Estée Lauder CMO Aude Gandon

AUDE: I push all the teams to do pilots, try things. That's usually the way we can learn fast and we can at least know what are the potential [risks] and if there is any potential risk. So you never have a zero risk, but making sure that the briefing is right, the choice of creators is right, making sure that they understand the brand, they understand our product, so they have a certain level of knowledge as well, I think will really help us and that's how we get the best of these amazing opportunities we have today in the world of marketing.

GREG: Aude Gandon, welcome to Building Better CMOs today.

AUDE: Thank you, Greg. Thank you for having me.

GREG: Now where am I catching you today? You in New York?

AUDE: I'm in New York.

GREG: Although I hear an accent that would suggest that you've also lived in Paris and beyond.

AUDE: Yes, I lived in Paris, I lived in London and New York. It's my third time in New York so the city keeps calling me back, I guess.

GREG: Oh, that's great. Are you a diehard — I don't know, should I even ask that publicly? I don't know. Are you a hardcore like, "I really wish I could get back to Paris," or "I'm committed to New York forever"?

AUDE: I would go where life takes me, where opportunities take me, but I'm not a diehard going back to Paris. I've mostly worked outside of Paris, actually, in my career. Mostly in London and in New York. I adore Paris, but I actually like working in the U.S.

GREG: Yeah, great. Why is that, by the way? I'm just curious.

AUDE: The focus on the outcome, on the energy to actually continue to want to move ahead, transform things, try new things, is way bigger in the U.S. than it is in France. And I think you can see it in some of the technological advancements and innovations that I think currently we're lacking a bit, sadly, because we have all the brain and all the talent, but the eagerness and the focus is very different.

GREG: You realize that, as a fellow New Yorker, I was baiting you to say how great New York was. So I just maybe should call that out to listeners so they knew where I was going [with that].

AUDE: And for me, it's my third time in the U.S., it's my third time in New York. So New York is definitely calling me. It's a city like no other, that's for sure. The energy, you know. I don't know, I'm part of these people as soon as I set a foot in the city, I feel the energy. Some people hate it, which I fully understand because I think it's not for everybody.

GREG: What's funny about that is that I still, I mean, I've been here well over three decades, well over three decades. And I still find that when I'm either heading down 278 that allows me to look over the city or coming over the Queensboro Bridge where you can really see the city in its glory. I don't know. There's just something very special in my heart.

AUDE: I'm the same. I'm the same. Every time I want to take a photograph. It's ridiculous.

GREG: It's ridiculous. And I don't know what —

AUDE: But you want to take a photograph even if you've seen it 200 times. There's a magic element. The overall kind of city landscape, you don't have it anywhere else.

GREG: So those outside of New York are going to get tired of us. We'll move on to other things with them. So listen. But hey, here's what's interesting though, and here's what caught my attention. I was super excited to have you on Building Better CMOs here. So one, you're at Estée Lauder, so that maybe the listener hopefully knew, but your title is actually global chief digital and marketing officer, and you held, it looked to be a very similar title, yeah, very similar title at Nestlé. So you've now done this, and you've gone out of your way to attach "digital." Now, in case the listener didn't notice, you also have a background at Google and, prior to that, agencies. But maybe talk about why your titles are both marketing and digital. Go into that a litle bit more and what that means to you.

AUDE: Yeah, it's been interesting because both companies we discussed and for me having digital is very key because I don't think you can separate it anymore. And in a way, for me, everything is digital. So you can argue on the fact that actually do you even need digital? But there's a real need right now to make sure that we understand that marketing doesn't stop on anything which is going to be brand strategy or creative development or consumer insight, but it's really linked to data, MarTech, AdTech. I have eCommerce in my scope because it reflects also the consumer journey and how people shop today. So that's the reason why.

GREG: So you came out of the agency world, senior leadership roles in agencies, then you ended up going to Google. Were you like, "Oh my God, the world's not what I thought it was." I don't know, did you kind of wake up, "Oh my goodness, what's happened here? I'm not in Kansas anymore." I'm not sure what your reaction would be. I would suspect very different.

AUDE: Yes, completely different. It was two different worlds. I joined Google ... I adored my time in creative agencies and I think I was very lucky because I worked on three clients over 25 years, three key clients, which is very unusual. I worked twice on L'Oréal. I worked 15 years with P&G, and I still say I haven't done an MBA in marketing, but thanks to my P&G years, I think I've done my MBA in marketing. It was incredible.

GREG: Same for me. I was P&G agencies almost my entire agency career, correct?

AUDE: Incredible. And I worked on Nestlé. I was starting to be a bit frustrated on how the digital technologies, all the new kind of digital platforms were actually really starting to create a whole impact on the marketing part of the company. And agencies at the time for me were not completely embracing it. There was still quite a lot of issues in accepting the fact that this was what was going to happen. And I think we were not leveraging and embracing at the time. Remember it was 2012 and 2015.

GREG: I see that. 2015, I mean, that's kind of a little disheartening to hear that you didn't feel they were really ready to get to the future even by then.

AUDE: Not at the level where I thought we needed to be in terms of how changing our ways of working, our processes, really structuring ourselves, I think there was still some gaps. I had two calls from two different people at Google the same week and I really wanted to learn digital from the inside. It was also at a time in my career where I knew that I could continue my career in agencies — I had had a very long experience — but I also wanted to put myself in danger a bit. So really kind of shifting gear, and in danger at two [levels]: danger in terms of the job, but also a bit of danger as a manager. I had the feeling that it would be a very different type of organization, different ways of managing teams and managing careers of people and also very different profile. And it was even more different than I imagined it to be.

GREG: What do you mean by so different in managing ... Are you managing ... Is it a type of talent? Is it the process by which you're going [at] things? Is it the orientation or the goal? That's kind of interesting.

AUDE: A bit of everything. So type of talent, young company, a lot of very, very young people. The average age at the time at Google was 27. That is already a very big difference.

GREG: Yes, very.

AUDE: Incredible talent in the level of education.

GREG: Yes.

AUDE: And so that already makes it completely different. And then there was the whole tech environment, the whole West Coast Silicon Valley views on how to manage talent, how the organization is working and so on. Very, very different. And I really wanted to learn this as well and to test myself on how can I adapt myself after 25 years in a certain environment. And it was fantastic. It was actually a great learning experience for me, both in terms of the digital muscle, but also on the personal and on the management level.

