Choice Hotels CMO Noha Abdalla

NOHA ABDALLA: But you actually also need to be creative in the field of marketing, and I think AI helps us do all that at much faster and better scale. I think this personalization that we've been talking about wanting to get to, that's made possible by AI, whether it's the creative, the media, the targeting, the measurement, all of that is just going to get exponentially better.

GREG STUART: Noha, welcome to Building Better CMOs.

NOHA: Thanks for having me today, Greg.

GREG: Yeah, this is going to be fun. I'm excited about this one. We've actually gotten to do some work here recently, haven't we?

NOHA: We have.

GREG: Yeah, big agentic AI project. Yeah, we'll get into that.

GREG: But listen, just so the audience and listeners are clear, so Choice Hotels. How many brands?

NOHA: 22 brands.

GREG: Oh my God, I can't even imagine. And how many rooms does that mean that need hotel guests?

NOHA: Millions of room nights.

GREG: Oh my God. I mean, I did a quick calculation — you don't have to comment on this — but I did a quick calculation on data from Perplexity, and I think I got into somewhere around 200-plus million room nights that got to be filled?

NOHA: Yeah, it's a lot.

GREG: It's a crazy scale, isn't it?

NOHA: It really is. I think part of it is, we have brands across all price points in all these different locations around the world, and so it doesn't seem as daunting as a marketer to try to fill all those rooms. And you think about all the use cases that people have for why they might need to be in that city.

GREG: Yeah, no, I mean, it's a crazy amount of volume. I just don't know. I guess I honestly hadn't thought it through in that level.

GREG: And this is actually your second go-around with hospitality, right? Because you were at Hilton before too.

NOHA: That's right. I've been at Choice Hotels for three years, but I also spent three years at Hilton.

GREG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Working with one of our very favorite people, right?

NOHA: That's right.

GREG: Yeah, Kellyn Kenny. Yeah, yeah, yeah, everybody's favorite. Yeah, she was board chair here for me for a while and just one of the best experiences ever. I consider it a great opportunity in my life to get to do that. So here's what's funny about you, though. You didn't start out in marketing as I've kind of listened — so tell me if I got my facts [straight] — you didn't start out in marketing. You didn't get into marketing until you went to the American Red Cross, which seems like a funny entry point to marketing. And I also think I heard something — and I think it came from you, so I think it's fact — is that you were a perfect student, perfect straight-A student, except for what course did you get a B in?

NOHA: Got a B+, Greg, not a B. B+.

GREG: [laugh] As only an A student would qualify. See, I don't qualify the plus-minus of mine because my grade point wasn't that good, but okay.

NOHA: That's right. So I —

GREG: So what happened? You're in management consulting, you end up going to the Red Cross at a very pivotal time, and somehow you end up in marketing.

NOHA: Yeah, so let me back up. I did my undergrad at Georgetown and I was in the School of Foreign Service. I thought that I was going to join the World Bank or the State Department one day.

GREG: Wow, how exciting.

NOHA: And realized for a variety of reasons, both personal and otherwise, that I might not end up at the World Bank. I didn't have a foreign passport. I didn't think I could pass the State Department test. My fiance at the time was studying to be a doctor in the US. I was like, I don't know if this international thing's going to happen for me. So I decided to apply to stay for five years instead of four and get my MBA. So my last year of undergrad, I started my MBA and I finished my MBA in a total of five years with my undergrad. And upon graduating, people didn't really know what to do with me: too qualified to go entry-level, but didn't have the work experience to go into the traditional MBA route. So I ended up at a company called Mercer Management Consulting — they're now, today, Oliver Wyman — and I did strategy consulting. My big client was the Mexican government at the time.

GREG: Oh, that's interesting. I don't know if I heard that. Okay, got it.

NOHA: Yeah, they were trying to create competition between the two state-owned airlines, and so they were studying the US airline industry and wanted us as consultants to help them think about how would you set up competition. While we were working on that project, 9/11 happened.

GREG: Yeah. Crazy.

NOHA: Long story short, the project ended up getting canceled, the government did not want to mimic [or] copy an industry that had been hijacked, and a lot of us from that team that were staffed on that project were from the Washington, DC, office. And so Mercer ended up shutting down the Washington, DC, office. So I was laid off from my first job.

GREG: Oh my God.

NOHA: But, from there, it became the opportunity to enter into marketing. So one of the partners at the firm had a relationship with the American Red Cross because we had done pro bono work for them. They were facing a very large crisis. Lots of people came out to donate blood as a result of 9/11, but it wasn't needed. A lot of it was thrown away because a lot of people died and they didn't need blood. That vision of throwing away donated blood ended up on the news and they had a crisis because people stopped showing up to donate blood. And as you know, it's an ongoing need. So they looked to this partner who I'd worked with at Mercer to come and help them start a national awareness campaign about why blood is always needed. So she started a centralized marketing department at headquarters for the American Red Cross. She brought a few of us over from our days at Mercer, and that was my first marketing job was this national awareness campaign about the need for blood.

