about Adobe and it's positive. So you really do have to think, what is my community strategy? I think more so than when, you know, if it was just SEO and that's just very much owned content, you have a high degree of control over that. I think with community it less about control and more about influence and nurture and how do they feel about the product How do you keep them involved in what happening what going on But I think that is something that marketers all marketers as they think about discoverability have to really look at and think what are customers saying about us? How do we think about growing that community? Because the other interesting thing about, you know, LLMs and brand discoverability is if you have, because there is, you know, they can consume a lot of long tail content. If you have a piece out there that maybe is not a great reflection of what you would like your brand or your story to be, it's still going to show up. And so you have to think, all right, I'm not going to get a perfect result all the time in terms of maybe earned media. So how do I want to make sure I'm arming my experience or my community, if you will, with information, answering their questions, engaging them so they are showing up well for us? Well, one of the concepts that struck me last year actually was the idea that because you're in marketing, you are customer zero of your own tools, aren't you? I just thought that was a wonderful idea that the first person you try out all your new tools on is you. So I just wondered from your own marketing perspective, where has AI sort of touched and made the biggest impact on how you do your own marketing yourself? I think in sort of three areas on the team. One, as I mentioned, in content creation, production, distribution, and then the analytics, being able to scale content, being able to personalize content, that's made a huge difference. Because we're more effective with our campaigns, but also we're able to move faster, experiment more, and get campaigns out there. So it allows us to touch more segments, more customers. The other thing that's been interesting is looking at where we might have had teams that either weren't working, not so much well together, but maybe it was a serial process. And can we now change it to a parallel process? We have a BDR team, so they help with not only getting content out to customers, but following up with customers. They work with sales. What we learned pretty quickly was there was a long time to create some of the customized, when they would want to get in a meeting with a customer. It was a chunk of time, like 90 plus minutes they were taking to do some prep. And we were able to shorten that to about 30 minutes. So saving them an hour, which at first you're like an hour, but you're like, great. Well, I have a lot of these folks. So now I just saved 100 man hours. And now what can I help? What can I do with it? Makes it more productive. So we look at how AI can shorten some of the work time. Also, how can it make our internal efforts around understanding things like consumption of assets, consumption of resources? We're much better at understanding, hey, we had resources over here. We were using maybe their agency resources. Maybe they were, you know, partner team resources, internal team resources. How are those going? What am I spending? What's my burndown look like? So being able to understand that much quicker, again, I think the team is much better informed on what we're using, what we're spending. And then it just makes us better to make decisions in the moment if an investment opportunity comes up, like, hey, we want to invest in this campaign or maybe this new event. And moving to your customers as well, I think I'm right in saying, I read in the press recently, that you've just done a big partnership with Tesco. Yes. Am I right? Yes. Yes, which is huge because like Tesco, biggest grocery chain in the UK by a long, long way. And they've got huge amounts of data on how, you know, pretty much everybody in the UK shops as well. So is there anything you can share with us on how they are going to be using Adobe? I think it is definitely. We're excited about it, by the way. It was great working with them. And we're excited for all the opportunity to really help them navigate, you know, customers in certain areas. is, you know, in certain, actually, even in certain days of the week, what is a specific customer need? Like, what's the lunch pickup look like on a Tuesday when you're in the city working versus on the weekends when you're home? What are you looking for? What do folks who are doing, like it's urban living versus, you know, outside of a city, how does Tesco embrace that entire, not just customer lifecycle, but different segments, different micro segments of customers, customer need. And I think really taking the rich data they have about their customer and then applying it to whether it's in-person shop, whether it's a grab and go, whether it's a weekly shop, using the app, using loyalty, really, but stitching together that data and then all of the different experiences and content they have and really bringing them together to say for each individual at various points in their day, in their month, in their week, in their life, how does Tesco want to show up for them. Yeah, very exciting to see how that unfolds itself. Now, obviously, it's Summit, so I'm assuming you'll be launching some big new products here, aren't you? So what can you tell us about what you've launched this week? So a big one for us was Adobe CX Enterprise. I've been talking about customer experience orchestration. So CX Enterprise is the purpose-built agendistic system for really bringing to life customer experience orchestration. So marrying your data, marrying your content, marrying your journeys, and being able to say, how do I build those experiences? But more importantly, how do I build them not just once, but they're living, breathing, reactive experiences based on customer input, customer preference, the action a customer did, and then the next best action we want to take. So CX Enterprise is really big. I'm very excited. All the CMOs I've talked to this week are excited to get hands-on with it. we have CX coworker. So last year, you may remember, we talked about agents, talked about agentic. We launched purpose-built agents. So think about like an audience agent, an insights agent. But now we've said, okay, great. You not only have purpose-built agents, but you now have a coworker who can say, all right, we've gotten some interesting customer signals and it would be great to spin up a mini campaign right now. And so the coworker can work with your purpose-built agents and getting feedback from