Season 6, Episode 6: Antonia Wade, Global CMO at PwC: Commerciality, pragmatism, and transformation

Ali
Antonia, hello and thank you for joining us.

Antonia
Hello, thank you for having me.

Ali
So to start with, I'd love to understand a bit more about who you are as a person, how you came to be the person you are today. So could we start by you telling me a story from your childhood that has shaped the person you are today?

Antonia
So many stories I could point to, but one I guess that immediately sprang to mind was I remember when I was revising for my A-levels and I'd got myself up at about 4 in the morning in a panic, and I was sitting at the kitchen table really stressed out and really kind of tense and slightly weepy about the whole thing because I had really high expectations of myself and my parents had high expectations of me too. And I remember my father coming down and saying to me, you know, however you do, as long as you feel like you have fulfilled your potential and you've done yourself proud, then we are proud of you. And every day I look at your mother and I remember what gets me up in the morning is my love for her and my love for you. And ultimately, at the end of the day, that's the important thing. And I think that that's quite a key story for me on a number of levels. First of all, the importance of setting yourself a goal and going for it, but also that the people who really matter will be forgiving and empathetic as long as you've tried your best and tried your hardest.

Antonia
And that, you know, my father died when I was about 30, and you don't get to have those memories all the time, every day. And it is an important thing to remember that perspective. And I think a lot of people say that, and a lot of us mean to do it. But I'm sure that there have been times when we've been on the phone on family holidays at weekends, and we might look back and wish that we hadn't perhaps done that.

Ali
That's an amazing story. What an absolutely charming and meaningful and supportive response as well from your parents. Can I ask, when you were growing up, who were the interesting influences around your life? I'm sure obviously your parents played a large role, but was there anybody else as well?

Antonia
Yeah, loads of people. So, my great aunt lived to a very old age, and she was perpetually interested in young people with different experiences to her. And I think she was a really influential person in terms of just being open-minded and curious about people very different from yourself. My godmother worked for a major charity and she spent much of the '80s in Ethiopia getting food packages and helping the work on the ground that happened there. And, you know, she really taught me about, again, the importance of putting oneself out there to do what you believe is the right thing to do. My parents obviously were huge supporters and advocates of me and definitely kind of set me on the right path. I had a maths teacher called Mrs. Love, which is an unusual name for a maths teacher, I think. And she was a teacher of mine when I was in sort of what I guess in America you'd call middle school, so sort of early secondary school. And she was a real stickler for doing your best work and living up to your potential. And I think that she taught me a lot about being proud of good work and proud of yourself for doing good work.

Antonia
And then I've always been lucky. I've got a sister and a brother. I've got a really great set of friends. In fact, when I had my 40th birthday, which was some time ago now, the people who were bartenders there had been bartending for Emma Bunton from the Spice Girls party the week before. And they said, "You know, it's really nice to be doing your party because it just seems to be that your friends have all been friends of yours since you were kind of 10 years old." And that's a real testament to the strength of the friendships. And I think that I've been lucky to have friends that have been both supporting and challenging for me through my life.

Ali
I think that's also the first mention of the Spice Girls we've had on this podcast, and I hope it won't be the last.

Antonia
There we go. I like to broker new conversations wherever I go.

Ali
So one of the things that interests me is how patterns that develop when we're young either get repeated or changed as we grow older. And I absolutely firmly believe that both things can happen and both things are very valuable. Do you feel like though you have values that you kind of first nurtured when you grew up or that first instilled in you that are still very much, you know, a part of who you are today? Or on the flip side as well, how do you think you're different today than you would've been as a child?

Antonia
So, a lot of my family were in the law and the legal profession is very big on doing what you say that you'll do. And I think that that's something that has really carried me through into later life. And I am really proud of the fact that whatever organisation I've been in, whatever team I've led, I've really instilled and insisted on, you know, being clear and transparent about what you're going to do and doing what you say that you'll do. And that contracting, I think, has stood me in good stead and has helped me to gain the trust of an organisation, particularly when I've been leading marketing transformations. I also think that there's something, again, in my family setup that was very much about the importance of being a good family member and a good friend. And I think that that has, as I mentioned before, carried through into my adult life outside work, but also within work too. And the experiences that I had, particularly I think through my 30s, where, you know, I had a lot of things happening outside work, really made me appreciate and value that actually people bring their whole self to work, and you need to support the human as well as the employee.

Antonia
And that is just quite a different stance from perhaps when you're in your 20s and you're a bit more kind of nose to the grindstone, where you sort of realise as you get a bit older the importance of being a good person, like a good person, an empathetic person in work. One area where I think that I am very different today to who I was as a child is I was always very competitive, but I was perhaps not that confident. And I think that that competitiveness was definitely, you know, I like playing games, I like, you know, competing. Like I enjoy setting myself goals, but I think that the kind of concept of confidence and being a bit more assured is something that has grown as I've achieved more goals and as I've competed on broader stages and accomplished more things.

