Joshua Spanier, VP of marketing at Google Media Lab, and Bethany Poole, Google’s senior director of product solutions marketing, are the hosts of Think with Google’s “Modern Marketers” podcast. In this piece, they share what they’ve learned from top industry leaders about modern marketing. Listen to the full season now on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Six months ago, we launched the Modern Marketers podcast where we speak to game-changing CMOs and CEOs about the innovative and inspirational work that has shaped them into the industry leaders they are today. Along the way, we’ve explored the realities they face in their roles: intense pressure for growth, dramatic AI-driven change, and stakes that have never been higher.
We’ve gotten to hear from the people behind the campaigns that really leave a mark, who take calculated risks and stay relevant in an industry that’s constantly evolving. By sharing their insights and strategies with us, they’ve also helped us define what “modern marketing” means.
We learned that modern marketing is a mindset, fueled by a few key principles. As we conclude the podcast’s first season, we’re sharing these principles, along with insights from our guests in their own words, with the hope of inspiring your own modern marketing.
1. Media is everything, everywhere
When we hear the word “media,” as marketers, we tend to think only about ads. That’s understandable, since ads have a quantifiable price that we pay for. But we’re limiting ourselves by only concentrating on ad buys.
Modern marketing requires us to expand our thinking. We must consider all the ways people can interact with our products and all the surfaces they might use to do so. We must then classify the totality of these connection points as media. We should also recognize them as opportunities to see and engage audiences, not just to achieve reach and frequency.
If every consumer moment, interaction, and surface is a marketing opportunity, how can your brand be useful, adaptive, and flexible in those spaces? It’s a question we posed to modern marketers like David Mogenson, Uber’s VP of marketing, who shared how his team changed its approach to ad creative. Choreograph global CEO Evan Hanlon emphasized the importance of experimentation, which is critical to homing in on what resonates with customers and to gaining insights that can shape media plans.
The proliferation of channels and platforms is really changing the way that we’re having to think about and approach marketing. You used to create a very polished perfect ad, and you ran that everywhere. Now you can create content with influencers that, 9 out of 10 times, works better than the beautiful, polished ad that we would have created. So, to some extent, you’re starting to see a little bit of “pulling down” of what that creative looks like.
Experimentation is really important. You can plan until you’re blue in the face, but you’re not going to know what it’s going to do until it actually hits the market. The other piece of that, which is most important, is that any signal that’s consequential and drives a decision is a valuable signal. If we get a very clear signal that something doesn’t work, it’s just as valuable as a signal that it does work.
2. AI is foundational
There’s no denying that AI is critical to modern marketing. While we’re still in its early days, the opportunity AI presents to power our work is enormous. Already, we can see clear applications across nearly every stage of the marketing process — including strategy and insights, creative inspiration, production, audience segmentation, optimization, reporting and analysis, planning, and beyond. Here at Google, we’re bullish on AI’s potential and are constantly exploring ways to incorporate it into our work.
We saw equal enthusiasm for AI among the modern marketers we spoke with on our podcast. In fact, understanding AI’s true value and how to use it to enhance marketing campaigns is top of mind for many CxOs, such as Brigitte King, global chief digital officer of Colgate-Palmolive, and Kipp Bodner, CMO of Hubspot.
Be open-minded to the fact that you possibly can’t even imagine what AI could become. You have to be willing to try AI tools for the first time to then get comfortable with it. I have a global digital organization on my team at Colgate-Palmolive, and they were the ones to get me comfortable. I was a little intimidated by AI; I have to be honest about that. “What is this? How does it operate? Am I going to make a mistake?” But then once my team started showing me how they were using it, I just started. And it brought my walls down. I started to realize, in fact, how democratized these tools have become.
We’ve done a bunch of tests with large language models (LLMs), and it turns out that they’re much better at guessing things than marketers. And marketing is essentially strategic guessing. I can use LLMs to execute perfectly crafted one-to-one emails in a way that a marketer just doesn’t have the scale to do. And I can use LLMs to recommend the right next step, and recommend the next content, and all those things. That is magical, and I think it’s going to be the big unlock for the next couple of years.
3. Culture is king
Modern marketing demands that we shift from interrupting to integrating with the cultural currents of our audiences by showing up in the spaces and places where they choose to congregate. And, by tapping into these currents, we can create relevance in the face of increasing ad immunity and avoidance. This means building marketing campaigns for engagement, participation, and collaboration. When done authentically, it can even create culture.
A great example is the story behind McDonald’s “Grimace’s Birthday Meal” promotion, as told to us by the company’s VP of marketing, Elizabeth Campbell. We also heard from Walmart’s CMO William White, who revealed the cultural principle he and his team follow.
Grimace’s birthday actually came out of an idea that one of our agencies had. There was a moment in which some of our older McDonald’s characters were starting to come to life more. It was an opportunity for us to celebrate Grimace, because everybody wanted to know, “What is Grimace? Who is Grimace?” It allowed us to enter the conversation in a more authentic way, versus us telling the consumers, “Hey, Grimace is hip; Grimace is cool.” The customer actually started having fond memories of him, which allowed us to go and celebrate him. And everybody remembers having a birthday at McDonald’s when they were a kid, so that was a great way for us to enter that conversation and to make it a natural part of the way McDonald’s shows up.
There’s a mantra I like to say to my team: “Be it, do it, say it,” — in that order. Oftentimes, in different companies and different brands, they’ll try to say something that isn’t something they’re being and doing. Or the organization will say, “Oh, we need to tell people about this.” And it’s like, well, is that really true and authentic to who you are? And I think that from day one at Walmart, throughout our history, there have been core things that go back to our purpose and values which haven’t wavered. So, for us, being true to who we are and what we do as an organization, and then saying it, really comes across in a way that’s powerful and reinforces the great things about this brand.
4. Marketing is essential to value creation
With budgets tightening, business leaders are ruthlessly prioritizing how they allocate resources. At most companies, marketing often isn’t at the top of the list. This puts enormous pressure on marketers to drive business outcomes.
Jim Lecinski, clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, believes it’s the job of modern marketers to solidify marketing’s role as a profit center by adopting a mindset — backed by measurement — focused on return on investment. While your measurement approach will be unique to your business, it should drive connection and alignment between your marketing and finance teams.
Modern marketing is about marketers who start by saying, “Our job is value creation and growth,” as opposed to, “Our job is likes, friends, fans, downloads, fame, or engagement,” — those kinds of things. While those measures could be a means to an end, modern marketers start by saying the end has to be revenue, profit, or share growth. For every dollar of budget that we’re given, we should be returning back $1.10 or $1.20 in not revenue, but profit. And that’s a conversation with your board, with your investors, with your founders, with your CFO, and your CEO to say, “What is the business goal here, and how can I and my marketing team make outsize progress and contribution to that goal?”
Tune in to the Modern Marketers podcast to access our full-length conversations with these innovative industry leaders, and discover even more insights from others, including Tombras’ president Dooley Tombras, Canva’s CMO Zach Kitschke, Experian’s CMO Dacy Yee, and Zola’s co-founder and CEO Shan-Lyn Ma. The complete first season is available on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
