Live from Adobe Summit: Three conversations redefining modern marketing
Recorded at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, this special episode of The CMO Show brings together three marketing leaders navigating transformation in real time and what it actually takes to make it work.
Across financial services, education and global enterprise, one message is clear: AI is accelerating everything, but real transformation still takes time, structure and serious organisational change. This episode cuts through the hype to show what that looks like in practice.
Arpan Saha, Chief Digital Officer at Nippon India Mutual Fund, shares how his team is rethinking customer experience in a market of more than a billion people. By benchmarking against e-commerce leaders, they’re simplifying investing, using AI and data to create more intuitive, personalised and accessible journeys at scale. It’s a powerful example of what happens when you design for real customer behaviour, not industry convention.
At RMIT, Darren Boyle unpacks a six-year transformation focused on moving beyond legacy systems to deliver more dynamic, personalised experiences. But his key insight is that this isn’t just about technology. It’s about clarity of purpose, aligning teams and systems, and staying focused on the long-term journey required to actually make transformation stick.
And from a global enterprise lens, Mark McCluskey at Genpact shares how to transform marketing at scale. From brand to operations, his team has rebuilt the function end-to-end, showing what it really takes to connect strategy, technology and execution across an organisation. It’s a practical look at how to drive change while bringing people with you.
It’s a practical look at how to simplify complex customer journeys, scale personalisation and rethink how your marketing function operates in an AI-driven world. If transformation is on your agenda, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.
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This episode of The CMO Show was brought to you by host Mark Jones, producers Niall Hughes and Kirsten Bables, and audio engineer Ed Cheng. This is an edited excerpt of the podcast transcript.
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Mark Jones:
We've got a bumper episode for you this week. You're going to hear from three different companies. In one episode. We're going to look at the education sector, finance, and then a service provider working with global enterprises. We're going to look at transformation and how these organisations are dealing with change in real time. And it all comes to you recorded live at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas recently.
There's something really interesting going on in marketing at the moment. Because of the speed of AI, there's a temptation to think that everything has to be done instantly. I've got to do it now. But what if the transformation you need to engage in over a long period of time requires patience, wisdom, and the sort of technical know how that you know can't just be instantly turned on? My guest today is Arpan Saha. He's the chief digital officer at Nippon India Mutual Fund.
It's a fascinating organisation because this is a company that over a nine-year period has transformed its digital architecture. It's been looking at its marketing architecture and also their whole go to-market strategy. How do you engage customers wherever they are on any channel, in any part of the country? And it's of course a very diverse cultural landscape as well. The challenge that this conversation brings is around the mindset we bring to that. Of course, we want to move quickly, but sometimes it just takes a bit longer than expected. So how do you deal with that? Let's take a listen.
Mark Jones:
Arpan, thanks for joining me.
Arpan Saha:
Thanks, Mark. Thanks for having me here.
Mark Jones:
Now, it's interesting to learn about Nippon India Mutual Fund. One of India's largest asset managers. I noted that you've got a particular interest in a mutual fund investor journey feeling more like Flipkart, which is a large e-commerce site in India. Tell me why you've got that perspective.
Arpan Saha:
So Mark, the way I look at it is: when I moved into this industry, and I realised that an investor who’s searching for a product to invest in online, is also looking for ease and experience. And therefore I believe that if you have to create your benchmarks on experience, one should closely follow the e-commerce space. Be it the Alibaba's of the world, or be it Flipkart, Snapdeal, Walmart, Amazon, you name it. And I'll tell you why. Because when you want to invest money, be it in a product or be it in a mutual fund, you want to have an experience which is uncomplicated, which is transparent.
Mark Jones:
Yes.
Arpan Saha:
And I guess that's why I believe the journeys of any mutual fund company or any company, be it a consumer durable or be it a consumer FMCG or be it a consumer finance company, should be frictionless and futuristic.
Mark Jones:
Why do you think mutual funds have never been frictionless? Have they deliberately baked in complexity?