GREG: Yeah. So today that would be, in essence, if OpenAI or Anthropic called you.

AUDE: I was going to say, if I had to do it again, I would go to an AI company.

GREG: Yeah. It's funny you say that. Listen, I love what I do and I've done it now for a while and I can't imagine making a change, but if they called, it would really be a torn conflict for me because I do think that sense of being out on the front edge of where the world's going is just so exciting.

AUDE: Absolutely. And so that was incredible and I loved it.

GREG: How do you think it changed either maybe the ways that you worked and/or the ways that you thought about marketing from being inside a tech company like that?

AUDE: I did two different ... I worked in two different functions. So when I started in Paris, I was on the ads sales part, the client part, looking after the global base luxury clients, beauty, FMCG, gaming, entertainment. And so I was also in charge of YouTube for France because obviously a lot of my clients were very video heavy.

GREG: I saw that. Yeah. I saw that you were YouTube focused there. Yeah. Very interesting. Neil Mohan was in charge at that point, right?

AUDE: Exactly. And it was incredible because 10 years ago, people forget, 11 years ago, there was already a lot of consumers on the platform, but it was difficult times to actually get clients to understand that in a way the new TV or some of the new entertainment was actually on YouTube. So there was a lot of work on educating what the platform was really about, how people were using the platform, what type of environment there was on the platform. There was also a lot of question on the safety of the platform at the time. And so that was pretty incredible because there was so much that we had to do in educating clients, making them start to try new things, understanding the breadth of the different kind of way you can leverage a platform like that and what it was bringing to the brands.

Suddenly you can do long format. Of course, you had very short formats of advertising. I remember when we launched the bumpers, the bumper ads, six-second ads. So you can imagine the first reaction when we did this.

GREG: Marketers must have been outraged. How dare you create such a short-form ad, right?

AUDE: Exactly. But it was also reminding the marketers of what consumers really are ready to accept in terms of the links, but also how to make it desirable so then you can go and click and then the format can be as long as you want. As soon as you start to raise that interest because you have the right key message in six seconds. And now we accept it because of course now we are also in the era of TikTok, but at the time it was still very, very new. And so that was incredible for me to learn this from the inside and also being part of the team who suddenly was not on the receiving end, but was actually getting into the education of the marketers.

GREG: I love that. It's funny, I actually was very involved with Google — I ran another trade body called the Interactive Advertising Bureau at the time — and Tim Armstrong was on the board. So I was friends with Tim when they bought YouTube, I think it was either $600 million or $900 million, I'm forgetting the number here, but it was a pretty small number from what it's worth now.

AUDE: It was very small when you see the numbers today.

GREG: Oh, today? And today I'm pretty confident, on a time spent, YouTube is by and far my number one media channel today for me.

AUDE: Me too.

GREG: Yeah.

AUDE: Me too.

GREG: It's crazy.

AUDE: And it is the case in different countries and definitely the U.S.

GREG: Yeah. I don't think anybody had any vision, at least in my opinion, any vision that that's where this would end up. It's sort of ... Yeah.

AUDE: But when you were inside, we saw it. It was interesting.

GREG: I'm sure you did.

AUDE: 2015, we saw it because we could see the behavior, we could see the interest. We also could see the breadth of the type of content which exists from news, from how-tos. There was education, people always forget, amazing educational content there. And so very often it normally takes a bit of time for the marketers to actually realize what consumers are already doing with the platform, with the media, and how it [is] being shaped by users, by viewers.

GREG: But you're right, the history has been is that marketers have been incredibly slow to adopt.

GREG: So what do you do now within Estée Lauder or within Nestlé around that [dynamic]? How do you capitalize on the fact that others are probably slower I think is where you're going to go.

AUDE: Yes. So I think if you look at what we're doing here at Estée Lauder, we are transforming right now the company, the ways of working, the structures, and so on. And at the core of it, we have communicated our strategy and beauty reimagined, and part of it is really being very consumer centric. We are a luxury and prestige company. So it's a bit different sometimes from being on Nestlé where it's a bit more natural, it's a bit less top-down from the strengths of the brand. And so for us, it's really being highly consumer centric. And if I take that strategy, which is the enterprise strategy as a marketer, it means understanding where consumers are and making sure that our brands are where the consumers are. And then of course leveraging it in the right way for the brands. Because again, let's remember we have a lot of luxury and prestige brands.

So it doesn't mean that we're going to do everything that can be done on the platform. It will need to be linked to our brand equities. But still, if women decide that where they want to see content for beauty is going to be on certain platforms, we need to make sure it's brand safe and so on and so forth. But then of course we will do the right formats, and the brands will be there because we're not the one to decide.

GREG: But part of your challenge to that is that ... You're right. So listen, you take an intensely brand-oriented company like Estée Lauder would be, more than 90% of other brands, maybe. Okay. There's a lot of risk to getting into new. You can get a misstep, you can kind of get it wrong. How do you mitigate or protect yourselves against that? Or is it, well, we're here to take some chances.

AUDE: I think it's finding the right balance between the avoidance or the mitigating of risk, but also accepting that there will always be a bit of risk, that zero risk doesn't exist. Working with the different partners we have, being an agency partner who are the expert as well and they can guide us as well as the platforms. And I push all the teams to do pilots, try things. That's usually the way we can learn fast and we can at least know what are the potential risk[s] and if there is any potential risk. And then of course we always have guidelines on what do we want, how do we want our brains to behave, what type of formats we want to do. Then we need just to go and do it. There's always a discussion, if you think of creators, you can't avoid creators, especially on beauty.

GREG: Especially on beauty, right, exactly. Yep.

AUDE: And it will never be a zero risk. It will never be. But it was never a zero risk when we had big celebrities on contract either. You never have a zero risk, but making sure that the briefing is right, we know the choice of creators is right, making sure that they understand the brand, they understand our product, so they have a certain level of knowledge as well I think really helps us, and that's how we get the best of these amazing opportunities we have today in the world of marketing. Because it's way more complex, but it's also way more fun to have all ... To go from TV to print to audio story, to YouTube, to Instagram, to TikTok, to what we can do even on Amazon, on a channel commerce now you can do content. It's incredible.

GREG: Why go from Nestlé over to Estée Lauder? Why make that change? Because you have the same digital domain. Why make a change?

AUDE: I worked on beauty for a long time.

