Podcast Transcript - Building Better CMOs
Webflow CMO Dave Steer
TKTKTK
DAVE STEER: We are transitioning as CMOs from being campaign specific to more systems oriented. So if there's something that I think we can fix now it's, as marketing leaders, think more about the systems that you're creating than about the specific campaigns that you are launching. Don't forget about the campaigns, but really your seat at the table is about how are you building a system overall that is driving brand and growth at the same time, full stop.
Webflow and the Modern Marketing Team
GREG STUART: Dave Steer, welcome to Building Better CMOs.
DAVE: Thanks for having me, Greg.
GREG: You are the CMO of Webflow, correct?
DAVE: Correct. Webflow is what we call an agentic marketing platform. We're a brand that's been around for over 10 years, about 300,000 customers. We have this enormous view of what's happening on the internet, just given the amount of experiences and customers that we have on our platform. We're classically known as a platform that enables people to create brand-immersive, high-growth types of websites. And increasingly, we are being pulled by enterprises mostly to help them create agentic marketing, such that it's not just about the website, but it's about the entire digital experience.
GREG: Fundamentally, it's about the website and that experience. I mean, does that make you a competitor to a Drupal? Are you big enterprise? Are you small-, medium-sized business? Where does it fit in the marketplace?
DAVE: The categories that we're in are going through an enormous amount of change. I think this is one of the most exciting times to be a marketer, both that leverages a platform like ours and a marketer for a platform like ours, because you're seeing the converging and creation of many new categories. In a lot of ways, our primary category is the CMS category, the content management system category. And big legacy brands have been around that category. That is going through an enormous amount of transformation as buyers of a CMS expect not just a CMS, but an agentic CMS. But we're also seeing new categories emerge around things like AI discoverability, things like AEO and GEO. And so the shape of what we're calling agentic marketing is actually going through an enormous amount of change right now, and we're excited to be at the center of a lot of that change.
GREG: Who often are you working with within a company? Is there a design team? Is there a customer experience team? Is it with the CMO? Where does a Webflow insert itself into a company? And by the way, I asked, are you big enterprise or small-, medium-size? Where are you guys in the stack?
DAVE: I forgot to answer that. We are, I would say, mid-enterprise and above. That's really where we see the differentiated value right now. And I talk about differentiated value from the perspective of if you're a mid-market enterprise and above, there are aspects of our value proposition that really speak to them. Things like the infrastructure that we have, the guardrails that enable teams to move quickly but not break their brand, and also the context of what we call a brand operating system, which is all the data that's associated with your brand. Typically, what we call ... [We] work with the modern marketing team. I underscore and bold and highlight that term because I think the nature of marketing is changing quite a bit. How we talk about marketing used to be a noun, now is increasingly a verb. And what I mean by that is we end up speaking to not only the marketer, but the designer, the developer, everyone from the CMO and VP of marketing to the individual contributor who is running campaigns or designing experiences.
I call it a verb because what we end up doing is breaking down a bunch of silos that used to exist on marketing teams to bring everybody in the mix onto the same platform.
GREG: So what is happening in companies that aren't, I guess, smart enough to use Webflow then? I don't know. What's happening there in the problem that you're solving within these companies? You made a point there about how they're not always on the same page.
DAVE: Over the years, one of the things about marketing that has happened is it has become a very complicated function.
GREG: That's why the MMA exists, Dave, by the way, just so you're clear. (laugh)
DAVE: This is my plug for you. This is my plug for you.
GREG: (laugh) Thank you. I appreciate it.
DAVE: Everyone joined the MMA because they're solving industry-wide problems. If there's ever been a need for an MMA, it's right now, because not only is the field going through a lot of transformation, but what we're seeing I think is the movement from what had been an extraordinarily siloed function, almost intentionally placed because of the complexity of the function, to one that the silos are actually breaking down. And so when I say the modern marketing team, it is going from a system where it felt like a relay race, and in order to do a campaign, you would pass the baton from function to function to function to function into one where marketers are actually much more orchestrators. They have the tools and techniques at their disposal to go from idea to execution as quickly as they possibly can.
GREG: Were you guys originally inserting yourselves into the CIO or maybe CTOs and now you're working more directly with...? I'm wondering how that's kind of changed over time. I'm curious.
DAVE: Our roots are actually more with the design community.
DAVE: Thanks for having me, Greg.
GREG: You are the CMO of Webflow, correct?
DAVE: Correct. Webflow is what we call an agentic marketing platform. We're a brand that's been around for over 10 years, about 300,000 customers. We have this enormous view of what's happening on the internet, just given the amount of experiences and customers that we have on our platform. We're classically known as a platform that enables people to create brand-immersive, high-growth types of websites. And increasingly, we are being pulled by enterprises mostly to help them create agentic marketing, such that it's not just about the website, but it's about the entire digital experience.
GREG: Fundamentally, it's about the website and that experience. I mean, does that make you a competitor to a Drupal? Are you big enterprise? Are you small-, medium-sized business? Where does it fit in the marketplace?
DAVE: The categories that we're in are going through an enormous amount of change. I think this is one of the most exciting times to be a marketer, both that leverages a platform like ours and a marketer for a platform like ours, because you're seeing the converging and creation of many new categories. In a lot of ways, our primary category is the CMS category, the content management system category. And big legacy brands have been around that category. That is going through an enormous amount of transformation as buyers of a CMS expect not just a CMS, but an agentic CMS. But we're also seeing new categories emerge around things like AI discoverability, things like AEO and GEO. And so the shape of what we're calling agentic marketing is actually going through an enormous amount of change right now, and we're excited to be at the center of a lot of that change.
GREG: Who often are you working with within a company? Is there a design team? Is there a customer experience team? Is it with the CMO? Where does a Webflow insert itself into a company? And by the way, I asked, are you big enterprise or small-, medium-size? Where are you guys in the stack?
DAVE: I forgot to answer that. We are, I would say, mid-enterprise and above. That's really where we see the differentiated value right now. And I talk about differentiated value from the perspective of if you're a mid-market enterprise and above, there are aspects of our value proposition that really speak to them. Things like the infrastructure that we have, the guardrails that enable teams to move quickly but not break their brand, and also the context of what we call a brand operating system, which is all the data that's associated with your brand. Typically, what we call ... [We] work with the modern marketing team. I underscore and bold and highlight that term because I think the nature of marketing is changing quite a bit. How we talk about marketing used to be a noun, now is increasingly a verb. And what I mean by that is we end up speaking to not only the marketer, but the designer, the developer, everyone from the CMO and VP of marketing to the individual contributor who is running campaigns or designing experiences.
I call it a verb because what we end up doing is breaking down a bunch of silos that used to exist on marketing teams to bring everybody in the mix onto the same platform.
GREG: So what is happening in companies that aren't, I guess, smart enough to use Webflow then? I don't know. What's happening there in the problem that you're solving within these companies? You made a point there about how they're not always on the same page.
DAVE: Over the years, one of the things about marketing that has happened is it has become a very complicated function.
GREG: That's why the MMA exists, Dave, by the way, just so you're clear. (laugh)
DAVE: This is my plug for you. This is my plug for you.
GREG: (laugh) Thank you. I appreciate it.
DAVE: Everyone joined the MMA because they're solving industry-wide problems. If there's ever been a need for an MMA, it's right now, because not only is the field going through a lot of transformation, but what we're seeing I think is the movement from what had been an extraordinarily siloed function, almost intentionally placed because of the complexity of the function, to one that the silos are actually breaking down. And so when I say the modern marketing team, it is going from a system where it felt like a relay race, and in order to do a campaign, you would pass the baton from function to function to function to function into one where marketers are actually much more orchestrators. They have the tools and techniques at their disposal to go from idea to execution as quickly as they possibly can.
GREG: Were you guys originally inserting yourselves into the CIO or maybe CTOs and now you're working more directly with...? I'm wondering how that's kind of changed over time. I'm curious.
DAVE: Our roots are actually more with the design community.
The Promise of Personalization
GREG: Oh, okay, okay. Hey Dave, can I ask you question? Sorry, I don't mean to cut you off. So I had an earlier question, I just didn't go there because some of what you've referenced here has been process, internal process, organizational dynamics, and a little bit of governance I think I heard in that. But then you've also got this element too that I hear very strong from you guys about creating a better experience, but then I don't really know what an experience is. Is an experience some sort of activity add-ons or something that's going on or is it the visualization of that? I'm trying to slot these into buckets so I kind of start to think about what I'm doing with this to take advantage of what you guys have.