the marketing team can actually build campaigns, build mini experiences and launch them so that you don't miss an opportunity to capitalize on a customer moment. If you think about, you know, the great example that we showed on stage was Ulta is a customer of ours. They're always, you know, they're always looking at social media. They have this social media insights tool where they want to see, hey, do we have customers that are beauty influencers talking about? And so if that happens at a time when, hey, quickly a coworker can respond to that social media insight coming in, great. Those two products were featured in an influencer video. How do we suddenly send a great like buy one, get one free or check out, you know, these two skincare products, send that campaign quickly. The coworker can spin that up and get that out. So again, it's just does a great job of amplifying your marketing team and having them be able to do more, you know, to help engage customers. That does make sense, actually, because I remember I learned two things last year. One was the agentic itself. And the other one was that, you know, having built agents, the next thing you need to figure out is how they coordinate together. And I think the phrase is orchestration, wasn't it? You need to work out how you kind of orchestrate all this amazing new resource you just added to your team. So I'm glad you followed that up. Yeah, no, I think the orchestration, I think that word resonates with marketers. Because if I think about, again, all of the different touch points and all of the different channels, so my customer may be on my channels, but then they may be on third party ones. How do I orchestrate all those touch points across all those different channels to really give the customer a deep, robust experience with my brand that stays true to my brand and is faithful to my brand, but is also delivering something that's engaging and delightful to the customer. The other thing that we talked about at Summit that we launched was Adobe brand intelligence. You know, as you create all this content, what you want to make sure you don't get is brand drift. So think about it as, hey, my brand showed up faithfully, you know, an asset number one, And by the time I got to asset 50,000 across multiple channels, it was like, ugh. So how do we embed guidelines? How do we embed AI guidelines into the tools creators use so that the brand shows up faithfully every time? Faithfully, authentically, within brand guidelines, there's governance and any sort of compliance, especially for regulated industries. So I think that it will be a huge help to marketers and creative teams to ensure that what they create remains on brand. And, you know, irrespective of the channel it shows up in or the asset. Now, you're launching some pretty big new software every single year. What's the secret to a successful launch of a new piece of software? I think starting with the customer and working backwards, like what do they need? What have you heard from them? Designing the product and then designing the story. Like what is the messaging? What's the positioning? How do you want to help it stand out? But also more importantly, how do you want to marry that customer need with the product promise and what they bring together? And so as we build off of all of the customer feedback we get and all of the voice of the customer, making sure that we weave that into the story so that as the customer starts to hear about the product, immediately they're head nodding with, yes, that is a challenge I have. I completely understand how that product will help me with it And then I think when you get that it able to really then draw the customer along on okay here how you can use it If you think about your use cases here's how we can help you map to those. So I think success has everything to do with starting with that understanding and that voice of the customer, and then telling that story that really brings to life their use cases and how the product solves and supports those use cases. Will you be pleased to know, I regularly see Adobe advertising throughout London. In fact, just coming into London today, I was in the underground. You're everywhere. So you're doing a good job. How do you split the investment or time between sort of building the brand and talking about the product? How do those kind of decisions happen? I think without brand awareness, without building your brand, you can't just talk about the product because the customer has no frame of reference. Right. So every brand has to think about what is their brand promise? What is their brand message to the customer? Because if you architect the brand in such a way that the brand promise, the brand message comes to life and the products you deliver, then both are accretive. Right. They they interact with each other in a positive way so that that product makes sense to me. But more importantly, I understand what I'm getting when I engage with that brand. so you cannot have one without the other right you have to think about what is my brand what helps with demand creation and then once I've created that demand how do I fulfill it with the right product offering and you also get involved in quite a lot of sports sponsorship as well I understand we do we do as well which must be quite exciting and what role does that play in kind of building the brand overall what I love about sports is it's this amazing combination of experiences and storytelling, emotional connections with the players, with the teams, with the leagues. And I think Adobe has a great product set for fan engagement. We do, we're the official partner around fan engagement for some iconic leagues. In the UK, it's the Premier League. In the US, it's NFL, MLB. But people, they love to experience sports. And the great thing about sports is they can experience now in a lot of different surfaces. So it's not, you know, maybe previously several years ago, it was just, I went to the game or I watched it on TV. And now it's like, maybe I'm in a game. Maybe I'm watching on TV. Maybe I'm following my player on social. Maybe I'm, you know, watching the podcast and my favorite sports personality on YouTube. So because there's all these interesting surfaces now, it's a great chance to think about your fan experience across all of these areas and how do you connect with fans especially as leagues and teams are global now so I don't think you have to live in Liverpool to be a fan of Liverpool you'd be you live anywhere but the teams then also have to think where are my fans or potential fans engaging with me how do I show up there how do I reach them And so I think the sport is really this intersection of culture and technology