GREG: And listen, you even had some fun ones and I can let the listener look it all up, but listen, you were the marketer for Animal Planet. I just think that's really fun and unique and kind of compelling. And I saw Hilton was in there, as we already mentioned. And yeah, you've had some really great experiences. So you end up at Choice.

GREG: What is the challenge with hospitality marketing? It's a difficult one, and I've done a lot of research — and for the listener, Noha sits on the global board here with the MMA — but you don't just run an ad and people go, Oh my God, that's right, I have to book a hotel in Ithaca this week. They don't think that way. It's like they're just going through their day and they go, Oh, now I have to go do this. Maybe not prompted by ... It's a complicated ad category unless you're there in front of them all the time. So how do you look at hospitality marketing?

NOHA: So there's a couple of challenges that I don't know that everybody realizes, but the first one is that I'm not just trying to get Greg to buy a widget. It'd be pretty easy to find people like Greg who might like this widget. I'm actually trying to find people who live in one place and want to go to another place, but I don't always know where they want to go. Or, if I'm trying to market the hotel, I don't always know, Where are all the people possibly coming from to go to that hotel?

GREG: Right. Or what's the reason, because different hotels have different places in my life, right?

NOHA: That's right, that's right. The other complicated factor is that I have an enterprise brand — Choice Hotels — and I have 22 brands that sit underneath that. So you need to market the enterprise brand, and a loyalty program that kind of also has the same brand name — Choice Privileges. The challenge is, not everybody knows all 22 brands, and not everybody knows that they belong to Choice Hotels. And so we also have multiple layers of messaging that we have to get across in our marketing. And as you know, we don't have that much time to tell that many messages. And so it is a complicated message.

GREG: It feels really difficult. I mean, airlines have a similar kind of challenge, I think, at the same level. And so many of these businesses are controlled — at least for the business hotels — they're really controlled by the loyalty programs. I'm assuming that's a big chunk of what they do. But some of the Choice properties are those traveling through America for a variety of different reasons, need a place to stay, family-oriented. I mean, it just feels really complicated to catch them at that moment that when they're actually available, interested, or to create an indelible impression. Is that right?

NOHA: Some travelers, they plan and book far out. Others in our world actually book pretty close in. So we have a pretty high percentage of travelers who will be on a road trip, for example, and they don't know when they're going to stop. We'll stop when we're tired, and then they're pulling off that exit ramp and they see five signs for five different hotels. And they have to, in that moment —

GREG: Pick.

NOHA: — make a decision about which brand do they recognize, which brand do they trust, and where do they think they're going to get the best value for their money. That layers on to the challenges that I have in my role, which is, I need them to also know these brands and to have a point of view about why do I trust this brand at night when I'm pulling off the highway and which one am I going to go to?

GREG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I think in the later part here, we're going to spend an awful lot of time with that.

GREG: Now, part of the way you've gone at that too is that you've gone down a celebrity approach with Keegan-Michael Key, so talk a little ... I'm just always curious. I mean, those feel like big complicated decisions to make within companies. You want to just talk about the process you went through that, and maybe just to frame it, as you mentioned it already, if there's 7,000 franchisees who are owners, they're actual owners of something, and then you've got corporately, you got a C-suite. Oh man, how do you get alignment and agreement to a path that you go and make the right decisions and all that? Talk a little bit about that and how that fits in around, I think vacation maximizer is what it's called.

NOHA: That's right. So just as I was saying, I really want people to know, learn, trust the Choice Hotels enterprise brand. I'll call it a shortcut to get people to associate Choice Hotels with a brand that they trust, is to have a celebrity who they know and trust deliver the message. There's that age-old thing: If you're meeting somebody new and you're like, Oh, I have to remember his name. Like Greg, oh, that's in my brain already associated with something else, I'll associate it with this person I just met with the Greg that's in my brain. That's the same thing for celebrities. I already know him, I already trust him, I know what he stands for, so then I'm more likely to remember Choice Hotels. I think the other thing that he brings specifically is just this idea of welcoming you, making you let down your guard, and through his humor, really connecting with our guests and our consumer in a way that ... Our hotels are not the stuffy hotels. Our hotels are the welcoming, warming environment that feels like home, and so we don't want somebody to portray our brand who feels unattainable. He feels much more like, well, he's a celebrity and I'm sure he does well for himself. He feels more like the everyday person, and you would believe that he would stay at our hotels. And I think that was really important as we were looking for someone to represent our brand. It's somebody that people trust and who can relate to you.

GREG: How long does that process take to pick a celebrity like that to represent the brand?

NOHA: A few months. A few months. And you do a lot of consumer testing with the various personas that you're trying to reach and appeal to, and you want someone who's not just recognizable, but you also want them to have the traits that align with your brand. And we have a variety of hotels and we have a variety of target customers, and so you're trying to do a Venn diagram of all of that, and then you have to go to someone who's willing to work with you for the price that you want to pay.

GREG: Yeah, there's so much complexity. And just for the listener, because they don't remember, it's "Key and Peele" was the show that I think that he's most famous for. And then the episode he is most famous for was the Angry Obama, which I still think ... Every once in a while it pops up in my YouTube feed, I still think it's the funniest skit I think I've ever seen in my entire life. So he's immensely talented.