DAVE: I think the consumer expectation of experience is fundamentally different today than it ever has been. There's a high expectation that the promise of personalization will actually come to fruition. And that has implications for the marketer, which is to say that we've always wanted a world in which we could deliver on the right message to the right person at the right time in the right channel.
GREG: By the way, we suck at that. We suck at that, by the way. I'm going to give you the scorecard on that. We're terrible at that, but go ahead. Yeah.
DAVE: Historically we've sucked at it. The industry has been terrible. And I think now is our opportunity with the technologies that we have in place to become much better at it. You know that's not going to happen overnight. And I think the reason why I lean a lot into process is because I think one of the reasons why we've sucked at this is how we've organized ourselves. When you have central platforms and central technologies that bring the entire marketing function and operation together so that it doesn't feel like a relay race, it is our opportunity to not suck at the right message, right person, right channel, right time.
GREG: Give an example from one of your clients on personalization and how that kind of plays itself out.
DAVE: The great thing about Webflow is there are a ton of really compelling customer stories to take a look at and visually immersive websites. One of my go-tos is the Lando Norris site, which I encourage everyone to take a look at. Talk about a visually immersive, brand-forward but growth-driven kind of site where they wanted to bring their team together and operate as one team, but they also wanted to represent the brand in a very compelling way.
GREG: I've seen so many marketers struggle with this concept of precise fit. We're just not equipped fundamentally to think it through. It's very funny to me. And yet we all say the words that you did — right message, right time, blah, blah, blah — but nobody does it and nobody knows how to do it.
DAVE: I think it's tragic, actually, because I think —
GREG: I would agree.
DAVE: There's something that happens from marketing strategy to marketing execution where good ideas go to die or good strategy goes to die. And I think we're hinting at it right now. I believe in a world in which you can have a cohesive brand — and call that look and feel, by the way, look and feel, tone and voice. You can have consistency in terms of your brand, but you express it in different ways. And one of the biggest places is actually understanding differentiated value and segmented value propositions to different types of customers so that you could look at the same creative unit, as an example, it might look very much the same. But the value proposition and some of the elements of the creative, maybe it's the people in the creative speak to a different audience or whatever, those are the things that can be personalized. One of the great things about our platform is we have this product called Webflow Optimize.
Optimize is essentially a conversion rate optimization that enables the CMO, VP of marketing, and their entire team to hyperpersonalize their website at will. What I mean by that is they can tune different parts of their site to different audiences with different creative that can be slotted in with different goals and objectives that they then use AI to automatically optimize for. And the way that I think about it is, I don't know, it used to be that in order to stand up an A/B test took days and weeks and it was only weeks later until you got the result. Now we're starting to see customers have dozens of experiments running at the same time and getting insights pretty quickly.
GREG: So is what Webflow is doing ... How is it making, then, the personalization better? I mean, you kind of maybe tipped your hand to some of the answer to that, which is that you can run multiple A/B split tests, which is one level of starting to get better at that. So what really separates Webflow and how would I take advantage of that different than ... Listen, MMA runs on Drupal, it may even run on old Drupal, it doesn't even support it anymore. So why would we ... What are we trying to do to make the effort to change?
DAVE: Well, I encourage you to come onto Webflow. I think that the reason why you want it to be a part of your modern marketing tech stack is because you want the flexibility and capability to be able to take that marketing strategy that I brought up earlier and then start to much more easily enable your team to program that in. Say you've got a positioning strategy that has three value proposition pillars and a set of capabilities underneath them that are targeting three to five different audiences. Well, with Webflow and Webflow Optimize, you can both get the insights and the conversion rate optimization, but also create personalized experiences for each of those audiences.
GREG: Then is it doing the personalization based on first-party data about knowing the consumer? Is it based on other dynamics?
DAVE: It's pulling in both first-party data and third-party data, and it's enabling the marketer to basically set the audience type, the geography type, even firmographics, the type of company that they're coming from. You could take first-party data and upload it into the system so that it is actually targeting the audience that you want it to. I think that this gets to the importance of having both a digital experience generally and a website very specifically as one of the key channels that a marketer can work with.
DAVE: I think the consumer expectation of experience is fundamentally different today than it ever has been. There's a high expectation that the promise of personalization will actually come to fruition. And that has implications for the marketer, which is to say that we've always wanted a world in which we could deliver on the right message to the right person at the right time in the right channel.
GREG: By the way, we suck at that. We suck at that, by the way. I'm going to give you the scorecard on that. We're terrible at that, but go ahead. Yeah.
DAVE: Historically we've sucked at it. The industry has been terrible. And I think now is our opportunity with the technologies that we have in place to become much better at it. You know that's not going to happen overnight. And I think the reason why I lean a lot into process is because I think one of the reasons why we've sucked at this is how we've organized ourselves. When you have central platforms and central technologies that bring the entire marketing function and operation together so that it doesn't feel like a relay race, it is our opportunity to not suck at the right message, right person, right channel, right time.
GREG: Give an example from one of your clients on personalization and how that kind of plays itself out.
DAVE: The great thing about Webflow is there are a ton of really compelling customer stories to take a look at and visually immersive websites. One of my go-tos is the Lando Norris site, which I encourage everyone to take a look at. Talk about a visually immersive, brand-forward but growth-driven kind of site where they wanted to bring their team together and operate as one team, but they also wanted to represent the brand in a very compelling way.
GREG: I've seen so many marketers struggle with this concept of precise fit. We're just not equipped fundamentally to think it through. It's very funny to me. And yet we all say the words that you did — right message, right time, blah, blah, blah — but nobody does it and nobody knows how to do it.
DAVE: I think it's tragic, actually, because I think —
GREG: I would agree.
DAVE: There's something that happens from marketing strategy to marketing execution where good ideas go to die or good strategy goes to die. And I think we're hinting at it right now. I believe in a world in which you can have a cohesive brand — and call that look and feel, by the way, look and feel, tone and voice. You can have consistency in terms of your brand, but you express it in different ways. And one of the biggest places is actually understanding differentiated value and segmented value propositions to different types of customers so that you could look at the same creative unit, as an example, it might look very much the same. But the value proposition and some of the elements of the creative, maybe it's the people in the creative speak to a different audience or whatever, those are the things that can be personalized. One of the great things about our platform is we have this product called Webflow Optimize.
Optimize is essentially a conversion rate optimization that enables the CMO, VP of marketing, and their entire team to hyperpersonalize their website at will. What I mean by that is they can tune different parts of their site to different audiences with different creative that can be slotted in with different goals and objectives that they then use AI to automatically optimize for. And the way that I think about it is, I don't know, it used to be that in order to stand up an A/B test took days and weeks and it was only weeks later until you got the result. Now we're starting to see customers have dozens of experiments running at the same time and getting insights pretty quickly.
GREG: So is what Webflow is doing ... How is it making, then, the personalization better? I mean, you kind of maybe tipped your hand to some of the answer to that, which is that you can run multiple A/B split tests, which is one level of starting to get better at that. So what really separates Webflow and how would I take advantage of that different than ... Listen, MMA runs on Drupal, it may even run on old Drupal, it doesn't even support it anymore. So why would we ... What are we trying to do to make the effort to change?
DAVE: Well, I encourage you to come onto Webflow. I think that the reason why you want it to be a part of your modern marketing tech stack is because you want the flexibility and capability to be able to take that marketing strategy that I brought up earlier and then start to much more easily enable your team to program that in. Say you've got a positioning strategy that has three value proposition pillars and a set of capabilities underneath them that are targeting three to five different audiences. Well, with Webflow and Webflow Optimize, you can both get the insights and the conversion rate optimization, but also create personalized experiences for each of those audiences.
GREG: Then is it doing the personalization based on first-party data about knowing the consumer? Is it based on other dynamics?
DAVE: It's pulling in both first-party data and third-party data, and it's enabling the marketer to basically set the audience type, the geography type, even firmographics, the type of company that they're coming from. You could take first-party data and upload it into the system so that it is actually targeting the audience that you want it to. I think that this gets to the importance of having both a digital experience generally and a website very specifically as one of the key channels that a marketer can work with.
The ROI of Personalized Marketing
GREG: Have you guys actually done experiments or tests to really understand what is the value of that personalization?
DAVE: In bits and pockets. Let me answer it very quickly and then I'm super curious on what you're seeing from an industry-wide perspective. And again, not another plug for MMA, but if there's any time for an industry-wide view on things like personalization, CRO, attribution, and then we're going to get to trust, I think now is the time.
GREG: Totally.
DAVE: The way that we have been considering value personalization is partially by treating my marketing team as customer zero for the products and capabilities that our product team is creating. And so as we get that data — and again, it's been in bits and pockets — as we get that data, we've been working very closely with our engineering and product team to say, "Hey, as a marketer, I want a much more uniform view on the value of personalization and the value of other things that we create."