GREG: Because you have background in L'Oréal, correct? Is that what I saw?

AUDE: I have background. While I was on the creative agency side, I worked twice on L'Oréal, but also P&G. Part of what I did on P&G, I worked on the hygiene, I worked on feminine care, but I also worked on beauty at the time where P&G was really aggressive in acquisition of beauty. So I did a lot of work both in London and in New York on P&G Beauty. When I had the opportunity to go to Estée Lauder, which for me has always been the iconic company of beauty, and I also met with the new CEO, Stéphane, and William Lauder. I got sold by the opportunity and by the challenge, because as I've said, it's a company which is in full transformation. And I always like when there is this type of challenge where you can really rethink the ways of working, what type of expertise do you need, how are we going to evolve and accelerate the company, which has incredible brands.

You have the in-depth expertise of beauty, you have incredible long-lasting, [long-]standing brands, and the opportunity to shape the future. With a new CEO, with William Lauder at the helm, I couldn't say no. And then he's in New York.

GREG: Oh, we're back to the whole New York thing. Exactly. I love that.

AUDE: Back to the whole New York thing!

GREG: I don't know about you. It sounds like similar ... I'm a little bit of a sucker for when things need to be changed, and as long as the company and the leadership is oriented to that, it's just so much more fun because you can just go in, you're not just playing to a long history of past, you get to evolve, I think, more quickly.

AUDE: Yeah, me too. I'm so aligned with this. I like when there's a challenge because I think it obliges you to think a bit out of you and to think out of the box. What I love as well is it obliges you to go in depth on the history of the company and the enterprise, keep what is amazing, and it's what I really like is highly respect what made this company amazing, what made it create such amazing brands and highly successful business, and then look at what can evolve or what needs to change. But first really understanding the history and what are the roots and what has made the success, because for me it's what I like as well is going back into the history.

GREG: Estée Lauder, what 70, 75-year-old company?

AUDE: 80 years old.

GREG: 80 years old.

AUDE: Eighty-year anniversary this year of the Estée Lauder brand.

GREG: That's crazy. I mean, not many companies get to last that long or to be that iconic in their entire history.

AUDE: Oh yeah, Estée Lauder was a visionary, absolutely visionary. And she understood everything about marketing and consumer centricity.

GREG: Oh, is that right? You think that was the key to what — Really? In what way?

AUDE: She completely understood what made women tick, what was the right product to develop, and how to make sure that the product would show up in the right place. She understood department stores very well and she understood her consumers better than anybody else. It was incredible. She had it in her.

GREG: She just knew it.

AUDE: She just knew it.

GREG: Wow, that's crazy.

GREG: Hey, there was something else. I was looking through some of the materials around your background, and some of it ... You made a statement that caught my attention: Just because you don't fit in doesn't mean you don't belong. What does that mean? And what's the context of that?

AUDE: There's a context from when I started working, I studied in a small marketing university school in Paris, and then I moved to London pretty quickly. And so it's true that I was not always the exact kind of profile, but I felt like I always belonged. And it was the same when we talked about Google, for example. It was a very big difference. When I joined Google, I was surrounded by people who had the experience ... In the group I was in, they were all mainly ex-consultant.

GREG: Oh, that's a very unique orientation to the world too.

AUDE: Very unique. Yes, absolutely. And I've never done consultancy. So it was different. And I think sometimes you can hear employees telling you they're not completely sure that they fit in. And I said, if it's the place that you believe you want to be in and you have something to bring, you completely belong. And that's what you need to look for.

GREG: I like that. What's the current tagline? What's the current focus of the campaigns that you're doing?

AUDE: It depends on the brands you're talking about. Some of our legacy brand, of course, is how we continue to really cherish and protect the legacy of this brand — the brand equity — but how do you kind of now expand them into this new world of media that we're talking about? So how do you take an Estée Lauder and make it really relevant? What are the formats to ... How do you work with creators on TikTok? We've launched most of our brands now on Amazon. So same thing. How do you have the right tutorial, the right content as well on a platform like Amazon, for example? So that's some of the focus we have right now.

GREG: But did I see somewhere the headline is "Beauty reimagined"? Is that the focus still?

AUDE: The enterprise strategy is the transformation of the company. So as I said, it's about how are we looking at our processes as an enterprise. So we are way more consumer centric, so really putting consumer at the core, which I mentioned is, for a luxury and prestige company, you usually put mainly the brand at the core.

GREG: Oh, right. Yeah, and/or the celebrity representing ... Right.

AUDE: The representative representing.

GREG: So what does that mean to put the consumer at the core then? How does that change what you do?

AUDE: Well, one of the things we were talking about is how do you decide which format, which platform you want to be in, what risk? And there could be a tendency in the past to think that one platform may not be the right ones for luxury brands, and typically accepting actually no. If our consumers are on this platform, we need to be there and we need to have the right content, of course, because we need to be respectful of the brand equity, but we need to be there. That is what is consumer centric. Put data at the core as well. So there's a lot of work happening on data to make sure that we can really be very focused on the consumer insight and the consumer data. It needs to guide us on our product innovation, of course, but also the type of content that we want to develop beyond our media choices.

GREG: And it's definitely not as easy as sort of the old days where you — and I don't know that Vogue would have been the only of the ... But when we had a print world, they held a certain prestige and orientation and it was easy just to place ads within that and consumers would go there, but it's not that world at all anymore. Is Estée Lauder on TikTok?

AUDE: Estée Lauder is on TikTok.

GREG: Of course. That's a complicated platform, I would think, for a beauty [prestige brand]. I mean, I happen to love TikTok. I think if not my second channel, it's way up there, but I would think it would be complicated to communicate within that environment. The rules are different. The old rules don't work at all anymore is maybe the point I'm trying to make.

AUDE: Yeah. So you're absolutely right. So in the past, and I think in the past you had TV, which was also incredible for us to have the rich, but also to create the desirability of a brand. If you launch a fragrance, for example — and that works, by the way, and I think we need to be very clear that it still works when you have the right objective, it works. And of course, then you would make sure you have the double-page print in the right magazines, but now you have a lot more avenues and a lot more choices to make, but I think you need to be everywhere. So for me, one against the other, is what is the objective? What is the strategy? Where are the agencies? Who do we want to reach? And if you look at TikTok today, yes, it's very different. It's creator-led.

GREG: Creator-led, I was going to say.

