Citi CMO Alex Craddock

ALEX CRADDOCK: Because if you want to get to the next level, you need to understand what motivates you. There's a lot of great people out there who are really good at what they do, from a functional point of view, an understanding of the discipline, how they execute and deliver. But what you realize — and this was sort of my aha moment — is as you get more senior in your role, you actually end up doing less and less of that. Your role does change. And if you want to continue to grow, you need to be able to find a reward in it beyond just the joy that you have in marketing as a discipline.

GREG STUART: Welcome to Building Better CMOs, a podcast about how marketers can get smarter and stronger. I am Greg Stuart, the CEO of the nonprofit MMA Global. And that voice you heard at the top is Alex Craddock, the Chief Marketing and Content Officer at Citi, the third largest banking institution in the U.S. Before Citi, Alex also held marketing leadership roles at Visa, Xerox, BlackRock, and HP.

Today on the podcast, Alex and I are gonna talk about bringing a strategic approach to content and new media; understanding what really motivates you; and the importance of taking risks and breaking the rules. How very un-corporate of him!

This podcast is all about the challenges marketers face and unlocking the true power that marketing can have. Alex is gonna tell us how he did that right after this.

GREG: Alex Craddock, welcome to Building Better CMOs.

ALEX: Hey Greg, great to be here. Thank you.

GREG: Yeah, that was great. I know we've been trying to get this on the calendar. I was very excited. Listen, you're a Brooklyn guy, aren't you? You live in Brooklyn?

ALEX: I am a Brooklyn guy, yeah. I've been in Brooklyn Heights now for nearly a year. Yeah.

GREG: Oh my goodness. See, I'm claiming how cool I am in Brooklyn. I've been there seven years now.

ALEX: Oh, you're way cooler than me. I'm just trying to get some of that coolness to rub off on me.

GREG: I don't know how much time you spend going over to Williamsburg. My daughter lives over there. I go over there and I go, oh yeah, this is the cool Brooklyn, and this is where I'm not allowed or belong.

ALEX: I'm not sure Brooklyn Heights is that cool.

GREG: Yeah, I know, but it is. It's very funny, too. Listen, I've been in New York over three decades at this point, and you would never go to Brooklyn. I mean, Brooklyn Heights would be like the only place you would go. And then now it's become the coolest place in the world. I mean, do you introduce yourself when you're in other parts of the world? Do you say you're in Brooklyn or you say you're in New York City?

ALEX: Oh, I say I'm in Brooklyn. I wear it with a bit of pride.

GREG: Yeah, me too.

ALEX: I couldn't even tell you where I got that from, but I do. I wear it with a little bit of pride.

GREG: It is, it's just a thing today. It's a very funny thing. Well, listen, I'm sure the listeners here, depending where they are, have not really come on to hear a rendition of how great we are at being in Brooklyn, how cool we are. But for the first time in my life, I feel cool at least if nothing else. So listen, Alex, you are over at Citi as the chief marketing and content officer, right?

ALEX: That's right. Yeah.

GREG: So I guess this is the immediate question. I think everybody in the podcast — hopefully, given the name of it — sort of understands that we focus on chief marketing. Why put chief marketing and content officer on there? What's the 'and content'? I don't know if I've seen that a lot by marketers.

ALEX: No, I think it's pretty rare, if not unique actually. And it's sort of interesting when they approached me for the role, it was a question I asked: why 'and content'? I've always just thought of content as a part of marketing.

GREG: I thought it was just a thing, right, exactly right.

ALEX: But I think the point that was made to me — and now I'm in the firm, and I've been here nearly a year now is absolutely true — is one, content is incredibly important, particularly on our institutional wealth businesses. And as with any large organization, and having worked in a few, I've seen this in other places, there is no shortage of content creators.

But clearly you do have a shortage of clients and client attention, and therefore there's a lot of work that we need to do to make sure that the content that we're putting out there actually meets the needs of our clients. It reaches them in the right places, and we deliver it in the right format. And what I mean by that is moving away from the PDF white paper, which can be quite popular in the financial services industry, and really embracing things like podcasts and video and short-form written, et cetera. So that was one part. And then the other part is actually I have the marketing function under my remit, as you would expect. So the business marketers and the enterprise marketers, but I also have Citi's global insights team, which is basically our thought leadership engine. And they are producing a huge amount of content which they use to communicate the great insights and thought leadership that they bring to life around the world. It was a nod to that as well. So we recognize that it is marketing, but it's marketing plus a few other things.

GREG: Yeah, that's really interesting, especially in your business. It is. Listen, at the end of the day, how much money can you make me? How can you protect my financials? But there's so much education that needs to be done for consumers around that, and/or businesses. So, very interesting. Have you ever seen anybody else with a content officer title?

ALEX: I haven't. And what's interesting is I think as more and more people know I've got the title, particularly those that are in the content world, they're like, "Hey, come and speak at this event. Come and sit on a panel. Why is it that content has been raised within your title to a point of great importance?" And I think it's a great question, and I think it does... I mean, for the reasons I said, but I think it also recognizes the fact that content has become so important as part of the marketing mix. And I think particularly in a financial institution the size of Citi where, yes, we have a huge retail bank here in the US. But outside of the US, it's wealth, it's services, it's corporate banking, investment banking, as well as markets. Content is your lifeblood there. To your point, that's how you are educating.

It's how you're making your clients appreciate what it is you have to offer them, how it can help them meet their needs. But also you've got to package it in the expertise and thought leadership and insights that you can bring beyond just the products and services and solutions. So it's an incredibly important part of what we do, but as with everything in every firm, we can do it a lot better. And I think as clients evolve, we need to evolve our approach. And that was very much the sort of logic behind putting that in my title.

GREG: Hey Alex, we'd be remiss then not to take advantage of others that are asking you to speak on it. What is your orientation — and we've got a bunch of other topics to get to — but what is your orientation to what it means to be great at content? What's your philosophy around great content? Go with the question any way you want. If you're going to be a great content officer, what does that mean? What does that mean? Yeah, what does success look like?