GREG: We have run a series of labs now. We've done actually 30 different campaigns, 18 different brands. MMA has no commercial interest in this, so I make no money if anybody picks up personalization. We have found that on average, personalization versus business as usual, which is just taking a series of a limited number of creative and just running it, is plus 130%. So it's 2 to not quite 3x, but 2 to 2 and a half x on average more valuable. We have seen, and this was an AT&T case study, and it was against sales, which is really crazy — we optimized the AI to sales — it was plus 272%. That's insane. That's 3 to 4x improvement in the performance of a campaign on sales than nonpersonalization. So it does kind of beg the question a little bit, like why the hell isn't everybody personalizing their ads?
DAVE: Well, I was about to ask you that question.
GREG: As an obligation to shareholders, by the way, just to be clear about why I'm saying that.
DAVE: I have a hypothesis, and my hypothesis is that — and I'm curious to get your perspective after I share my thinking — my hypothesis is that it has historically been too difficult to do it.
GREG: Yes, I agree.
DAVE: And so what that has created is a sense of laziness from a marketing perspective, which is unacceptable. I think you know where I'm going to go on this one, both as the fiduciary responsibility of a marketer to use funds wisely to help companies grow and just sheer laziness in terms of think of creative, resourceful ways to do it. But I'm curious to get your take.
GREG: I think the incentives are all wrong. We've never created the incentives partly because we don't have really the best information about dynamics is I think what kind of drives that at some level. The precise issue we're doing is it's machine-learning-driven placement. And most of the time what brands do when they're optimizing things, they'll use a technique called one-armed bandit is the statistical technique. And we have found huge ... And we've now looked at a few different approaches, but the one that we found is using machine learning techniques called K-Modes clustering and one-hot encoding. And what those are in essence doing is that they're clustering cohorts of consumers that are looking for — or visitors, users, whatever you want to say, viewers of ads, what do you want to say — it's looking at browsers, machines, location, time of day. It's looking at all those factors and it's building a cohort that says these people are most going to respond to this ad now.
And because it's the one-hot encoding, it's able to make rapid decisions. It's changing it every minute. I don't know if it's really that fast, I'd have to ask the tech guys, but it's changing it pretty rapidly and it allows you to optimize really aggressively. What we are doing is, so it's all machine learning placement personalization. The ads are generally pre-created because most brands are not willing to do generative ads on the fly. They're just not going to do that yet. There's too much risk, especially for if you're a regulated business of any kind. But when we get to that, then it's really going to be powerful. Then the machine really starts to take over and run it. And like I said, just in what we're doing, no first-party data, no data-privacy risk whatsoever, but you got to produce ... I mean, we had one campaign, the campaign we did for Major League Baseball, 2,200 ads were created, but they were looking at things like, was it about the game?
Was it about the player? Was it about hot dogs and soda? Was it about the experience of the ballpark? We represented all those different need states. Was it going with your family? There's many different reasons you could go to a baseball game, but we made no presupposing that there was only one singular reason for going.
DAVE: In bits and pockets. Let me answer it very quickly and then I'm super curious on what you're seeing from an industry-wide perspective. And again, not another plug for MMA, but if there's any time for an industry-wide view on things like personalization, CRO, attribution, and then we're going to get to trust, I think now is the time.
GREG: Totally.
DAVE: The way that we have been considering value personalization is partially by treating my marketing team as customer zero for the products and capabilities that our product team is creating. And so as we get that data — and again, it's been in bits and pockets — as we get that data, we've been working very closely with our engineering and product team to say, "Hey, as a marketer, I want a much more uniform view on the value of personalization and the value of other things that we create."
GREG: We have run a series of labs now. We've done actually 30 different campaigns, 18 different brands. MMA has no commercial interest in this, so I make no money if anybody picks up personalization. We have found that on average, personalization versus business as usual, which is just taking a series of a limited number of creative and just running it, is plus 130%. So it's 2 to not quite 3x, but 2 to 2 and a half x on average more valuable. We have seen, and this was an AT&T case study, and it was against sales, which is really crazy — we optimized the AI to sales — it was plus 272%. That's insane. That's 3 to 4x improvement in the performance of a campaign on sales than nonpersonalization. So it does kind of beg the question a little bit, like why the hell isn't everybody personalizing their ads?
DAVE: Well, I was about to ask you that question.
GREG: As an obligation to shareholders, by the way, just to be clear about why I'm saying that.
DAVE: I have a hypothesis, and my hypothesis is that — and I'm curious to get your perspective after I share my thinking — my hypothesis is that it has historically been too difficult to do it.
GREG: Yes, I agree.
DAVE: And so what that has created is a sense of laziness from a marketing perspective, which is unacceptable. I think you know where I'm going to go on this one, both as the fiduciary responsibility of a marketer to use funds wisely to help companies grow and just sheer laziness in terms of think of creative, resourceful ways to do it. But I'm curious to get your take.
GREG: I think the incentives are all wrong. We've never created the incentives partly because we don't have really the best information about dynamics is I think what kind of drives that at some level. The precise issue we're doing is it's machine-learning-driven placement. And most of the time what brands do when they're optimizing things, they'll use a technique called one-armed bandit is the statistical technique. And we have found huge ... And we've now looked at a few different approaches, but the one that we found is using machine learning techniques called K-Modes clustering and one-hot encoding. And what those are in essence doing is that they're clustering cohorts of consumers that are looking for — or visitors, users, whatever you want to say, viewers of ads, what do you want to say — it's looking at browsers, machines, location, time of day. It's looking at all those factors and it's building a cohort that says these people are most going to respond to this ad now.
And because it's the one-hot encoding, it's able to make rapid decisions. It's changing it every minute. I don't know if it's really that fast, I'd have to ask the tech guys, but it's changing it pretty rapidly and it allows you to optimize really aggressively. What we are doing is, so it's all machine learning placement personalization. The ads are generally pre-created because most brands are not willing to do generative ads on the fly. They're just not going to do that yet. There's too much risk, especially for if you're a regulated business of any kind. But when we get to that, then it's really going to be powerful. Then the machine really starts to take over and run it. And like I said, just in what we're doing, no first-party data, no data-privacy risk whatsoever, but you got to produce ... I mean, we had one campaign, the campaign we did for Major League Baseball, 2,200 ads were created, but they were looking at things like, was it about the game?
Was it about the player? Was it about hot dogs and soda? Was it about the experience of the ballpark? We represented all those different need states. Was it going with your family? There's many different reasons you could go to a baseball game, but we made no presupposing that there was only one singular reason for going.
Moneyball Marketing Mindset
DAVE: Isn't it powerful that you used baseball as an example in this case?
GREG: Well, I have a number of others, but yes, that's the one...
DAVE: Well, but I love this example for this reason, which is I feel like we're in the moneyball moment for the marketing industry.
GREG: Yes.
DAVE: Where you don't have to be the data scientist anymore to be able to have all of these statistics in front of you and to create all of the testing, all of the hypotheses, that you want to run as a marketer. The tax on your technical literacy has gone down.
GREG: Yes.
DAVE: The tax on your content creation ability has gone down. And so now this is what ... I'm always a glass-half-full kind of person. I feel like this is the moment where marketers now can up-level their game and it's achievable for them.
GREG: The challenge that we have is that I don't think marketers are oriented towards scientific principles to build knowledge. We too often, as my chairman says all the time, the decision was made based on HIPPO — highest-paid person's opinion — and that kind of BS needs to stop.
DAVE: Yeah, 100%. I mean, I have no commercial interest in it, but if I can make a book recommendation to your audience.
GREG: Please.
DAVE: Alex Schultz's book "Click Here" I think is a must read for any modern marketer. Alex is the now former CMO of Meta. I had the pleasure of working with him both at eBay and at Facebook before it was Meta. And I think that is a resource for modern marketers, again, to get out of this highest-paid person in room kind of dynamic and really think about all of the modern channels that are in front of marketers right now and come back to the fact that the technology changes but the principles don't, and having solid hypotheses and testing against them, that's a great resource for your audience.
GREG: You've had a couple of jobs that had "trust" in the title.
DAVE: I have.
GREG: What was the title at eBay?
DAVE: I was a trust marketer.
GREG: A trust marketer. So what the hell is a trust marketer, by the way? (laugh) Honestly, I've been around a long time, Dave, I've never heard that as a title. So yeah.