AUDE: The way you suddenly have to accept that your brand is also going to be talked through creators is very different from having a very tight creative and production because suddenly we're not managing all the content. And then of course there's TikTok Shop, which is where we have some of our brands who already launched on TikTok Shop very successfully. We do TikTok Live as well on some of our brains. And to go back to when you were asking me about how do we decide what risk we're ready to take, that's where we're learning. So we're doing it because we need first to learn the ropes of what works on a TikTok Shop or on a TikTok Live and what are the right brands, what is the right category? We have different categories between skin care, makeup, fragrance, and it's not the same. It's not the same consumer behavior from one category to the next, and it's not the same from one brand to the next.

GREG: You know, one of the funniest statements, I had a CMO call me here, this is about six months ago, and she called and she said, she was asking me if the MMA had done any research around, as she calls [it], around authentic content, so a variation of influencers, creators. And I'll never forget what she said — and I'm a long-standing advertising person like you so it's very funny, this is what she said. And you can kind of catch the whole intonation how she went at it. She goes, "Yeah, Greg, have you done research?" And I asked her to explain, she goes, "Around authentic advertising versus" — and I heard her, she hesitated — "versus what I do now, inauthentic advertising." And I thought, wow, what a distinction to make about the world that we've built an entire industry around. And I kind of had to take a moment and go, oh my God, I wonder what that means in its own right.

AUDE: Yeah, it's a fantastic question. I'm not sure I can answer it in two minutes.

GREG: I didn't have an answer at the time. I thought what a phenomenal question to analyze and understand. But to me, it felt like the question of the day for all these new platforms.

AUDE: Yeah, completely. But also the new formats, again, because per-platform can have different formats. So I do think the ... I wouldn't call what we've done in the past and what we still do today is inauthentic.

GREG: Yeah, I'm not trying to diminish it, but it was a funny ... It was the realization she came to that the world had suddenly changed.

AUDE: Yeah. The world has definitely changed, but I still think that the world wants a brand to be able to tell its story and to visualize its story the way the brand wants to do it. I think it has a real authenticity into it. When you look at the brands, and for me, a MAC and an Estée Lauder are very different type of brands. And when they create their own content, which is led by the brand teams, it is very authentic because it's rooted in what the brand stands for and what the brand believes. Then what we have to do now is we have to be able to make it so tight and so clear that when we start to hand the brand over to other people such as creators and influencers, they understand what the brand stands for and then they are putting their own self and their own belief and their own interest, by the way, on that brand and how do they start to actually add a layer to that story, which is their personal layer.

So if you have a makeup artist or if you have a creator who is a makeup creator, they have a certain interest in a certain type of makeup, a certain look, and they have their own story and that's how they bring it to life. But I don't think one is more authentic than the others because I think you also have inauthenticity in creators. Some decide to really kind of do it because it's also a job and an income, of course, because everybody, it's an industry. And sometimes you also start to see the inauthenticity. So I think really understanding what your brand stands for and how do you give that story through the different kind of ways now we can tell the story so it feels authentic to the consumers and to the viewers. And I think they know what is inauthentic or not.

I think we really need to highly remind us that and we need to always remember they have the best BS meter that anybody can have.

GREG: I was going to say, you're going to get feedback fast and furious in today's world. And that's the challenge of the role that you sit in, especially when you're selling ... It's not like you're talking about product features in beauty. That's not the orientation of this. There's some element but that's not the core crux of it. And it's certainly not a pharmaceutical commercial where we just list all the things that it's supposed to fix and the harm it can do. [laugh]

AUDE: Exactly. Exactly.

GREG: Hey Aude, I'm kind of curious, just in the different experience you have, as you reflect back to your career — and you've got a nice multicultural kind of experience that's interesting — what is some of the best advice that you've been given? Do you know? And listen, you can make it professional, you can make it personal if you want. I had somebody talk to me about what their father had told them, I thought it was sort of interesting. You go in any direction you want, but I was just kind of curious, as you look back, what do you think?

AUDE: I think first I was always ... My parents showed me that it was important to work hard and to be pretty focused. And so I think that is the first gift because I always say it makes a big difference.

GREG: Why'd they push that so much, by the way? I'm curious. I've done the same thing with my children. I'm curious how you heard that or —

AUDE: Like my parents, I come from a simple background, and so work was highly important because they didn't have the diplomas. So what you have is your work ethics. And so I think that was always important and it's still important today. And I'm telling the same thing to my grownup children.

GREG: Yes.

AUDE: And the other thing is, it's a marathon. And it's funny because when I reflect now after the years of working and the different experiences, it definitely is a marathon. And I have the thing that sometimes it's a bit lost in the new generation because things are going so fast that people want also to kind of move fast and to advance fast, and staying in a position in a job for enough time that you can actually learn the ropes but also live with your own decision instead of jumping always to the next job and to the next promotion, for me, it's pretty important.

Sometime a lateral move is actually a great move, and I think that is sometimes a bit forgotten. As we have the chance to be in an era where I guess we are going to be living longer, it's even more important than in the past because we are going to also work longer.

GREG: We sure have the opportunity to do that today more than ever, it feels like. Yeah.

AUDE: And you have the opportunity to change and to evolve, and I think that's the beauty as well. I've changed. I've always kept the same focus on marketing, but I've shifted in my career.

GREG: I was a digital guy and so I jumped in and out of things. I always felt like I was being called on an emergency basis to go in and fix things. And that fit in my life of sort of drama at some level and a little bit of ADHD, just like a new thing to go figure out. But it's funny, I've only, as I've gotten older, started to really appreciate this sticking in there to figure something out kind of conclusively, wholeheartedly, as it continues to evolve. Because the story, even here at the MMA, which is, this is a very different company than it was five years ago, let alone 10 years ago. And there's something about that that I really appreciate. I wish I would've appreciated that more. I almost feel like that's what you're saying, in some regards.

AUDE: Yes. Yes, it is. I think it's just, again, when there is the right opportunity, you also need to know how to grasp the right opportunity. But I think it's just you need to think of your career as something which is going to be a marathon. There's going to be some better time than others, but really being able to see what are you going to learn from a job. I've always been choosing jobs thinking of what I was going to be able to grow into and what I'm going to learn. The last thing I definitely — and I really like mentoring people — I always say as well, when you can, you can't always do that, but when you can, choose your boss, because more than the job itself, the opportunity of the job or your boss is actually, for me, what has always had the biggest impact in terms of the learning curves and in terms of the advancement in my career.