ALEX: So I think my simple answer would be, I think it's really understanding what you're trying to achieve, who you therefore need to speak to. And in simple terms, what's the best way to do that? And I think that sounds very logical, that's just sort of strategy. But what you tend to find in a lot of large organizations is a lot of content creation and authoring happens outside of the marketing function. So you're working with product partners, business heads, and they are creating a lot of content, but they're not always doing it with that sort of simple checklist in mind in terms of what am I actually really trying to achieve? Who do I really need to speak to? What's the best way of actually doing that? And I think what invariably happens is a poor marketer in one of the marketing teams suddenly gets all this content on their lap and being told to send it out and get it in front of as many clients as you possibly can. And I'm kind of exaggerating to make a point, but I think what we've got to try and do, particularly in the role that I'm in, is make sure we bring that more strategic approach to content and we bring it to content at the authoring stage, not just, "Hey, now I've produced it, please, can you get this out for me?" Because I think it's sort of the old mantra of, "We'd like to do less great content," which sort of sounds a little bit oxymoronic. But it's like we want fewer pieces, but I want it to be great.

And I think if you think about that from the client experience, if we literally sent out everything that we were producing, our client would probably get bombarded multiple times a day, every day of the year.

We've got to be much, much smarter. And we've got to think about that holistic experience as well. Because we have clients... we have five businesses here in Citi. We have clients who can be a client of every single business. And if we don't actually recognize the fact that they are a client of every single business, you could multiply their content experience by five, it could get very, very busy and very, very noisy for them. So that's a lot of what we're looking at as well. So that's what I would say to your question around what's great content.

GREG: Alex, this is very interesting. You're right. I think there's this tone in marketing that goes "Yeah, and we do this content thing." It's some sort of add-on. And it's funny, before you said it, I was thinking, yeah, we do need a holistic view. Let me ask you a different question around that. So you manage the advertising budgets, I assume. Advertising teams, advertising agencies, the budgets, media and all that. How does that integrate with content? But I think my bigger question is now that you're the chief content officer also, how does that then relate to the paid market? Have you changed your opinion and now that you have command of this whole dramatic area — sometimes that was just put over to comms or like you said to the product people — what's your relationship?

ALEX: And more often than not, content distribution was via email, or you'll throw it on a website and you'll send them on a link. And I think what we're now saying is, for some client segments, it's actually not about a paid ad-like message terminology. It's let's use our content in different formats to be the piece that they actually engage with that is amplified by paid media. So that could be a short-form video, it could be the tease for a podcast. It could be a very short three or four line summary of something you actually want them to go and read. But let's get their attention in that paid media environment and then pull them to the longer-form content if they want to go to it. So it's becoming, again, much more strategic in terms of what are we actually pushing out there? And often an ad, particularly for a B2B decision maker, an ad is not going to break through.

GREG: Not going to do it.

ALEX: It's going to be really hard to get their attention and get them to actually go, "Yeah, this is something I want to find out more about." A piece of content? You can actually do that.

GREG: I was talking to somebody at one of the consultancies the other day, another content, a thought leadership-oriented kind of organization. And it was very interesting. She said something I didn't see coming. She says she does almost all paid advertorial or paid content dynamics, and it was a significant part of the budget that she was doing. And it caught me off guard. If I take my old line of thinking — and excuse the listeners who maybe think I'm dopey here and didn't get this — but it's like I always thought you don't really go for advertorial. I wouldn't think it would work. I thought I ignored it as a consumer. No consumer really knows what they do, but I thought I ignored it. But she was saying no. She goes, I see the performance and that stuff really... Paid content. And a lot of us who come from — I come from media — I thought we shunned that kind of thing. And yet she was saying it was a really powerful part of what she was doing. Do you have an opinion on that?

ALEX: Yeah, I do. And if I think of my time here at Citi, my time before at BlackRock...

GREG: At BlackRock, right.

ALEX: Paid advertorials, or native content as we tended to call it because it sounds slightly better, was incredibly powerful. Working with a media partner, like a Bloomberg for example or a Wall Street Journal, and saying we have a really great piece of content that we would love to introduce into your experience, but in a way that makes it feel like a part of your experience rather than an interruptive ad. And for them, what's appealing beyond the fact it's paid is if it's good content, it's actually additive to their experience. And we ended up with Bloomberg actually co-creating content together. So it would feel like a Bloomberg editorial piece, but it would be co-created with us and we'd be bringing insights alongside their insights and producing this content around it with their in-house studios. So I think it's a really interesting space, and I think particularly in the B2B space and those of us in technology, pharma, financial services, where you're dealing with a complex product and you probably need more space and time to be able to tell your story in an engaging way than a normal ad format would give you, it's become incredibly powerful.

GREG: Yeah, that's so interesting, Alex. It's really kind of reeducating. And I talked to somebody in one of the social medias — I won't say which one, doesn't really matter. But I was talking to somebody there and I asked him... Because I remember social media when you could build a page or you could find a way to get attention through organic. And I said to her, is that at all? She goes, not a chance. Not a chance. Of course, those businesses — and I respect that — are probably pretty oriented to making sure that they're pushing people towards paid. I mean, that's their business. And so it's kind of saying the same thing. It's like if I want sort of a professional distribution, I can't just depend on if I write it, they will read it. I mean, that's a failed strategy, right?

ALEX: I mean, yeah, that was definitely at the beginning of social media. That was how it worked.

GREG: Yeah, I remember.

ALEX: That organic reach, and then they realized there was a lot of money to be made by throttling that organic reach. Even people who follow you, I think you're seeing basis points of that audience if you post something organically. And also if you want to use it effectively, and I think social media has just evolved so massively as everybody knows, the sophistication of targeting now is quite unbelievable. So actually when you are paying, you're getting a very sophisticated way of targeting your client audience with your content that honestly you wouldn't enjoy in an organic world where anybody could be following you. So I think it's a really interesting space.

