The future of retail media with Coles360
Want a captive audience with costs comparative to TV ads? Might be time to check out the fresh face of retail media.
On this episode of The CMO Show we take a deep dive into the world of screens and supermarkets, joined by Paul Brooks, General Manager of Coles360, and Alex Lawson, Head of Strategy & Media at Market Media.
When it comes to disruption, retail media might take the cake – it's a fast growing space transforming right before our eyes.
Retail media is a surprisingly effective, little understood part of the marketing landscape. As traditional TV advertising continues to fragment, and retailers invest in IRL experience, marketers are beginning to understand the value that retail media brings.
“Two and a half years ago, we had pretty much zero screens. Now, outside of every single one of our stores, you will see a digital screen – one that’s able to deliver in real time with dynamic creative,” says Coles360’s Paul Brooks.
“Brands and advertisers are starting to understand our platform, our activation, and the power that can be able to drive an outcome.”
Customer experience in a retail setting means navigating relationships between in-store customers and business stakeholders. In an emerging space, this brings both opportunity and challenge.
“It’s like having six plates on sticks, and you’ve got to work each one differently. The best thing I can do for my clients is do good stuff for my customers, and the best thing I can do for my board is do good stuff for my clients and my customers,” says Market Media’s Alex Lawson.
“It works in harmony, but overall we really want it to feel natural for the customers. If we’ve done that, we’ve done our job.”
Tune in to hear more about how Coles is using retail media in their own stores, and how one of New Zealand’s largest retail chains and retail media networks is further driving growth.
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Credits
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The CMO Show Production Team
Producer - Pamela Obeid
Audio Engineers – Ed Cheng & Daniel Marr
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Transcript:
Mark Jones
I bet you've been in a supermarket and you've heard the song coming out over the radio and you started singing along, maybe tapping the foot, right? A little bit embarrassing, but of course those of us in marketing know it's all intentional.
What about though, if we think about the bigger picture? What if there is a bigger channel, a bigger marketing context at play? I wonder what that would look like.
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Hello, Mark Jones here. Thanks for joining us on the CMO Show. Today we're going to talk about retail media and we're going to talk about what retail media is and what it's becoming. And if you don't know, just hang on because this is a cracker. I'm joined by Paul Brooks, who's general manager of Coles 360, and Alex Lawson, head of strategy and media at Market Media and The Warehouse Group in New Zealand.
It's a really fascinating look at some intersecting worlds. These are big retail operations that are acting like publishers that are thinking about how can they work with advertisers across all of their assets to put messages in front of consumers, shoppers like you and I? It's a really fast-growing emerging space that is transforming, and in some cases disrupting the media landscape. So let's get into it.
Really excited to talk about the future of retail media with Alex Lawson, head of strategy and media at Market Media and The Warehouse Group in New Zealand, and Paul Brooks, general manager at Coles 360. I presume in Melbourne, Paul.
Paul Brooks
Yeah, I actually split my time between Melbourne and Sydney, but in Melbourne today.
Mark Jones
Yeah. Very nice. Well, thank you both for joining us. Since you're talking, Paul, just give us the quick two-second rundown of who you are and what you do.
Paul Brooks
Sure. As you said, Paul Brooks, general manager at Coles 360. Joined Coles just round about two and a half years ago now to come in and launch our retail media offering. So two and a half years in loving the sector, loving the business in terms of what we're doing, and just prior to that I'd spent the vast majority of my career in agencies and publishers across multiple markets. So a bit of a step change, but enjoying it.
Mark Jones
Which is a seamless unrehearsed transition to Alex, that you know from those days, right?
Paul Brooks
100%.
Mark Jones
Alex, thanks for joining us, mate.
Alex Lawson
Oh, pleasure. Thank you for having me here. Good to see you.
Mark Jones
Tell us about The Warehouse Group. Now, I got to say too off the bat, I enjoyed meeting you over in New Zealand at the iMedia Summit, and one of the things that struck out to me was you guys can pretty much talk to every single human in New Zealand.
Alex Lawson
Yeah, well, I mean, New Zealand's a fairly small country, but we get six million people through our doors every month which is more people than we actually have in the country, so that's always a good time.
Mark Jones
I don't know how that works.
Alex Lawson
Yeah. We're a multicategory retail group. So our main offering is the ubiquitous, the warehouse stores or the big red sheds. They've been around for about 40 years. And they're a general value retailer, so very much kind of like a Walmart model, but just not quite as extensive in grocery yet. Although we do have grocery as a offering, but it's in a sort of pantry staples fashion. And then we have another retail mom called Noel Leeming which is a Best Buy consumer electronics kind of thing.