NOHA: And Substitute Teacher. I don't know if you saw that skit where he —

GREG: No, I didn't see it. That too?

NOHA: He calls out all the names of the kids in the class and he pronounces them very literally. So it's very cute.

GREG: Actually, I do think I remember that. Yeah. No, he's a very funny man, no question.

GREG: Okay, well listen, so let's change here for a moment because you and I have an interesting experience we just went through, which is around using agentic AI in order to develop commercials. Is that possible? Does it work? Can you do it fast? Where is the state of that? And we presented some of that at the board meeting, and that was a phenomenal process. So any reflections you want to give on that? But what I kind of want to get to too is I think you said to me that your board has expressed an interest in AI, and although I don't expect any confidential conversations, obviously, I'm just curious, what's your take on boards' interactions with AI? What's the state of where we are as an industry and what's happening there? Maybe start a little bit, if you want, with the project we went through and some of the learnings from that, and then we can jump into the board stuff.

NOHA: Choice Hotels partnered with the MMA and a company called Monks to experiment and see if we could create video using an agentic process. Very little inputs in terms of assets.

GREG: Very little.

NOHA: In a very short period of time.

GREG: [laugh] Very short period of time, two weeks, not barely, even. Right.

NOHA: And the hypothesis was perhaps we could create video that is of decent-enough quality to run alongside some of our other advertising. And I think what we learned is, wow, we can move really fast. We can provide very limited inputs into the process. We can test with synthetic personas, we can develop a variety of scripts, and we can create pretty believable video at scale. You could create lots of versions of it.

GREG: Lots of personalization opportunities. Massive.

NOHA: And it's pretty good. If I had to give it a score, it's about 80% of what I would've paid a lot more money for and taken a lot more time to create without all the versions.

GREG: Yeah, it's funny you say that. So the board made me first show that I think they were, I felt like they were hedging their bets a little bit. Well, we think it's 65% there. And I remember looking and going, well, I'm not a CMO like they are, so I'm going to respect their judgment. But I think it's better than that. I think it's better than 65%.

NOHA: And what I haven't solved for yet, and that's okay, is including a celebrity. So the version that we made did not include a celebrity, but it included actors who were casted in this AI world and —

GREG: Characters. They were characters, they were real personas, characters. They represented something to you if you'd seen it. Yeah.

NOHA: That's right. And we were able to use some pretty low-fidelity videos that we had shot at some of our properties so that it was fairly authentic, realistic, in terms of what our hotels look like. And if you can imagine that today I create a handful of versions of our ad spots because I can't shoot at 7,000 hotels, I can see how, in a future state, we would be able to create custom videos for all of our hotels and really showcase the individual property and not just a representation of that hotel brand.

GREG: And what does that do to add to trust? So on the off chance, we do have pre-planning and knowing that somebody's going to go to Ithaca at some point or they're going to be in Buffalo or, I don't know, whatever random city I'm picking out there that has one of many ... that actually would be able to see and go, oh, okay, I get a better sense of that, I think I'd like that, that does make more sense to me.

NOHA: Yeah, I mean, ultimately —

GREG: Trust, it increases trust. It's another way of building that.

NOHA: That's right. Ultimately, as marketers, our goal is to get to personalization, and we all use personalization in a variety of ways. If I know you one-to-one, and I know that I'm talking to Greg and I know where Greg wants to go or where he might want to go, I obviously would love to send you a message with a video that shows you the hotel and what it can deliver for you based on the signals that I get on where you might be going. That's an end state, but we're not quite there yet. But it is what we're all striving to do. And so I am very excited about what I'm seeing with these agentic capabilities. I think I heard this from someone much smarter than me, but today is the worst day that AI is ever going to be.

GREG: The best one I heard the other day, and this is more at a human level, but I heard a professor say this in a meeting I was in with a bunch of other professors, and he said, he goes, how'd he put it? He goes, Five years from now ... The dumbest doctor in five years will be smarter than the smartest doctor today.

NOHA: Yeah, I believe that. I believe that.

GREG: It's really compelling. It's incredible, especially what's happening now with GPT-5 that I've noticed and its ability to really produce a full-on research report and be really thoughtful about it. And I don't sense the hallucination dynamic like I used to. It's really crazy.

NOHA: Well, I was talking to someone much smarter than I who runs a company that delivers AI solutions, and she shared with me that the reason why some of these LLM models deliver hallucinations is because some of them are built with more creativity in them, and that's what actually lends itself to the hallucination. She had actually created a truth agent that you can then run on top of or after you've run your search or whatever you've asked the agent to do, to then make sure that what's come out is all true and authentic. And so you can imagine, yeah.

GREG: Of course, of course somebody built that, of course it's there. It can't be that complicated for that. Interesting.

GREG: Hey, you also had another experience here that caught my attention, and I don't think we're going to mention the name of the company, but you were in a group of 60 CMOs earlier this week talking about AI. What was your conclusion from that, Noha? What are you thinking? What changed as a result of hearing your peers talk about their challenges with AI? Which, by the way, with a company who has a lot of its own AI experience and expertise.