GREG: Interesting. I'm kind of curious, just in your opinion then we'll kind of move on then to the core of the topics here. I'm just curious. You also spent eight years at Visa. So you've been around financial service. You mentioned BlackRock earlier, but you've been around financial services for quite some time now. Does it feel that much different today than it did some number of years ago when you were part of Visa or beyond or some of the other financial services? Do you kind of go, wow, the world's just changed so dramatically? And either in this content area or even just beyond. I'm just curious.

ALEX: I think, yeah, it does feel different. I mean, I think obviously my time in financial services... Actually, Visa was longer than that. I was in the US for eight years, but I was in Asia before that with Visa and then in Europe with Visa before that. So I think total it was somewhere like 12, 13 years. So I'm sort of dating myself. It was long before social media arrived. So I think, yes, it has changed a lot. I think the social media, the data technology revolution. I think the sophistication of what we're able to do with the data that we have first party, but as well second and third-party data has made it a lot more sophisticated in terms of how we are marketing our products, particularly on the retail side. But I think what's really changed most significantly is how the sort of traditional B2B financial services companies have embraced marketing.

I remember when I went to BlackRock, which was a while ago, but marketing equaled sales support. And I remember being told that. It was like, we don't really do marketing like you did at Visa. We do sales support. And I'm like, I get that, but I'm not just a sales support guy. In fact, if I'm anything, I'm not a sales support guy. And the power for marketing comes beyond just the sales support piece. And it was a really exciting journey to go on to actually educate folks in the marketing department as well as your partners across the firm on the power of what I would call strategic marketing and how it can be a really powerful compliment to some great sales support. And it gives you that scale reach that you're never going to get through a Salesforce, and you couldn't afford to scale your Salesforce. And I think I was at BlackRock at an amazing time where it grew from 6,000 people to 22,000 people. Assets more than doubled. It was just an absolutely wild time. And so it was sort of almost serendipitous that I was there at a time when they needed to embrace marketing because they had to to be able to reach the clients at scale around the world that they were doing business with and supporting, and making sure that we were harnessing the power of strategic marketing to build the brand and build the business.

But that's where I think the biggest change has really been, I guess in my time in financial services.

GREG: It's funny you say that. I'll take it even back to sort of B2B for a moment. I go through a process every year doing nominations for the board, who do we want to add into the board and what CMOs do we want to talk to? And it was about, I guess, four or five years ago, the board stepped up and said, we need more B2B CMOs. And the trend that was going on was Alicia Tillman's over at SAP, now at Delta. Dara Treseder ends up at Autodesk now. So I mean, you've seen a lot of these big B2B companies, tech companies really reach out for, dare I say, more consumer-oriented, professional, sophisticated CMOs. It's really interesting. It's changed a lot.

ALEX: It's fascinating. Yeah, really fascinating.

GREG: Well, listen, speaking of all that, though, let's get into our first topic here. Alex, what's the best advice you've ever been given? Listen, I don't know about you, but I've had all sorts of experiences where people have said things to me that I still retain today. Now some of it's bad advice, by the way. You can always go there if you want. Sometimes I look back and go, that was really... In fact, there's one in particular that has taught me that I'll never go back to. I go, that's exactly what propelled me to the career I have today, which is very funny, but that's a whole other point. But what's the best — we can go with good advice you think you've received over your career?

ALEX: Like you, I've had a lot of great advice and I've had some not so great advice in my career. But I think when you shared this question with me, where I go in my mind is what's been the most meaningful piece of advice? What's really made a difference in not just my career but also my life, I guess more broadly? And I think that the advice really was — it was probably about 10, 12 years ago when I was told or advised, probably more accurately — you need to figure out why you're doing what you're doing. What is it that really motivates you to get up in the morning?

GREG: I love that.

ALEX: Because you get to a point in your career where you're working really hard, you're having an element of success. You're at that inflection point in your career where you're taking on more and more, your teams are growing, your responsibility is growing, and you can actually forget why you are really doing what you're doing because you're so wrapped up in the day-to-day of everything and the responsibility and the pressure that comes with that. And I hadn't ever thought about it before, and I didn't really think about why I needed to think about it. And I sort of took it away as a question. I was like, I need to do some homework on this. And I was very lucky at the time because I had an executive coach that I was just using anyway because the firm made them available. And so I started working with her and I said, "I've got this really big question that I was advised I needed to answer."

GREG: Who asked you the question, Alex? Can you say, not the person, but what was their relationship?

ALEX: It was actually my CMO at the time.

GREG: Oh, okay. And do you know why she or he asked the question of you?

ALEX: Because if you want to get to the next level, you need to understand what motivates you. Because you get to a point... I think you see this in every function. There's a lot of great people out there who are really good at what they do from a functional point of view, an understanding of the discipline, how they execute and deliver. But what you realize — and this was sort of my aha moment — is as you get more senior in your role, you actually end up doing less and less of that and more of leadership in its broader sense. And yes, the experience and the expertise you've acquired on your career journey is incredibly helpful.

And it's great when you're sitting with teams and you can ask more informed questions, you can share advice and give some thoughts, but your role does change. And if you want to continue to grow, you need to be able to find a reward in it beyond just the joy that you have in marketing as a discipline. And that was kind of where the question came from.

GREG: Or the money you're being paid because that ain't enough to carry through...

ALEX: That ain't enough.

GREG: In fact, you start to resent the money at some point.

ALEX: We all realize that at some point in a career that it's actually got to be for a lot more than just the money. And so I did the work with the executive coach around what is it that motivates me? And actually what was fascinating about the journey — and this is why I think it was the most meaningful piece of advice I was given — is we didn't start in the context of my working life and my career. We started in my life, my personal life.

What is it that you get excited about? Show me the real excitement, Alex, not the corporate excitement because you're suddenly on a stage and you've got to be. It's like what really excites you? And it was fascinating sort of unpacking the things in my personal life that motivate me, but then parlaying them into, "What does that look like in the corporate world for you?" And long story short, where I ended up was with a purpose statement or a motivating statement for myself, which is all around what motivates me and excites me: Creating an environment where my team can do their very best work, achieve ambitious goals, and do so while growing and developing themselves, but in an environment where they feel respected, valued, and recognized.

