What you need to know:

• CMOs of Telstra, Kia and Mailchimp took centre stage at this week’s Mailchimp event discussing the power of distinctiveness in marketing, how to overcome marketing’s many binaries, and getting c-suite buy-in for being bold with brand.
• As Telstra’s Brent Smart put it, we need to get past marketing as ‘or’ and look at the mix of art and science as ‘and’: “The best marketers are able to hold two opposing thoughts about brand at the same time and realise how to use both in different ways,” he told attendees. “The new that’s one coming to us is AI or human – it’s another tension confronting us.”
• In revealing their first AI marketing use cases, Kia’s Dean Norbiato said Kia is looking at AI from a creative production standpoint and as a way to streamline and have greater ownership of creative assets. The team is now using a creative voice agent without any rights that the brand can own and deploy across TV, radio, or other audio.
• Over at Telstra, AI is helping deliver creativity for Smart. He noted the telco went from 150,000 calls to 600,000 calls to its annual Santa hotline in 2023 with the use of AI to drive two-way conversations.
• In striving for distinctiveness however, panellists recognised challenges around budget and c-suite buy-in for brand over performance. “You can easily see brand building getting shot down by performance marketing if they’re very dollar in, dollar out focused short term. Unless you take senior leaders on the journey, showcase the benefits and give yourself some rope – not to hang yourself but to climb up with – you won’t succeed,” Norbiato said.
• Mailchimp’s Michelle Taite’s meanwhile, was concerned what’s influencing decisions behind creative, brand and marketing efforts is just budget. “I often see people making decisions based off how much budget do I have versus how much data do I have. The data allows you to do things that are much more creative than budget.”
• Panellists also said driving attention and connection should be a holy grail. “All neuroscience shows connection drives emotion, drives action; reason just leads to conclusion. You want to inspire action,” said Taite.

‘AI versus human’ is the latest binary in a long line of “or” propositions the marketing industry needs to get over if we’re going to truly deliver future customers and growth, says Brent Smart.

The Telstra CMO was on a panel at this week’s Mailchimp event in Sydney discussing the challenges and opportunities facing modern marketing teams including Kia GM of marketing, Dean Norbiato, and Mailchimp global CMO, Michelle Taite. Debate stretched from striving for distinctiveness not just across advertising but experiences to win that ever-rare quantity, attention, through to applications of AI in marketing. The trio also spoke on why psychological safety is vital for brands to find creative effectiveness and that old chestnut of proving marketing’s worth.

When asked about troupes of the marketing profession he’s trying to break free of, Smart came out swinging against either/or thinking in modern marketing today. It’s high time we stopped seeing marketing as either performance or brand, data or intuition, art or science, he said.

“It’s both, it’s and: The best marketers are able to hold two opposing thoughts about brand at the same time and realise how to use both in different ways,” he told attendees. “The new that’s one coming to us is AI or human – it’s another tension confronting us.”

The only tension Smart is pursuing right now sits within the culture of his marketing team and what best serves the creative process.

“The idea I put at the heart of our culture is to be hard on the work, kind to the people. And yes, it feels like there’s a tension there,” he said. “Being hard on the work is about being honest about the quality you’re producing, the standards you’re upholding and how you’re going to judge creative ideas. It’s really important to have intellectual honesty. But also, you need psychological safety, and to ensure people feel comfortable bringing in an idea. There is no stupid idea.

“That’s why it’s important for marketers to think about the power of ‘and’. We’re trained in marketing to be single minded, to find that single proposition or positioning, but sometimes you need the ‘and’ to get to the real power of what marketing can be.”

(Smart has previously unpacked Telstra's mission to systemise creative excellence – taking a leaf out of AB InBev's book – here.)

KPI-ing cross-functionality

For Kia's Norbiato, a powerful lesson in respecting all aspects of the marketing craft came from tackling issues between two staff members who weren’t getting along.

“What I decided to do is put the KPIs for certain skills in one person’s review into the other’s; for their bonus, they had to work together,” he said. “What ended up happening is they got along quite well. From there, it was clear how important it was to be a lot more cross-functional.

“What I do now with all staff is effectively have a component of their job that sits or has a foot in another part of department within the marketing team. That cross collaboration means they’re not just focused downwards, but looking more broadly. “There’s nothing worse as a marketer if someone is not asking what’s the why behind what they’re doing. Sitting across other departments fosters that healthy level of competition which helps the rising tide.”

Taite’s way of finding ‘and’ rather than ‘or’ is to align the brief not to one channel or specific part of marketing, but to the customer.  “Ultimately what that means is thinking and skills bleed across,” she said.  

AI in marketing action

The panel conversation didn’t just cover how AI could create another binary for marketers to contend with, but also how AI is being employed.

Kia is looking at AI from a creative production standpoint and as a way to streamline and have greater ownership of creative assets. Norbiato said the team is now using a creative voice agent without any rights that the brand can own and deploy across TV, radio, or other audio.

