How Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) can Maximise their Impact in 2024

The Panel

• Nick Tran, CMO at FarFetch
• Nishma Patel Robb, Senior Director, Marketing at Google UK
• Gareth Helm, Non-Executive Director and Board Advisor

How can CMOs enhance their impact, drive brand growth, and navigate the evolving marketing landscape in 2024? We recently hosted a panel of experts—who reached a consensus that to be successful, marketers will need to focus on culture, the right data, and to better understand Gen-AI.

Marketing at the speed of culture

Creativity, content, and storytelling need to be everywhere—not just on adverts. The difficulty for marketers is that the focus has shifted too much to the bottom of the funnel, when the top of funnel is so important. Nick Tran, with his former TikTok hat on, described the “Ryan Reynolds” effect and how brands can now take culture moments and use digital channels to drive content amplification—Mint Mobile being a prime example.

In the UK, the recent success of the England women’s football team has led to premier league football clubs placing more emphasis on their women teams and accessing a new fan base. The panel was in agreement, that reacting to culture and using digital tools to do so is critical for the success of marketing in 2024.

Over-reliance on data

Is the over-reliance in data taking the creativity out of marketing? Are organizations using data in the right way? Nisma chimed in on this point with her suggestion that, while every marketer is worried about data and thinks everybody else doing it—in reality, very few are doing it right. Marketers should focus on what data points actually matter, and understand the customer journey, rather than capturing every data point.

Gen-AI risks making marketing beige

Any leader not considering how they can embrace AI is making a mistake. Gen-AI can make a marketing team more efficient, it can enhance the customer experience. However, what many people miss about AI – is that it’s only surfacing what you want to see.