And then the warehouse stationery is very much like an office max kind of offering. So we really span all these categories. And I've been with the group for four and a half years now. I joined literally just before COVID, and have been tasked with setting up the retail media network for about the last three.
Mark Jones
Well, speaking of your retail media network, and I think just to get things out of the way from a definition point of view, if the listener doesn't understand what retail media is, let's just get a shared understanding here, Paul.
Paul Brooks
So for all intents and purposes, what a retail media network is, is a retailer that looks at all of its assets that it owns, be that website, app, screens, radio, magazine, catalogue, trucks, you name it, any single asset that they've got to potentially use it as an activation platform to be able to monetize as an advertising business. So for all intents purposes that's what it is.
What has changed significantly over the last few years is retailers understanding value that that can play. The brands and the advertisers that are looked after within that organisation and the platform and the activation and the power that can be able to drive an outcome. And then increasingly, how do you start to knit all of those together to form a sophisticated media offering? that's what a retail media network is, and it's evolving and changing quite quickly.
Mark Jones
Yeah, honestly, it's fascinating just how many touch points you referred to there, and even I'm sure some that you didn't.
Alex, did he get it right? Is that anything left off the table there in terms of definitions?
Alex Lawson
Look, I mean in general, yes, completely agree with Paul. I think the difference of how we set ourselves up in comparison to a lot of networks around the world actually was that we were born out of literally doing full funnel marketing for our endemic clients. So we adopted that right from the start. So we actually say, "Yes, we do all our own assets." And all that kind of thing, all the stuff that Paul was talking about in-store, on site, et cetera, et cetera. Anything you slap an ad on. But we've always treated ourselves like a marketing agency within the retailer.
So we were always saying, hey, if we're working with one of our clients, which was an endemic supplier, and we felt that that ad needed to be on Facebook or TV or an out of home that we didn't own, we would buy that for them and act a bit like an agency. The other thing that I think we are doing differently or we were at the forefront of, and now a lot more people are looking at it as well, is we opened ourselves up for non-endemic and agency clients which is very much on our own assets.
So screens in-store, working with us online, all that kind of stuff. They don't need us to buy TV ads or anything for them, but they are doing that. And they're really interested in activating our first party audiences in safe ways for us as a retailer as well. So we go everything that Paul said, and then we're been in a position where our business has allowed us to go outside of it as well which is kind of fun especially as an old media person.
Paul Brooks
I was going to say that's an interesting point because the couple of points where you said you were born out of, that's where a lot of the growth is coming from most retailers. So how do you start to activate against those audience on some of those platforms that Alex spoke about? And that's definitely a future growth strategy, certainly for ourselves and for most retailers. And the vast majority of retailers and certainly groceries, most of their revenue has been generated from brands that you can see on shell forums in-store, but again, some of that future growth comes from non-endemic and near-endemic.
Mark Jones
So what strikes me about this, if we think about what's changed in the last couple of years, Paul, you're saying that the level of sophistication that you've either got or moving towards has taken off. Is that a fair summary?
Paul Brooks
Yeah, absolutely. I think we've launched just over two and a bit years ago. And although most of the assets that I spoke to did exist in some form, they were treated in terms of relatively siloed and probably in a decentralised model. But if you were to take the sophisticated model, a really good example is around what we are doing with front of store screens.
So two and a half years ago we had pretty much zero screens. We are now just about to roll out the third phase. So that means outside of every single one of our stores you will see a digital screen. We now have integrated a CMS which enables us to be able then segment and target based on day of week, time of day, geolocation and add a lot more as we move forward, as we move from those slow moving faces to essentially open up programmatic deliveries. So being able to deliver in real time with dynamic creative.
Mark Jones
Alex, speaking of TV, the thing that struck me from your presentation that I saw in New Zealand, you mentioned that the CPM for retail media is almost level pegged with TV now. Is that right?
Alex Lawson
Yeah, well that figure was coming from when we took a sort of a CPM off our screen network because that's kind of where our largest audience is, and we benchmarked that against sort of a market TV rate. But yeah, with in-store screen network which we've also have stood up, over the last 12 months, which has been a real labour of love doing that, has given us that real ability to reach those in-store shoppers that we have.
And for us that's really powerful because the vast majority of our conversions happen in-store. It's just the nature of the products we sell and the model that we run. It's very rare would you buy a 65 inch five grand TV online without going to the store and having a look at that first to make sure you like it.