“We are also looking at AI from a static imagery perspective, before we get to motion and movement, which has long way to go,” he said. Globally, like many larger companies, Kia has a policy that staff can’t just use any AI, so it’s been exploring closed source solutions.

“The first iterations had six wheels – those weren’t really functional and there’s still dev work from our end. But we see AI as very much streamlining that creative process,” Norbiato added.  

For Taite, AI is about speed of delivery, and she pointed out Mailchimp’s ability to create personalised and contextualised iterations of its recent ‘Clustomer’ campaign benefitted from the use of AI.

In Smart’s view, AI is a tool much like data, and he urged marketers to use it in distinctive ways to create unique experiences. A successful example was Telstra’s annual free calls to Santa program, which allows consumers to go to a payphone, dial in and speak to Santa. Historically, Telstra used a recorded message. This past year, genAI enabled it to create two-way conversations.

“That blew kids’ minds,” said Smart. “We went from 150,000 calls to 600,000 calls to Santa. Think of the minutes those customers and future customers were spending with our brand – they never spend that time with Telstra. Enriched by AI, we made that a cooler experience for customers.

“With AI, we often think about as a way to do fast, or to generate content quickly. It can also create great experiences if we use it in a creative way.”

Proving marketing’s effectiveness

Throughout the panel, conversation also kept returning to being distinctive not just across advertising, but all experiences.

“I call it blanding over branding – everyone sat down with the human-centred designers and they’ve worked out how to take out the friction, the pain points and you end up with a generic, bland, boring experience,” Smart commented. “The best experiences in the world have a bit of creative friction in them.

“Walk into Hermes and try to buy a bag; you can’t. There’s a huge amount of friction in the customer journey and that’s what makes it special, memorable and worth talking about. Too often we want to take it all out, have no pain points and make things super convenient, but there’s nothing memorable about it.

“The job of marketing is to be distinctive. It’s not about being annoying and getting in the way of people buying stuff, it’s about something that adds memorability and is worth talking about to your product, brand or experience.”

In Kia’s case, challenging category conventions came by intimately knowing them first, then overturning a bunch of them. The auto brand is back with an uptick in sales in 2024, showing year-to-date growth of 4.6 per cent and more than 33,000 vehicles sold as of 31 May.

Take Kia’s recent teaser media campaign for its forthcoming ute. Not only did the brand need to use a different tone and language reflecting the customer cohort more likely to buy a ute, it needed to ensure the work didn’t operate in isolation to its overall brand platform. Adding to the challenge was the fact Kia didn’t have a ute vehicle to drive through its ad creative, or even a product name to drive distinction initially.

As a result, creative used a rural pub with a partially obscured name, employed a rural community, and featured a host of Australian sporting stars. The result was increasing awareness of Kia making 4 x 4 vehicles to 24 per cent.

“We weren’t driving over a ravine or down water, finishing with the big front three-quarter shot, and people noticed it,” Norbiato said.

Yet you can’t be bold if you don’t have buy-in to go for it in the first place. While a big subscriber to being distinctive, Norbiato questioned Smart on how marketers have the conversation about trying something different.

“You have to bring it back to what is the business challenge at hand,” responded Smart. “In every category, there are loads of choices for customers. If your brand goes unnoticed, your bit of content goes unnoticed, it’s a complete waste of time. You have to get someone’s attention – there’s no rarer resource today than attention.” 

Smart is increasingly turning investments towards attention-based planning at Telstra.  Ultimately, attention is critical if marketing is to do the unique job it holds over all other functions, Smart said: Delivering future demand.

“There are so many departments at Telstra, in big companies with ‘customer’ in their title, servicing existing customers, making sure customers are satisfied, yet there is only one department finding future customers and that’s marketing,” he said. “I encourage more marketers to have that conversation in their business as it’s a way more strategic conversation than current ROIs, social engagement.”

The challenge Norbiato spotted is how significant performance figures can look to the uneducated c-suite.

“You can easily see brand building getting shot down by performance marketing if they’re very dollar in, dollar out focused short term. Unless you take senior leaders on the journey, showcase the benefits and give yourself some rope – not to hang yourself but to climb up with – you won’t succeed,” he said.

Taite’s concern was what’s influencing decisions behind creative, brand and marketing efforts.

“I often see people making decisions based off how much budget do I have versus how much data do I have. The data allows you to do things that are much more creative than budget,” she advised.

“Our team recently pulled together a game for our product called ‘dumpling delivery’. You play golf with your mouse with a dumpling. That’s it. The intent was after marketers create a campaign they’ve thought a lot about, they need just a moment to chill, and we could deliver a moment of comic relief where they get those creative juices going. That to me is experimenting small, using the data, but also using the data to connect.

“All neuroscience shows connection drives emotion, drives action; reason just leads to conclusion. You want to inspire action.”