Ali
You mentioned that you enjoy playing games. Were there sports or particular pastimes or things that you did when you were young?

Antonia
Well, I enjoy tennis. I enjoy tennis today. Actually, I really like card games. I'm a very good bridge player, pretty good chess player. I really like board games. I like all card games actually. So perhaps less on the sporty side and more on the cultural side.

Ali
I love tennis as well. And actually recently one of my, I don't want to stray too far into the work part of this conversation just yet, but for the last few years, one of my favourite interview questions to people I've been interviewing has been, can you describe to me how to play a game that you love, assuming that I've never seen or played it myself before? And I'm very tempted to whip that out now as a question to you.

Antonia
Particularly because we're recording this during Wimbledon, everybody. I'm definitely not going to try and explain to you how to play tennis. Although one thing that did happen, which doesn't happen very often, is I actually came back to tennis during COVID, so I hadn't played for quite a long time. And so, I sort of played with a coach to kind of get me back into it again. And it was, as I said, one of the few things that you could do during COVID. He basically made me unlearn and relearn how to play tennis. So I'm a much better tennis player now, but I have to say unlearning, like literally totally different grip, totally different serve, everything. And that is definitely harder, I think, than learning something for the first time.

Ali
Absolutely. I did something similar actually, funny enough. I found that when I came back to playing, I was a lot worse and a lot swearier than I was when I was 14. But luckily now I feel pretty confident to come up against most of the 85-year-olds that seem to play at my village tennis courts on a Sunday. So competitively I'm doing fine.

Antonia
Perfect. You're gonna love hitting the geriatric age bracket, as we all do at certain points.

Ali
Yeah, exactly. So one of the other things I'd be interested in is what advice would you have for your younger self if you were to have dinner with them now? You know, choose whatever age you want to choose. And the reason I ask, not because we're about to travel back in time to have dinner with our younger selves, but more I think it's one of those questions that elicits useful advice that other people who are now younger might want to follow, might never have heard up until this point as well. So yeah, advice for your younger self.

Antonia
Yeah, so I wouldn't have given it to myself in my early 20s or teens, 'cause I think I'd have felt quite daunted by it. But certainly from my mid-20s onwards, the advice that I would give myself is, I am who I am today because of decisions I made 5 years ago. So, you know, if as you are thinking about what you want to do and why you want to do it, you try and project forward and make good decisions for yourself, not for the rest of your life, but for the next 5 years. I definitely credit where I am today to who I was 5 years ago, and that person got to where they were today because of the decisions that I'd made 5 years earlier. So, I would really encourage you to be quite thoughtful about that. It's easy to either be too long-term or too short-term in your decision-making. And sometimes, therefore, it's worth taking a lateral move. Sometimes it's worth really pressing the accelerator down on that promotion. Sometimes it's worth, particularly if you're a woman, thinking about what happens if you come out of the workplace for a while because you want to start a family.

Antonia
What do you need to do to plan out into that next 5 years. And I have found that a very helpful thing to continue to do, and I continue to challenge myself to do it now. So I now am thinking about what do I need to do now in terms of skills, in terms of finances, in terms of family life, in order to get myself ready for where I want to be in 5 years' time.

Ali
It's fantastic advice, and it's hard to ignore the echo in that of these kind of 5-year feedback loops you're talking about. And how that reflects professionally the role of marketing, those longer feedback loops, the things we're doing now, how much of the impact is going to live in 1 year, 2 year, 3 year, 4 year, 5 years' time. I just think it's interesting that's something that you've obviously identified in your own personal life as well, that sense of being very aware of long feedback loops.

Antonia
I think you need the long and the short, don't you? But I think at least if you have a sense that you're directionally correct, that's probably better than being too precise, but you have to have a sense of a vision and a purpose because otherwise you're so short-termist, it feels like you're not actually making meaningful progress. So, the analogy I sometimes use with my team is, let's just agree that we want to meet in, I know, Barbados in a year. How you get there, I don't mind. Ali, if you want to leave it to the last minute and get a last-minute flight, no problem. Steven, if you want to take a boat and take a year to get there, that's fine. Or, you know, Jane, if you want to take several stop-offs, I'm okay with that. Like, it doesn't matter, but let's just agree that timeframe and where we want to get to. And then how you get there, you can be a bit more flexible about.

Ali
Very good. There's something in that as well, which is, and again, moving to stray more into the kind of marketing career and AI part of this conversation, but the recent trend around AI is obviously not to use prompts so much, but actually to start thinking about loops. And essentially that's, you know, setting a goal and structuring that goal in a way that the AI agent is able to achieve what you want it to achieve. And feels like maybe that is an element of your management and your leadership style as well. It's, you know, like you just said, you know, you set the goal, how you get there is up to you. I'm not going to micromanage you every step of the way, which I just think is just an interesting reflection of obviously what's happening with the tech at the moment.