Arpan Saha:
So if you look at the space of investments, if you look at the space of markets, it's always been perceived as technically strong in the sense that, "Oh, did I have a major in economics? Do I understand this fund?" But it's not that. It's basically a place where people come to invest their money and to ensure that your money grows along with you over time. When you're doing that, it's very important that you intuitively answer the questions of your consumers. The consumers over here are faceless and they're not going to type in a question. They are going to be wanting a service, which is more of a buffet, where they can choose and pick and consolidate. And at the same point of time as a brand, you need to be transparent on the e-commerce space saying, "Hey, no, this is what you should know before putting in your money." And how do you do this all in a systematic journey? And that's where the CX, the consumer experience really comes from.
Mark Jones:
Yeah. And I want to talk about the CX component in just a minute. Help me understand a bit more about the types of customers that you have. I presume most are in India, but maybe across the region as well.
Arpan Saha:
Yes. We do have consumers who are across the region, but we have regulations too. So if you have to invest in mutual funds, you have to be in India physically to start off the process.
Mark Jones:
So what is the particular mindset of an investor now in India compared to many years ago when these funds first began? What's changed?
Arpan Saha:
Well, the generation has changed. When the mutual fund industry started off, people who invested in it are now generation X, the way they used to think about investments was completely different from the way the Gen Z or the Gen M is thinking about it. What happens is both have different goals. So if you look at a Gen X goals, a Gen X typical goal would be, I want to buy a house, I want to save for the golden days, right? Gen Z or a Gen millennial would think in a very different way, saying, I" want to see the next soccer World Cup in 2030," or, "I would like to save up enough to go and hit the next Dua Lipa concert, right? This is the way the thought process has changed. And ideally, in a market where there is a problem of plenty, you need to keep it very simple.
Mark Jones:
Yes.
Arpan Saha:
The more you keep it simple and you let people understand that this is something for the masses and you don't need to be from the elite lot to invest in a fund, you have the retained industry opening up for you.
Mark Jones:
So we have two things. There's the customer experience is different, but also the brand perception of the product.
Arpan Saha:
Absolutely.
Mark Jones:
So how do you then design experiences in that context? What are you doing?
Arpan Saha:
We believe that every journey needs to be handcrafted. And how do you use AI and how do you use data? And the marriage of the data along with the intelligence gives you the right kind of journey for your consumer and the right kind of products too. For a youngster who's 25, who's just started off his career, he wants to be more adventurous while picking up his funds saying that, "Hey, I have a long innings to play and this is what I need to do." So when you build journeys, you try to go informative as much as possible, but at some point of time there is too much of information for the consumer might make the consumer feel very boring. So how do you do that? How do you give the consumer the control of what he wants to see, what he doesn't want to see, and how do you tick all the boxes and yet keep the journeys distinct from each other?
Mark Jones:
The work that you've done, I understand you were able to move new customer acquisitions from one in 10 to one in two digitally. What does that mean?
Arpan Saha:
So, if there are two consumers coming to the mutual fund industry digitally, one of them is definitely an Nippon consumer. So that's the kind of digital chassis and AI enclave that we have built where we say that one is reaching out to the consumer, second is allowing the consumer to come in and check out fast.
Mark Jones:
Okay.
Arpan Saha:
And third is constantly engaging the customer with what he wants to know rather than what he doesn't want to know, right? We have been working on this throughout. So we have Adobe campaigns. On the third side, we work with Google. We have demand side platforms which allows us to understand what is the consumer up to, what is it doing, right? And a persona based marketing and also the eighth segment, what do you offer to whom?
And therefore, how do you keep all this going with the best new creative campaigns where you want to reach out to the right customer? The other thing is, don't wait for the customer to come to you. Go where the traffic is. All of us believe that having a great website is going to solve my e-commerce problem. Well, no. Many people don't want to use a website. They want to probably do a transaction on a WhatsApp, right? So how do you understand who is going to get served where, whether it's going to be physically at a branch or digitally across a website, across an app, across a conversational commerce where you're speaking to your Alexa, you're saying, "Hey, that's for me today." Or whether it's on WhatsApp. It's something that you need to democratise across.
Mark Jones:
So what about voice and language? So particular styles and types of language. How important is that in this experience? Because of course India is many, many cultures and there's lots of considerations in terms of how to engage with a really diverse group of people.
Arpan Saha:
Well, voice is going to be the future. India as a country, 1.5 billion people.
