What you need to know:

• Arnott's CMO Jenni Dill and Lisa Gilbert, Global CMO at the $20bn IBM spinoff Kyndryl, are leading the hunt for 20 "super CMOs" with ambitions for executive leadership and board roles in the inaugural APAC Marketing Academy-McKinsey Fellowship program.
• Dill and Gilbert have both completed the program and are more rounded, financially fluent and P&L savvy marketers as a result.
• Marketers have to become bilingual, per Dill. "When you're deep in an agency creative conversation, you are deep in using the language of creativity, because you want to get the best out of your agency. When I am deep in a conversation with my CFO or my CEO, I've got to translate into their language."
• It's working at Arnott's - the business is growing and double digit pace for some of its oldest brands including Tim Tams.  
• Kyndryl's US-based Global CMO Lisa Gilbert says the Fellowship program landed her a public board seat and rewired how she does B2B marketing - Gilbert chairs the Marketing Academy alumni in the US and is visiting Australia and APAC, partly to launch the APAC Fellowship initiative.
• Only top flight CMOs that have 20 years experience and report directly to the CEO or a VP can apply - but you can't buy. 
• Get the full download via the podcast, here.

Jenni Dill had just completed The Marketing Academy’s McKinsey-led Fellowship program before she took the CMO gig at Arnott’s in July 2020, almost exactly a year after private equity giant KKR bought the business from Campbell's Soup Co for US$2.2bn. Pretty handy, because 13 days into the role, she had to present the three-to-five-year strategic plan to Arnott’s board.

A few months earlier Dill had been in New York for the Fellowship’s residential leg, with the likes of Amazon’s now top global marketer Claudine Cheever; Angie Klein, then top marketer at Verizon and now CEO and President of its all-digital mobile network Visible; and Dara Treseder, then Peloton’s top marketer and now global CMO for US$42bn design software multinational Autodesk.

It was the last international face-to-face Dill and any of the other fellows had for a while. Three days later she was scrambling for masks and hand sanitiser to make the Qantas flight home. But the calibre of Fellowship marketers and their subsequent climb up the corporate tree underlines the esteem in which it is held.

Established ten years ago in Europe, the program expanded into the US. This year it’s APAC’s turn, with 10 marketers from Australia and 10 from the broader region now vying to make the inaugural Fellowship intake – for good reason. Some 57 per cent of those who've completed the fellowship program have since moved into CEO or board roles, and another 32 per cent have been promoted since completing the initiative.

Dill says senior marketers serious about becoming a board member or CEO should go all out to make this year’s cut.

“The starting point orientation is very much you are our high flying marketers right now. You know what you're doing from a marketing perspective. Let's make you into leaders, which are CFOs, CEOs or board directors,” says Dill.

Which the numbers suggest is what usually follows.

“A lot of my cohort moved into CEO roles fairly quickly, some have moved into board director roles since then,” she adds. “But I think everyone shared the view that they were trying to be much more successful and more impactful as a growth oriented marketer.”

Becoming bilingual

Marketing has been banging on about speaking the language of business and finance for years. The Fellowship teaches fluency, per Dill.

“It’s an absolutely fantastic way for senior marketers to learn to navigate the language of the CFO, the language of the CEO and the board, and manage those very senior stakeholders in a really positive, proactive way. As you work through the program, whether it's talking about corporate strategy, organisational design or managing stakeholders, particularly from a financial lens, it equips marketers with the essential skills they need to translate their consumer customer growth orientation into meaningful P&L and balance sheet results,” says Dill.

“As soon as you can do that, you take marketing out of being vanity metrics … and into here's the growth we delivered for the business, and here's how it flows through the P&L, here's the growth that we made on the balance sheet by growing the brand and growing the assets of the business … So the program is essential in doing that – because it's the only program I know of in the world that is designed for senior marketers.”

Not that there’s anything to be ashamed of in speaking marketing’s language. It’s just marketers must become bilingual in order to reach the upper echelons, reckons Dill.