Antonia
Oh, I know. I would say that as I look at the tech as well, I mean, I don't think that what we are here to do in marketing has changed, but how we do it is going to be different. And you see that when I talk to fellow CMOs about should we in-house, should we use agencies, how do we think about agencies, what do we think about offshoring, what's a what's not, what's left. I mean, to be honest, the purpose and the what of marketing hasn't changed, right? I believe that marketing should make you money, not just cost you money. In PwC, we're all about driving the value of our brand, creating revenue growth, and enabling a kind of tech-driven, data-driven organisation. Those things haven't changed, but how we do it will change pretty fundamentally over the coming years. But you know what? It's changed pretty fundamentally over the last few years as well. It's just going through another shift.

Ali
It's so lovely to hear you say that, and so important as well. The number of breathless posts and commentary that you hear about how AI has changed everything. It's completely changed what marketing is. What the hell were you trying to do previously? It's like, if it really has changed, if people are really believing it's changed everything, well, I have no idea what people are trying to do previously. So I 100% agree with that as a sentiment.

Antonia
Well, and I mean, I'm older perhaps than a lot of your listeners, and my children laugh at me when I tell them about this. But when I used to go out when I was 18, you had to take 10p and be where you said you were going to be because you had a phone box to communicate with people, and if you weren't there, then you weren't going to meet them. And I would look at that and I think about how much that's changed. You know, we've been through what's happened in terms of social, digital, the technologies that we own and wear. It's just transformed how we do things. And the job that I did while I was supporting myself through university, which basically was printing things off, handwriting it, and putting it in a filing cabinet, that job doesn't exist today either. But has our life got any less rich because of that? Probably not. In fact, probably it's more interesting being a graduate in a technology-driven era than it is in those kind of more hand-drawn eras. So, you know, I'm a net optimist about kind of where technology will get us. It'll be bumpy, but certainly I think that we should think about jobs changing and the how changing.

Antonia
And yes, some jobs will go, but some jobs will get created too.

Ali
I love that. I love that phrase, the hand-drawn era. That's one I'm definitely going to steal. It reminds me of what you're saying then reminds me of a lovely quote from Andrej Karpathy, who's now at Anthropic, talking about the fact that we live in an era of the most extraordinary leverage for a single human being that there's ever been because of the technology of AI. And I love that for two reasons. One is that I think it's true and it presents a real concrete, incredible optimistic lens that I think is very, very important. Sometimes it gets lost in the narrative. It also kind of includes in its implicit sense of agency that people and individuals still have, which I think is super important. And again, something gets overlooked. And also as a B2B marketer, he uses the word leverage in a in a naturally relevant and legitimate way, which I think is also quite nice.

Antonia
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Ali
We're kind of ticking around the edges of marketing now, so let's dive into that part of the conversation. So first of all, can you tell us a little bit about how you first got into marketing?

Antonia
Yeah, so it's kind of a bit of an accident. So I actually, I can't really lie about my age when I talk about my career because it's kind of really wedded to a timeline. So, when I left university, I joined Accenture and I went to the London Stock Exchange to deal with the Y2K project. So, this was the feeling that as we moved from 1999 to 2000, as the— went from 99 to 00, the ho— we would have a kind of financial and technology meltdown, which thankfully didn't happen, probably not because of me being very junior at the London Stock Exchange. And then I moved, I actually applied for an advertising agency in the kind of graduate recruitment round and had secured a place at one of them. But at that time, the dot-com bubble was real, as it was dot-com, yeah, bubble was real. And I moved into a dot-com and really found myself doing all sorts of things. I didn't start it, but I was sort of went there and started doing all sorts of things, including marketing. And that's really when I kind of got interested in doing marketing. And I have enjoyed a really wonderful marketing career ever since, albeit that I didn't go to the advertising agency.

Antonia
I then went off and did other things, but always kind of in the periphery of marketing. And it's interesting, I was talking to somebody, I was at university with a while ago, and they were saying, you know, I would never have thought that you would have ended up in marketing because I started off studying architecture. But actually, I think there's quite a lot of commonalities between architecture and marketing. It's kind of combination of being hugely innovative and creative whilst being ruthlessly pragmatic, but also really thinking about how does a building or a space work around a human. So it kind of also kind has an empathetic element to it that perhaps some of the other kind of sciences don't. So, I really think actually architecture is a very good breeding ground for good marketers, and I think it's stood me in good stead.

Ali
Absolutely. And it's not a complete coincidence that we now have one of many slightly strange job titles come up as GTM architect, I think, which speaks to exactly what you said, the systems thinkingness of what we do have to do today. You've had a career that most marketers, most CMOs could only have a dream of. You worked on some phenomenal brands, leading marketing at, you know, some of the largest, most influential businesses in the world. What do you think have been the constants during that time that you would love to share with other people who are looking to move into CMO roles or perhaps have just started their first CMO role today?