Mark Jones:
It's huge.
Arpan Saha:
And we love talking, right? It's a very colourful country with very old values and principles. And India has multiple languages where people speak. So it's very important to give them the ability to have a digital experience in a very known environment. And that's where vernacular, as we call it, comes in. True, the second thing is voice. We all have a fat finger problem, and the screens are only becoming five inches, 5.5 inches, websites are going away, mobile sites are coming in, apps are opening up. So how much do you want your consumer to time?
Mark Jones:
We just want to talk to it.
Arpan Saha:
You just want to talk to it, right? And you want to talk to it in a conversational way. So that we call conversational commerce.
Mark Jones:
I'm interested in how you're working with your marketing teams. You have this concept of going where the traffic is or going where, we would say in the old days, the eyeballs on the web, right? Go where the people are as opposed to getting everybody to come into your platform. Now, what's different about that for you? What are you doing differently?
Arpan Saha:
A lot of things. For example, we see a partner who is attracting a lot of traffic. We open up a storefront at their premises on the internet space and we co-brand and do campaigns using Adobe Campaign Manager. So it's a win-win for both, right? Second is somebody comes to my sites or my properties, they get a very different handcrafted journey, which is sitting out of them. Third is our demand side platform associations with Google and using AI LLMs like BI Max, right? We ensure that the consumer gets what he's looking for.
Mark Jones:
How have you been working with the broader marketing team to tell the story of what you're doing?
Arpan Saha:
What we try to tell marketing is to understand the consumer insight, the different type of consumers which have come in and not the traditional mutual fund customers.
Mark Jones:
Yes.
Arpan Saha:
If you connect with their aspirations, saying that, "Hey, if you want to really ... There's one life, enjoy it, see the top countries before you're 40, invest in a SIP, systematic investment plan today." That makes more sense for an youngster to get hooked, right? And I think what also we do with marketing is we say infographics has to be the way. It can't be too many words because people want to see content. And so marketing and digital in our company works together to build the best of content which can resonate with the various consumer segments in India.
Mark Jones:
The last topic I wanted to ask you about was the mindset around AI and in enterprise scale organisations like yours where there's how many employees?
Arpan Saha:
1,400.
Mark Jones:
Right. So that's a large organisation. It takes time. What's your advice for CMOs, CDOs, and even the whole C-suite from a mindset point of view to embrace digital transformation?
Arpan Saha:
I think my advice is pretty much the fundamental of AI, which says that without machine learning, there cannot be intelligence. Now, machine learning needs to be given time. So as a CMO, CDO, even the CEO, who's the executive sponsor, you need to be very patient and you should allow the machines to learn. At the same point of time, train your staff or your teams on not to use AI as an utility tool, like making a nice resume or typing a letter, I think. But rather using AI to enhance security, awareness, customer delight, bring in the best range of products and extend reach. I think that's what you should use AI. I also believe why time is important in such things, because when you're going to transform yourself to an AI centric organisation, you have to bring in ethical AI.
Mark Jones:
Well, Arpan, you've shed a lot of light on some pretty interesting topics and you've told an amazing story about the transformation in your organisation over many, many years. So thank you for your sharing that with us and for your time today. So appreciate it.
Arpan Saha:
Thank you, Mark. And thank you so much for having me here.
Mark Jones:
It’s a pleasure.
Mark Jones:
One of the most interesting things about this conversation for me is thinking about voice as a vehicle for making an investment decision. But it's also an interesting example of the sorts of changes that marketers together with CDOs and the whole organisation need to be making to the way they think about the customer experience. How are we going to grow across all of these different platforms and make it really frictionless?
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Mark Jones:
I've been speaking with a lot of marketing and tech people lately, thinking about the future of AI and how this whole world is changing so quickly and it always comes back to people, the people connections, how well we can tell stories, how well we can communicate and bring people with us on the journey. But the question behind that is how well do you understand the vision, the purpose, the mission? Where are you going and how do you stay grounded on that journey?
Mark Jones:
Darren Boyle, thanks for joining us on the show.
Darren Boyle:
You're welcome.
Mark Jones:
RMIT, really interesting story. You've been transforming the infrastructure and the marketing function for the last six years.
