Sack client, not agency

Industry Contributor 29 Apr 2019 - 2 min read

Sack client, not agency

By Paul McIntyre - Executive Editor

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Agencies are usually in the firing line when things go wrong. But Joe Tripodi, newly retired Subway CMO and former top marketer at Coke and MasterCard is spilling the beans. Clients are "dysfunctional and they don't know what they want". (Marketing Week)

In broad ranging interview with Marketing Week Tripodi offers some gems:

CMOs come in, change the agency, and contribute to their own downfall "because they set up the expectation that the world was going to change because of advertising".
"My biggest pet peeve is that people even at the most senior level in some of the biggest companies, think an ad campaign is going to solve broader business issues."
Biggest lesson of his career: "Don’t believe your own bullshit".
Key challenge facing marketing: sourcing, curating and managing the plethora of content required in a fragmenting world.
Advice to marketers: Get a broad skill set. "Get exposed to as many different parts of marketing and consumer engagement as you can." Then, when you find something you like, "go deep".

Joe Tripodi, a global CMO with Coke, MasterCard and Subway, suggests his marketing peers are dysfunctional. With a big hand in campaigns including Mastercard's 'Priceless' and 'Share a Coke', Tripodi carries some cred. His views on maladjusted clients will ring true both with agencies and marketers that are wise to his biggest career lesson around self-delusion. But CMOs coming in to change the agency as a business fix is becoming less of a "thing" in this market. It still happens and that is, in most cases, delusional. Moreover, any belief among Australian c-suite execs that advertising can fix a broader business problem, as Tripodi posits, is a stretch here. We probably have the opposite view - does advertising do anything?