Antonia
I guess there are a few elements to it. First of all, you have to be both resilient and pragmatic. So what I mean by that is, you know, you have to meet the business kind of where it is. So if the business, for example, is going through a tough time and you need to hand budgets back, you have to not be precious about that. You have to listen to what the CFO is saying or the CHRO is saying and try and understand what's the problem that they're articulating that marketing can uniquely solve. And sometimes that's a direct solve, or sometimes it's about bringing the way in which you think in marketing to a problem that is in a different area of the business where they don't think like marketers, and that can be incredibly useful as well. So, that would be the first thing. The second thing is about being kind of curious and kind of open-minded. So, really trying to understand what are you hearing from clients and customers and what's actually behind that, like what's really going on, and using that curiosity to kind of distil insights that might help you to do something very different.

Antonia
And that's harder than you would think it is because you kind of got to listen to lots of feedback and try and spot what are some of those common trends, what are some of the things that are happening, and what is the motivating factor behind that, which can sometimes be quite surprising. So, let me give you an example. In a previous company, we found that lots of, as people were moving through the process of sales into kind of service delivery, that really the level of happiness with our brand was going down quite a lot. And we were trying to really understand what was going on. And what we found was actually, when we really sort of scratched beneath the surface, it was when you moved from being with a salesperson sales team who tended to be quite fun and take you out for drinks and give you quite a nice time into more of a kind of account management, technical account management team who tended to be a lot more analytical and a bit more sort of KPI and service-oriented. It just was quite a jarring experience to move from one team to the other.

Antonia
So, we were like, okay, well, what can we do to help that? Those things, both things need to still exist, but what could we do to smooth that transition? So, just trying to understand like what's happening kind of beyond and behind the feedback.

Ali
I wonder if that was exacerbated a little bit by buyer's remorse as well, presumably, that natural dip that everyone has after they've initially committed to a contract.

Antonia
Ah, yeah, potentially. But you say it's a natural dip, but it doesn't necessarily need to be. So I, uh, anyway, we can— maybe we can come back to that. There are a lot of people who talk about kind of using the language of the C-suite. Um, certainly I have taken advice from CEOs, CFOs as I've come into role. You talked about people who just come into the CMO role. That's a great time to really build a good relationship and take advice from those leaders about what they're hoping for, what they're looking for, how they talk to their fellow board members about what's going on? And how do you think about marketing as an asset and as somewhere where you will allocate capital in order to achieve a return? And what's that look like? And then the last thing is, how do you build confidence and loyalty within your own team? You know, no leader is alone, and so how do you think about creating an environment where your team can flourish and be their best selves, and how do you also appropriately push them to take on new things and do things in a different way?

Antonia
So, trying to encourage a sense of curiosity and an environment where people can do their best work.

Ali
Fantastic. More important than ever today as well, given the number of changes that are happening. So, obviously today you are now CMO of PwC, which again, a phenomenal global business, uh, familiar to everyone I'm sure who's listening to the show. Could you tell me a little bit about the role of marketing at PwC today? You know, what are the challenges and opportunities the business faces, and how is marketing playing a role in supporting those?

Antonia
Yeah, thank you. So, every CMO role is slightly different, so it kind of depends what you've got in your purview. I think it's sort of interesting, every time I talk to a CMO, we all do slightly different things. But in my role, I look after brand strategy, creative, but also the brand governance. We look after the big global campaigns that we execute kind of consistently around the world to support the global growth priorities. We look after pwc.com, that's the experience on the global site, but also the platform for all of the countries. And we feed the requirements, the business requirements into the full technology stack. So that's the marketing technology, but it's also our CRM and sales enablement technologies as well. We look after upskilling our network, and that's in things like brand. We have a marketing academy, so we're looking to kind of upskill marketing teams around the world. So a fairly broad remit that covers technology as well is kind of strategy, planning, and creative. One of the things that we started looking at a few years ago was whether our brand was helping us to drive consideration across the full suite of services that we offer in PwC.

Antonia
And this is probably something that some of your listeners, particularly in B2B, particularly in somewhat sizable businesses, will find, which is, you know, your buyers know you for a certain set of services, but they perhaps don't know you for the breadth of what you offer. And being— having the market be aware of the breadth of capabilities that you offer, but also considering you, uh, particularly, uh, where it's in areas that you are perhaps less well known. But also for us, what we found was in those areas we had kind of more complicated and larger buying groups. And so what we needed to do was slightly different to what we had done historically, and we challenged ourselves around whether our brand was working as hard for us as it could do in order to achieve that. So that led to us refreshing the brand, which we did about 18 months ago now. We refreshed the brand platform, which was kind of, you know, what does PwC stand for? And that then informed the creative, verbal, visual identity and our advertising campaign, which hinges on the premise of, so you can. So PwC offers clients X, so you, client, can achieve Y.

Antonia
Outcomes. And that was a— that's been a very strong platform for us. We really looked at the different codes that we had, so we really focused on orange. We looked at bringing in a mark into our logo and into the work, and also bringing a distinctive photography style. And we did that alongside a kind of much more cohesive paid media strategy across the world. So that's been very successful for us. I think one of the other keys to The success for that was that I partnered with our head of HR and our head of kind of client delivery, so it was combined across the employee experience as well as the client experience. So it's really kind of across all parts of our go-to-market execution, and that's been a really exciting journey to be on at PwC. We've already started to see some really significant returns in terms of awareness consideration, but also recall around people and how people feel about PwC's brand. So that's been a successful thing and something that I feel very proud of as I look back over the last 18 months.