and business. And that new fan experience, I think, is something that we can really help teams and leagues build. But we also love to tell that story to other customers, because I think there's a lot for any brand in how successful teams, successful leagues, even successful players manage their brand, manage their fan experience, their customer experience, you know, and just manage engagement overall so that fans feel connected. I love that. I mean, what would be the biggest lessons you think that a brand could learn from the way that kind of fans engage with sports? I think the, I don't want to pick a favorite because all the partnerships we have are my favorite, but I think when you look at leagues that are doing a really good job. They're thinking not just about the player in that moment in that game, but how does the team show up? What are the other cultural intersection points for that player? How are they managing content for their players, social media for the player? It's interesting to see the players having their own personality now in social media. I think for any business, if you think about how passionate are my customers about what I'm delivering, you can take a lot from sports. And I think. I think Premier League does a good job with this. I think the NFL in the U.S. does a good job with this, really thinking about what is the excitement around a team, but how do we take that brand and maybe export it to other customer segments, other countries? What's the excitement around a player and how do we expose them, you know, in different places on and off the field? So I think any brand that's looking to build a loyal following, build a loyal customer base, reach new customers and understand how they scale globally i think there is a lot to learn from sports leagues and teams that do that very well i was going to ask you actually one thing you said earlier i know you're talking about the adobe brand in terms of storytelling but the amazing thing about sport is the stories isn't it it's the stories that come out and you follow the players whether you have a bad run of form or something funny happens and you know sports fans love all the rival banter and the history and that kind of thing. And it just all makes it, they love it, don't they? And it doesn't matter what sport it is, it's the stories and the rivalries and the players and all that kind of thing that make it exciting. But it all comes back to the emotion, doesn't it? It just builds this strong emotion around the brand. Yes, we actually had Will Brass here this week with us. He's the COO for Premier League. And he was talking about all of the emotion and all of the intensity that's come down to these last few games and just really bringing that to life for people. And you're right, these stories, it's like you get so engaged in what's happening to the teams, to the players on the field. So I do think, yes, this emotional connection that people have to sports. And even if maybe you're not a fan of a certain team, you can't help but get into it when you're watching them competing, you know in some sort of in the final levels for a championship it's just it's amazing it's so true it's funny i find that even with the olympics it doesn't matter what the sport is i'll suddenly get into it in about five minutes it could be curling or something random i've never done before but i'm like this is amazing and this person has this backstory and they've overcome these odds it's incredible you know so it's it's all about you know the human spirit and emotion um rachel maybe to wrap up, I thought maybe a fun question to ask you at the end is what's the best bit of advice you've ever been given that's helped you in your career? I think knowing your business, knowing, you know, as a marketer, you're not in isolation. You're a critical part of the business. You're a critical part of growing your business. So you have to understand it. You know, what are the inputs? What are the outputs? What's the customer base? What do they care about? What's revenue, what's profit. You have to be a business expert because truly deeply understanding that makes you a better marketer because then you're able to build the right marketing strategy, the right plans, the right programs to support that business and actually drive that business. I think that marketers, oftentimes people will say marketing is a cost center. And it's not that I disagree with that. It's just that I think it's the wrong lens to apply to marketing. Because if you think about it, if you're doing, if you're understanding your business and you're delivering as a marketer, you're driving customer engagement, you're driving customer acquisition, you're driving customer growth. So marketers really own that customer loyalty, that customer acquisition motion. And every business, that is the lifeblood of a business. How are your customers? Are you retaining them? Are you acquiring them? Are they happy? Are they growing their footprint with you. But that's what marketing really owns. And when a marketer truly understands the business they're working in, then you are delivering and driving growth for that business. That's top advice, actually. I think a lot of marketers forget that they're in business. They think they're in marketing. The job is to be good as a marketer. The role of marketing is to change business and create growth and all those kind of things. And the moment you realize that, It reframes the language you talk, the people you, you know, you kind of network with and the way you frame everything, you know. So it's a very good reminder. We are here to create business and marketing is a wonderful way to do it. Rachel, thank you so much and congratulations on Summit. It's been great to talk to you and yeah, good luck with the new product launches as well. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Great. Thanks for joining us. So I hope you enjoyed that episode of Uncensored CMO as much as I enjoyed making it. Now, by the way, I've got a new newsletter. So if you'd like to get my thoughts on the one thing that I take out from each episode every week, then do subscribe to the One Thing newsletter. I'd really appreciate it. Also, I have another podcast. Just launched Uncensored Renegades with the fabulous Cori Marchesotto. She is one of the world's best CMOs. She's an absolute rock star. Every week we pick one topic, spend 20 minutes trying to fix it. So check out that. It's in your feed, Uncensored Renegades. And finally, I want to give a huge thank you to my sponsor, System One. They generously provide so much support for this podcast. It would not happen without them. So big thanks and lots of love to System One. I'll see you next time.