NOHA: It was great to be in a room full of colleagues who are going through this experience together. And I think we shared two emotions together. One is around the uncertainty and the fear of the unknown, and the other is around just pure excitement. We have a lot of technology and tools that have been part of our toolbox for years as marketers, but AI is a whole nother level. And we were talking about how, and I can say this because I'm a little biased, but marketing may be the function that is most disrupted by AI in a good way.

GREG: Feels like it. And why do you say in a good way? I'm not sure every marketer probably feels that way. Why do you think in a good way?

NOHA: I think there's just so much opportunity. We talk about, as marketers, the fact that it's kind of left brain, right brain, there's a whole bunch of things you can measure, but there's a whole bunch of things you can't. You do well when you are able to think analytically and build business cases and be very logical, but you actually also need to be creative in the field of marketing, and I think AI helps us do all that at much faster and better scale. I think this personalization that we've been talking about wanting to get to, that's made possible by AI, whether it's the creative, the media, the targeting, the measurement, all of that is just going to get exponentially better with AI and it's going to cause us to rethink all those workflows and all the ways we've historically gone to market and think about what's a new way that I can get to market that's faster, more personalized, more accurate, more measurable, all of the things.

GREG: Yeah, I've said this a lot publicly, I keep waiting for, I float — you don't know I'm doing this with you at the board — but sometimes I float stuff with the board just to see how you react. Do you really resist the idea? Does anybody fight it? I've said a couple of things in board meetings where I've had board members go, well, that's bullshit, a little bit, but I'm looking to see where people ... Okay, so I have said a lot both onstage and in meetings: It is inevitable that all ads will be created by machines and all ads will be delivered by machines. And I've not had anybody really take me to task on that, and I've kind of been wanting to say, well, no, there's a reason why not. I'm looking for the contrarian point of view. The issue is, of course, I'm just raising if that is fact, if that is what's going to happen, then what are we doing to get prepared for that? That's my responsibility to help you get there. But I do think it's funny, Noha, that nobody has taken me to task and argued another point of view on that, and it's not like there's wallflowers on the board. So I don't know.

NOHA: So I want to give you an example from my team.

GREG: Go.

NOHA: About a month ago, a group of colleagues on my team came to me and said, We want to present three different campaign ideas. I said, great. They presented all three campaign ideas and I said, I like this one. And they said, huh, that one was created by AI.

GREG: Oh my god.

NOHA: The other two were created by our agencies.

GREG: Ouch.

NOHA: As I asked more questions about that campaign that was created by AI, the individual who had created it showed me the first outcome when she went to AI for it. It was not good. She then showed me how she refined and trained the LLM to come back with something that she thought Noha would like. She also has built an agent that is predictive of what Noha will approve, what Noha will say.

GREG: So she had ... Wait, so it wasn't just meant to be an objective third ad, it was meant to be the ad that the machine knew you would like.

NOHA: Separately. So separately, she had built an agent that has learned from my podcast, my blog posts, my LinkedIn posts, emails between us, feedback I've given her, and so she had taken all ...

GREG: It's an extraordinary amount of effort, by the way. First off, what's their name? I like that kind of dig in. But go ahead. [laugh]

NOHA: Yeah, so I think the point of my story is, I don't know that we'll never get to a point where all ads are created by the machine and the media is bought by a machine. But I will say that the inputs matter, the judgment in the EQ of marketers as they're guiding these machines matters. And ultimately that's what I'm going to be looking for, if I still have a job, [laugh] when I hire people —

GREG: Understood.

NOHA: — as marketers is, it's very helpful to understand the core tenets of marketing. It's very helpful to understand customer insights. It's very helpful to understand what good creative looks like. Those are all really critical things for the modern marketer to be able to manage the machines that are going to be doing more and more of this work.

GREG: I do agree with that. It's funny that you say that because I notice my own behavior, and by the way, it interests me, you do. I don't know if this got into the meaning of all the other CMOs, but I continue to be surprised at how much my own behavior is now changing and interacting with chatbots, AI chatbots. It feels like it's compounding every week and how much more I depend on it. At the same time, I do really agree with you. I'll tell you what, here's ... I know it's a funny thing. Sometimes I'll go and I'll do something and it will give me a really fast answer, which is really exciting, but I almost feel like sometimes it's almost too much input for me then to make a decision on the thing. I'm not sure if I'm expressing this [well] . I don't really have the time to look at all the things it can tell me to go through. It's like it's almost making my job, at some regards, harder at some level rather than just using the judgment to get stuff done and move forward. I don't know, it's a funny dynamic. I don't know if anybody else has experienced that, but I don't know.

NOHA: Yeah, I think I have experienced something like that. Ultimately, it's the same thing that you have to do today with all the windows, or when you're doing a Google search and you click on all these links, you're having to look through all the stuff and then make your decision. Presumably it's summarizing some of that for you so that you don't have to go through all the links and have all the tabs open.

GREG: Supposedly. But still, there's so much information I still have to digest in order to interpret that, and then I have to go, well, no, that's just not right. I didn't ask ... I'll tell you what's interesting, it's teaching me that I don't always ask questions very well. I don't give direction well, which is what you find out if you manage a team, very quickly, you're not very good at it sometimes. But yeah, I often have to go back and say, I just didn't ask that in the right way because I know that's not the right answer.