Ali
Yeah, it's been an incredibly impressive piece of work just looking at it from the outside on an execution level. I appreciate you went through some of the more important metrics that you're looking at to measure the return on investment in that particular piece of work, but you also achieved the rare feat or received the rare accolade of an absolutely effusive column from Mark Ritson, who I don't think I've ever seen write quite so positively about anything actually, which I'm sure probably feels good, even if it isn't worth a great deal to the business. But I do think it's probably worth mentioning that, and anybody hasn't read the column probably should, and then go and have a look at the brand and the rebrand that you've done, because I think it is a very interesting case study and will be for a while.

Antonia
Thanks, Ali. I appreciate that. And I was extremely proud, as was the team. I mean, it's a team effort, and there are a huge amount of people involved in it, both within my team, but also within each country. And the power of everyone coming together and executing against that goal was what made it what it was. And so certainly the marketers in my broader community felt very good about the article too. So yeah, thanks to Mark for that.

Ali
Yeah, absolutely. And actually, if there was one kind of general wish that I could have and a gift that you could give to every marketer out there, probably be a chance to do the Mini MBA actually, because I think it is a fantastic course. I don't know why I'm plugging his courses. He's fine. But yeah, so the other thing you mentioned there, obviously, he referenced it earlier, marketing as an investment, not just seen as a cost. So brand obviously is a big part of that. Actually, I have a real issue with the word brand generally and how marketers use it. It's become almost meaningless because it means so many different things in different cases. However, I think there was an interesting article that came out recently written by a guy called Ian Whitaker talking about brand, particularly from a private equity point of view, where PE firms spend a lot of money to buy a business that has a strong brand and actually don't invest in that asset at all and tend to lose an awful lot as a result in terms of the value of the business or potential multiple from the business. Most B2B marketers today have probably read enough to know that brand, in perhaps a more commercially credible sense of the word, is an incredibly important part of marketing investment.

Ali
And yet many of them will be struggling to tell that story to their board. Is there anything you'd say to them that might help them tell that story and make that case?

Antonia
Yeah, a few ideas for people to think about. First of all, it obviously depends if what you're measuring and how you're measuring it, but one of the things that we looked at was, um, what's the link between brand consideration and revenue performance. And what we found was that consideration is a leading indicator of revenue performance. And so that's helpful then because what you can say is, well, it takes time for people. And you know, you've— everyone's probably heard of the LinkedIn thing about 95% of the market aren't in market, only 5% are in market ready to buy. So what brand consideration basically tells you is what's the health of that 95%. And if you assume that at some point they're going to come into markets to buy, it will be additive in the long run. And we were able to show that correlation, very helpful for us. We also looked at, and again, there's a lot of market data you can look at around this, you know, top-of-mind likelihood to buy, and there seems to be a strong correlation there. Also, you can see the correlation in the data between well-known brands or relevant brands and pricing power.

Antonia
And so that's also, you know, again, going back to this talking the right language, as soon as you talk about brand sentiment, people, you kind of lose people. If you talk about brand as a lever to pull for pricing power, then you get a different reaction. One of the things that I think about is, if you— I take your point on brand, I actually think about it as creating future demand. So, you know, you've got things that are creating demand in market today, and your brand helps you to create permission for future demand. And so again, if you start to look at that, particularly if you look at the length of time it takes to sell your services— now, if you're in a more kind of consumer environment where it is kind of every week, every month, every quarter fair enough. But typically in B2B, you're selling things that have a much longer lead time. So then creating future demand and starting to talk to the CFO about, well, if you put in a dollar today and you could get $10 back this year versus $20 next year, what's the trade-off you really want to make?

Antonia
And, you know, it's always a capital investment, right? So you have to just make a decision about when do you want to make your return. And it might be that you want to kind of hedge your bets a little bit on that. The other thing that I think about — and I have had useful conversations with private equity firms over the years about this too, which is typically what you want to look at is what's your cost of acquisition for a customer versus lifetime value. And actually investing in brand can be quite efficient across both of those because you can reduce your cost of acquisition because you have a strong, relevant, and well-known brand, and you can increase loyalty, which is basically your lifetime value, by having a brand that people choose to be associated with over the longer term. And I think particularly in B2B, where, you know, it is pretty career-making or breaking, where you are marketing into a buying group, having a strong brand can really help you in both of those things. And I think that that's a reasonable commercial metric to be looking at from a marketing return perspective.

Ali
Yeah, thank you. I think that's an incredibly solid three-legged stool on which to build your case. I love that point about future demand. Grace Kite's got this lovely idea of discounted future free cash flow, which enables all sorts of interesting, again, useful models that hopefully are relatively compelling without getting too complicated.

