“I like to think about the CMO as actually the chief consumer officer. So I guess marketing people should always be the people with the best knowledge about consumers,” says Marcel Marcondes, U.S. CMO, Anheuser-Busch. “Marketing needs to deliver on creativity on advertising and everything. But if you really want to drive growth, we must lead the conversation on innovation as well. Because this is how we fulfill their needs through our products.”

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Masters of Marketing conference, Marcondes explains A-B’s quest for agility and why it’s no longer enough to simply steal market share from competitors.

“First and foremost, we’re radically changing the way we do innovation. We’re reducing lead times by half so we can really bring great beers and great products to life in a much faster way,” says Marcondes. “We’re really trying to bring more people to the category” in order to expand the category, he adds, citing health and wellness beverages. “And we’re developing new kinds of beers that can really address that in a very effective way.”

Whereas beer brands are used to planning and delivering “whatever we want to do” to drive business, that strategy has gone flat, according to Marcondes. “Now it’s all about listening to consumers first. So it’s harder to plan. You must pay attention on a daily basis to what’s going on out there, what’s relevant in culture, what people are talking about. This is really time sensitive.”

Asked about A-B’s longtime use of brand-building television advertising, Marcondes says TV still occupies an important place in the company’s communications. “I still believe in TV to support innovation. It’s all about driving fast awareness. This is exactly what you need when you’re launching something new to the market.

“Nowadays, that’s the beginning of the conversation. We need to have TV and we need to go way beyond that because either we are part of the conversation or we’re irrelevant. I cannot allow this to happen to our brands or to our categories.”

This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions. Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find more videos from the series here.

“The CMO Growth Council was formed to focus on marketing taking back control and leading disruption because marketing is being disrupted completely but taking control to lead disruption to drive growth,” Pritchard says in this interview with Beet.TV at this week’s Masters of Marketing conference. “Because there’s not enough growth.”

Earlier this year, the ANA Masters Circle got together with 25 CMOs in Cannes and focused on five areas that are perceived to have the greatest opportunity to drive more growth. They are data and technology, customer centricity, brand experience and innovation, talent and capability, and society and sustainability.

“We spent the last couple of days with 200 CMO’s going through what the 25 CMO’s had come up with over the past few months and identified several areas that looked of great interest to us to really advance growth,” says Pritchard. “Data and technology is clearly one of the big ones, because mass marketing is being disrupted and everyone is reinventing media and reinventing advertising for that matter.”

As a result, CMO’s need to know about data management platforms, analytics capabilities, algorithms and related areas.

“What the CMO’s decided is that this is something we really have to just transform from an industry standpoint,” Pritchard explains. “And what we talked about was committing to creating what’s essentially an ANA marketing university that would bring all the best minds together through the ANA to be able to create the capability industrywide to transform our industry.”

He says that ANA CEO Bob Liodice made a big commitment “on the spot to make that happen.” Moreover, Pritchard asked whether CMO’s would be willing to serve as adjunct professors “and a bunch of hands went up.”

Another subject of great interest to the CMOs concerns customer centricity and brand experience and innovation so that brands can create relevant experiences across all consumer touchpoints. “Every single one of us was talking about how we’re using lean startup and lean innovation capabilities to be able to do fast cycle iterations in very small groups to be able to create ideas and get them out in the market much more quickly,” Pritchard says.

He is especially passionate about society and sustainability to be a force for good and a force for growth. “We invited everyone join #SeeHer, join the Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing, join Free The Bid so you can get equality behind the camera. And then we also introduced an idea of joining #Brands For Good,” one of whose efforts is to recognize brands that try to reduce plastic consumption.

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

In addition to #SeeHer, Georgia-Pacific has its own program to promote gender equality in advertising and media called Strength Has No Gender for its Brawny brand, CMO Douwe Bergsma explains in this interview with Beet.TV at this week’s Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

“While we were looking at talent through separate efforts, all of a sudden we got a lot of feedback especially from young women that were joining Georgia-Pacific” who had seen the company’s presentations at universities and conferences, “which became a motivator for them to join the company,” says Bergsma. “We heard the same stories from our agencies where some of the top female creatives wanted to work on our business because of the way we embraced #SeeHer. So there was an indirect benefit where we all are challenged with recruiting the best talent that unexpectedly, because of our position and because of our activities, a lot of female talent gravitated to our organization and stayed.”

The #SeeHer GEM metric uses consumer surveys to identify best-in-class advertising and programming that supports girls and women. The ANA rolled out #SeeHer in 2016.

Georgia-Pacific began by using GEM data to inform its advertising creative and expanded to using it in its packaging. “Our Sparkle packaging is fully developed with the help of GEM scores to identify how our fairy should look like on-pack,” says Bergsma.

In addition, the company has used GEM scores “to qualify most of our communication content, especially our TV ads, we make sure that everything has a positive GEM score when relevant.”

Another benefit of #SeeHer has been “It’s extremely motivating for our employees and the agencies we work with.”

Bergsma believes there’s much more unconscious bias in society than people might think. He points to himself as an example.

“Through #SeeHer and GEM, I actually caught myself in some unconscious bias while I thought I was doing pretty well” based on positive scores related to Brawny paper towels but not for Sparkle. “If that’s true for somebody that’s actually involved, I’m sure it’s true for all of those involved but especially those that are not involved.”

You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.