Global CMO Growth Council Outlines Ambitious Agenda For Coming Year
June 27, 2019
The Global CMO Growth Council unveiled a leadership roadmap for driving business and brand growth with the specific goal of increasing revenue for marketers worldwide by one percentage point, or more than $500 billion, over the next three years.
The ambitious plans were announced during an afternoon session at the 2019 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which co-founded the Growth Council with the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) last year in partnership with the ANA’s CMO Masters Circle.
The Growth Council is a global community of CMOs representing many of the world’s biggest brands. Its leadership body is comprised of 25 CMOs and is chaired by Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer for Procter & Gamble and ANA Chairman. The agenda presented today was formulated by the leadership body over the past year and refined during meetings this week at the Festival.
At its official launch at last year’s Cannes Festival, the Growth Council identified four strategic priorities to drive growth and achieve marketing objectives. Since then, the group developed plans to address brand and business building opportunities and presented them today at the Festival.
The four areas of focus and a sampling of the Growth Council’s goals for addressing them are:
- Brand Innovation, Creativity, and Experience: Reframe marketing and the role of the CMO through a customer-first lens that requires building brand equity in creativity, sharing knowledge and combining brand experience with media. This includes the launch of a first-of-its-kind Global Center for Brand Innovation & Creativity to equip CMOs with assets to help them redefine the basic tenets of marketing. Among those tools are assets to equip CMOs with the measurement and tracking of a brand’s value.
- Data, Technology and Measurement: Create tools and assets to guide CMOs through the dense and complicated worlds of programmatic media buying, advanced digital technologies and new forms of cross-media measurement systems. Establish a set of universal best practices for MarTech that specifically drives business growth.
- Talent Development & Organization: Establish three strategic areas of focus. First, transform the academic curriculum to align with the business community while establishing a new campaign to “market marketing” as a career choice. Second, train marketer and agency staffs to upgrade existing business performance. Third, elevate CMO development as a cornerstone priority to better navigate the complexities of the CMO role.
- Society & Sustainability: Become the gold standard for helping CMOs drive innovative outcomes that benefit both society and business by focusing on three key areas: gender equality; propagating brand safety by eliminating hate speech; closing the gap among marketers claiming support for sustainability (70 percent) and those who are actively promoting sustainability (30 percent).
ANA CEO Bob Liodice said Growth Council members will utilize the assets and capabilities of a wide range of “business machines” created by the ANA that specifically address the four key areas. These include the ANA’s #SeeHer gender equality initiative and the Talent Forward Alliance, a cross-industry initiative designed to create a unified movement to elevate marketing and advertising as a career on university campuses, among others.
He also cited the ANA’s Center for Brand Purpose, which is designed to fuel business growth by helping marketers create purpose-driven, strategic programs and solutions for their products and services, and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media. The latter was announced earlier this week at the Cannes Festival by 16 global advertisers, the five leading agency holding companies, leading media companies and top trade associations, including the ANA.
“The infrastructure and architecture to facilitate brand growth has already been built, as represented by these business machines,” Liodice said. “They are all available to the Growth Council as its members continue their efforts to establish marketing as an engine for sustained business growth.”
The CMO Growth Council and its partnership with Cannes Lions partnership is an ongoing, annual effort that will pivot between Cannes Lions and the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference in the autumn, and extend to local regions throughout the year.