Mark Jones
Now, as you talk to clients, is there a penny drop moment where they go, "Hang on a minute, you guys are a media company"?
Paul Brooks
It is evolving and it's changing. If I look at our existing client base they are 100% what you would say they've come from a trade, which is quite different to likes of where we are heading. And Alex and I, in terms of our previous world is where we used to look after above the line marketing. So what you would see generally those adverts seen on television, on screen online. So those two worlds are merging probably not as quickly as everybody thinks, but they are certainly come together.
Conversations are quite different. So you are starting to see that change.
Alex Lawson
Adding onto that point from Brooksy, it's really interesting because we are all, as every retail media is about to do that transition from retail media or a retailer to a publisher. And it's a really big thing for our bosses and our colleagues to get their heads around because normally retailers don't work like retail media networks and publishers.
Mark Jones
I think there's a huge mindset shift that you're talking about for leaders in retail, but I don't think the rest of us in the marketing media world have too many leaps and bounds to take in order to get that right. Well, I certainly had a big aha moment. I was like, "Well, of course," because we don't watch TV anymore except ironically we're watching TV in shops.
Alex Lawson
And we encourage that because in our Noel Leeming stores we obviously sell a whole load of TVs. And every store has a wall, so it's literally a wall of TVs. And we've taken those TVs over and we run ads on them now and we run-
Mark Jones
Obviously.
Alex Lawson
... messages and stuff like that. So you can literally go and watch TVs. But if you look back at those points, and certainly when you are in agencies and with clients, and I think what really happened is Google did us all a massive favour by just saying that they're about to deprecate the cookies. And I know they've backtracked on it now, but just them saying they were going to get rid of cookies, sent shock waves through the ad world.
And everybody panicked and then retailers stood there and went, "Hi, we've got first-party data. We can do cookies too. We've got first-party cookies that aren't going to be affected by this. We are now the most powerful owners of data." And everybody then went, "Hold on, you guys have got really valuable audiences and we would like a piece of that please, and how do we get our messages in front of your audiences?" And that, for me, was one of the massive turning moments of retail media of when it started to become really powerful.
Paul Brooks
100% agree. I think when people ask me around what's changed over the last few years and why has retail media grown so quickly and essentially carving out a sector within itself? There's those structural changes. One was around the proposed deprecation of the cookie. So to your point, it was always going to get more harder and more difficult to be able to track behaviour online and therefore target appropriate and relevant advertising. I think secondly, the pandemic helped as well.
So what that meant, we had lots more insights understanding the data around our customer behaviour. And I think the third component, and you touched upon it earlier, Mark, is that the traditional media owners are a challenge, right? Television's fragmented, we know what's happening and we're publishing and press. A lot of those traditional media owners and the domain of advertising is becoming more fragmented and more difficult to be able to cut through and also prove the effectiveness. So you think about those three overarching structural changes, that is essentially those things have helped fast track and accelerate retail media as a sector.
Mark Jones
The old journo editor in me wants to ask, is Coles Radio just the beginning? Is there going to be Coles News something something? It's not much of a step to bolt in some editorial.
Paul Brooks
No, no, you're right. I don't think we are looking at all of our assets and think about as we start to advance and move into more demand sources. By more demand sources is moving into agencies and brands direct. That probably challenges some media owners. You look at retail media is growing round about 20% on an annualised basis. Advertising per se isn't growing to that degree.
Mark Jones
Alex, what's your take? Are you doing or thinking similar things?
Alex Lawson
I mean, we call it Red Radio, runs in our warehouse stores and you can advertise on it and do all that kind of stuff as well. I think for me, it always comes back to the customer and both in our sense the customer who is our client, but also the customers that we literally have in the store. And there are lots of things that we could do, but we are very focused on what is the customer experience and how do we add value to that rather than just great, we're going to throw like 85 different ways for you to be pummelled as you come into our store or go onto our online experience.
Alex Lawson
we always say the primary objective of all the campaigns we're doing is to achieve the client's objective, the secondary objective which we say to all our guys, you don't need to worry about this, we'll worry about it somewhere else, is obviously the revenue goal that we have from our boards and our exec teams because I want them to do the work that's going to keep clients coming back and achieving for everyone.
Paul Brooks
I think you need to absolutely 100% work with the customer. If you get the customer experience right you can then get it right for suppliers and then you can get it right for the business, and a byproduct of that is the growth for the business. And then that'll give you that long-term sustainable business as opposed to what I think we're starting not necessarily here at the moment, you've certainly seen in the US, is there are, I think there were 21 retail media networks spun up last year.