GREG: I don't know about you, but I find that I'm constantly saying something to the staff or the team. I have these themes. So I'm assuming everybody else is the same thing. There's a theme I'll have for six, nine months that that's the most important thing.

GREG: So what's the most important thing you're advising to your teams today?

AUDE: I keep telling them, look at the fundamentals. And we have a big focus right now on our data, our consumer understanding and our data. So I keep going off do we have the data? Is the data clean? Can you please look back at the data? That's a bit of the two themes right now because of where we are in the company.

GREG: Which is a little funny for, if I can say, for a beauty company. And I don't have a huge amount of ... I have a lot of experience with brands and I've watched from a distance, but I don't have experience in beauty. But I would've thought that they would've been like, "I just know the customer" or "I understand the consumer" or "I have a feel for it" or something, or "This feels like ..." There's a lot of that kind of stuff. My wife worked in fashion for a lot of years. So I kind of saw from there and they would make, I don't know, to me from the outside felt like arbitrary decisions. But I think what you're saying is that ... And listen, they were very right and extraordinarily successful, so God love 'em for getting it right. But I think what you're suggesting is that that's just not the way of the world as much anymore.

AUDE: Yeah, because the world is changing, the consumer journey has been shifting dramatically. So if you think of a company like the Estée Lauder companies, most of our brands had a long-standing commercial avenue which was the department stores. And so absolutely the teams know the consumers extremely well because we have incredible beauty advisers everywhere and makeup artists, and the consumers in the past would go to the counter. We have a lot of data on them. We would get the beauty advisers coming back and telling us from the consumer care team what are the requests, how people are using the product, what is the feedback of the product. And then you start to have the multibrand stores popping up, the Sephora and the Ulta. You have now online. Of course, we have our brand dot-com, which is successful and where we actually get a lot of data, but a lot of it now goes on other platforms where you don't always have the data on the shopping. And then, as we discussed, TikTok Shop.

You can go and buy on Instagram, you can go and buy on Pinterest. So suddenly there's a lot of consumers' behaviors which are in places where the behavior's different. You don't always look for the same thing when you walk into a department store or when you look into an Ulta or where you go and decide to discover when on a TikTok Shop live. And so that's why really kind of now really focusing on gathering the data, understanding the data, is very, very important.

GREG: It's funny. I had one of the quick service restaurants, one of the big QSRs in the burger world. They said something — this is like three, four years ago now at this point — but they had said to me, it really caught my attention. They said, "You know, Greg, we used to operate with four personas. We had counter cash, counter credit, drive-in cash, drive-in credit." That was it. They go, "We have 28 now." For them it'd be Uber Eats ... So you're having the same kind of situation.

AUDE: We have exactly the same.

GREG: One that really does require having a chief digital officer in place, by the way, [laugh] just to make the obvious statement to everybody here.

AUDE: It really goes from consumer data to eCommerce to media choices. Everything is digital.

GREG: And it's interesting too, because listen, titles communicate something too. So the company ... You have chosen to communicate to everybody internally, listen, sure we are powerful brands and we put a lot of energy and effort — most of your conversation here has been around the powerful brand dynamic — but do not neglect that we operate in a heavily intense data-filled, data-enriched, data-insight world today.

AUDE: Exactly. And so that's really about — of course it's marketing, it's the power of the brand, it's getting the right products — but then how do you really bring them to life, where being from the commercial side to the media side is completely different and very, very, very complex. And that's what I think [makes] the work extremely interesting, but the complexity is just crazy versus even 10 years ago.

GREG: Crazy. Crazy.

AUDE: Yes.

GREG: And what's funny about it too is that there was nothing ... It's, well ... I mean, listen, all consumers are the same, no consumers are the same. So they all approach it and they would all approach your products in a very different way and different things. It was interesting, and I used to ... I happened to mention there, my wife was in fashion at one point. You know what I watched her do? It was really funny. She would be able to identify what the Neiman Marcus buyer was like in Texas. And then she knew what the Bloomingdale's buyer was in New York. And then she knew what the Bloomingdale's buyer was different in San Francisco. She understood that was her power, I guess. That was her orientation in that world, and that's what you're up against too. Everybody's different.

AUDE: Yeah. The best buyers really understand the difference. From one huge kind of country like the U.S., of course, it's not the same. And so that's why we need data. You can't do it anymore just by having one source of information anymore.

GREG: Is there an example you could share about where that really has come home for you for a particular brand?

AUDE: No, but you can see it even from one market to the next, from one country to the next. Behaviors are not the same. The way people actually view beauty can be very different. Before, we would say it's a certain culture, but it's also, of course, potentially the weather and so on and so forth. And now what we can do is we can look at groups, and groups are more linked and more kind of similar on behavior than they very often are depending on where they live. So sometimes you can look and you can have actually more similar behavior from people around the world living in big urban centers than you would say one country against or versus the other. So you can say that a certain group of consumers can have more similarities if they live in L.A., New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. You may have amongst all Americans versus all the French.

That is because they have the same language, they consume the same type of content. Think about content today. Now language is not even an issue anymore. You can go on YouTube, you can go on any other platform and it can get translated into your own language. If you don't speak English, it's okay. So suddenly there's no borders anymore. It's all based on a certain behavior and certain interest, for example.

GREG: Brand is about pushing at some regards a sort of similar orientation, maybe not the best word, but a similar orientation to a particular product or the needs that it solves versus getting that really right, and then respecting that all consumers are sort of different. So then you kind of move to a realm of maybe you're really doing all personalization. I mean, that's really complicated today.

AUDE: So it is complicated. I think what is common is, again, we go back to creating a desire, getting the right story, because it needs to be true to what the brand stands for because otherwise that's why you start to lose the authenticity that we were referring to before.

GREG: 100%. You try to be something you're ... Yeah. And then how do you make sure ... That's kind of part of my question. How do you stay who you are, but yet be different for everybody? What? That's insane.

AUDE: But after that, I think that's where you can stay true to who you are, but actually have a message which can be adapted to the different consumers. So if you look, one product can have several benefits, for example. You can have a fantastic moisturizer, but obviously there's several ingredients and there's different properties to it. So depending on what is the interest, is it really about moisturizing or is it more about giving you a glow? The ingredients do the same. So you can start to adapt the actual message on the same product depending [on] what is the interest or what the consumer is looking for. And that's what the platforms are giving you now and that's what the data is giving you. And because of the new tool like AI, you can adapt what is going to be your key message to the different consumers. And that's the beauty of what is happening now on all the different platforms.