DAVE: Today all marketers are trust marketers, and I'll tell you a story about that in a second in terms of one thing that I rolled out to the team just a few weeks ago. I started my career as part of the founding team of this nonprofit organization called Trustee. And for the time this is like —
GREG: Any of us, all of us old-timers, know Trustee. Exactly.
DAVE: Yeah, but a lot of your audience is not old-timers. So just imagine a world in which giving your credit card information over to a nameless, faceless website was an unthinkable thing.
GREG: Unthinkable. I was there. I remember. Unthinkable.
DAVE: You remember.
GREG: It was dumb, but it was unthinkable. Right.
DAVE: It was unthinkable, but that's what happens with new technology. It creates a lot of promise, but a lot of concern at the same time.
GREG: Really? Technology has that problem? It doesn't have that problem, Dave, it's fine. Everybody's okay.
DAVE: Are we having that problem in 2026? I don't know.
GREG: Maybe. AI's got an agenda. Draw a cute cat. Kill all the humans. That's basically its agenda. So those are two things that it does really well. Yeah. (laugh)
DAVE: I laugh though that's a very scary proposition today. And so the idea was with Trustee, how do you build the Good Housekeeping seal of approval for trust on the internet rooted in privacy? In my career —
GREG: It was a really important organization at the time. It was instrumental. I don't know the current state, but it was very instrumental at the time. Agreed.
DAVE: I agree. I agree. I'm really proud of that experience. And I'm also proud that it was one of my first experiences professionally, which is to have built that. And then I ended up working at companies where trust was a fundamental growth blocker.
GREG: Are we going to name names of those companies? PayPal was there. PayPal had ... I mean, same, back to the financial, the trust of passing money back and forth, right?
DAVE: Well, the interesting thing is I've worked in places where trust is a blocker and also trust is an attractor.
GREG: Opportunity, I guess is what you're saying by that, right? If you could get trust right, then you would succeed. Is that what that meant?
DAVE: A hundred percent. The core PayPal value proposition at the time is you could use your credit card and have the person receiving the payment not have access to your financial information. Trust was the way that PayPal could differentiate from a mainstay brand like Visa and MasterCard, which was to put that right at the center. eBay's issue was both a positive and a detractor, which is like, they built the business. And for the time, this is almost pre-Amazon, they built a business based on a premise of buying and selling with complete strangers. And so my job working with a great cross-functional team was how do you build trust and confidence in that kind of leap of faith? And so that was a lot of fun.
GREG: In 1996, I believe — could have been '97 — I was one of the very few people who was sort of leading in interactive when I ran an interactive group for Young & Rubicam. I got a call to go see a company in San Francisco, and I had not spent a lot of time in San Francisco. I just remember how dismal the 101 seemed, which that hasn't really changed. I went to this very dingy, dirty office. It was littered with these small doll figures. It was stupid to me, weird. I was meeting with the CEO and I said, "Jeff, I just don't get how you build trust into this thing. It just doesn't make sense." So that was Jeff Skoll, who at the time was the [President] of eBay just before, and that was about a year or six months before Meg Whitman came in and took the company public.
But I just told Jeff, I just didn't think eBay was a good idea. I just didn't see how it would work. Now, there's a lot of New York arrogance in that, but it's a good lesson for me to remember like, maybe I should open my mind a little bit. So I had the problem there too. I didn't see how they were going to get past it.
DAVE: Greg, I wonder if we're uncovering the origin story of how Dave Steer got his job at eBay. It actually started with a conversation between Greg and Jeff before Meg even got there of questioning how do you actually build trust and confidence?
GREG: And they said, "Can you help us figure that out?" Is that how you got there? Because you said I can help figure that out.
DAVE: I think I came a couple years after that, so I can't claim that, but in the story arc of, I guess, my career journey, I'm now going to remember this as a prelude to it. So that's really interesting.
GREG: That's funny. Yeah, but listen, and they did really successfully crack that code. Don't you think eBay did a pretty good job of that?
DAVE: I think they did a great job at it, and I think it probably took crisis for them to get to that point.
GREG: What was the crisis? Do you remember?
DAVE: They had started putting things on the platform that were very much against what the community of eBay ... Again, think of eBay as a community-built brand.
GREG: It was very much a community. It was very strong. Right.
DAVE: And so they had put some stuff on the platform that the community was very much against. And the aha that they had — this predates me, but it was the premise for me going there — the aha that they had was like, "Wow, we really didn't actually consult with our community about any of this. We didn't create transparency. We didn't get any feedback from them." That was the moment where they started really taking trust very, very seriously. I like to think out of crisis comes opportunity, and I think they really saw the opportunity that they had to double down on community development, to build a trust framework. And part of that was on the marketing side. A big part of it was actually on the trust and safety fraud prevention side. And so they hired a bunch of really amazing people over there that really developed policies and enforced policies for the platform.
GREG: Well, I have a number of others, but yes, that's the one...
DAVE: Well, but I love this example for this reason, which is I feel like we're in the moneyball moment for the marketing industry.
GREG: Yes.
DAVE: Where you don't have to be the data scientist anymore to be able to have all of these statistics in front of you and to create all of the testing, all of the hypotheses, that you want to run as a marketer. The tax on your technical literacy has gone down.
GREG: Yes.
DAVE: The tax on your content creation ability has gone down. And so now this is what ... I'm always a glass-half-full kind of person. I feel like this is the moment where marketers now can up-level their game and it's achievable for them.
GREG: The challenge that we have is that I don't think marketers are oriented towards scientific principles to build knowledge. We too often, as my chairman says all the time, the decision was made based on HIPPO — highest-paid person's opinion — and that kind of BS needs to stop.
DAVE: Yeah, 100%. I mean, I have no commercial interest in it, but if I can make a book recommendation to your audience.
GREG: Please.
DAVE: Alex Schultz's book "Click Here" I think is a must read for any modern marketer. Alex is the now former CMO of Meta. I had the pleasure of working with him both at eBay and at Facebook before it was Meta. And I think that is a resource for modern marketers, again, to get out of this highest-paid person in room kind of dynamic and really think about all of the modern channels that are in front of marketers right now and come back to the fact that the technology changes but the principles don't, and having solid hypotheses and testing against them, that's a great resource for your audience.
GREG: You've had a couple of jobs that had "trust" in the title.
DAVE: I have.
GREG: What was the title at eBay?
DAVE: I was a trust marketer.
GREG: A trust marketer. So what the hell is a trust marketer, by the way? (laugh) Honestly, I've been around a long time, Dave, I've never heard that as a title. So yeah.
DAVE: Today all marketers are trust marketers, and I'll tell you a story about that in a second in terms of one thing that I rolled out to the team just a few weeks ago. I started my career as part of the founding team of this nonprofit organization called Trustee. And for the time this is like —
GREG: Any of us, all of us old-timers, know Trustee. Exactly.
DAVE: Yeah, but a lot of your audience is not old-timers. So just imagine a world in which giving your credit card information over to a nameless, faceless website was an unthinkable thing.
GREG: Unthinkable. I was there. I remember. Unthinkable.
DAVE: You remember.
GREG: It was dumb, but it was unthinkable. Right.
DAVE: It was unthinkable, but that's what happens with new technology. It creates a lot of promise, but a lot of concern at the same time.
GREG: Really? Technology has that problem? It doesn't have that problem, Dave, it's fine. Everybody's okay.
DAVE: Are we having that problem in 2026? I don't know.
GREG: Maybe. AI's got an agenda. Draw a cute cat. Kill all the humans. That's basically its agenda. So those are two things that it does really well. Yeah. (laugh)
DAVE: I laugh though that's a very scary proposition today. And so the idea was with Trustee, how do you build the Good Housekeeping seal of approval for trust on the internet rooted in privacy? In my career —
GREG: It was a really important organization at the time. It was instrumental. I don't know the current state, but it was very instrumental at the time. Agreed.
DAVE: I agree. I agree. I'm really proud of that experience. And I'm also proud that it was one of my first experiences professionally, which is to have built that. And then I ended up working at companies where trust was a fundamental growth blocker.
GREG: Are we going to name names of those companies? PayPal was there. PayPal had ... I mean, same, back to the financial, the trust of passing money back and forth, right?
DAVE: Well, the interesting thing is I've worked in places where trust is a blocker and also trust is an attractor.
GREG: Opportunity, I guess is what you're saying by that, right? If you could get trust right, then you would succeed. Is that what that meant?
DAVE: A hundred percent. The core PayPal value proposition at the time is you could use your credit card and have the person receiving the payment not have access to your financial information. Trust was the way that PayPal could differentiate from a mainstay brand like Visa and MasterCard, which was to put that right at the center. eBay's issue was both a positive and a detractor, which is like, they built the business. And for the time, this is almost pre-Amazon, they built a business based on a premise of buying and selling with complete strangers. And so my job working with a great cross-functional team was how do you build trust and confidence in that kind of leap of faith? And so that was a lot of fun.