And the economics within the US are quite different. So they can probably afford to carry a lot more retail media networks and we can in Australia and New Zealand, but to be able to set up a retail media network, it takes investment, it takes infrastructure, it takes a whole host of stuff that stakeholder management, board buying, CapEx, OpEx, et cetera, which means you need to have to do things in the right way to be able to set up everything we spoke about earlier. But you're starting to see some of these smaller ones spin up, jumping onto what the proposed gold rush or gravy train is, and that is not a long-term sustainable business. So I think we'll see a mass fragmentation then consolidation probably quite quickly in some countries.
Mark Jones
I want to explore a little bit about the results and what you're learning, but before we do that, you mentioned the stakeholders, and I think that's what I'd love is just to understand a little bit is, how do you balance customers at a few different levels so the actual customer in-store buying things, but you've got customers of the retail media network, so suppliers as you might call them, but actually they're customers, really, and then you've got all these stakeholders across the business at varying levels of understanding of what the heck are these people doing? So how do you manage all of that? Give us an insight into how you process all of those different moving parts.
Alex Lawson
It is a giant balancing act. It's like having six plates on sticks kind of things and you've got to work each one differently. and the best thing I can do for my clients is do good stuff for my customers and the best thing I can do for my board is do good stuff for my clients and my customers.
So it works in harmony, but you've definitely got challenges as you go because a board and an exec will latch onto the, like Brooksy said, the gold rush side of it and be like, "Great, show me how much money we're going to make." And you're like, "Okay, well that's an element of it." The suppliers or the clients, they want to sell more stuff and they're excited about closed loop reporting and the ability to see exactly what happens to a sale by investing another dollar in this ad or this ad or this ad.
And the customer's probably at the end of it because they're the guys who hopefully they don't feel like they've had this whole onslaught and they're finding it naturally coming to them and things. But I mean we've had examples where we have said no to things which is quite challenging in a growing media business to say no to somebody going, "I've got money in a bag for you right here." And we've had to say, "No, it's not right for us or our store environment."
Mark Jones
Paul, I presume you've got a similar filter to getting that balance that Alex was talking about.
Paul Brooks
Yeah, 100%. And in the last two and a half years, we've done most things right, and I've learned along the way is in terms of how we approach different subjects or different topics to be able to get things going or accelerating from a Coles 360 perspective. And that means absolutely ensuring that you're engaging with that stakeholder management group. So across the entire organisation, both formally, so in terms of the quarterly forums and informally as well in terms of building those relationships, so the education piece that Alex spoke about earlier.
It also involves operations. It also involves the technology team. Also we're heavy on sustainability. So that involves a sustainability team. So very quickly, what started off as a asset that we could make work for suppliers and monetize suddenly needs to make sure that it is a very cross-functional group and it delivers for the customer first and primarily, but also those group benefits for all of those stakeholders. So it is not easy and it takes time, but doing those things in that way and engaging every single touch point across the organisation would mean that you're setting up the business for success and that long-term component as opposed to the sugar rush.
Mark Jones
So actually you're being very, very careful about this experience you are creating. Now, I mentioned some of the results. I'd love to understand, what are you learning? What's working. What's not working? What are some of the experiences that give us a bit of an insight into, for example, how does it drive sales or how do you communicate to your advertisers, your sponsors, your suppliers, the reach that you're getting or other metrics? Just give us a quick overview of what you're seeing and learning.
Alex Lawson
I think what we're starting to do is play into areas that traditional media companies, like we are now outdoor networks, we are now broadcast networks, and the difference is we've got the sales data to go with it so we can start looking at those things and doing proper A, B testings and sales lifts and stuff like that.
I think at the moment globally we're still quite outside of that endemic digital, if you've got a high e-com purchase cycle kind of business, we're still quite young in this sense and there's a lot of great work happening around the world, but nobody's quite cracked it and we're all trying to get there. So I think it's a really exciting time. And like I said earlier, we have that additional challenge where most of our purchases are made in-store which gives us a certain tracking thing, but we are definitely seeing it working.
I mean, we had a great opportunity recently when we were installing our in-store screens and we phased the installation just through because of logistics and everything and getting screens into the country, et cetera. So we had a moment where we had a period of time where we had clients on screens in our top 30 stores, and then we had the remaining 60 stores as natural control stores. So we were able to see results that were coming through. And without being too specific, we were seeing 25 to 30% sales lifts in-stores that had screens. So that's on those products. So that's a really powerful thing.