Antonia
Yeah, the other thing to think about as well, the other reason why I partnered with our HR lead is that brand is also quite efficient use of spend when you look at attraction and retention of employees. And again, that depends a little bit on the nature of your company. But for a professional services company, your revenue driver is your people, right? And so being able to attract and retain the right people is also quite an effective use of brand. And if you then look at employee data around why you attract a certain type of employee, and often it is the strength of your brand. That can also be a helpful case to make if that's appropriate.

Ali
Yeah. And so often marketers get, get maybe myopic about the purely external meeting the customer part of the impact of the work that they do. I think it's a lovely reminder to everyone that brand is something that happens internally as much as it does externally as well. There was also something you mentioned there about the 95/5 rule. Not one to debate now, but actually I've always found that quite an interesting one for marketers to interpret or misinterpret. I think a lot of, sometimes people shorthand that as in only 5% of your audience is ever really thinking about buying at any one time, whereas actually it's really a kind of sales formula, isn't it? For that 5% will buy in any given quarter or at any one time. And actually when you run the numbers on a 3-year refresh cycle, renewal cycle with an 18-month sales cycle, things tend to look a little bit different. But nonetheless, I think again, it's a very important way of showcasing to the rest of the team, there is an awful lot of time when people are not going to be thinking about buying from you, uh, when you might still want to get stuck in their heads.

Antonia
The other thing that I would also say though is you've got to be strict on your target addressable market. Even within that 95/5, doesn't mean that 95% of the whole world needs to know what you do. 95% of your addressable market needs to know what you can do. And I do still sometimes see activations from competitors and others where it's so broad brush, and I'm just like, was that really the full market that you were trying to go after? And sometimes I'm curious about what's insight that led you to such a broad broadcast type of activity versus something that felt a bit more targeted. So that's the other thing probably to think about.

Ali
Absolutely. And part of the hugely important marketing strategy work of segmentation and targeting, which is so often overlooked. And actually interestingly, this is something I've spoken to a few different CMOs about over the past few years, which is when people think about ROI from marketing, it's so extraordinarily hard to really capture the full ROI of that upfront marketing strategy work, you know, defining who your audience is, defining your market, defining who you go after. That plays out across the entire firm in so many different ways. And yet, how much of that really shows up in any kind of ROI calculations that people are able to make? So I think that's just a pet peeve of mine. Although obviously, some of the commercial metrics you mentioned obviously are very much reflective of that. So they capture it almost indirectly in some way. One thing we haven't really talked about is AI. And I know it is something that comes up in every single conversation at the moment, something that I've been incredibly bullish on for, since I was about 6 years old actually, that's another story. But how do you think about getting your team ready for AI at the moment?

Antonia
Yeah, so there's a few things. So first of all, we've been experimenting for a while, so we've kind of proven a lot of cases out and we've learned a lot along the way. So that was important to kind of really start to get going. And we've We've had some really phenomenal results, and of course, we've had some times where it just wasn't quite what we were hoping or expecting, and that's fair enough, like that happens. We have really invested in training and also have put in place some guardrails to help the teams around what we think we could and should allow and what we won't allow. And so, just to give people the flexibility within a framework, because I think when it feels so open and free, it's kind of too much. You have to kind of give some sense of parameters to give people that sort of psychological safety to be able to experiment within some level of guardrails. The training's been phenomenal. We've had very good reception on that. What we're going to do now is our fiscal year starts in July, so we've created a lot of good work last fiscal year, just in July now, and we've bought ourselves a little bit of air cover and time so that we can go a bit more all in.

Antonia
So, what that means is that we can kind of, rather than it feeling like it's side of the desk and people couldn't do it as they get round to it, what we're doing now is signalling really that we expect you to go all in and start really using it in earnest. So I'm excited about that. Some of the things that we've learned though is that you still need to be good at what you do and use it as a tool. So for example, when we're looking at image work, image work on its own doesn't produce anything that's that good. But if you put somebody who's really good at photography into doing the prompts, then you get really excellent work. Well, that's the same as having a junior person in your team that you're training up, right? So similarly, you know, we've been looking for opportunities to improve what we get. So, some of the synthetic data results that we had weren't as good as we wanted to. So, now what we're doing is A/B testing real data and synthetic data with a view to seeing how much closer it can get, but also refining some of the data sources that we've got.

Antonia
So, we're sort of trying to do it with this level of how do we improve it even when it's not great. And then across all of it, I really like— there's a kind of NASA saying which I really like, which is the team's job is to not let something fail. And I quite like that as a concept, right? So, it allows you to democratise, you know, the questioning around why you're doing something, what you're doing, and how you're doing it, because you're doing it in the spirit of making it successful. And I think that that's important. You've gotta kind of go into any new thing with an idea that you can't just like fall at the first hurdle and just be like, right, it's never gonna work. We tried it once, it's not gonna happen. Like instead, you've just gotta say, okay, can everybody play a role in trying to help this to be successful? And like a lamb on its shaky little legs, you know, over time it'll become robust and withstand the kind of knocks that it'll give it. And the upsides are pretty good, right? You know, think about how long in B2B, well, my whole career, scarcity has been our problem, right?