Mark Jones:
The interesting factors that are pushing you, of course, is changes to the education sector.
Darren Boyle:
Yeah.
Mark Jones:
So just briefly, what's going on for you there?
Darren Boyle:
Well, obviously, the education sector is a very competitive environment. It is very competitive. We really try and drive the experience for our audiences, particularly in the prospect world. Most of what we've done is to drive and help prospecting and prospect students. Yes, it's a very competitive, it's a very legislative, very government driven view as to how, what we can and can't say and all the rules around visa processing, international students, domestic students. RMIT, we do want to be all inclusive, so we do market as best as we can to every single cohort.
Mark Jones:
How has that forced you to really rethink both the experience that you're creating for students, but also the whole team, like how you work together?
Darren Boyle:
There's a couple of things. We don't have huge marketing budgets. We don't have huge digital budgets. Rightly so, because we should really be focusing on the student experience, which we do. So we don't have huge teams. We don't have huge budgets, which does force us to collaborate. It does force us to be as personalised and try and manage that journey in a much more curated way. So there's lots of regular communications. The student prospecting journey can be up to two years. So we really try and effectively manage that journey by talking to each other and trying to be on message, on brand, and driving the message that's going to be relevant to that particular audience at that particular time.
Mark Jones:
The interesting thing for me as we start moving into the agentic world, and you've mentioned you're sort of going towards that with AEM and other tools. The student journey is not only complex, it's long. It could be 10 years, right? So it requires a real commitment to accuracy, to the flexibility. I'm wondering, what's your thoughts on how you'd like agentic to step into that picture? Because as you rightly say, you haven't got huge budgets, you've got to get this automated so that it can help you scale.
Darren Boyle:
It's understanding context is where we really need to go. As you say, the journey can be very long across multiple channels, multiple touchpoints, each of which can have a part to play in influencing the decision as to why RMIT is the best university for them. So having our channels more aware of context is I think where AI can really play a part.
Mark Jones:
Yeah. Great.
Darren Boyle:
Then there's another, just an operational element around content velocity. We market to students across the globe. We have multiple channels. Creating that content to be relevant to them for their context, it will be very difficult, if not knowing impossible without the use of AI.
Mark Jones:
It's a journey that I think all marketers are going to face, whether it's now or in the coming year, and regardless of the platform they're using. What would your advice be for CMOs, heads of marketing and CDOs as they push into that? Because there's a lot of learning to be done.
Darren Boyle:
There is. I'd say there's a couple of elements is as we move into more of an LLM world and they're being more and more dominant in the search environment is not to lose your brand KSP, so you're real, "Why does your brand stand out? Why is your brand different?" It's to create content that is relevant to your audience and relevant to your brand and authentic to your brand, but is also very visible in LLMs because that's the risk versus reward. The risk is your content is very generic because it's seen by LLMs, so you get citations, but then it's not very authentic to your brand. I think that's going to be the challenge is creating that content, creating a website that LLMs can then see into pull the content out that is visible, but also authentic to your brand and your experience.
Mark Jones:
On the personalisation front, many of our listeners are wildly different stages of their journey. What's the picture looking like for you? How much further do you have to go in your mind?
Darren Boyle:
For us, it's around content velocity. I think we have a reasonably solid data foundation and we have the ability and the capability to personalise. What we don't yet have is that content and content velocity deliver personalised experiences at the scale we'd ideally like. So it's using AI to create multiple versions of content, imagery, experiences, and then drive that real time. I think that's the content velocity piece is something we're really looking at and the marketing lead is really looking at as well.
Mark Jones:
I'd be interested to know your previous experience includes Telstra, Australia Post, and ANZ, really large organisations as well, but quite different. If you were to draw a bit of a thread through all of them into now, what are the principles that you're applying from your history to this experience?
Darren Boyle:
Great question. All organisations at their core are trying to deliver products or service to their customers. The product can vary dramatically, and in the education environment, the products are very different. I'm very used to delivering products, "Here's a mobile phone." Or logistic, "We'll get your parcel to you on time." Education, there is a lot more emotion. There is a lot more investment in the decision. For our students and our prospect students, this is one of the biggest decisions, if not the biggest decision they've made in their life. So they tend to take a long time and it's a very considered purchase. There is very little last-minute nudges and it's a very considered purchase. So we really have to bring that into life as we go through the sales funnel with them and we deliver all of the content and all the messaging and all the channel messages as they go through.