You can really do that more and more, and I think is going to get even faster with AI and all the new kind of platforms proposing agents to be able to do it very quickly for you.

GREG: Very fast, right?

GREG: As you look out in your experience now having been, like you said, agency, many brands, Google, end up now as a CMO, chief digital officer, of a couple of very large, very strong marketing-driven companies. Okay. As you look back on all that now, what's your sense of what the marketing industry either still doesn't kind of get right, we don't really fully understand, maybe don't appreciate, don't have enough knowledge around? You can go any direction you want here. What's your sense of where marketing doesn't quite get it right? And then we'll get into maybe some of those solutions around that if we have them.

AUDE: Yeah, of course. I think some we have and some we don't today, but I'm sure together as a group of experts, I'm sure we can tackle it. The first one for me is, especially for the younger generation, we need to reput a focus on the marketing fundamentals. I feel we both talked about our days working with clients like P&G and L'Oréal at the time while you were doing TV advertising and print and radio and so on. There was an obsession about all the fundamentals of marketing. How do you build the brand? What is your brand equity? What is your tone of voice and how you track it constantly and how are you building differentiation versus another brand?

GREG: P&G always tried to answer the really hard questions, in my experience.

AUDE: Exactly.

GREG: And they wouldn't try to answer all the questions. They said, "This year ..." or "We're focused on this big ..." They were really trying to tackle and be right all the time.

AUDE: They would go in depth, but also they would never get tired of their brands, if you think about it.

GREG: True, that's funny.

AUDE: We would call it that it was a bit of a recipe, but the recipe was holding. They were not getting tired of themselves, which I think sometime, especially as the world is going faster, we have a bit sometime — I'm not talking about us specifically, but overall the industry — of getting tired of ourselves before actually the consumers are. And so I think for the new generation, because they grew up right now from day one in a digital marketing world, we've been way more obsessed about the digital media platforms and the tools, than we have been sometimes about the marketing itself. We may not have spent enough time focusing on what is your consumer understanding, what is your insight? How do you translate the data in an insight? What is a good insight, which is very different from having a data point? How do you build a brand equity?

What are the key things that you want to own and protect on your brand equity that you will never kind of let to anybody? And I think in this era of digital, if you think about it, we've been focusing a lot more on the data, what is the right platform, what is the right formats, do I do a Reel, do I do a post? Should I do more creators? And so I think we owe to the younger marketers, generation of marketers, to make sure that we bring them this kind of in-depth kind of marketing fundamentals, because that hasn't changed. I don't think it has changed. I think the way we actually deliver it has changed, but the fundamentals haven't changed. We've lost a bit, and I've seen it in a lot of companies.

GREG: Aude, what are the fundamentals? So if you were to make a list of the fundamentals that ... So listen, now we're giving advice back to young marketers, right? I think that's where we're at. What do you think those fundamentals are? And by the way, can I point out something too? You were one of the incredibly rare marketers, let alone CMOs, you actually have an education in marketing and communications, don't you?

AUDE: Yes.

GREG: So listen, my board is some of the biggest CMOs, some of the most relevant CMOs in the world, whatever the qualification, they're CMOs. Less than 25% of them have a degree in marketing. That feels to me like a miss for fundamentals.

AUDE: I'm not surprised. It's the first fundamental. I think the problem we have a bit in marketing is, I always say, it's always the job where everybody has a point of view on your work in a company.

GREG: Yeah, no, no kidding.

AUDE: Everybody watches TV or is on TikTok or YouTube and therefore believe that they understand marketing because they actually look at content and brand.

GREG: They're all consumers of advertising, right?

AUDE: They are consumers of advertising, which is very different from being a professional of advertising. And I think that's the first deceit that we have, that we need first absolutely to make sure that we have people who have the expertise, grow and build all the fundamentals on what is marketing, what is the science of marketing? Get the history. Sometimes I tell people, go and read the book of David Ogilvy. Everything in David Ogilvy's book is still relevant today. Even if you have to do advertising on TikTok and Amazon, in all honesty, it's the same. It's just a different way of doing it, of bringing it to life — not doing it but bringing it to life — but the fundamentals are there. Again, if you want to really understand a consumer, it's not about gathering the data, it's taking the data and then you need to know how to filter the data because, as everybody says, we're data-rich and insight-poor, and then how to transform this data into the right insight.

So knowing what is an insight. And then when you get into your creative development, what is a big idea? Go back to the process of the big idea. Is it the right big idea for your brands? When you do a brand health tracker, what are you tracking of your brand? What do you believe is what you want to own of your brand and what you don't care about? Because maybe you don't deliver certain items on your brand that helps track it, but you don't care because it's not relevant for your brand anyway.

GREG: So listen, yeah, you and I come from agencies so we love the big idea concept that definitely come out of the big creative agencies. I totally remember and appreciate that. And listen, I was young in my career, so I'll make a little excuse for myself, but I don't know if I knew exactly how to identify or to recognize ... I used to always question myself, did I really know and have the confidence to be able to get behind what I thought was a big idea and to really ... Because listen, if you talk to your agency people the most say, there are no bad ad campaigns, there's just bad clients. I don't ... maybe some variation of that. That's maybe a little meaner that I meant it to sound.

AUDE: There are bad campaigns. There's bad clients as well.

GREG: There's both. Okay. There's both. So would I have the confidence to know? How would I know I had the confidence to know that that was an idea I was going to bet on? Do you have any perspective on that? Because it's a big question for us, I think.

AUDE: Oh yeah, of course. And again, one big idea can be developed into one very, very bad creative, by the way. So it doesn't stop. It's still a concept, and then the way you bring it to life can be fantastic or can be a big, fat failure. So it was all the way, which —

GREG: A lot of places to go wrong, yes, exactly.

AUDE: We had amazing big ideas which were very badly executed. So the execution is key. I think first is, again, if you really know your brand and you're really clear on what is your marketing objectives. So again, what are you trying to achieve? What are your KPIs? What are the choices you're making? It's pretty easy to kind of know what is the right idea. And then of course you have a concept that you can quickly test with consumers, and today it's very easy to actually test with consumers in a matter of days online. But usually when you are clear what you want to achieve and where you're going, you know what is the right big idea.