GREG: Oh, wow.

ALEX: And what has been fascinating about that is it was really motivating for me and actually made me think about my role in a very different way. It wasn't actually about the things I was delivering because I actually didn't deliver a lot of things myself. It was about creating an environment where my team had the support and the culture where they could be incredibly successful and deliver the phenomenal things that together add up to what we as a marketing function have to deliver that then helps build the brand and build the business. And what I also found is it gave me a much greater meaning to my role. It became something that was much, much bigger than just the job as I had sort of previously defined it. And I realized it was something that really, really matters to me. And I think now, I use it as a filter for what I do and what I don't do. It's like if what I'm about to do doesn't help deliver on this, then I probably shouldn't be doing it.

I also use it to find a huge amount of satisfaction and reward in what I do. If I see somebody that has achieved something they didn't think was going to be possible. If I've seen someone grow their career in a meaningful way because I've created an environment where they could do that. If I've seen the joy that people have when their great work or even their smaller contribution has been recognized and valued by myself, that's something that makes me feel great about what I do and makes me believe that as a leader we have way more impact beyond just the output and the outcomes that we drive. It's how we are impacting the team as individuals and impacting their lives at work and outside of work. So that was the best advice I ever got, but it's been something I've lived by ever since.

GREG: I loved this part about working with a coach. I think if you are trying to be a high-performance person — which obviously your role is, everybody on this podcast absolutely is — then you're crazy to do it alone.

ALEX: It's very hard.

GREG: I mean, every great athlete needed a coach and not because they weren't super talented, but you need somebody outside of yourself to kind of point you in the right direction, I think.

ALEX: They point you in the right direction, they challenge you on things that, yeah, you might be thinking about, but it's very hard to push yourself because you get distracted by other things that do matter, and therefore carving the time out to really do that work on yourself is difficult. I think when you have the discipline of a coach, it's amazing where you can get to. And like I said, not just how it helps you in your career, but how it actually helps you in your life more broadly. I mean, I would say I learned a lot about myself going through that exercise.

And all the things I was doing that I just sort of thought it's just what I do, but I hadn't really thought, why do I do it? And I realized why it really matters to me. So yeah, it was a great piece of advice, and I'm very grateful I was pushed to do it.

GREG: There was an article in either the Times or The Wall Street Journal here about a year ago, maybe plus two years ago, that was basically a reflection of Harvard MBAs. And part of the thesis is that they basically said that there's a big bid in companies now — it just came up in what you said, made me think of it — about helping to promote happiness amongst employees. There's a big focus around that. And the variations, you had job satisfaction and feel good. There was a happiness component to what you said. And it was interesting what they said, but what they needed to do is they needed to make sure they understood. They said, we need to make our MBAs understand happiness. How can you make somebody else happy if you're not there?

ALEX: So true.

GREG: I think there's an element of what you're saying there for you to sort of understand your own happiness, your own success, and then help bring that for others. I think it feels like part of that. There was a lot you said there, but that was part of the self-reflection I think I heard.

ALEX: Yeah, very much.

GREG: Do you have a sense — this is a hard question because you don't really have a pre and post kind of on this thing — but do you have a sense of how that has then changed your relationship to your team and even maybe others in the company?

ALEX: I'd say one, it's made me a lot happier and it's made me feel less like you're on a corporate treadmill. If you know a work treadmill, it's not just about big corporate. It's just like you can just work, work, work Monday to Friday and a bit Saturday, a bit Sunday. You don't have to stop and think about what you're actually doing.

I now really enjoy what I do because I appreciate the impact is way bigger than just output and outcomes. I think what it did, as well as it taught me that to be a leader — which if you're a CMO, you are a leader, you're a leader of a big function, big organization. It goes way beyond just that functional experience, functional expertise, and being able to develop strategy and allocate budget and all those good things to create that environment where a thousand-plus people can be incredibly successful and do amazing things. That's the power of leadership for me. And I think it helped me really understand what leadership was. I mean, you read lots of books around leadership, and some of it's very aligned, some of it can be a little contradictory. But I think sort of appreciating that that's what leadership is, and when you start to think about other great leaders, you realize that actually that's what they're doing. They are creating that environment. And I think it just made me reshape the role in my mind a little bit.

GREG: What do you think is the best advice you've given to people, by the way, or given to someone? I realize that wasn't a part of our original script, but I'm just listening to you here. What have you said to others? You have a self-reflective bit to you that you can tell you've thought about this, you process it, you've oriented towards it. And I hear the care and concern. And I saw, as I did some pre-learning review, some of what your philosophies are, look at the world, there is a real orientation in you, like what can you do to be helpful to others? I hear that in what you do. Hard to know. The best advice is the one that they listen to, I guess. But I don't know what that is.

ALEX: No idea which one that is. No, I mean I think the one that I give consistently... And I think it's interesting, it's probably in response to questions I get because you get to a certain level and people go, "How did you get there? What have I got to do?" And it was interesting when I first joined Citi, there were a lot of people at different levels in the organization who proactively put time in my calendar, and we had a meeting, we had a call.

And it was like, "I just want to pick your brains and I want to understand how did you get here? What can I learn from you?" I'm at this stage of my career and I'm like, that's really interesting. And so I guess I can't say I've got any great pearls of wisdom on how I got here because everybody is slightly different. But I said the one thing that I did do that I was very lucky in the sense I was told to do it very early on in my career. Literally, I think I was nine months into my grad training program at Renault. So I started off in a French car company. He was like, own your career. Own your career from day one. Be very clear what it is you want to do next. Let people know that even if it sounds completely crazy, let people know that you are that ambitious, that you have a clear plan, you know what you want to do next, ask for help and guidance on how you get there. And you'll be amazed at what happens.