Mark Jones
Paul?
Paul Brooks
Yeah, I was going to say, if you think about the old adage, if you talk to a lot of people that come through marketing and CMOs, they always talk about the fact that, 50% of their marketing works, but they don't know which 50%. And that has been really difficult for traditional media owners and agencies to be able to prove that. The raw oil in a retail media network is the ability to be able to target accurately and to be able to prove it, so to measure it. And all of that is underpinned by first party data. And I would argue you need a compelling loyalty programme to underpin that so then you can capture what happens online and in-store, which means effectively you are owning the moment of truth.
The digital and the physical shelves are right at the point of transaction. What that then means, and we are not right there, and I don't think any reason you talk to any retailer or any retail media network across the globe should then be able to deliver the right message at the right time to the right customer in the right channel and be able to prove out those results.
Mark Jones
Yeah, so to your point, the investment in tech has got to be pretty heavy or at least very carefully thought through because what you're speaking about there is quite sophisticated by anybody's measure.
Paul Brooks
100%. you need really to deliver on the promise of a sophisticated, compelling retail media network. You do need that investment. You need that infrastructure. You need the scale. And with those things, and normally comes a reasonably large retailer who have got the willingness to be able to invest with regards to CapEx and OpEx to be able to support that growth. There isn't an easy or a cheap way of doing that. And our business has supported the growth of Coles 360 and all of the things we're looking to do, technology, partnerships, infrastructure, CRM programs, and all inventory management, all of those things that help you deliver a scalable operation.
Mark Jones
If we think about the future and where all this is going in the time that we've got left, it strikes me that there's a few things at play. One is this long-term mindset that you need boards and senior execs to understand because you're still really building this stuff out. A couple of years in really isn't very long as far as these things go. So you've got that at play.
And then there's a disruptive element to what's going on in the media marketing world because you are really changing things up a lot in terms of perceptions, but also how it works. And then you've also got this other thing that comes to mind for me, which is your suppliers in-store they used to just argue about where they sit on the shelves, but now they're all like, "Can we have a deal where we will go in the middle of the shelf and we want premium positions on the TVs?" And all that stuff. So suddenly there's just layers of disruption and complexity that seem to be coming here. So is that fair firstly? And then secondly, what's the future looking like for you guys? Paul.
Paul Brooks
Yeah, look, yes, it is fair. And I think disruption is 100% right. And I think what you alluded to is there's lots of different worlds coming together.
Then there are different metrics, different expectations, different dynamics, different ways of working that we're all playing out which are all going at different paces in our business and which will be going at a different pace in Alex's business and overseas as well. So I think what we'll start to see is this continue to evolve and change. In fact, that's an interesting thing. I was talking to a couple of retailers, actually a rover from the US, and they're probably about 12 or 13 years with regards to internet retail media journey.
Mark Jones
Oh wow.
Paul Brooks
So more advanced and mature than us, but they've effectively gone through. They talk about their third phase of growth. So one to five, 6 to 10 years, and then they're in their 10 to 15 years. And we are still very much in that first phase of growth.
But I think one thing for sure is that this space will continue to evolve and change. I think as we move forward you'll see the continued probably challenges around mainstream media. I think that will continue. I think all of the things that we've mentioned earlier around sophistication of assets, maturing, what we're doing from a measurement perspective, integrating technology, changing the ways of working, all of those things we'll make sure that we are on for a period of long-term sustained growth.
Mark Jones
Alex.
Alex Lawson
Yeah, I mean, as anyone who works in marketing, media advertising, we are natural magpies. We all love a shiny thing. And it's very-
Mark Jones
Does that also mean we swoop?
Alex Lawson
We swoop. We do all sorts of things like that.
Paul Brooks
Only for two or three months the year.
Mark Jones
Okay. Right.
Alex Lawson
And it's easy. If you spend time on LinkedIn, you spend time at conferences, everybody's got the next new shiny thing that retail media is going to become, whether it's facial recognition screens or hyper-targeted like this or something else, something else, something else. And I think what 24 years in this industry has told me is that actually the basics stay relatively the same. There's people who come into a store, they want to buy something, they're going to buy it.
It's your job to interact with them in the best way. And I think so what we'll see, there'll be a lot of noise, there'll be a lot of stuff where somebody goes, "This is the next big shiny thing and look how amazing this is." And whatever, and you'll go "Cool." Some of them will stick, some of them won't. But what will stick for me is a structural change in the way that advertisers, whether they're endemic or non-endemic think about retail media. It's place in the pyramid or the funnel or whatever you want to call it.