GREG: Are you a believer in creative testing, by the way? You are?

AUDE: Yes, I am.

GREG: Because not everybody who's a super brand person believes in creative testing. I don't know.

AUDE: I wouldn't test the real execution. I would test more the concept and the idea.

GREG: Oh, okay. Okay.

AUDE: But I would not go into testing the fully formed execution because I think usually, again, if you know your brand and you're the owner of your brand, you know how to execute it well. And so the most important thing for me is what is the concept, what is the insight, and so what is the idea? But yeah, I think earlier on it's important to test because you need to get some consumer feedback, because sometimes we have our own filters and we may miss something which is pretty obvious but that we are not aware of or that we completely missed.

GREG: No, feedback is absolutely a gift. Yeah. But some people, I don't know, I've always found it to be kind of a funny conflict.

GREG: MMA has been working with — I don't know what I think about this, so I'm going to ask the question — MMA has been working with a provider that's actually able to use AI to evaluate whether or not a creative could be made better. So we're kind of at the point of near finished creative, at least I would've thought, on that kind of thing, it's not just concept testing. And then we have AI sort of make recommendations. Do we trust that? Do we not trust that? What's the state of that world? Because you're right, if we get stuff wrong, we can trip ourselves up in the message or the communication somehow and then lose the consumer, but I don't want machines to be making ads.

AUDE: Yeah, no, I don't want machines to make ads either, that I don't believe in it, but I do believe that you now have some AI tools which can actually help you. So it depends what this company really does in terms of what does it mean in making it.

GREG: Yeah, how are they doing it? Yeah, there are a lot of questions about it.

AUDE: How are you doing it and based on what, but I can give you a few examples because I do believe it's an art. For me, creativity, it's an art. I come from a generation where choosing the right photographer, choosing the right director ...

And it's not just a director, it's, if you do a film, is the editor is incredible because the way you actually cut the film can make the whole difference on your content. And I still believe in this. For example, we've worked with this company called CreativeX, which is AI driven, and what they do is they don't change your creative, but they basically make sure that your content is going through all the basics. Do you have the branding at the right place? Let us be clear. We still sometimes we so love our visual that we don't want to put the branding in the first images, but we know that people jump. Do you have the right horizontal and vertical formats? Can you have it with sound off with subtitles because when people consume YouTube and they in a bus, suddenly they need a subtitle because they cut the sound off.

That typically for me is where AI is helping me to quickly look and say, okay, here are all the different kind of hygiene things that you need to make sure that your content is going to be visible, understandable, and so on and so forth. Now, [if] AI was going to tell me what type of images I should put, I would be very careful. Because the AI is only intelligent if it actually gets the right briefing and the right data set. So the tool is not intelligent.

GREG: It's not. It's not expertise. AI is not expertise.

AUDE: It needs the right consumer data and insight so the tool understands who I'm trying to talk to. Do I have the right brand books and the right brand guidelines to make sure that the AI is going to direct me in the right place? Then if all this is done properly, I'm not saying no, but it means that, again, the human is the one who is going to actually teach and brief the AI so the AI can actually get a good feedback. I think, again, we need to be very careful in the age of AI is a marketer's skill is even more important because only the marketer knows what to feed the AI with. And if we don't do it that way, it's going to be garbage in, garbage out, and everybody's going to look the same.

GREG: We talk a lot [about this] because the MMA is very fixated, as I think you know, we're very fixated on the science, like what's the underlying science? And trying to get to just exactly what you said, like what's the right answer? But the right answer is a complicated statement sometimes because you got to ... On what basis are you making that evaluation and then what's your measurement technique to actually get there? So these are really, really hard questions. But what's interesting is that, and I've said this a lot publicly, is that as much as I love AI — I'm totally committed, I'm going to transform the entire MMA with it — the LLMs do not have marketing expertise. In fact, if you ask them what good marketing is, they will give you the wrong answer because it's predicated on a bunch of people's opinions, not validated science and research of how things work.

AUDE: But because all these companies, I guess, needs to hire marketing expert to start to help develop the right AI, which is a marketing AI. I completely agree. I've seen the same. I love it. I love the tools. So I play with all of them. It's going to transform our world so it's better that we play with it and we understand it. But to go back to your point, marketing is an expertise and a science as well as an art. And I think it's also where it's half science, half life, half art. And that's the beauty when I get some young people being very worried about their job, the future of the job with AI, I think marketing, because there's the art part and there's the emotional part as well, we're fine as long as we get all the science part well as well and we understand it.

And I think that's why currently the models are a bit short on marketing. I fully agree.

GREG: By the way, what's the push there within Estée Lauder to support your teams in sort of understanding AI and the machines and its application to the business?

AUDE: It's a very big focus on —

GREG: How are you doing it? I realize that's a whole day seminar probably on its own.

AUDE: We're looking at it through — if I look at specifically at marketing — every aspect of marketing. So we start to have AI tools for our consumer intelligence team. So of course the way we now are looking at new partners on how to do our consumer data, everything which is consumer testing as you mentioned, we're looking at it as well. Of course, you have everything on media and so you may have read that we quickly transformed our media operating model to go with one global partner, WPP, because we believe that we can't do everything ourselves. And so these type of partners help us and the open platform is actually very AI driven. So we start to have a lot of tools in our media organization which are AI driven as well. And we are also looking at how we do adaptation and transcreation because you talked about personalization, and the AI tool is going to finally be able to help us to make sure that we have very personalized messaging.

GREG: We should. We did know that was a good idea, it was just hard to do.

AUDE: Yeah. The tools exist now so that's what we're focusing on right now and what we're going to transform over the next few months. And then you have, of course, everything which is linked to the new LLMs. And so how people are going to start — are already kind of starting — looking for answers and brands on the ChatGPT, the Claudes, and the Geminis of this world. And so here as well, we've done six months of a pilot in three countries on six brands on really understanding, okay, where are we, where are our brands, what are we missing, and what is all the simple hygiene things we need to do to make sure that our brands surface on an LLM.

GREG: So this is getting at the AEO/GEO kind of question, right? Very important.

AUDE: So we also have a pilot, we've got the learnings, and now we're going to scale it. By the time all the models of the GEO and the models are ready and you have shopping completely integrated and so on, we'll have the right organization and the right tools.