Mark Jones:
Yeah, patience is required is what I'm picking up here.
Darren Boyle:
Absolutely.
Mark Jones:
I want to ask you a simple but also complicated question, which is what do you really love about your job?
Darren Boyle:
The end outcome. So that's what and my team. I think we have an incredibly dedicated, really hardworking team and I love to see the output that the team generate. I go home and talk to my kids, "What did you do all day today, Dad?" "Oh, I went to meetings and I spoke a lot." I don't do that much myself, so I'm really, really proud of the team and what they do, but it's the end outcome. Once a week, I love to walk around campus and saying, "I'm a very small part of creating this environment," and looking at all the students and what we are looking to do to them to get them ready for the work life, but also much more than that.
Mark Jones:
What would you say to people that are feeling a little bit unsure on their transformation journey?
Darren Boyle:
Is embrace it personally. There are a myriad of training courses. There are myriad of videos you can go and have a look at, so embrace it. Have a look at the new tools, go in. Most of them offer free licences, go in, have a look at them, play with them. We've tried to offer some training for the team to get everyone on a level playing set, but that would be the first one. The second one is I do feel strongly that it's going to be a tool that helps you do your job better. A lot of the AI functionalities will still need a human at somewhere in the loop. The very simple tasks that are repeatable can be done by AI. But you will always need a human in the loop. That's where anyone with a level of experience in their role, it is in assistance, it is a help, but you still need that humans, particularly if you look at creative. Creativity will never die. AI will help us do creative at scale, but that base creative, again, you still need a human touch.
Mark Jones:
I think that's a great note to end on. Getting the right context, being able to communicate it well, bring people with you on the journey is a great way to think about it. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Darren Boyle:
Thank you for having me.
Mark Jones
That is a great way of thinking about a digital transformation journey for marketers and CDOs, because it is, of course, always about the customer, and we all know that customers are highly emotive, and we don't just make logical, rational decisions, even though our tech infrastructure needs to be rational, needs to behave in very predictable ways. So, a great way of thinking about how to balance the tech, and of course, the humanity that's required in our leadership.
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Mark Jones:
In marketing, we're often doing one thing at a time and it might be just a brand campaign. But what if you had the challenge of doing a brand campaign and AI transformation and looking at your whole culture and operations at the same time? And just to make it even more interesting, you had to do it for a large global organisation. Wouldn't that be something?
Mark Jones:
Mark McCluskey from Genpact. Thanks for joining us.
Mark McCluskey:
Thank you for having me.
Mark Jones:
Who are you and what do you do? Tell me about your job.
Mark McCluskey:
So, my job is to look after marketing operations and effectiveness at Genpact. So basically everything that has an operational backbone is really what I take care of. So that's across all of our countries, all regions for Genpact. And I think one of the most interesting things about it for me personally is a big part of that role is involved in the marketing technology.
Mark Jones:
Right.
Mark McCluskey:
And I think this is a day and age where the tech is really coming into its importance of the marketing function and we get to play with new stuff, which is always fun.
Mark Jones:
What's the main offering at Genpact?
Mark McCluskey:
So Genpact, we've actually gone through quite a big change. We're pivoted as a company. We're now moving much more towards becoming an advanced technology solutions provider and an agentic solution provider. So for us, it's all about making sure how we take our process knowledge and our process excellence and use advanced technology and agentic to make an impact for our clients.
Mark Jones:
I want to talk about the AI transformation that you've been through and there's a really fun Client Zero Paradox that I want to explore. So it's using your own technologies, applying your own systems and processes to your own transformation. Can you tell us about that project? What have you done and what did you learn?
Mark McCluskey:
Yeah. So for us, we've really put a big push on that Client Zero approach. So I think with the whole concept of drinking your own champagne, you've got to use your own technology, your own solutions, improve their worth to clients. I think for us at Genpact, it's really given us a licence to experiment, fail fast, try things and see how it works.