GREG: In 1996, I believe — could have been '97 — I was one of the very few people who was sort of leading in interactive when I ran an interactive group for Young & Rubicam. I got a call to go see a company in San Francisco, and I had not spent a lot of time in San Francisco. I just remember how dismal the 101 seemed, which that hasn't really changed. I went to this very dingy, dirty office. It was littered with these small doll figures. It was stupid to me, weird. I was meeting with the CEO and I said, "Jeff, I just don't get how you build trust into this thing. It just doesn't make sense." So that was Jeff Skoll, who at the time was the [President] of eBay just before, and that was about a year or six months before Meg Whitman came in and took the company public.
But I just told Jeff, I just didn't think eBay was a good idea. I just didn't see how it would work. Now, there's a lot of New York arrogance in that, but it's a good lesson for me to remember like, maybe I should open my mind a little bit. So I had the problem there too. I didn't see how they were going to get past it.
DAVE: Greg, I wonder if we're uncovering the origin story of how Dave Steer got his job at eBay. It actually started with a conversation between Greg and Jeff before Meg even got there of questioning how do you actually build trust and confidence?
GREG: And they said, "Can you help us figure that out?" Is that how you got there? Because you said I can help figure that out.
DAVE: I think I came a couple years after that, so I can't claim that, but in the story arc of, I guess, my career journey, I'm now going to remember this as a prelude to it. So that's really interesting.
GREG: That's funny. Yeah, but listen, and they did really successfully crack that code. Don't you think eBay did a pretty good job of that?
DAVE: I think they did a great job at it, and I think it probably took crisis for them to get to that point.
GREG: What was the crisis? Do you remember?
DAVE: They had started putting things on the platform that were very much against what the community of eBay ... Again, think of eBay as a community-built brand.
GREG: It was very much a community. It was very strong. Right.
DAVE: And so they had put some stuff on the platform that the community was very much against. And the aha that they had — this predates me, but it was the premise for me going there — the aha that they had was like, "Wow, we really didn't actually consult with our community about any of this. We didn't create transparency. We didn't get any feedback from them." That was the moment where they started really taking trust very, very seriously. I like to think out of crisis comes opportunity, and I think they really saw the opportunity that they had to double down on community development, to build a trust framework. And part of that was on the marketing side. A big part of it was actually on the trust and safety fraud prevention side. And so they hired a bunch of really amazing people over there that really developed policies and enforced policies for the platform.
The Trust Framework and Team Coaching
GREG: What was some of the best insight, perspective, advice, if you want, that you've been given? It could be professional or personal, go anywhere you want with it, just as you look back over your life at this stage of your career and so on.
DAVE: We talked about trust earlier, and I want to go back to it because I think about trust a lot, both as a external and also a leadership philosophy that I have. Let me start by saying that about four or five years ago, I really started thinking about what my personal professional mission is.
GREG: Interesting.
DAVE: After a lot of conversations and soul searching, I really came to the conclusion that my mission in my professional life is to unlock people's full potential. That's what I do each and every day.
GREG: On an individual basis, you kind of think of that. Is that where that goes?
DAVE: That's right. On an individual and team basis.
GREG: Yeah, okay.
DAVE: A lot of what I talk about to my team over here is I want them to have the environment where they can do their best work of their career is going to happen at Webflow, and to set the environment for them to be able to do that work. If we can create the best marketing team, the world-class marketing team, it is also going to help us from a business perspective because we become a case study. The advice, though, really comes back to trust. I have a coach, her name is Katrina, who introduced me to this idea of the trust framework. And here's me coming to the table thinking like I'm an expert in trust. I've been doing it for a long time. She introduced this trust framework concept in terms of team building that I think both works internally for teams and externally for brands.
The general equation, the trust equation, is reliability plus credibility plus approachability over self-orientation. And really what that means is —
DAVE: We talked about trust earlier, and I want to go back to it because I think about trust a lot, both as a external and also a leadership philosophy that I have. Let me start by saying that about four or five years ago, I really started thinking about what my personal professional mission is.
GREG: Interesting.
DAVE: After a lot of conversations and soul searching, I really came to the conclusion that my mission in my professional life is to unlock people's full potential. That's what I do each and every day.
GREG: On an individual basis, you kind of think of that. Is that where that goes?
DAVE: That's right. On an individual and team basis.
GREG: Yeah, okay.
DAVE: A lot of what I talk about to my team over here is I want them to have the environment where they can do their best work of their career is going to happen at Webflow, and to set the environment for them to be able to do that work. If we can create the best marketing team, the world-class marketing team, it is also going to help us from a business perspective because we become a case study. The advice, though, really comes back to trust. I have a coach, her name is Katrina, who introduced me to this idea of the trust framework. And here's me coming to the table thinking like I'm an expert in trust. I've been doing it for a long time. She introduced this trust framework concept in terms of team building that I think both works internally for teams and externally for brands.
The general equation, the trust equation, is reliability plus credibility plus approachability over self-orientation. And really what that means is —
Mining Conflict Together
GREG: Yeah, break those down. I mean, I think the first two — credibility, reliability — I think we get those. I don't know if I understood approachability, so let's come back to that one, what that means. But I think also too over self-orientation, I think is the one that you ... When I've heard you say this before, it felt like it threw me for a loop. I had to then stop and think. Yeah, so go ahead. Break it down.
DAVE: Well, there's a reason why it's the denominator, and so it is the inverse of self-orientation. So first I'll talk about it in terms of team and then about brand. Self-orientation means I'm in it for myself. The opposite of self-orientation is I'm in it for the team.
GREG: Self-centered to the extreme. It's only about me. Yeah. Okay. Got it.
DAVE: Said the other way, I play for the front of the jersey versus the back of the jersey. Am I in it for the team?
GREG: Oh my God. I've never heard anybody say that that way. I love that. I love a good sports one.
DAVE: Yeah. We always go back to sports. So the team orientation's important. I also think that that translates into really great brand building. The brands that are about the customers that they serve or the communities that they serve or the stakeholders that they serve and not in it just for themselves, even though we have fiduciary responsibility to grow our companies and to be successful, but those brands that put the customer quote at the center, but also orient their work around customer success, those are the ones that I think are the enduring brands for the future. And so I've thought a lot about this trust framework and this trust equation in a lot of the work that we do. I think it's bananas for anyone to not have a coach at any level of their career. And for some reason, we don't invest in it as individuals and few teams actually invest in growing people's careers with coaches.
That's a thing that has to change. For me, the personal experience was actually in my last job at GitLab. We had a new CMO come in and her entire focus was to create the highest-performing marketing team. She knew that the way to do that was to bring a team coach in. So it wasn't actually an individual coach, it was a team coach that worked with us as a team to establish frameworks for becoming high performing. I'll talk to you about one of the frameworks in a second. It's not the trust equation. It's a different way and it's good advice that I've gotten and how I lead. And so what she would do is she came in, coached us as a unit, and then coached us individually within that unit. Each of us has different motivations, each of us has different strengths and weaknesses and opportunities to grow and all of that. And in the process over about two to three years, had created, if not the best marketing leadership team that I've been a part of, one of the top ones. It was a transformative experience.
GREG: Was Katrina the coach for that or no?
DAVE: Katrina was the coach for that. One of the things that she introduced us to was what's called the Tuckman model of high-performing teams. Most people have never heard of that. What they have heard of is forming, storming, norming, and performing, which is a typical way that teams develop over time. What she did was she introduced us to that concept, gave us a way of thinking about it, and then a way of thinking you don't become high performing unless you know how to conflict as a team. Unless you know how to mine for conflict, find conflict, and get through it together as a team. And so that's what she led us through.
GREG: Wait, wait. They're telling you that you're looking for conflict in some regards?
DAVE: That's right. Because conflict occurs. It's everywhere.
GREG: What does that mean, though, looking for conflict? I mean, that sounds a little bit like two men go into the Thunderdome, one man comes out kind of thing. Is that ...
DAVE: (laugh) It's not that.
GREG: Were you doing a gladiator thing on this, Dave? What do you mean? No, what's the conflict that they're kind of advocating for? It's obviously not open warfare in a business. So what does that mean?
DAVE: Any organization, any team, is going to have inherent conflict. The question is, is it above or is it below? Do you bring it into the room and have discussion about it and you mine for conflict and then resolve your way through?
GREG: Okay, okay.