GREG: MMA does a thing called ... We do a series every once in a while we bring up sort of out of the back room, it's called Great Debates. And we basically pick difficult topics. So when Google was getting ready to deprecate cookies — or allegedly at the time, now they didn't do it — but we did a thing, Great Debates: Identifiers. So we had all the identifier providers come in and provide their story. How they went at the world was pretty important. We've done around Great Debates: Measurement, we've done Great Debates: Marketing, we've done a couple. So we're going to do Great Debates: AEO/GEO coming up very soon because I've talked a lot, I have another podcast on AI, and it's very hard to differentiate how those companies are going at that market. And AI is kind of a magical mystery anyway. I just don't think we ... It's very complicated, it feels like, right?

AUDE: It is complicated. I think we start to see a bit of light. I think part of the reason why it's complicated, it's being built as we speak.

GREG: Yeah, true. Yeah.

AUDE: Again, what we were discussing before on how consumers are starting to use these models and so of course we want to be there, but actually if you look, a lot of them don't really have shopping embedded into it, they don't have all the systems into it, but because we already see the huge growth of search and consumers there, we already want to be there and do our marketing and have eCommerce on it. But actually the models were not ready until now. The latest announcement of Google from IO, how OpenAI is transforming ChatGPT and so on, you can see things are happening. But six months ago, they were not ready actually. And so that's why I thought for us doing pilots were the right time because anyway, I was not going to shift dollars from traditional search to there because they weren't ready. Now you can see that it's accelerating and it's going to go fast, but it is going to evolve fast as well.

And so we've seen it. So it's great that you're going to do a debate on this because I think it's definitely the next big —

GREG: Yeah, we know we have to figure this out. How fast can we get there? How quickly can we make better decisions for it? And there might be different solutions for different brands. I mean, I have no idea at this point. I don't know what I don't know.

AUDE: Well, I'm sure different solutions for different brands, you will still have ... I think you'll have different solutions for different platforms because as the others —

GREG: Oh, right, right , right, right. Right.

AUDE: Which I think we're making a mistake right now. We're putting ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, all in the same kind of place. When you start to dive into what they're building, but also what is the ecosystem they're actually building it on, it's very different. It's very different. Gemini obviously has YouTube as well integrated and they have everything on search and they have —

GREG: Did you see this? It showed up on TikTok, maybe YouTube, back to our original point for me. They had taken the LLMs and they gave them a set of ... They said, "We're going to create a community, and you can't lie, cheat, steal, but go ahead and create your community and create your world." So what I remember was Anthropic, they checked back in two weeks later, they were all still friendly with each other, okay. I'm going to hear from X on this, but I think it was over at X Grok, they all killed each other within three days. [laugh] So maybe I'm wrong on that a little bit, but the different LLMs have different reactions to ... It was really the point of the thing and it was very funny. And then, I don't know, it was a very funny sort of example.

AUDE: I think it's a key point because first they all have different sources.

GREG: Correct. There's a lot of nuance to the training they're doing off of the data sets, correct.

AUDE: The models are being trained differently because you also have different beliefs and philosophy per platform. And so that's now what we need to understand and to learn to be ready.

GREG: Listen, I saw here, there was something you mentioned that you're very strict about being home by six for your kids. I mean, they're adults now, so I don't know. That was at one point, yeah?

AUDE: Yeah. When I was not traveling. And so the reason why I mentioned it was I worked always on global jobs. So I was not very often home at six because very often I was in a hotel traveling.

GREG: But if you were home —

AUDE: If I was not traveling, I really wanted to be home early so I could have an evening at home. And the weekend was the same. So my weekends were basically my family and maybe less on the friend side just because I couldn't do the family and the job.

GREG: If you were to tell a young marketer one thing, your advice for them, having to look back over the expanse of your career and where you've gone to and what you've done, what would that be?

AUDE: There's a lot of different answers. If it was one thing, gosh, it's difficult. Learn. Learn marketing. Learn marketing. Understand what marketing is all about.

GREG: We're not a profession, though. Do you know that? We're not. Because every profession — doctors, lawyers, accountants, architects, engineers — they're all professions. They're trained to be in the business. They're certified, re-certified. We're not trained or certified in this business.

AUDE: Exactly. We're not trained, but we can get trained because there's a lot of things we can do and there's a lot of content. But for me, really understand what is marketing is for me the thing I would ask the person to do first. And also get the culture. What I found sometimes a bit difficult, very often people don't have the culture of the brands anymore. So I hear things and so I love and I always feel like I'm 80 years old. I'm like, no, no, no. Let's talk about how Nike built what Nike was and "just do it." Why "just do it"? If you have a body, you're an athlete. If you talk about Dove, all these brands, Pampers, Tide, Coke, there's a whole history and you realize there's a whole science. They were incredible marketers and they knew it was a science, of course executed with art, but it was a science.

And I think this is where, for me, that's the advice I would give any young marketer.

GREG: It's that diversity that makes it such a fun business, right?

AUDE: Of course. You can have all the understanding of marketing, but then you apply it to very different brands, very different industries.

GREG: Very different.

AUDE: To talk, to actually to create interest and desire to very different consumers. And that's what I love because it means that it's always new.

GREG: Yeah. I think that's why I liked being in the agency business so much for as long as I was, because you had to dig into a client's problem with a set of not understanding having come from that category very quickly and understand to the best of your ability what was really going on and provide insight and knowledge to them.

AUDE: I think it's the best school, actually. I think agencies are the best school because you learn all the fundamentals, you work with a lot of different people who are expert, being the creative, the strategist, the business people and so on. And also you really learn a lot of different industries because you have different clients, and you learn to listen. And I think that's also something that sometimes we forget is when you're on the agency, you always need to understand what is the subtext of what your client is telling you in a meeting.

GREG: [laugh] Right.

AUDE: It's your choice, what is in the word... And so you really need to understand your client's business, understand your client's structure, understand your client's politics. Then you have your own agency reality, and you need to mix it all together to come up with the best idea, the best strategy, and the best execution. And that I think is something which is amazing as a first school.

GREG: That ultimately creates impact.

AUDE: It creates impact and to sell product and to have a strong and resilient brand.

GREG: Well, there you go. There's the advice. That's the perfect place to end. Aude, I can't thank you enough for doing this. I appreciate it. It's such a great conversation.

AUDE: Greg, no, thank you. It was so much fun, so thank you.