“When you're deep in an agency creative conversation, you are deep in using the language of creativity, because you want to get the best out of your agency. When I am deep in a conversation with my CFO or my CEO, I've got to translate into their language: The work we're doing here is driving value and driving growth, and here's how it's translating through the P&L. So it's about using the right language with the right audience to make sure it's landing,” she says.

“Internally, we're very much talking about our growth orientation. We're talking about our efficiency, our effectiveness. We're talking about the point where we're at on our ROI model, which we're still increasing returns from [after] increasing investment. When you're dealing with a private equity owner, they understand investment really clearly – and if you give me X dollars, I'll give you Y back in this amount of time. It's a really attractive proposition to be able to do that and back it with results," she adds. 

"There's always risk. Obviously, with any future investments, there's never any guarantees. But when you've got the benefit of a body of work delivering results, it makes it a much better and much more attractive investment than, ‘hey, I want to make some ads.’”

Not that there’s anything wrong with wanting make ads either.

What’s changed?

Dill says The Marketing Academy Fellowship has honed two aspects of her capability: The ability to own the growth agenda and to move at pace.

While a vastly experienced marketer – a former CMO at McDonald’s following a 25-year career at PepsiCo – Dill didn’t have the same global network behind her at Arnott’s. “So you’re kind of on your own  and for me the Fellowship gave me amazing clarity in how to attack the growth agenda and really line up a compelling framework for growth,” says Dill. “How to make sure I was making the right changes to organisational design faster than my normal nature would probably be; to make sure that I had the right talent coming with me; and to make sure that we're able to deliver those business results really quickly. Not on a ten year plan, on a two to three year plan, both at the top line and at the bottom line.”

It’s paying off. Not quite three years into the role, Arnott’s is powering – despite some FMCG’s fearing that consumer belt-tightening will push more squeezed households into the arms of supermarket's own-brands.

Crunch outlier

“Consumers are definitely feeling the pinch. But we are seeing opportunities for growth,” says Dill. “We’re seeing people trading more into spending money in the supermarket versus white tablecloth restaurants that are much more expensive. So you're seeing people being much more conscious over every dollar they're spending and that is playing into your weekly supermarket shop: Eating more from home, taking more things to work if you're in the office, taking your lunches, taking your breakfast, more dinners at home. And that's definitely we're seeing opportunities,” adds Dill.

Products lines like crisp breads – Vita-Weats and Cruskits – are punching “double digit growth” per Dill, as people think about longer shelf-life alternatives to breads, while the firm is “seeing a slight increase in the volume sold on deal” as shoppers stock up on staples when they are at a discount.

“That's not to say that people aren't doing it tough out there, they absolutely are … [but] we are growing versus year ago. We're growing market share, we're growing top line,” she says, while acknowledging that “input cost inflation” remains “a daily challenge.”

Brand delivering

While Arnott’s has invested in product line innovation, Dill says the vast bulk of growth “has come from reinvigorating the Arnott’s brand” after a decade of underinvestment. Which is why older brands are now on the up.

“Both Shapes and Tim Tams are growing double digit at the moment. They're brands that have been around for decades. So being able to breathe kind of new energy and new life into those brands has been really important – and that's been through some great marketing, it's been through great work with the sales team in terms of our activations in store,” says Dill. “And then we've done some work on advertising, we've done some great consumer promotions and really built the engagement model. Very little of that has been actually about [product] innovation.”

Nearly three years since Dill had to present that three-to-five year strategic plan to the board, driving that kind of growth – while linking brand and marketing investment directly to the P&L – should help when it comes to landing the next one.

Total reframe

Lisa Gilbert is the US-based VP of Marketing at Kyndryl, an IBM spinoff with 90,000 employees and revenues approaching US$20bn. “We’re the largest managed infrastructure services company you've never heard of,” per Gilbert, with local customers including NAB, regionals like Singapore Airlines and globals such as Ford and Mazda.