DAVE: Or do you not talk about it in the room, and then around the water cooler you're having that kind of conversation? So it's about bringing that conflict so that the team can actually go through it. But the core premise is this, is that most people, including myself, are conflict averse.
GREG: Some are, yeah. I live in New York. I actually like conflict, but go ahead. Yeah. I know there's other sides.
DAVE: But a lot of people are really conflict averse. I mean, it is both emotionally hard and physically. You can actually feel it and it feels uncomfortable for a lot of people. And so practicing conflict as a team with a great coach to facilitate your way through it, [it's] almost like therapy.
GREG: I actually have a psychologist on retainer at the MMA.
DAVE: Oh, wow.
GREG: I've now told at least a couple hundred people, probably, that. And you know what's funny, Dave? I've never once heard anybody say, "Oh yeah, we do that." But I don't know how or why a company would go through without that. It's nuts to me. And listen, I use him for two things. One is to understand the decisions I'm making. Am I making those decisions based on the best of the information I have without as much bias as I can, without my own pathology in there, which is basically what therapy's supposed to get at, pathology. And then I also use him to give me feedback. Most of the time, he may have talked to somebody else who's got a complaint, but I'm going to be the problem or I'm the one who needs to change because it's my job to make the company work. It's not their job per se to change, although maybe they're better off that they do that, that's different point.
But it's my job to go change. So I need to find out well then what's the move or what's the understanding and how do I need to know how to approach that person? But you're right to the point that we don't really spend that time doing it. And let's also recognize too that for most employees, work is a complicated thing. They've got stress outside work in their life. They've got, I don't know, bills, bullshit, kids, whatever. I mean, there's a whole series [of things] — husbands, wives — there's a whole raft of things that can happen that then get brought into work, probably not super productive. And it's just a company's meant to be productive. It's not here to be a feel-good family, although I guess they can create that environment, but that's not the intent. It's a commercial dynamic. And he's available to pretty much really anybody in the company who wants to call him and say, "I need to run something by you.
I want to get a perspective. I need to have a difficult conversation with Greg. How should I have it?" Whatever it might be.
DAVE: Could you imagine fielding a baseball team without a coach?
GREG: Oh, it'd be insane.
DAVE: It'd be chaotic. They'd lose all the time. I think it's bananas that the business world hasn't adopted that mentality, number one. And number two —
GREG: I know. Why aren't we helping people? Why aren't we helping them with professional help to get things right? A coach is maybe a variation of a psychologist. I mean, it's a different approach, my psychologist does a particular thing, but —
DAVE: I think they are ... I was going to say two sides of the same coin. I actually think that ... So I'm married to a therapist, so you should know that about my background.
GREG: Oh, that's funny. There we go.
DAVE: So by osmosis, I take a lot in from what I hear. And the distinction between a credentialed therapist and an amazing executive team coach is very blurry in terms of the way that they approach it. And it's all based on psychology and understanding what makes people tick. And this is where it gets back to my own personal mission, which is in order to unlock people's potential, they need coaching to help them through it.
DAVE: Well, there's a reason why it's the denominator, and so it is the inverse of self-orientation. So first I'll talk about it in terms of team and then about brand. Self-orientation means I'm in it for myself. The opposite of self-orientation is I'm in it for the team.
GREG: Self-centered to the extreme. It's only about me. Yeah. Okay. Got it.
DAVE: Said the other way, I play for the front of the jersey versus the back of the jersey. Am I in it for the team?
GREG: Oh my God. I've never heard anybody say that that way. I love that. I love a good sports one.
DAVE: Yeah. We always go back to sports. So the team orientation's important. I also think that that translates into really great brand building. The brands that are about the customers that they serve or the communities that they serve or the stakeholders that they serve and not in it just for themselves, even though we have fiduciary responsibility to grow our companies and to be successful, but those brands that put the customer quote at the center, but also orient their work around customer success, those are the ones that I think are the enduring brands for the future. And so I've thought a lot about this trust framework and this trust equation in a lot of the work that we do. I think it's bananas for anyone to not have a coach at any level of their career. And for some reason, we don't invest in it as individuals and few teams actually invest in growing people's careers with coaches.
That's a thing that has to change. For me, the personal experience was actually in my last job at GitLab. We had a new CMO come in and her entire focus was to create the highest-performing marketing team. She knew that the way to do that was to bring a team coach in. So it wasn't actually an individual coach, it was a team coach that worked with us as a team to establish frameworks for becoming high performing. I'll talk to you about one of the frameworks in a second. It's not the trust equation. It's a different way and it's good advice that I've gotten and how I lead. And so what she would do is she came in, coached us as a unit, and then coached us individually within that unit. Each of us has different motivations, each of us has different strengths and weaknesses and opportunities to grow and all of that. And in the process over about two to three years, had created, if not the best marketing leadership team that I've been a part of, one of the top ones. It was a transformative experience.
GREG: Was Katrina the coach for that or no?
DAVE: Katrina was the coach for that. One of the things that she introduced us to was what's called the Tuckman model of high-performing teams. Most people have never heard of that. What they have heard of is forming, storming, norming, and performing, which is a typical way that teams develop over time. What she did was she introduced us to that concept, gave us a way of thinking about it, and then a way of thinking you don't become high performing unless you know how to conflict as a team. Unless you know how to mine for conflict, find conflict, and get through it together as a team. And so that's what she led us through.
GREG: Wait, wait. They're telling you that you're looking for conflict in some regards?
DAVE: That's right. Because conflict occurs. It's everywhere.
GREG: What does that mean, though, looking for conflict? I mean, that sounds a little bit like two men go into the Thunderdome, one man comes out kind of thing. Is that ...
DAVE: (laugh) It's not that.
GREG: Were you doing a gladiator thing on this, Dave? What do you mean? No, what's the conflict that they're kind of advocating for? It's obviously not open warfare in a business. So what does that mean?
DAVE: Any organization, any team, is going to have inherent conflict. The question is, is it above or is it below? Do you bring it into the room and have discussion about it and you mine for conflict and then resolve your way through?
GREG: Okay, okay.
DAVE: Or do you not talk about it in the room, and then around the water cooler you're having that kind of conversation? So it's about bringing that conflict so that the team can actually go through it. But the core premise is this, is that most people, including myself, are conflict averse.
GREG: Some are, yeah. I live in New York. I actually like conflict, but go ahead. Yeah. I know there's other sides.
DAVE: But a lot of people are really conflict averse. I mean, it is both emotionally hard and physically. You can actually feel it and it feels uncomfortable for a lot of people. And so practicing conflict as a team with a great coach to facilitate your way through it, [it's] almost like therapy.
GREG: I actually have a psychologist on retainer at the MMA.
DAVE: Oh, wow.
GREG: I've now told at least a couple hundred people, probably, that. And you know what's funny, Dave? I've never once heard anybody say, "Oh yeah, we do that." But I don't know how or why a company would go through without that. It's nuts to me. And listen, I use him for two things. One is to understand the decisions I'm making. Am I making those decisions based on the best of the information I have without as much bias as I can, without my own pathology in there, which is basically what therapy's supposed to get at, pathology. And then I also use him to give me feedback. Most of the time, he may have talked to somebody else who's got a complaint, but I'm going to be the problem or I'm the one who needs to change because it's my job to make the company work. It's not their job per se to change, although maybe they're better off that they do that, that's different point.
But it's my job to go change. So I need to find out well then what's the move or what's the understanding and how do I need to know how to approach that person? But you're right to the point that we don't really spend that time doing it. And let's also recognize too that for most employees, work is a complicated thing. They've got stress outside work in their life. They've got, I don't know, bills, bullshit, kids, whatever. I mean, there's a whole series [of things] — husbands, wives — there's a whole raft of things that can happen that then get brought into work, probably not super productive. And it's just a company's meant to be productive. It's not here to be a feel-good family, although I guess they can create that environment, but that's not the intent. It's a commercial dynamic. And he's available to pretty much really anybody in the company who wants to call him and say, "I need to run something by you.
I want to get a perspective. I need to have a difficult conversation with Greg. How should I have it?" Whatever it might be.
DAVE: Could you imagine fielding a baseball team without a coach?
GREG: Oh, it'd be insane.
DAVE: It'd be chaotic. They'd lose all the time. I think it's bananas that the business world hasn't adopted that mentality, number one. And number two —
GREG: I know. Why aren't we helping people? Why aren't we helping them with professional help to get things right? A coach is maybe a variation of a psychologist. I mean, it's a different approach, my psychologist does a particular thing, but —
DAVE: I think they are ... I was going to say two sides of the same coin. I actually think that ... So I'm married to a therapist, so you should know that about my background.