So it doesn't always work out that you get the role, but what you will do is you'll get a lot of people leaning in who are willing to support and guide you and steer you and develop you. So if it's not right for you that particular year, you're going to be right for it the year after because someone is actually helping you get there. And I think having that clarity of what it is you want to do and not being afraid to throw it out there and not being afraid to scare yourself a little bit. And I think probably everybody who's been on these podcasts with you would have moments in their career where they've gone, "Oh my god, what have I asked for now?"

GREG: Oh shit. I think it's called oh shit. I think that's the technical actually business term for it. It's in MBA programs.

ALEX: This felt like a great idea, but now I'm in it. But I think you need to be comfortable putting those things out there and having that 'oh shit' moment when suddenly you get it. Because if you don't put it out there, you're never going to get it. And I still see it today, I'd say there aren't enough people owning their careers and really having clarity about what they want to do and the help that they need to get there. And I think it goes back a little bit to what you're saying about an executive coach or mentors who I think are very, very important in any successful person's career, they can only help you if you know where you're trying to go.

They're not going to be able to tell you that. And I find it interesting in development conversations over my years as a manager and a leader. "So what do you think I should do next?" Well, hell, I could give you 20 things, but what do you actually want to do next?

GREG: But what do you want to do?

ALEX: I don't really know. I was lucky, like I said, nine months in, someone told me, go and be bold. Own this. It was great.

GREG: And we'll move on, but I got this one for you. So what did you think it was when you were at Renault, and how different is it today? I don't even have to know you that well. How different is today than what you actually set out to do, right?

ALEX: So different. I mean, this is the wonderful thing about careers is they go off in weird and wonderful journeys in different times. But no, at Renault I was on a graduate training program, which I must admit after nine months of doing lots of different things, I'm like, I'm bored of doing lots of different things. I want a real job.

And there was an area manager job in the north of England in a place called Manchester that was... I don't even think it was put on an intranet because there wasn't one. It was probably sent around in a memo. And I remember going to my boss and I said, "I want to do this." And he was like, "Well, why?" And I was like, "Because this is where you go and learn what it's like working with franchise dealers. You really learn the business and if I want to grow my career..." Way too early for you to do that was the advice. So then in a rather cheeky kind of what you do when you're 23, I picked the phone up to the guy who was the hiring manager and I said, "Hey, I'd love you to consider me for the role." And he was great. And he was like, let's get together. We talked about why I wanted to do it. He was super honest and said, "Look, I think it's probably too soon." But he said, "I'm really excited that you applied for it." And the crazy thing is I ended up getting it.

GREG: You did? Oh my god, that's so funny.

ALEX: So I moved to Manchester, which I never thought I would do in my life. And that took my career off in a completely different trajectory.

GREG: Manchester to Singapore to New York City. Who knew?

ALEX: I know.

GREG: It really is. I mean, Alex, I think your hunch is right: have a goal, have an orientation, be open to whatever happens.

And then pay attention, learn yourself, know what's next, make the best decisions you can. I mean, I really think life is just about making slightly better decisions than you otherwise might. I've had a guy here on retainer for 10 years, PhD in organizational psych. Ten years he's been on retainer here. And it's just about helping us as a team individually, especially, make better decisions. It's so important. I just need to get clear. Like okay, why are we doing this? And he brings such a wealth of knowledge that you couldn't have, you couldn't get enough experience that he's got.

ALEX: Yeah, that's amazing.

GREG: Okay. Well listen here, we've got to get to the core. We're having too much fun with all these other things. We've got to go create some better CMOs now.

ALEX: Alright, let's try.

GREG: MMA is all about trying to fix stuff. As a nonprofit trade association, my job is to make the world of marketing and CMOs, in particular, better. And so as you look out in your experience — whether it's here or BlackRock, I don't care where you draw upon, that's fine. And maybe it's all of them or none of them. But as you look out and say, this is the thing I think marketers don't necessarily either fully appreciate, they might not respect it, they might not really... That you think the marketing industry just doesn't spend enough time. Again, I'm on a hit list here for what else can we go fix? So what do you think it is that we might be missing the mark?

ALEX: It's a great question. I guess any CMO, and I'm sure many of us that have joined you on the podcast, we sit there and go, right, what are we missing?

GREG: We don't often have that conversation. Usually we talk about how great you are. That's what most podcasts... All due respects to the CMOs. It's a lot of hero worship in these podcasts, and I appreciate that. That's just not what our focus is here. We're going to try to make it better, but go ahead.

ALEX: But it's true. We should all be taking a step back and go, what are we missing? What is it that we could be doing a little bit better? And I think there are topics like measurement and accountability that, yes, we know. I think I've been saying this for way too long, so I'm not going to say that again. But there are things like that that we have got to get much, much better at. But I think as I was thinking about this question in this context, there were a couple of things that are closely related that I think as an industry we need to step up on.

And I say this because I look at a lot of what is out there. More often than not, I think you could take a piece of content or an ad-like object, and you could remove one brand and put a competitor brand on it, and it would actually work. And I think in the world we are operating in today where there is a proliferation of content from brands, from us as consumers, and everything in between, if that is something that can happen to your work, the chances of you standing out and that message or that moment of engagement being attributed to you and actually going on and changing perception and ultimately behavior is probably not going to happen. So for me, number one, we've got to recognize the power of challenging the status quo.

GREG: Okay.

ALEX: Being bold, being visionary, being willing to take some risks, being willing to push ourselves to do things that stand us apart from our industry, from our competitors, the conventions, the tropes of our industry. Yes, it can feel incredibly uncomfortable, particularly when you are going on the journey and you initially launch something because you don't... I mean you do all the testing and you hope it's going to work, but you've got to be brave. Particularly in a large corporate organization to kind of go, "Hey, you know what? We're going to do something really quite different to what we've done in the past and what everybody around us is doing. Because I really believe that's the way that we're going to be able to stand out, breakthrough, engage in a meaningful way, and have that engagement attributed to us as a brand that'll change perception and ultimately behavior."