Antonia
We've had scarce resources, we've had scarce money, we've had to do more with less. And now suddenly you have an opportunity where you really can do more with less, and you really can look to freeing up time to do the things that you both enjoy and you know that adds value. So, you know, on that level, I feel pretty excited about it. I think we all have things in our days, in our lives where we'd really rather not do it. And we are all sitting in processes where there's unnecessary amounts of friction, and that can all go. And that means that I can spend more time with clients, I can spend more time with my team, I can spend more time with my stakeholders, I can spend more time with agencies creating new ideas rather than kind of in the downstream of the execution. And I feel pretty excited. Excited about that.

Ali
That's absolutely true. I know, so I've run about 80-ish workshops now with clients and marketing teams over the past couple of years, and the number one use case that comes out in every single workshop that I do is reporting. Can somebody just please help me sort out that report that I have to do every week or every couple of weeks that feels like I am doing purely administrative work? So yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I love your shaky little lamb analogy as well. So yes, when something doesn't work when you're using AI, that might mean a number of things. It might mean that AI cannot do it. It might mean that AI cannot do it yet. It might mean that actually there is something in the way you're using it, which means it is not doing it as well as you'd like. So again, such a pattern I've definitely seen play out.

Antonia
I mean, if you think about AI as having a junior person in the team, you know, it's the same way as if you've got a junior person in the team and if you're not getting what you had hoped for, is it because you weren't clear enough about what you wanted? Is it because you didn't give them enough information to be able to do something good? Do they need to work differently and with somebody else in order to create good work? So, similar questions to those you would ask yourself in a management context, I think are helpful as you're thinking about what you should ask in a technology context.

Ali
Absolutely. That analogy of AI as an intern, or AI as 10,000 interns, is certainly really interesting. And I actually wonder how much that's going to hold over the next few years as this jagged frontier goes to places that we often can't, even experts, human experts often can't. I think it's going to be interesting to see how that analogy bends a little bit over the next few years. If it's okay, I did want to revisit the first thing you said there, which was around expertise. Now, I think one of the known behaviour patterns of AI is that it is very good at tasks that are verifiable. So if you have short, concrete feedback loops, AI can get very good at that very, very fast. A lot of marketing tasks are a little bit more nuanced or have less binary answers to whether or not they have worked or not, or have very long feedback loops. And so as a result, actually, to your point, instead of that feedback loop being something which can be automated and something which is built into the system, often you still need that human expertise to effectively act as the verifiability.

Ali
This is good or this is not good. And again, just want to echo, that's definitely a pattern that we've seen working with clients and obviously working in our own agency, trying to get the best out of the technology.

Antonia
There's a lot of talk about AI slop, but humans produce quite a lot of slop as well, right? And one of the things that I think is an interesting AI use case is asking the tools whether the copy produced is in any way differentiated from anything that you've done before, anything your competitors are doing. And honestly, most of the time I think you'll get a pretty disappointing response to that. And so, that's where you can use AI. So, you're doing something different, probably isn't going to come from AI, but prompting you to know that what you're doing isn't different enough, probably you can get from AI. And kind of helpful.

Ali
Yeah, it's a lovely way of putting it. It's a very common failure mode of AI criticism, that, isn't it? It's like, oh, that's not very good, rather than comparing it to what was there previously or what the other alternatives are. I know we've only got a couple of minutes left. One thing I did want to ask just before we get onto the quickfire round, you are one of the few CMOs I've spoken to who has written a very successful book on marketing. And I'm delighted about that because I think all marketers could do with that level of passion and interest in their craft. And I think we would all be much stronger as an industry as a result. Could you tell me just a little bit about the book and for anybody who hasn't heard of it, why it is that they should go and read it.

Antonia
Thank you. Well, first of all, I'll tell you, if we've got a minute, I'll just tell you about how the book came about. So, I had 3 months off between my last job and this job, and my husband was like, "If I become your job for 3 months, I will end up divorcing you. So, please will you find yourself something to do?" So, I was like, "Okay, fine. I'll write a book." But actually, joking aside, I wrote it because I felt like I'd learned a lot and I wanted to be able to share that knowledge with other people who are in marketing. It's, you know, for me, the more good people we get in B2B marketing, the better, and the more helpful we can be to each other, the better. Um, and that was the spirit in which it was intended. I guess there are a few elements to it. First of all, my sort of central hypothesis is that the marketing funnel is basically hopeless for B2B marketing. Just doesn't work. It's not how we operate, it's not how we work. And instead, what we need to do is to really think about a buying cycle and what are the information needs of our buyers at each point in that cycle, and how do you meet their needs, as opposed to how do you think about cramming them through a funnel.