NOHA: I think this reminds me a lot of when we were getting used to the idea of searching with keywords, it took a while, but then everybody started to think that way. Now, we have to start thinking in prompts and we have to learn how to write good prompts. And that in and of itself is the skill set that I was referring to earlier with this young woman on my team who's done a really nice job of being thoughtful in how she's engaging with her agent and the LLM to get to ideas that can be presented to the CMO.

GREG: Right. And I need to learn how to talk to machines. I mean, it's really that simple and it's a whole new thing. Okay, so listen, this is all really interesting. It's fascinating, and it certainly amplifies for me just what we're up against to go forward as an industry. And your joke there, will we still have jobs? I don't know, is my job ... I mean, I see a lot of stuff that could be done better and maybe the market job could be done better. We'll see. But here's a question I have for you.

GREG: As you look back — let's go back to the human part of this thing — as you look back over your career and you think about the things that were told to you, the advice that was given to you, that direction that — back to one of your original points there around how your career transformed and changed. Do you have a sense of what was some of the best advice you were ever given in your career?

NOHA: Yeah, absolutely. I look back now at my career — 20-plus years — and I tell the story of first I did this and then I did this and I this and it all seems to make perfect sense, as if I had a roadmap —

GREG: [laugh] Which you didn't.

NOHA: — and I knew exactly where I was going and where I was going to land, and I didn't.

GREG: See, you weren't even trying to be in marketing when you were in business school. So the thought of being a CMO would never have even entered your mind, right?

NOHA: No, it didn't. And I did get some good advice early on in my career, which was sometimes when you get to a fork in the road and you have to decide, am I going to stay in this job or take this new job? Am I going to change roles, am I going to change companies? Sometimes it can feel like the weight of the world on your shoulders to make that decision. But early in your career, the piece of advice is that it's generally not the right decision versus the wrong decision.

NOHA: Each path is going to lead you somewhere else and you're going to learn something new. And so take the burden off a little bit or the weight of that decision off and pick something and learn from it. You'll either like it or you won't, or you'll like parts of it or you'll learn something new.

And then, as you get further in your career, as you get a little bit more specific about what you might want to do in five years, then you can go and get that ideal job description. I want to be a CMO. Go get the biggest CMO job description, put it into Excel, take the qualifications and say, I have this, I don't have this, I have this, I don't have this. And then you can start to make your next career move decisions based on those gaps that you might need to fill. I did that myself probably about eight years ago, and I started to say, oh, I need this, I need this, I need this. And then I started to make decisions that would allow me to fill in some of those gaps so that I could become a CMO one day. And that was super helpful.

GREG: I got a funny question for you. Who did you look up to that you said, I want to have their job? I can remember early my career looking at some of my bosses and go, oh my God, I don't want their job. That does not seem like fun or interesting at all. I had a boss early in my career in a New York City advertising agency, she used to cry in her office all the time. I was like, I don't think I want that. [laugh]

NOHA: Yeah, I can't say it was any one person.

GREG: Was there anybody you looked at? Okay.

NOHA: No. I mean, obviously, Kellyn Kenny is a CMO that I've admired for a number of years and have learned so much from her. But I also just think, as I was getting further into VP of marketing roles and I had said, oh, earlier in my career I did this type of marketing, and then I added on, so at first I was in brand marketing at Animal Planet and I added on digital and social at Capital One, and now I'm going to do some performance marketing. And so you just kind of start to layer it on and say, oh, wait a second. A CMO gets to do all these things. That's kind of how it came clear in my mind that a] I wanted to do it, and b] I think I have some of the key building blocks, I just need to fill in a couple more.

GREG: Yeah, yeah. It's funny, my children now are at the age where they're starting in their careers and what I've said to them, I says, be very clear. Have a plan, create a vision board. I don't know what you want. It's the same conceptually. Have a goal, but then listen carefully and go where the winds take you. You really wouldn't know. I can't look back. I mean, I don't, I would've, you'd ever heard me say this, but when I was asked to step in and run the IB the first nonprofit trade, I didn't see myself doing nonprofits. I told the chairman at the time, he was the founder, CEO at CNET, Shelby Bonnie, I said, Shelby, I want to run a trade group. I said, that would be the dumbest effing thing I could do. That's what I said, my exact words. Now, you know I've been doing this a long time with a lot of passion, so it's very funny. I mean, we just don't know. It was not my goal, but for me it turned out perfectly. Isn't that funny?

NOHA: Yeah. I had similar situations in my career, frankly, where people would tap me on the shoulder and say, Hey, come do this. I'll remember very vividly at Capital One, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I was doing bank marketing, and someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, Hey, can you start our social media practice?

GREG: And you were like, what?

NOHA: I was like, What? Who me? I don't know anything about social media.

GREG: Social media? I don't even like people that much. Social media. Forget it. I don't know what you ... [laugh]

NOHA: And you know what they said to me?

GREG: What?