GREG: But hey Alex, I've got to say, though, if you're suggesting risk taking, that sounds very uncorporate of you, by the way.

ALEX: It is risk taking. And it's funny, I mean I've done a lot of these, I guess, psychometric tests they call them. And what always comes out on mine is he's a little bit of a rule breaker...

GREG: There's nothing wrong with a little bit of that.

ALEX: But you break the rules, you break them in a thoughtful and considered way. They don't go around creating chaos and mayhem. But I think as CMOs, I think we're in one of the few seats in an organization where you can break a few rules, and you can be a little challenging and get people to maybe look and think about things in a slightly different way to the way they would naturally look and think about them because of the conventions that we all get wrapped up in. I say that with zero criticism, it's what you're surrounded by. It served me well at Visa, I would say it's where I started to get braver. BlackRock, particularly with iShares and the ETF industry as it was, if iShares had followed the conventions of that industry we would've been doing the same old stuff as everyone else. And we wouldn't have stood out. The fact that we were completely different and we completely disrupted that space is what helped the phenomenal growth of iShares to happen. And here at Citi, we're asking ourselves similar questions.

GREG: How did you do that with iShares? Maybe go back to that for a moment, since it's such a current role. Yeah, I mean, what would be different about that? What's taking a chance? What's that look like?

ALEX: So taking a chance, I mean, one of the big observations and one of the first things we did was actually take a step back and say, what are the conventions of the industry? And in simple terms, there's a lot of blue and green. They have been proven to be sort of safe colors in the world of financial services.

GREG: We've all read the same book. Right, exactly. Yeah.

ALEX: There were a lot of pictures of very happy people of a certain age walking off into the sunset with their amazing retirement where everyone's either on a tropical beach or on a yacht or owns a vineyard. And you're kind of like who are these people? I mean, I'd love my retirement to been like that.

GREG: I've not met them.

ALEX: Yeah. And then there would be this sort of language, either headline or copy, that literally you would read it, you'd go, I actually don't know what that says. I'm not sure I can actually play that back to my mom because I'm not sure what it says. So we sort of did this whole assessment and went, there's an opportunity for a brand that can come in and be straight talking, use real language, does so in a highly engaging visual way.

So we embraced a really bold color palette. We used big, bold headlines. Our copy and call to action was fun and simple to understand. We used a lot of video rather than just print. And we were very targeted about what we were doing. And I mean a lot of what we were doing as well was trying to talk to this sort of emerging older millennial that was starting to step into the marketplace thinking about, "What do I do with my money? How do I grow my wealth, particularly with an eye on retirement or an eye on college for my kids," or whatever it might be. You were not going to get them with happy people of a certain age sitting on a yacht with this strange language that no one understood because you wouldn't know what to do. And it proved to be incredibly, incredibly successful. But you can imagine at the time when we first put this forward as a marketing function, everyone looked at us like we were crazy.

GREG: Did they? Yeah, I was going to say, so of course the obvious question, what was the response or what was the initial reaction or what did you hear from people?

ALEX: The initial response was, "We probably should have kept him doing sales support."

GREG: Remember that box we had him in before? Can we put him back in the box?

ALEX: It's like, this is crazy. How do we know this is going to work? And obviously we'd done all the usual testing and validation, and the insights were there to inform it. And I was lucky that I managed to get a few key players on board who trusted me, which I think gets nicely to the second part of the core...

GREG: If you're going to take chances, you better have friends.

ALEX: You need some friends. There is no CMO in the world who can operate with autonomy. And there's no C-anything that can operate with autonomy, that's just not how organizations are set up to operate anymore. We have to bring people with us. And I think this sort of gets to the second piece I was going to say, and it sort of plays nicely with the iShares example. We need to have partners, whether it's CFO, CEO of a business, or CEO of the firm overall on our side. They need to be advocates for what we're doing as much as we are of what we're doing ourselves. They need to support us and create the environment where we can be challenging and take some risks. The only way you can do that, though, is if you bring them on that journey with you. And I think the mistake that marketers more often than not make is they try and do that using marketing language.

GREG: Oh, I didn't see that coming.

ALEX: Yeah. I think marketers have a language that we can speak very comfortably to each other all day long, and we know what it means and we feel very safe in this little space that we understand. We do it with our agencies and the agencies do it back with us, and it's all great. But if you take that language out to your CFO or the CEO of a business or a product head and expect them to understand and get excited about what you're doing, they probably won't. They will probably sit there. And I've heard this from others: "I just don't understand what you're talking about."

GREG: Wow.

ALEX: It sounds great. So we've got to be much better at translating what we're trying to do into the language that they speak. And how I talk about this within my teams is we've got to shift from talking about the craft of marketing, of which we are rightly incredibly proud. We've all had great careers, we've learned a lot through experience and got a lot of expertise. But we've got to switch that into the business of marketing. How is marketing actually driving the business? Tell me what marketing is actually going to do. What is the role that marketing is going to play, and put it in a language that I am going to understand and I'm going to be able to appreciate. And I'm also going to be able to appreciate not just for what it's able to do, but how it's going to actually operate with the rest of what I have in my business.

Because again, marketing doesn't operate in a silo. And I think the great thing about being a B2B marketer, particularly, is marketing and sales, we have to operate seamlessly together. There's got to be this beautiful seamless handoff as you're taking a B2B decision-maker through a customer journey. That requires a huge amount of collaboration, but also a huge amount of appreciation for what each other is actually doing and how what you're doing is highly complimentary. They're only going to be able to understand that if we speak in language that we can all understand. So that's the second part of my things that we could do.

GREG: I think you're dead on. I think it is a two-part thing, too. You can't do one and building support without sort of changing the world, isn't it? Hey, let me ask this side question here. We've had this discussion with the MMA. What is the role of marketing? What is the role of the CMO? Do you have that defined in your mind? Is it crystal clear?

ALEX: Yes. Could it be better? I'm sure. I think we need to build resilient brands. I think that's the world we work in today where there's a lot of change. It's very dynamic. You need a brand that can be resilient, that can stand the test of time in a very dynamic environment.