She doesn’t hold back when describing the impact of the Marketing Academy’s Fellowship program.

“It reframed my relationship with marketing. It totally changed it,” says Gilbert. “I now have the belief that marketing, at its best, has the power to make profound changes in the world, and it should give us the permission to take our rightful seat at the board table.”

Whether in B2B or B2C, she says marketing “can impact people by changing the way they think and how they behave. We can influence what people believe in, who they vote for, what they wear, who they date, the choices they make, and how they feel about themselves and others. And I don't think people see marketing like that”.

Promotion primer

Gilbert, then CMO of IBM UK & Ireland, was part of the EMEA Fellowship class of 2018, alongside CMOs from The Wall Street Journal, Coke, Warner Bros, Disney, Diageo and Unilever. As well as absorbing their perspectives, “it gave me more confidence, the swagger to rock up and take that rightful seat at the table”.

That confidence formed a springboard to take a bigger role – as CMO for IBM in Japan, its second largest market globally. “But even more profoundly for me personally, it gave me the courage and confidence of wanting to obtain a board position – a paid board seat – which was no easy task,” says Gilbert. She duly landed one with Access Intelligence, the UK-based marketing intelligence firm that houses iSentia and ResponseSource within its stable.

Now running marketing for Kyndryl’s global markets, Gilbert is propagating the learning to her regional heads. “The CMOs in all the countries report to me, and my mission is to have each of those CMOs or marketing leaders become a strategic advisor to the business – not an order taker.”

Giving CMOs that kind of advisory license is paying off, per Gilbert, leading to a sharper results focus.

“Using account-based marketing (ABM) as our lever, we are completely data driven,” she says. “We are able to sit with the managing partners of each one of our accounts using our LTV [life time value] model and the data cube to be able to give insights as to what is the TAM [total addressable market], what kind of software packages that the clients have.”

That means the marketers and client management can build marketing strategies based on what that client actually needs.

“They can rock up and really understand what's happening deep in the client – versus not really understanding what's happening in each of those businesses,” says Gilbert. “And we can do that for each of the companies that we serve. So it really helps to narrow down where we get really focused and specific as to how we add value.”

Next: Super CMOs

Next up, Gilbert is pushing Kyndryl’s marketers to become what she calls ‘super CMOs’ – that is, to take on an additional adjacent role.

“In my mind, the super CMO is the CMO who starts to take on these ‘plus one’ projects; our plus one areas of responsibility. A lot of it comes from the organisational design: In Australia recently I met with Pip Arthur, who's the CMO and COO of Microsoft. So that's a super CMO, that's her plus one – and I think that's by organisational design. But then I have friends who are CMOs and now also Chief Sustainability Officers, they have added sustainability to their remit as well,” says Gilbert. “And you can pick your plus one based on whether the organisational design or your personal passion.”

Which is good news for any CMOs out there not feeling too busy…

How hard can it be?

For marketers aiming ultimately to run businesses from the very top, now’s the time to apply for the Fellowship. The deadline for applications is 5 June – and the McKinsey-led course costs nothing. It’s just really hard to get into.

“It’s a merit-based program. You can't buy your way into this. You have to literally go through a selection process, which is high standards, quite tough, but is designed to get a great group of people to help grow everyone individually, but also collectively,” says Arnott’s Dill.

Alongside their CV, applicants need to submit evidence of their contribution to industry and their impact on their business. Then they need a written endorsement from the CEO, or company or industry senior.

Plus, marketers need to have circa 20 years in the game and “a clear ambition to take a CEO position or sit on a board,” says Kyndryl’s Gilbert. “You have to be the most senior marketing leader within a client side organisation, globally or regionally, and you need to report directly to the CEO or the regional or global president or equivalent.” Lastly, she says, “You have to hold significant budget and evidence of revenue or P&L.”

Nothing ventured and all that...

Get the full download via the podcast, here.