GREG: Oh, that's funny. There we go.
DAVE: So by osmosis, I take a lot in from what I hear. And the distinction between a credentialed therapist and an amazing executive team coach is very blurry in terms of the way that they approach it. And it's all based on psychology and understanding what makes people tick. And this is where it gets back to my own personal mission, which is in order to unlock people's potential, they need coaching to help them through it.
Shifting from Campaigns to Systems
GREG: The purpose of Building Better CMOs is to identify the problems. I'm here to talk about the challenges. What are the things we need to fix? What do we need to be better? Where do you think marketing ... Where can it really improve? What do you think we could get so much better at that would make the business and what we do and our contributions so much better?
DAVE: Yeah, I want to answer it in two ways. One is aspirational and one is practical right now. And I'll start with the practical right now. To the ethos behind the question that you asked, I think we get failing grades as marketing leaders and CMOs in the executive suite, and we can complain about it or we can do something about it. I think what's happening is we are transitioning as CMOs from being campaign specific to more systems oriented. So if there's something that I think we can fix now it's, as marketing leaders, think more about the systems that you're creating than about the specific campaigns that you are launching. Don't forget about the campaigns, but really your seat at the table is about how are you building a system overall that is driving brand and growth at the same time, full stop. That's the primary two jobs.
A system to me — and we're in this point in time right now, we're actually being called to do it — is how are you transforming your own team with AI right at the center? So a system to me is like how do you unblock people from the relay race that typically occurs within a marketing team from function to function to function to create a system where you've got all of the insights that you need around a shared brain or a shared operating system such that every marketer is an orchestrator of their own work. That to me is a system, where you can go from idea to execution to learning back to idea as quickly as you possibly can. What that does is it gets you out of the mentality of I'm a new CMO, I've got to do a Hail Mary pass to do a rebrand and hopefully it's going to work. And then 18 months later it didn't work and I'm trying to find a new job.
GREG: So how do I execute a system? It feels like a state of mind and maybe an orientation rather than a process I build. I don't know. Keep going on it. I'm trying to figure out how I execute against what you're suggesting, just so you know that's where my mind is.
DAVE: The way that I'm executing against it is thinking about what does a modern marketing team organizationally look like? Because I think it doesn't look exactly like it has looked for the past two decades. We used to have a lot of content people in marketing. I think content is easier to create now. It doesn't mean we don't need content people, but the role of the content marketer feels more like a content strategist and an orchestrator than it feels like somebody who's chunking out e-books all the time. The way that I'm approaching it — and you can look at product marketing in the same way and growth marketing in the same way — so the way that I'm looking at it is thinking about what are the roles and responsibilities of marketers and how should we organize ourselves for an agentic age? How do we get through the transition period that we're in right now?
I would characterize the first phase of the AI-native marketing team is like plant a thousand seeds and see what blooms. We're entering a much more intentional phase right now, which is create a bunch of governance models and much more intentionality behind the work that we do. These are just examples of the way that I've approached it from a system-level thinking versus a I have to launch a brand campaign and hope and pray that it works. And I think that if CMOs take that mentality, you will see the report card improve for us on the executive suite and you'll see the tenure of the marketer improve as well. We'll be much more like CTOs and CIOs versus everybody around us thinks that they can do marketing so they'll give us an opinion of the swag that we should order.
DAVE: Yeah, I want to answer it in two ways. One is aspirational and one is practical right now. And I'll start with the practical right now. To the ethos behind the question that you asked, I think we get failing grades as marketing leaders and CMOs in the executive suite, and we can complain about it or we can do something about it. I think what's happening is we are transitioning as CMOs from being campaign specific to more systems oriented. So if there's something that I think we can fix now it's, as marketing leaders, think more about the systems that you're creating than about the specific campaigns that you are launching. Don't forget about the campaigns, but really your seat at the table is about how are you building a system overall that is driving brand and growth at the same time, full stop. That's the primary two jobs.
A system to me — and we're in this point in time right now, we're actually being called to do it — is how are you transforming your own team with AI right at the center? So a system to me is like how do you unblock people from the relay race that typically occurs within a marketing team from function to function to function to create a system where you've got all of the insights that you need around a shared brain or a shared operating system such that every marketer is an orchestrator of their own work. That to me is a system, where you can go from idea to execution to learning back to idea as quickly as you possibly can. What that does is it gets you out of the mentality of I'm a new CMO, I've got to do a Hail Mary pass to do a rebrand and hopefully it's going to work. And then 18 months later it didn't work and I'm trying to find a new job.
GREG: So how do I execute a system? It feels like a state of mind and maybe an orientation rather than a process I build. I don't know. Keep going on it. I'm trying to figure out how I execute against what you're suggesting, just so you know that's where my mind is.
DAVE: The way that I'm executing against it is thinking about what does a modern marketing team organizationally look like? Because I think it doesn't look exactly like it has looked for the past two decades. We used to have a lot of content people in marketing. I think content is easier to create now. It doesn't mean we don't need content people, but the role of the content marketer feels more like a content strategist and an orchestrator than it feels like somebody who's chunking out e-books all the time. The way that I'm approaching it — and you can look at product marketing in the same way and growth marketing in the same way — so the way that I'm looking at it is thinking about what are the roles and responsibilities of marketers and how should we organize ourselves for an agentic age? How do we get through the transition period that we're in right now?
I would characterize the first phase of the AI-native marketing team is like plant a thousand seeds and see what blooms. We're entering a much more intentional phase right now, which is create a bunch of governance models and much more intentionality behind the work that we do. These are just examples of the way that I've approached it from a system-level thinking versus a I have to launch a brand campaign and hope and pray that it works. And I think that if CMOs take that mentality, you will see the report card improve for us on the executive suite and you'll see the tenure of the marketer improve as well. We'll be much more like CTOs and CIOs versus everybody around us thinks that they can do marketing so they'll give us an opinion of the swag that we should order.
The Modern Marketer Skill Stack
GREG: I had a big-time CMO say something to me the other day. He is really one of the smartest marketers I know. He says, "As smart as I think I am," and I do think he's really smart and I do think he's really scientific about it. He goes, "As smart and scientific as I try to be, at the end of the day, I think the brand people," he goes, "they just want to see the pretty ads." (laugh) It was very disappointing to hear that. I thought, "Really? They don't respect your intelligence and the scientific nature you bring to this?" It's like, oh, well, I don't know. I think that's an element of we probably have some training [to do]. We need to develop the skills, the attributes, the understanding, and then train others that this is how we do things. It's not just about arts and crafts. (laugh)
DAVE: A hundred percent. I think about the modern marketer as right brain and left brain, art and science. And I think we're not there yet, but Greg, that's the kind of not only up-leveling, up-skilling, but the kind of support I think we want to give to marketers today, which is how to be able to do both.
GREG: I think we need to both respect and then build the knowledge that we really need to have. Meaning we have to respect how hard it is, but don't just default like, "Oh whoa, my life is difficult." Knock it off. The issue is that we're full of hard science and soft science. You have to know psychology, sociology. You also have to know statistics. I don't know, there's not too many other professions that really have to mix both sciences in that way, I think.
DAVE: Marketers are expected to be kind of polymaths right now, and I think that is getting at what you're talking about. Today, you're expected to be an expert in storytelling and brand. You're expected to be an expert in driving growth and performance marketing and channel marketing and all of that. And you're expected to be an expert in how do I transform my team to be AI forward?
GREG: And I've got to have a tech background.
DAVE: Yeah. And so my perspective is pick two out of those three where you as a marketing leader are going to spike and then hire really, really well for that third one because you're not going to be able to do all three.
GREG: I think it's even more complicated, Dave, if I can say. I think there's actually, I actually identified 12 different sciences that we need to have. I've documented them somewhere. I'd have to go find them again, but 12 different sciences we've got to know. It's like, ouch.
DAVE: I'd love to see that. Yeah, that's great.
GREG: We need to be focused less on campaigns and more on systems.
DAVE: That's right. And don't forget about campaigns. Campaigns is one of the ways that you get message-market fit and you drive growth. But as the marketing leader, show up to the table as the person who's building and operating a growth and brand system, not a singular campaign. And then I said there's an aspirational problem that I call in all of us to solve. And I think this is an industry-wide problem and opportunity, which is how do we finally get the trust equation right? How do we figure out —
GREG: Trust to who, by the way? Internal or external, by the way?
DAVE: Oh, that's a great question.
GREG: (laugh)
DAVE: I'm glad that you asked because I was referring to external.
GREG: I thought so, but the internal is almost worse.