And I think through that, we've got to be able to demonstrate how we are growing the revenue of the business. And I think what we are doing now, which is what I love about the role, honestly, is we are balancing that long-term brand building and that short-term or medium-term revenue growth. And there's nothing that we can do on our own that is going to grow revenue.

Well, that's actually not fair. Outside of the retail world where you can actually do something, somebody clicks on something, they decide to buy your product.

But in the B2B world, whether that's wealth or institutional banking divisions, you are doing that in partnership with others. And I think you need to really think about what are we doing in partnership with others to actually accelerate the revenue growth of the firm. And I think if we're doing those two things well and we're balancing that long-term and short, medium, and long term, then I think we're getting it right as CMOs. But it is a fine balance. And there are times, I mean, it's a hard balance to get. Sometimes I feel I'm a little overweight brand in some jobs I've done. Sometimes I feel I'm a little overweight on the short to medium term. So it's tough. But that's how I think about the role in terms of its contribution to the firm.

GREG: Well, I'm glad you brought it back to saying this. We've got to bring it back to the business. Listen, I tell this story a lot. About seven, eight years ago, I was in a closed-door session with about 15 CMOs, and just to give a context of the room, the CMO of General Motors was there at the time. He's no longer there. But the CMO of Dunkin' was there, CMO of T-Mobile, Allstate. So you get the idea.

Packed room of powerhouses. And we were doing another exercise kicking off an initiative around the marketing org that we're doing. We're still working on it today, funny enough. And it was a 10-minute warmup question. The question was, what's the role of the CMO and what's the role of marketing? It was a throwaway question, we didn't really even care what the answer was. Alex, one hour later, we realized nobody in the room agreed. Nobody agreed.

ALEX: Wow, that's really interesting.

GREG: That's crazy. So how are we going to explain to the CFO, the CEO, and the board if we're not consistent? And listen, they just heard something from the previous CMO that totally accounted what this CMO just... I hear it often oriented around growth, which is a variation of business. If you're going to talk growth, you have to talk business terms. I think you're totally right about that. It's so important. And for some reason, marketers I don't think have always owned up to that responsibility.

ALEX: We haven't. We haven't. And I don't know why, because I don't think it's served us well. I don't think it's served us well.

GREG: I don't think it's served us well. That's the point. Yeah.

ALEX: I mean marketing, way before I even became a marketer, was there to drive business. That's what it does. It's there to sell products.

And I think we sort of forget that. And I don't know whether it's just the way the CMO role has evolved and marketing has evolved, or the pressure it's come under in periods of time when resources are tight and firms look to cut budget. I don't know. I think it's sort of an interesting one because I think we should own it. We should own it with pride. I say this to the team, we are as important as sales and product in driving revenue growth. And if we don't believe that ourselves, there's no way they're going to believe. It goes back a little bit to, like earlier on, if you are not happy, how can you make everyone else happy? If you don't believe that you can grow revenue, no one else is going to believe you.

GREG: Right, right. And if you're not clear and articulate... We do a lot of work also here at the MMA around... For one, we say that marketing is not a function, it's leading a coalition. So that's a variation of what you said. So I like that. But how do you have those conversations? We had a bunch of conversations at the board level about how do you have the conversation with the CFO? How do you have the conversation sometimes with the CIO? I've got a bunch of people asking me to do more work around that now. Can you articulate some of how you do that, whether it's here at Citi or wherever? Doesn't have to be specific to a company.

ALEX: I think a lot of it for me starts with put myself in their shoes. Don't go in there and tell them what you might instinctively want to tell them. Put yourself in their shoes. What do they care about? What are the questions that they have in their mind? They don't want to know the technicalities and the ins and outs of what you're going to do. They don't really care. They trust you. They want to know what is it going to do for me? So if you're the CFO, how are you going to help me grow revenue and do it as profitably as possible? And you're being a good steward of the firm's resources.

GREG: One of the best advice that was ever given to me... The one that jarred me the most. So I was probably 32, 33, and I had been made a senior vice president with the Y&R. So VP in an agency, not so big, but senior VP is starting to get into real titles. I never forget, I said this to friend of mine who was really, he was just crazy-ass smart. Walter Sabo is his name, actually funny enough, was a radio guy. And I said, "I hope I'm smart enough to keep up." And I'll never forget, he goes, "Greg, at this level, everybody's smart. Now it's about keeping 51 percent of the vote." Isn't that funny? He was a little cynical in the way he was approaching that, but I still remember that point, which is the same thing. It's like you need to keep the support of people. That's how, if you're going to get stuff done, that's what you need to do.

ALEX: You do. It's so true. And I think it's more true now than it ever has been in the world that we work in.

GREG: Who else do you most have to interact with? So we just talked about what the CFO wants, pick another... I mean we could go for the CEOs, or who else do you think you need to try to understand and how do you look at that when you approach them? That's an interesting topic.

ALEX: So I mean, if I think about Citi, CFO, very important. We have five businesses. Each has a head of business, so think of that as a CEO.

GREG: Oh, okay. Okay. So you've got a bunch of presidents or division heads.

ALEX: Right. So I've got work very closely with them.

GREG: Totally.

ALEX: Tech and ops. So technology and operations, which is CTO and every CMO knows how important CTOs are. Sometimes you're aligned and sometimes you see the world slightly differently in terms of how you want to be investing in your technology.

GREG: You said chief customer officer, too, I think I heard you say, right? Another executive.

ALEX: Yeah. And I think that's where you're leaning in on the client experience. And I think that's another really exciting part of the CMO role now and how the role has evolved. You are a very critical stakeholder in the delivery of a client experience. But again, you don't own it in its entirety. You own elements of it. So how are you being a responsible steward of the client experience and working very closely with your sales partners and others — could be customer service, client service — to ensure that you are actually thinking about that experience as an experience rather than a bunch of touch points that may add up, may not add up. And I think that's a really interesting evolution because client experience is so key now because we've all been educated over the last 15 years with what's going on on our mobile devices to really think about experience, and it really matters. Often it's what will make you choose whether you buy from somebody or you don't.