Antonia
The second sort of fundamental tenet of that is that marketing doesn't own any part of that, and sales doesn't solely own any part of that. It's all shared across marketing and sales, across the whole lot. So, as you put together the lifecycle, which in professional services can be extremely long, it's always shared. And the question is kind of where's the volume dial where it's more marketing than sales, but it's always a partnership across the two. The third is that I think that in successful companies of the future, marketing will set the expectation of the company and the customer experience, and everyone else will follow it. And so, that's a kind of provocative end point that I end on. And then within it, what I've done is I've sort of dissected what I think the buying stages are, what do I think that marketing and sales can usefully be doing, how do you measure the impact of what you're doing, and in measurement, I look at: how do you know you're being productive? How do you know that you're ultimately successful and what are the indicators? Because sometimes the gap between activity and outcome is quite large.

Antonia
And so, what are those indicator metrics to show that you're going along the right trajectory? In the second part of the book, I talk about how do you think about the return on investment of brand? How do you think about return on investment for all marketing? How do you think about return on investment for technology? And how do you think about connecting and working with sales and agencies? So, broadly, the first part's about the kind of buyer cycle, and the second part is more about how do you think about becoming a good B2B marketer across those networks that you have within and outside the company.

Ali
Amazing, thank you. And I did read it when it first came out, and I've read it since, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone as well. It's a fantastic book. I love what you said there about the metrics, by the way. Your set of metrics, I think, is very good. I think— I don't know if you've heard of HALO investment strategy, — a heavy asset, low obsolescence investment strategy — which became popular over the last 12 months. It feels a little bit like we're entering a potential danger of hollow marketing, kind of high output, low outcome marketing, as it's possible to do a lot of things very quickly without actually getting the metrics that matter to move. Right, I know we've got very little time left. Can we just run through a very quick, quickfire round if that's okay? So first of all, complete the sentence: The qualities I look for in my next exceptional hire are...

Antonia
Curiosity.

Ali
The top answer, I love it. I often say the only problems that worry me are the ones I can't see, so I try to be open with the team about any challenges I have. In the spirit of psychological safety, what's a mistake that you've made in the past few weeks?

Antonia
I think that when there are a lot of changes happening, whether that's outside the organisation or within the organisation or both, it can be tempting to want to sort of almost shield your team from that, and what that can then lead to is a lack of communication, whereas actually probably that's the moment where you should be communicating more, even if it's just to say, "I don't really know and we're still kind of getting there," but at least keeping those lines of communication explicitly rather than implicitly open.

Ali
What is something most people get wrong about you?

Antonia
There's lots of things people get wrong about me. I think that people forget that I really I love doing marketing and I really enjoy being in the work. I have a pretty creative brain. I really enjoy thinking differently about things. I'm not a very status quo type person. And once you get to a certain level, people are a bit like, okay, we'll bring you everything at the end for final approval. But actually, I quite like being involved in blank sheet beginning and the messy middle as well.

Ali
Yeah, turns out most execs don't love surprises, was a lesson that got drilled into me. What are the 3 technologies you're most excited about over the next 10 years?

Antonia
Well, I'm excited about— we talked about AI and agentic technology. I'm pretty excited about that, not least when my husband's agent and my agent talk to each other, that means that we can take the nagging friction out of the domestic environment. I'm very intrigued about what they're doing with robotics. I've read a really interesting thing in Japan. They're looking at how to use robotics to help people who've got Alzheimer's. Really interesting. And I think as we become an ageing population and as I get older, I'm kind of intrigued and excited about that. And then again, on the kind of more health level, I'm a big believer in predictive health and the real investments and leaps forward that are being taken in healthcare, I think will make us a healthier and happier cohort.

Ali
Agreed. Okay, well, last question, let's go, Antonia. What's one piece of advice or one idea, either about marketing or about life in general that you keep coming back to?

Antonia
I think that you have to continue to look at your day, your week, your month, your year. And people talk about kind of work-life balance or even within work kind of balance. I don't think you really get a balance. I've got a kind of ugly term for it, which is an appropriate ratio. Like, do you have a work-life appropriate ratio? Because it's different in any given week to month, and indeed some years it's different because you want to spend more time with your family; some years you want to really double down on work. But even within a week, like, do I have my work-appropriate ratio? Like, am I doing enough things that sustain and excite me? And is that balancing out with the things that I need to do in order to kind of continue to drive the reputation of marketing internally or externally, for example? So, I think that constantly kind of reviewing where's the balance of time and effort. And if you didn't get it right this week, what can you do to get it right in the quarter or in the month? And if you didn't get it right in the quarter, how can you get it right in the year so that you can kind of give yourself a bit of forgiveness, but at least kind of make sure that you do get that appropriate ratio across the period of time that you want it.

Ali
I'm sure your early maths teacher, Mrs. Love, would approve of the appropriate ratio and the Antonia constant. Sounds very good. Well, thank you so much anyway for being with us today. Thank you, Antonia.

Antonia
Thanks, Ali, I appreciate it.