Alex Lawson
And we are starting to see it. I mean you see it in a lot of the multi-global brands are setting up in-house retail media buyers and how do they deal with it? It's fast becoming no longer the domain of the trade marketer or the buyer or the seller. And it's becoming the domain of the brand marketing departments.
Mark Jones
We're almost out of time, but just in closing, what's your sense about the long-term? what percentage of total store sales would be attributed to standard products that you buy versus the amount of money that the store takes in from the retail media sponsorship and the advertising and so forth? You hear what I'm saying? Over time, what are we heading towards? It's like this retail media business actually could become quite significant, it seems.
Paul Brooks
Yeah, I think there's a couple of things there. For our business and their publishing is we still got 90% of our customers are in-store, but online has increased significantly and it will continue to increase and grow, but at this stage we've still got 90%. Definitely the growth will come from our online and our digital business. And you can see some of the trends that are happening in the US and the UK in terms of what that looks like. Somewhere between closer to something that starts with it too with regards to digital side of business.
With regards to the growth, so there's a lot of technology and creative companies that are moving into retail media network as are some of the traditional media companies that are looking into retail media network. But the one thing's for sure we look at the US, they're still experiencing double-digit growth after 12 or 13 years. We are two and a half to three years in. So I hope that in 10 years time, I'm still talking about double-digit growth for our business, but yeah, you can see where the trajectory is coming.
Mark Jones
Alex, any closing thoughts along those lines?
Alex Lawson
I think if you look at it from the business of the retailer, the top line revenues between a retail media network and our business, and I'm sure at Coles, we are never going to get anywhere near the same amount of top line revenue that we make from selling stuff.
It's just not going to happen unless there's a massive change in something, and that would be an interesting scenario. But what gets the retail groups excited and what gets a board excited is if you're a supermarket or you're a retail group, your margins that you deal on, your general products and stuff you sell versus a retail media margin, it's very, very different. I mean, there's a very different return model on margins for retail media versus the stuff you sell in-stores.
Mark Jones
Got it.
Alex Lawson
So that's what gets a retailer excited. And I think one example, which is a very interesting one is, if you look at Amazon, and yeah Amazon is what? The world's largest retailer or something like that. It's the behemoth of things. I think they've got this under control now, but I know a couple of years ago, if you took the ads business away from Amazon, Amazon would lose $8 billion. And for me, Amazon are no longer a retailer that sells ads. They're a publisher that creates their inventory through retail - that's the dichotomy that we deal with. It's just a totally different world to normal retail. And that's why, it's so hard for retailers to get their heads around how a publisher works and how a retail media network needs to work within their business because we do not think like a retail group. We don't act in the same way. We have different needs, different desires, different things that are going to make our things work. So it's just a super exciting world. I love being a part of it right now. It's just the most exciting bit of media I couldn't want to work on any other bit.
Mark Jones
Thank you Alex and Paul for being, firstly, so generous with your time and your insights. I am really fascinated by what's going on. And to your point, it's really excited to see how this is going to grow and evolve, particularly from a disruptive perspective, because you've got all these different elements coming together, and obviously that's a pretty interesting thing to turn up and do every day.
Paul Brooks
Yeah, 100%.
Alex Lawson
Never a dull day, right?
Mark Jones
Alex Lawson, Paul Brooks, thank you so much for being my guest today on the CMO Show.
Alex Lawson
Pleasure. Thank you, mate.
Paul Brooks
Thank you, Mark. Cheers Alex.
Mark Jones
One thing that struck me speaking with Alex and Paul, and I don't know if you could pick this up, but they really love their jobs.
These guys are having a great time and you know why? Because it's new, interesting, there's a a pioneering vibe going on, right? They're thinking about all of these intersecting areas where you've got the tech, you've got the stakeholder engagement, you've got building teams, you've got working with suppliers or advertisers, and you've got this need to move from the strategic to the tactical. And it's all happening within this broader umbrella of like 20% plus growth year on new year, which is kind of fun. So if you find yourself in a space like that, I imagine, and that's certainly the impression that I got, that it's quite energising that.
I think the trick though is making sure that as you go along you maintain that mindset that is open, that you're curious, and I think some lessons for all of us stay connected to those people who've been before you.
The CMO Show is brought to you by Impact Institute in partnership with Adobe. We are a podcast all about great ideas that you can use in your business by marketers and for marketers. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.