“Everybody needs to grow. Everybody wants to grow. But if you read lots of reports, growth is substandard, is suboptimum,” Liodice says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2019 Cannes Lions confab.

Before joining forces with Cannes, the ANA’s Master’s Circle had already started to develop the Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing and #SeeHer, whose goal is to improve gender equality.

The three priorities that have emerged since then involve “reinventing the academic curriculum and marking students understand what the marketer career can be”; upskilling and reskilling “because most marketers don’t have the skills to compete in this world”; and how to build a better CMO.

“How do you build a CMO that understands the wide span of responsibilities and understands what is necessary to develop their respective organizations?” is the way Liodice explains it. “It’s a very, very complex job and no two CMO’s are alike. They’re like fingerprints.”

Asked by interviewer Joanna O’Connell, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, how to balance “taking back responsibility as a marketer with the role of your partner ecosystem,” Liodice cites the wave of change that has swept the marketing world.

“It starts with a stake in the ground that says it’s the marketer’s agenda, it’s the marketer’s money,” he says. “And when the marketers win everybody wins. Because you generate more resources that can be distributed to the agencies, media publishers, consultants etc.”

Liodice believes that in recent years, that vision had been lost “or at least it had been muted and in some cases almost disintegrated. I’d say over the past decade, that model had changed as the Googles and the Facebooks and the agencies all changed and totally disrupted what the ecosystem looked like.

“The marketers became almost paralyzed, did not necessarily understand how to react as they were dealing in an increasingly non transparent world. And in that non transparency, their ability to navigate and make the ultimate business decisions to build their brands and businesses was frittered away.”

As Liodice was being interviewed, the CMO Growth Council was in the process of figuring out how to prioritize “four big buckets” consisting of data, technology and measurement; brand innovation, creativity and experience; and talent, society and sustainability, which includes equality diversity brand purpose.

You are watching Beet.TV coverage of the CMO Growth Council Summit in Cannes. This series is presented by Teads. For more videos from our series, visit this page. Please find all our coverage from Cannes 2019 right here.

“If you look at the digital media supply chain, as an enterprise, the jury is still out because we still have a LUMAscape which is as complex as Einstein’s theory of relativity,” says ANA CEO Bob Liodice during a break at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

“And because of that, marketers don’t understand how to best leverage that supply chain to their advantage.”

As proof of the extent of dysfunction, he says that only 25 to 40 cents on every digital dollar reaches the consumer. “That’s awful. We need to find a way to improve that productivity. We haven’t gotten there yet.”

The ANA has been working with Digital Content Next to support TrustX, a programmatic advertising marketplace designed to help maximize marketers’ digital advertising expenditures. “The early read is that we can get twenty percent improvement, but there’s so much more work to be done,” says Liodice.

This year, the Cannes Festival is an opportunity for the ANA to “globalize” its CMO Masters Circle initiative. It’s composed of 1,000 executives from leading brands across ANA member companies who are trying to help solve what Liodice calls “the universal problem in our industry, which is growth.”

According to Liodice, 50% of Fortune 500 companies have declining after-tax profits while 40% have declining revenues. Masters Circle has crafted a 12-point strategic and is “building machine around that effort.”

He says Cannes recognized that the program is working and “they thought that this was a good opportunity to spread that message on a global basis.” Some 20 to 25 of the leading CMO’s around the world will “discuss the issue, come together and decide what it is that we want to do to attack the growth agenda worldwide.”

Among the ANA’s other ongoing initiatives is providing its members with more of a grounding in various futuristic technologies that have marketing implications, like artificial intelligence, blockchain and virtual reality. To this end, the ANA recently acquired the Data & Marketing Association, which was founded in 2017 as the Direct Marketing Association, as Advertising Age reports.

This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean.    Please find more videos from this series here.