Mark Jones:
Yes.
Mark McCluskey:
And we've really put that into full force in marketing. So we've been looking really closely at how we can build AI solutions and use them in the marketing space. And actually a lot of that process and thinking is really looked at not just how can we use, but what should we not use AI for? So I think one of the most interesting parts we've really seen in all the work we've done is you can apply AI to almost anything in a marketing context and really making sure we've rolled out a bunch of AI case studies this year, but there's also been a lot of AI cases that we haven't deployed. So for us, it's been about think fast, fail fast, try new things and look at where we can get those most interesting use cases and bring them to life.
Mark Jones:
What was the before state and the after state, if you like, the end result that you were looking for in this transformation programme? Just assume nobody has any clue what you've done.
Mark McCluskey:
Well, I think for us, probably the first thing to say, it wasn't approached as an AI transformation programme.
Mark Jones:
Right.
Mark McCluskey:
AI was one of the enablers to help us do it, but we really had a perfect storm in our setup. One, as a business, we were pivoting towards becoming the advanced technology and the agentic solutions provider. So we had a reason for change that was driving us to push for how should we rebrand as a company?
Mark Jones:
Yes.
Mark McCluskey:
And then alongside that, I said, "Well, if we're going to rebrand as a company, we've got a new mission that we're trying to achieve, how does marketing need to support that? " And we looked around how do we structure the team? How do we have our people to be most effective? And clearly when you're having that sort of conversation, technology and AI is going to be a big part of it as well. So it was everything that came together, a bit of a perfect storm, but I think it would give us a good opportunity and a licence to make a lot of change.
Mark Jones:
So what have you discovered? What have you learned?
Mark McCluskey:
So I think for us, there's a lot of learnings actually. I think there's probably for me with my operations hat on, the three biggest learnings for me are one, that yes, you can roll out new technologies, new solutions, but if people aren't using them, they're not going to do anything. So you've got to put equally as much attention and focus on the people, the process, enabling people to get it to work. Then the other part of it is, to my earlier comment, yes, there's lots of opportunities to implement AI, but the AI landscape changes daily, weekly, monthly. So you can't be always chasing the latest shiny thing. You've got to make a few big bets and run with it to make it work. And I think the last part of it is you've got to treat it as a transformation. So it's not just a brand refresh. It's not an AI rollout. It's a marketing transformation and get everything to work end to end to be successful.
Mark Jones:
And it's also culture as well. Team, processes, everything.
Mark McCluskey:
100%. 100%.
Mark Jones:
Now you mentioned a global rebrand and it's interesting to have a strategic pivot to have the AI transformation and then do a rebrand. The challenge with rebrands, of course, is that we don't want to just give the company a fresh look. We want to actually make sure that we're embodying the whole story of the company. So how did you get that right?
Mark McCluskey:
Yeah. So I think for us, there was a few things that came to it. One, we knew that a rebrand works best when it actually isn't just a new logo or a new label or a new you can feel. It's when the experience of a company changes end to end. So we had to look at what was the digital experience. So we did a website refresh. We looked at our campaign experience where all the touch points where a client or a partner or even potential talent who might be potentially someone who might come and work for Genpact would have an interaction with us. And I think we also look very closely at the fact that not just getting the experience right, getting the brand right, but getting the whole processes right in terms of how we operate. So that's where the transformation part comes in.
Do we have the right governance in place? Is the messaging changing? And where are we putting on marketing dollars? So one part of my role in the marketing ops space is looking after our budgets. And also my title is operations and effectiveness. Where are we getting the best bang for a buck for every dollar we spend? So we look very closely in terms of what we wanted to achieve and then where we wanted to pivot ourselves. And one thing I was just very conscious of is that every dollar that we put into technology is one less dollar we have in activations. So getting that balance right, I put the mirror up to myself and my own team to say, "Should we really spend this? Could we get better use of it elsewhere?" So I think all those things have to come together to give us a real change in just one, how we're perceived in market, but also what sort of business are we driving?
If we're driving the same leads, the same growth as we're driving before, we've failed. And we have seen that shift away from more legacy areas of where Genpact used to operate towards that agentic space.