NOHA: They said, You're a smart marketer, you'll figure it out. There's nobody else who is an expert at this yet. It was early days. And they also said, and anyone who does know anything about this doesn't want to work at a bank, and you're already here.

GREG: Yeah. So that's right. We can't. We're screwed. We can't hire for it. You're the best we've got, just please go do this. And we are not really interested in hearing discussion, I think is what they said. [laugh]

NOHA: But I do think there's something to be said —

GREG: But how brilliant was that for you to learn that as an aptitude?

NOHA: Such a great experience for me to have that I built upon later. And so I will say, to more junior people in their careers, sometimes it takes somebody else seeing something in you for you to even start to believe that you could do something. And it's when the thing is new and when it's hard that you're going to learn the most.

GREG: Yeah. Yeah. It's funny you say that now. I think I've done a pretty good job of figuring out the world and moving forward. It's the opportunity of being older, you have a chance to look back and reflect on some of what happened there. I wish though ... But I'm shocked at how much I feel like I know now that would've been really beneficial to me back then, which is kind of a pitch for get some input from somebody, get some advice, get a perspective, find a mentor, somebody who cares about you that can help you address something. There are some complicated questions that come up along in a career. Correct?

NOHA: Yeah, agree. Yes. And I definitely used lots of mentors along the way and sometimes would check in with multiple mentors when I had to make a critical decision. And they're never going to make the decision for you.

GREG: They can't.

NOHA: But it does help to talk it through. And I've always had an open door to anyone on my team to the point where you have to actually tell people, I am going to give you advice that's in your best interest. I am not going to try to say, no, you shouldn't go, because selfishly, I want to keep you on my team. So if you are at a crossroads and you want to decide, should I apply to this job or should I apply to a business school, you can come talk to me. I'm not going to hold it against you. I'm not going to try to convince you to stay. I'm going to help you make the best decision for you.

GREG: Yeah. It's funny, I've said the same thing to people. In fact, I've actually, I have a funny spin on that. I tell people here all the time. I says, listen, if you think it's really time to go and we can have a conversation about that or not, I don't have any pretense about what you choose to do with your career, and I certainly won't take offense at it. However, talk to me a little bit about it, because it's important to me that I help you get to someplace successful because it makes us look good if you do that. That's my self-interest and the company's self-interest. I need you to go do better. Please don't go take a dumb job, okay? That doesn't make us look good. It looks like you weren't talented. It looks like you weren't good at what you do. It looks like you didn't work at a quality organization before. Isn't that funny? I do that a lot.

NOHA: Yeah.

GREG: I've had those debates with people over the years.

NOHA: Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. I just want people to be happy and to continue to grow, and it's okay to come and tell me, It's my time. I want to go.

GREG: Yeah. Help me align, though, to your goals. What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? Let me help you get there. Let me help fulfill on that. Please don't do something just because you feel this impetuous move [or] because somebody called you and they like you or something, that's not enough of a reason sometimes.

Okay.

GREG: Well, listen, let's go to the biggest question of building better CMOs. As you know, since you sit on the board and the kind of work that we do and what the MMA is all about and trying to find a way to improve upon marketing. Now, if you're going to improve upon marketing, it's good if you start with where you think the challenges are. So the question I always ask guests here is, what do you think we as an industry don't fully either understand, appreciate, we as marketers could be better at, would be well-served to be more appreciative of? And it can be a series of either ... You can go any way you want on this, but what do you think that marketing, marketers, CMOs should be better at?

NOHA: We've got a ton of tools at our disposal to continue to put marketing in the marketplace and measure marketing and tell the story about the impact of marketing.

GREG: We're getting better.

NOHA: And that's all. And we're getting better and we're continuing to work at it. But I do feel like sometimes, as everyone's focused on the clicks, the bookings, the sales, etc., that we lose focus a little bit on a higher-order purpose, which I think is critical to being successful as a company and as a marketer, which is that emotional connection with your consumer. At the end of the day, this is a human you're trying to connect with, and they are more likely to not just buy from you, but come back to you, be loyal to you, advocate for you if you've connected with them on a human emotional level. That's not just the advertising, that's not just putting the message in the right place at the right time. That goes to purpose of the company. It goes to values, it goes to how you make somebody feel when they experience your product or your service. And so I think the role of the marketer is often just boxed into, what did you deliver for me lately in terms of campaigns, revenue, etc.

GREG: Yeah. How many room nights did we get this week? Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure they read the reports every day, every minute.

NOHA: Which is the job. It is the job. But I do think the job is more rewarding, and frankly, you'll be more successful at the job if you can also think about and influence other parts of the business that ultimately all work together to get to that point where you have someone who truly loves your brand and who you don't have to work so hard to convince to buy again from you. I do manage the loyalty program, Choice Privileges, and that does create more value in the relationship and in wanting you to come back and rewarding you for doing that. But I would even say it's a step above that too. It's like someone who's actually going to talk about you and someone who's going to forgive you when you make a mistake as a brand and who is going to go out of their way to make sure that their next time that they're going to purchase a product from your service, that they start with your brand first. Those are things that I think are harder to measure and therefore sometimes forgotten is really ultimately what we want to achieve as marketers.

