C Space at CES is a series of panels featuring marketing, advertising and media executives discussing topics such as artificial intelligence, data, personalization, content creation and creator-led marketing. The following are the insights and strategies shared by six brand CMOs on the first official day of CES.
Molly Bardeen
Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
home depot
Build your brand by evolving with consumers:
“The key is to really evolve your brand to meet the needs of consumers… because they are changing. One of our biggest brand challenges is that everyone who walks into Home Depot has a problem they want to solve. We need to think about, with all the tools we have now, how can our brand be represented in a different way, whether it’s personalized content that helps them with the projects they’re working on, or apps and every piece of content? [other] The experience we have, [it’s about] How do we think about content at scale to really connect and help them out.
“This is a dialogue Now with our consumers rather than us telling them what to do. We are now in a two-way conversation…co-creating, listening and responding. So I think what really grounds you is not the product that you solve, but the core problem that you’re trying to help your customers solve. And then understand the media landscape and the tools you can use to help solve that problem in a way that really makes sense to them today.
Gulen Benji
Chief Global Chief Marketing Officer, Mars, Inc.
Mars Snacks Global Chief Growth Officer
On brand building through co-creation with consumers:
“Consumers want more and more personalization—no dead-end engagement. They want opportunities to co-create. In fact, two-thirds of consumers want meaningful, customized relationships, with more than 80% of Gen Z want brands to allow co-creation.
“So when we talk about brand building today, we’re talking about [how] Brands define themselves not only by their products or experiences, but also by what they represent. In this way, they provide two-way interaction and experience without blind spots. Every experience leads to another experience or buy button. We invite our fans, communities, and consumers to create our brand world with us.
“We do this because we want to be able to deliver the right engagement and the right offer at the right time to every relevant touchpoint in the world, while also providing a personalized service for each individual. That’s how we define what it means to be a constant in this new era. Developing brand-building methods.
Randy’s Club
Chimeo
weather company
On upskilling your team to better prepare for artificial intelligence:
“I think we have to give our teams the time, space and encouragement to experiment at The Weather Company. We created our own AI sandbox and encourage people to experiment with the internal AI we’re using as well as external AI . We also encourage people to work cross-functionally because what might motivate someone in marketing (you never know) might work for someone in another function and vice versa.
“Talking about successes and failures…that’s an important part of culture: how we share wins and…our [missteps] Along the way? But if we don’t make the time, it will only be a plus for our team rather than a necessity.
Drew Panayiotou
Chief Marketing Officer
clean dr pepper
The most exciting thing about Creator Space:
“Ad units are not inherently a good thing. I mean, I’ll say this as a chief marketing officer: when a piece of content that you call an ‘ad’ intersects with a piece of content on or related to a creative platform When the time comes, miracles will happen.
“What’s exciting to us is that when we look at content creators and how they create content that’s relevant to the product and the content that you’re watching, it becomes really powerful…the more we move away from this notion that these big brands are emerging brands , we have to buy an ad unit, the more it can work its brand magic.
emily katchin
Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President
Smart Equipment Group and International Market
Lenovo
On creating cross-functional AI teams:
“One of the things we did early on was we established an internal committee, if you will, on artificial intelligence and the responsible use of artificial intelligence in the marketing organization. We brought in a security team, we brought in a communications team, we brought in With the legal team in place, we built an organization that was entirely based on an understanding of artificial intelligence and the appropriate use of artificial intelligence. And then what we did was go out and survey our marketing organizations to find out what they wanted to know more about in the context of artificial intelligence. What.
“We went a step further and went out and bought a license. We hired a great trainer and we’re doing course 7 of 11 for marketers. So the point is, you want to democratize information with artificial intelligence ization, marketing in artificial intelligence responsibly, teaching your marketers how to do it the right way, get in there, get the license to experiment.
“We’re moving to things like rapid engineering and management and eventually libraries, right? Because if someone else has figured out the prompts, why do I need to figure out the prompts? We’re not in the single-source space for personalization , but experience here will lead to that.
Mark Weinstein
Chief Marketing Officer
Hilton
On the need for brands to focus on creativity:
“It’s distracting that you see this slew of brands trying to create the next artificial intelligence, but most of us can’t actually create that thing. We’re going to use these tools to be more efficient. We’re going to tell our stories. .So my biggest focus right now is…what creative ideas do I need to put into the world?
“We spent the last year debating: Is artificial intelligence a good idea or a bad idea? It’s kind of a waste of time. That’s what happened. The next waste of time is arguing about what we’re going to build next, or what tool is going to win it. That’s not important in the second point. What’s important is that this wave is coming, the capabilities are coming…and we need to be ready for it, telling our stories in a relevant way, providing the right information to our customers.