GREG: Hey Alex, I wasn't going to do this today. We'll kind of wrap up here in a minute. Let me ask you sort of a side question. I just was having a conversation earlier, and I was seeing some other stuff around agentic AI that's coming along. So do you think agents are going to take over the whole conversational dynamic of what we're doing in business? It feels like it could.

ALEX: It could. I don't know if they'll take over. I think there's a balance between agents and the large language models. What I like about agents, though, is you can set them up to go against very specific tasks. So what are the jobs that you want done? And they can sit on top of that large language model. So I think, will they become everything? I don't know. I'm probably going to eat my words. Possibly. But I think they're really exciting because if I think about... I'm super nascent in this thing. I know enough to be dangerous about AI — learning, you can imagine, at a rapid pace.

GREG: Everybody's struggling with it.

ALEX: Where I was a year ago, you kind of thought it was it, or even a year and a half ago. Now I think about it. I thought it was it. And you realize actually it was a little bit of a blunt tool. And I did some things with translation and I saved a few million bucks, and I was like, oh my god, it's amazing. And you were like, well, yeah, but that's the only thing I could really think about using it for. Now where we're going as we think about agents is building agents against very specific use cases.

And actually, I'm liking the conversations we're having within the marketing and content function because it's been done through that lens. And I think the danger a year and a half ago was a little bit sort of wild and a little not strategic, and you were just sort of having a go at lots of stuff. Now I think we're sort of able to narrow it down and say, what are the jobs that we want to get done that could really have significant benefit to us as a team or to the firm overall? And I look at it through the lens of productivity. Yes, amplifying the great talent we have, making it simpler and easier for them to get stuff done. That's really important. I get excited about cost saving because it's money I can reallocate to other things. So that's good. But I think the more I think about AI and how we are thinking about applying it is it's the accelerator it can have on our impact.

And I think the revenue growth or the revenue acceleration that AI can bring is going to be considerably more than any money you're ever going to save. But I kind of think about the year and a half, two-year journey I've been on. It was all about saving money and trying to get...

GREG: That's where everybody started, right.

ALEX: Now it's like, actually no, the opportunity is elsewhere. But you've got to have these agents, and you've got to have some smart people who understand this space. And that's hard in its own right. I mean, it's so new. But I have to say, I think it's really exciting and it takes me back a little bit to 2009, '10, '11 when this thing called social media emerged and everybody was like, "So do you think it's going to be big?"

And it's like, I don't know. And it's like, what should we do? And it's kind of like, well, I think we should just jump in with both feet and have a good go, be smart and thoughtful about it. But let's build our playbook and figure out the best way to use this and figure out the best ways not to use it. And I think that's where we are here and we're here now. And I love the fact that within Citi, this is the year when we are really focusing on AI. We see it as a massive opportunity for us as a firm across every function. And I'm having some really exciting conversations with some super smart people. And I'm bullish about where we're going to get to in 12 months, because I think we've got much greater clarity now about what we can do.

GREG: And I agree, Alex. I don't think we really know. For mobile, Uber was kind of the killer app. I think that was the thing that reset a total consumer relationship dynamic. We'd never seen that. Like, wait, you want to know where the car is? Who's coming to get you? You want to know everything about them? How fast am I getting that information? We'd never seen that before. And so that changed all businesses. Everybody suddenly wants to come with that. I don't think we know what it is.

ALEX: I have this conversation with my daughter particularly. She's 24, and she's like, "I'm not going to have a job in 10 years' time, dad, because it's all going to be getting done by AI." And I'm like...

GREG: What'd she get her degree in?

ALEX: So she did philosophy, politics, and economics.

GREG: Wow, okay. Okay, good. And what's she doing?

ALEX: She's in government/public policy.

GREG: Oh, okay. Okay. Oh, and she can see from there that AI's going to change everything.

ALEX: But it's creating a lot of anxiety. But I said, what you've got to appreciate — and I think this is how I like to talk about it — is it's not about replacing, it's about amplifying. It's about making us even better. We are incredibly capable beings. We know that. With the right tools, we do amazing things. And you go back thousands of years to pull on examples of that. And I think this is just another great tool for us.

So I'm like, just think what you are going to be able to do and the speed at which you're going to be able to do these things with access to AI. And then think about the new roles that will get created that we haven't even started to think about yet. And she then calms down and pretends to be excited. But it's interesting with that age group, they are anxious about AI. While I'm sitting here and I'm really excited about it, but I get it from their perspective. They're at the beginning of their career. I'm at the end of mine.

GREG: Right, exactly. I think we can play it out from here, Alex. We'll be okay. Exactly. Hey Alex, I really was looking forward to this. I was super excited. I've loved getting to know you the last couple of years and stuff here, and you've more than delivered. This is just awesome. I think there's so many pearls of wisdom in here. So thank you. I can't thank you enough for being on Building Better CMOs.

ALEX: So much fun. I loved it. I'm glad we were able to make it happen finally, Greg. So cool.

GREG: You bet. Thank you.

 Thanks again to Alex Craddock from Citi for coming on Building Better CMOs. Check the description of this episode for links to connect with Alex. And if you want to know more about MMA's work to make marketing matter more, visit mmaglobal.com. Or you can attend any one of the 64 conferences in 16 countries where MMA operates, or write me: greg@maglobal.com.

Thank you so much for listening. If you've made it this far, then I'd like to ask a quick favor. Follow Building Better CMOs on YouTube. We have a full video version of every interview from 2025, as well as highlights from this show and my other podcast, Decoding AI For Marketing. Our YouTube username is @MMAGlobalMarketing, or you can just go to bettercmos.com/youtube.

Our producer and podcast consultant is Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm. Artwork is by Jason Chase. Special thanks to Angela Gray and Dan Whiting. This is Greg Stuart. I'll see you in two weeks.