GREG: You as the CMO are the person to do that. And let me be fair, I don't know your CTO, your CFO, but the CFO doesn't think about building trust with customers, I don't think, that may not say their job or does the CTO, and there's maybe be other parts of the function that may be somewhere, but it's really going to be, so you are the person who has to take the leadership within the company, what you're advocating for, you're the person in the company who has to take leadership. Although you might not be responsible for customer experience, which is where trust might show up, you've got to make sure that somehow that tone and orientation is set in the company. Is that what you're saying?

NOHA: Yeah. Because ultimately when I'm selling you this room night, this room at a hotel, I'm making a promise to you that I'm going to deliver and you're going to get a good value for that money that you paid for it. And so while I may not be ultimately responsible for the entire experience from booking to staying ...

GREG: You're not checking them in or monitoring the fire alarms or, I don't know, whatever else can go wrong in a hotel.

NOHA: That's right. But I do want to make sure that the company is delivering on the promise that we made in that marketing or advertising. You can't do that if you're not reaching out into the organization and trying to influence other parts of that experience. And then I'll say, in a franchise business, there's another layer — level — of influencing that needs to happen with the owners of these hotels. They pour their life savings into these hotels, and they're responsible for running them. They carry our flag, our brand, and we try to make sure that we are explaining the value that we want them to deliver on behalf of our guests. We provide training and we provide awards and things when we see that they're delivering what we've promised. But it is ultimately pretty complicated and pretty challenging to try to influence all of that.

GREG: Trust is a very funny thing. Do people plan to have trust? Does anybody really set out? I mean, I think I actually do in my career, but I don't know if I do it for my company or if I focus on for my company. That feels so complicated.

NOHA: I have come across companies who have trust embedded in their purpose statement. I remember seeing a presentation from the New York Times a couple years ago where they really went hard at wanting to make sure that they had the truth.

GREG: And by the way, that was incredibly — I know the campaign — that was an incredible ... That's one of those campaigns we all wish we'd done, right?

NOHA: Yup. But it's so fitting for who they are and what they deliver. But I will say, I do think trust is one of those traits that every brand strives to earn with their end consumer. And it can be the little things. I was talking to a member of my team the other day, and she was sharing a story where her disabled brother had traveled a long way to get to a hotel. He was in a wheelchair, and he was very excited to go into the pool, and he saw that there was a lift next to the pool, and he went to go utilize that lift and it was broken. It didn't work. And so he had to go to the front desk and ask for help in how they could help him get that lift to work again. And it didn't, right? And so it's one of those things where —

GREG: That's trust broken.

NOHA: That's trust broken. And so it's one of those things where we need to make sure that as we market ourselves and say that you're going to be able to stay in an accessible room and we have an accessible pool, and all the things, that that experience all the way through is delivered upon, and that's how you build trust. And now if you do deliver on it, you definitely have that person's loyalty the next time they go to travel.

GREG: So that's trust: deliver what we say we're going to do. Where else does that come up? Where else can you embed trust? And do you do research against it, by the way?

NOHA: We do brand perception studies.

GREG: Okay, yeah.

NOHA: And trust is one of the characteristics that we track over time. We also have a very strong emphasis on what we call LTR, which is the likelihood to recommend, a score for every person who stays at one of our hotels. We are really focused on making sure that we hold our hotels accountable to continuing to work on that LTR score and that we're continuing to increase it. So again, it's not directly trust, but it is an NPS-type measure around whether or not you're likely to recommend it to other people. You're not going to recommend a place that you don't trust.

GREG: I don't know if it gets ... SLA makes a very legally contracting — so, service-level agreement — but you can put that in with the hotels and sort of encourage them. You can certainly train them about here's what customers really care about, because people can be unaware sometimes. So yeah, I guess there's a lot that you could really do to do that.

NOHA: Yeah. Yeah.

GREG: I think it'd be interesting to figure out the degree to which trust then ... I mean, I think you're right, especially, if I dare say, especially in today's times, we seem to have a lack of a trust. So to make that a primary thesis of business would make a lot of sense, or to make that a predominant, not primary, but predominant feature of a business would be important.

NOHA: And I think it's one of those really hard to reach feelings between a consumer and a brand. I was just thinking about this idea of, America is all about choice, giving everybody choice, and the internet that democratizes all the things you could buy, all the places you could go, right?

GREG: Oh my God, right.

NOHA: I do think that to think that you could build a relationship between a brand and a human that is anchored in trust, that would result in them almost blindly always picking you over some other option, I think that's a very high-order goal to go after. It's hard, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't try. And I think that's where I like to point my team, that we are the customer advocates in every conversation that we're in internally with our peers, and we are trying to get to that point of what I would call brand love and advocacy. And that's really ultimately what we should be trying to aim for with every touchpoint.