Mark Jones:
So again, what have you learned? But it's quite funny you talk about this, having those two roles, the operations and budget, it's almost like you need an AR avatar to talk to yourself, right?
Mark McCluskey:
Yeah. I mean, one of my running jokes on my team is sometimes I have to decline or reject my own requests as in the governance process. And sometimes I'm actually more inclined because I want to make sure we look at everything holistically and I don't know tilt things one way just so I sit in that part of the business. And then that's where also we have a... We're very lucky. You mentioned culture before. We have a good culture in the marketing team and I know that a big part of my role is to support all of my peers for them to be successful.
Mark Jones:
So I'm interested in what marketers can learn from their experience. You don't have to reveal all your budget numbers, but what's the rough split between creative and the sort of campaign front end, that content and creative versus the operations, the tech, and maybe some of those other AI transformation pieces that we spoke about? So all the operational processes, how have looked at the whole thing?
Mark McCluskey:
We looked at this long and hard, and I think most of the stats we saw were more in the consumer space, which has a bigger split between what we call build and execute.
Mark Jones:
Yes.
Mark McCluskey:
So we classify build as anything which is technology, licences, the cost to produce content and creative versus money in market.
Mark Jones:
Yes.
Mark McCluskey:
I think generally speaking, we try and get a ratio of 40% build to 60% execute as a minimum, but we're always looking to optimise that. The better we can get that ratio towards execution, the better.
Mark Jones:
So the work that you've done is pretty extraordinary in terms of transformation, brand, automations. Were there any companies or people that you look to for inspiration? Where did you get your ideas from or has this sort of been in-house and native?
Mark McCluskey:
It's twofold actually. I think one of the things, we're very lucky. We've actually have a service line within Genpact called Genpact Experience and they are the Adobe implementation partner, so they work with a lot of clients to implement Adobe products and solutions. And I think I'm very lucky as a marketeer that have the luxury of an in-house team who actually is working with other marketing departments and lots of other organisations. So we actually went to them to get some advice and guidance in terms of how are other people doing it. What are people seeing in the marketplace. Where's it working. Where's it not been working and got some really good feedback. Then the other part of it as well is pulling on your peer network. I think there's no shortage of information and case study of where AI is working, but it's generally, to be honest, what people put in the public domain I think is quite... It's the same thing over and over again.
I think some of the sweet spots come from a more informal conversation from where organisations have done something different or built something more innovative that we can then look to replicate.
Mark Jones:
So for a CMO listening or a marketing ops leader or a marketing leader, what advice would you give them? What's something that you would have done differently on this journey?
Mark McCluskey:
I think for me, probably one of the biggest learnings, I think more than anything is actually start with the governance. So I think we were rushing to get agentic use cases live to support our transformation. Our company is moving at pace, so marketing was moving at pace, and sometimes we sometimes left maybe the government's a little bit too late. We have to think about that as things are going live, the whole expression of you're building the plane as you're flying it, that was definitely the case with us. So I think for me, just taking that step back, having a bit of a pause from time to time, I think the other big learning for me is that everything has to... It only works when it all works. So when you're doing a transformation, your channels, your messaging, your solutions, your look and feel, how you show up in market, it's all going to come together. And if it doesn't, it feels ingenuous. So I think for us, making sure that everything works together well with a good operational backbone so it doesn't fall apart.
Mark Jones:
Yeah. Mark, thanks for joining me on The CMO Show.
Mark McCluskey:
Thank you very much.
Mark Jones:
One of the things I liked about Mark's comment on the culture change and all the work they've done to bring the whole team along, asking him about where do you get your inspiration from? And a couple of things. He has an in-house team, but he was also looking externally to peers within his network. And it's a great reminder that if you're doing something for the first time, never forget that your CMO or marketing peers are more than happy to share their stories just like Mark. So it's a great reminder in the midst of change, always be looking to those people that you know, that you trust that can help you on the journey in this community of ours.
So that wraps up this special episode, bumper episode with three amazing guests and really broad set of experiences that you can learn from. Of course, all united by this idea of how they're transforming in response to so many changes going on at the technology level, as well as what we're seeing across organisations as they adapt to different ways of working. So I hope you took a lot away from it. We'll see you again very soon.