GREG: We've kind of said this in some other things, and there was an earlier conversation, listen, yours is a complicated marketing role. I mean, I work with a lot of CMOs, obviously, and I've often thought those with franchise businesses, you then complicate it with 22 different brands all wanting some attention, which is hard to satisfy all of them, and yet they need to be all unique. And then we've had a lot come up in MMA conferences about how the challenge for markers is that everybody in the C-suite thinks they do marketing as a side hustle. That was Dara Treceder who said that at one of our events one time. What didn't you see coming? Maybe what was the thing that said, oh boy, I don't know. I didn't know that was going to be as challenging. Look at that ... What's different in what you're trying to do? Because so many marketers are at franchisees, what's the lesson learned? I'm trying to look for a bit of wisdom out of your now experience having done it. And you've done it twice, because Hilton would've been similar, right?

NOHA: Yeah. I mean, I think I have learned a lot about what it takes to run your own business, really even more so than at Hilton. We have a lot of small business owners and an appreciation of all of the challenges that a franchise owner who owns a hotel has. I mean, think about today what's going on in the economy. You have labor prices going up, you have food and beverage prices going up, you have insurance costs going up. You have some consumers who've decided to take one less trip because, I don't know, is AI going to take my job? So I think ...

GREG: There is an uneasiness right now, everywhere.

NOHA: What I've learned is that it is not easy to run a hotel. I have a ton of respect for our owners. I've also learned the value of being a branded hotel. Because if you're an independent hotel and you're dealing with all those things, you don't have the kind of resources and what we call the franchisee success system that supports the hotels as they're trying to decrease costs. We have options for them to buy things in bulk at a much cheaper rate. We have global sales teams that send them RFPs for group business. We have a website and we have advertising that brings a bunch of people to our website to see their hotels. We offer so much support for these franchisees that it's this combination of we need to understand and appreciate everything that they're going through and really listen to their biggest challenges and concerns.

And then we need to provide solutions. And so I think people don't think about that side of the business because they're thinking about, you have a hotel room, you put furniture in it, you try to get a guest to stay in it, you give them food. No, we're really also in the business of helping hotel owners maximize the profitability of their business. And there are lots of operational challenges in running a business. We also are constantly thinking about what are new ways that we can continue to add value and help them run that business.

GREG: Yeah. No, listen, running a business is hard. Running a hospitality business feels extra hard. And you're right, if you don't have serious support ... Noha, this has been great.

GREG: I have a funny last question for you, though. I'm not sure, maybe the producer's going to cut this out. It's going to depend on how you answer. I wasn't thinking of it until just now. You ready? Do you like to travel?

NOHA: I love to travel.

GREG: Okay, good. Where's your favorite place to go?

NOHA: It is very hard to pick my favorite place, but I will tell you my favorite places that I've ever been have one thing in common.

GREG: Yeah. What's that?

NOHA: Blue water. White sand beaches.

GREG: [laugh] Well, that leaves a lot of room around the world.

NOHA: And not a lot of people.

GREG: Oh, is that right?

NOHA: So I recently came back from the Maldives. I mean, that was amazing.

GREG: Oh, you did do the Maldives. Yeah. That's everybody's bucket list, right? Has to be.

NOHA: Yes. That was amazing. Truly. It felt like I was at the edge of the earth because you could just see blue for miles and it's thousands of islands, and it was really something else. But there's also beautiful beaches and islands to visit near the US. I love Turks and Caicos. I love Anguilla. That's where you find me in my happy places is by blue water, white sand beaches.

GREG: I 100% agree with you on Turks and Caicos. And Anguilla, you said? Is that the one?

NOHA: Yeah.

GREG: I'm on my way there. I think we're there in February or so. Something like that. I have to remember, February, March. Yes, totally. Yeah, too nice. Too nice. A special place of the world.

Well, listen, Noha, this has been great. I can't thank you enough for doing this. I appreciate you being on the board and helping us. I love the fact, I mean, just for the listener, I mean, when I wrote a limited number of board members that I knew would be somewhat predisposed due to agentic AI, and I says, Hey, by the way, my big event in Santa Barbara is coming up in three weeks. I need you to make a decision really fast, and you got to commit some time and resources. Are you in? And you didn't hesitate initially and you didn't hesitate in the whole thing.

NOHA: Yep. I'm in.

GREG: And the board totally appreciated you leaning in like that because I do think we really learned a lot. I think everybody got a glimpse into the future because of that. Right?

NOHA: Yep. We all did. Yeah.

GREG: Great stuff. Excellent.

NOHA: Thank you.

GREG: Thank you.

NOHA: Thanks for having me.

GREG: You bet.

Thanks again to Noha Abdalla from Choice Hotels for coming on Building Better CMOs. Check the description of this episode for links to connect with Noha. Now, if you like this episode, you might also enjoy my conversation with Zena Arnold, the CMO of Sephora. We talked about the value of brand as performance, the growing number of customers who buy online, but pick up in store, and how you turn those customers into brand ambassadors. You'll find that episode and every episode of Building Better CMOs on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're hearing me now. At MMA, we are working to make marketing matter more through conferences, research and education. If you want to get to know more, visit MMAglobal.com, or you can email me directly, greg@mmaglobal.com. Now don't forget, Building Better CMOs is now on YouTube. Just go to bettercmos.com/youtube to start watching today. Our producer and podcast consultant is Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm. Artwork is by Jason Chase, and a very special thanks to Angela Gray and Dan Whiting. This is Greg Stuart. I'll see you in two weeks.