DAVE: But the internal is almost more the opportunity that we have as well. And so when I say systems thinker and show up to the table thinking about that, that is part of the trust internal equation. And then the trust external is how do we measure it? What are the best practices that apply throughout any vertical or throughout any industry that we can adopt? And I don't think anybody's done it, and I think we have an opportunity to do that now.
GREG: But Dave, I'm selling Dove soap. Eh, whatever. Do I really need trust?
DAVE: (laugh) Of course you need trust.
GREG: I'm selling a car. Okay. I need trust because we don't like to kill people. That's not good with that kind of technology, right? I don't know. Is there any place that trust ... I mean, I guess I'd want it from my financial. I'd want it from account ... I mean, I'm trying to think. Is there any place I wouldn't care about trust? No. I mean, if it's toys, I need to have trust that they're going to be ... So I guess the question [is], if trust becomes so important, then do you know or have a ... I feel like I'm about to start a whole nother podcast episode here, which I don't need to do in five minutes. How do you really work to build trust or is it just making sure you don't lose it?
DAVE: No, I think it's both. How do you cultivate and engender it? And then how do you put the systems in place to make sure that you don't lose it when crisis hits? I think you need both sides of that equation. The great brands that are out there — some of which I've worked with and some of which I haven't — they can pre-plan for the doomsday such that if there is a crisis, they've got the plan in place. But part of that pre-plan is to really architect trust to begin with, to be the depositor into the trust bank as often as they possibly can.
GREG: I thought in some regards too, that that was building brands. I was at AOL when they got in real trouble, remember? And it was because they were so arrogant they never built the brand. eBay, I think, got in that same kind of trouble too at one point, I think. They hadn't really done, I thought, enough brand work. Maybe they did. I'm trying to think, but they hadn't really done ... Some companies, they don't do enough brand work and they get high in their own sort of supply and then something goes wrong or they have to switch a policy that creates angst and trouble and then they don't have a strong enough brand for people to let ride through with them and they just create all sorts of shitstorm for themselves, I think.
DAVE: And that's where I think the industry-wide opportunity is. Just as brand marketers have over decades worked to really — and there's still work to do — to define what brand actually means and how to measure it, trust is everything and nothing at the same time. That's where I think we have an opportunity as an industry to come together and really say, "Here is our jointly held framework for why trust is important and how to engender it and how to protect it when things go wrong."
GREG: And my guess, if I can make a political statement, in today's time, I'm not sure that it's ever been more important than it is now.
DAVE: Yeah, I agree. Trust in institutions is at an all-time low.
GREG: All-time low. Yeah. A whole host of challenges. We don't trust each other. We don't trust the other side. We don't trust anything anymore.
DAVE: And to end it on a great note, what a great opportunity for a brand to differentiate themselves based on being the most trusted brand in their category and to competitively differentiate from that perspective.
GREG: If we could come up with a methodology to isolate and measure the value of trust, it would be interesting because I would love to put some quantitative nature to the importance of that or even just that it could be moved. I mean, that's a challenge with brand trackers today. You do all this work and then you never see the thing move at all. I'd love if we could come up with a ... And I think the Edelman guys have done a lot of [this]. Richard's been in a lot of work around the trust dynamics and the importance of that and the dismal state of it in the world at large. [It's] not just an American phenomenon, right?
DAVE: Sign me up, coach. I'll join you in doing that.
GREG: We got work to do. Well, Dave, listen, I can't thank you enough for you and Webflow coming on here today. Really engaging conversation. I kind of could tell it was [going to be] and we way over delivered on it. So thank you very much.
DAVE: I appreciate it, Greg.
DAVE: A hundred percent. I think about the modern marketer as right brain and left brain, art and science. And I think we're not there yet, but Greg, that's the kind of not only up-leveling, up-skilling, but the kind of support I think we want to give to marketers today, which is how to be able to do both.
GREG: I think we need to both respect and then build the knowledge that we really need to have. Meaning we have to respect how hard it is, but don't just default like, "Oh whoa, my life is difficult." Knock it off. The issue is that we're full of hard science and soft science. You have to know psychology, sociology. You also have to know statistics. I don't know, there's not too many other professions that really have to mix both sciences in that way, I think.
DAVE: Marketers are expected to be kind of polymaths right now, and I think that is getting at what you're talking about. Today, you're expected to be an expert in storytelling and brand. You're expected to be an expert in driving growth and performance marketing and channel marketing and all of that. And you're expected to be an expert in how do I transform my team to be AI forward?
GREG: And I've got to have a tech background.
DAVE: Yeah. And so my perspective is pick two out of those three where you as a marketing leader are going to spike and then hire really, really well for that third one because you're not going to be able to do all three.
GREG: I think it's even more complicated, Dave, if I can say. I think there's actually, I actually identified 12 different sciences that we need to have. I've documented them somewhere. I'd have to go find them again, but 12 different sciences we've got to know. It's like, ouch.
DAVE: I'd love to see that. Yeah, that's great.
GREG: We need to be focused less on campaigns and more on systems.
DAVE: That's right. And don't forget about campaigns. Campaigns is one of the ways that you get message-market fit and you drive growth. But as the marketing leader, show up to the table as the person who's building and operating a growth and brand system, not a singular campaign. And then I said there's an aspirational problem that I call in all of us to solve. And I think this is an industry-wide problem and opportunity, which is how do we finally get the trust equation right? How do we figure out —
GREG: Trust to who, by the way? Internal or external, by the way?
DAVE: Oh, that's a great question.
GREG: (laugh)
DAVE: I'm glad that you asked because I was referring to external.
GREG: I thought so, but the internal is almost worse.
DAVE: But the internal is almost more the opportunity that we have as well. And so when I say systems thinker and show up to the table thinking about that, that is part of the trust internal equation. And then the trust external is how do we measure it? What are the best practices that apply throughout any vertical or throughout any industry that we can adopt? And I don't think anybody's done it, and I think we have an opportunity to do that now.
GREG: But Dave, I'm selling Dove soap. Eh, whatever. Do I really need trust?
DAVE: (laugh) Of course you need trust.
GREG: I'm selling a car. Okay. I need trust because we don't like to kill people. That's not good with that kind of technology, right? I don't know. Is there any place that trust ... I mean, I guess I'd want it from my financial. I'd want it from account ... I mean, I'm trying to think. Is there any place I wouldn't care about trust? No. I mean, if it's toys, I need to have trust that they're going to be ... So I guess the question [is], if trust becomes so important, then do you know or have a ... I feel like I'm about to start a whole nother podcast episode here, which I don't need to do in five minutes. How do you really work to build trust or is it just making sure you don't lose it?
DAVE: No, I think it's both. How do you cultivate and engender it? And then how do you put the systems in place to make sure that you don't lose it when crisis hits? I think you need both sides of that equation. The great brands that are out there — some of which I've worked with and some of which I haven't — they can pre-plan for the doomsday such that if there is a crisis, they've got the plan in place. But part of that pre-plan is to really architect trust to begin with, to be the depositor into the trust bank as often as they possibly can.
GREG: I thought in some regards too, that that was building brands. I was at AOL when they got in real trouble, remember? And it was because they were so arrogant they never built the brand. eBay, I think, got in that same kind of trouble too at one point, I think. They hadn't really done, I thought, enough brand work. Maybe they did. I'm trying to think, but they hadn't really done ... Some companies, they don't do enough brand work and they get high in their own sort of supply and then something goes wrong or they have to switch a policy that creates angst and trouble and then they don't have a strong enough brand for people to let ride through with them and they just create all sorts of shitstorm for themselves, I think.
DAVE: And that's where I think the industry-wide opportunity is. Just as brand marketers have over decades worked to really — and there's still work to do — to define what brand actually means and how to measure it, trust is everything and nothing at the same time. That's where I think we have an opportunity as an industry to come together and really say, "Here is our jointly held framework for why trust is important and how to engender it and how to protect it when things go wrong."
GREG: And my guess, if I can make a political statement, in today's time, I'm not sure that it's ever been more important than it is now.
DAVE: Yeah, I agree. Trust in institutions is at an all-time low.
GREG: All-time low. Yeah. A whole host of challenges. We don't trust each other. We don't trust the other side. We don't trust anything anymore.
DAVE: And to end it on a great note, what a great opportunity for a brand to differentiate themselves based on being the most trusted brand in their category and to competitively differentiate from that perspective.
GREG: If we could come up with a methodology to isolate and measure the value of trust, it would be interesting because I would love to put some quantitative nature to the importance of that or even just that it could be moved. I mean, that's a challenge with brand trackers today. You do all this work and then you never see the thing move at all. I'd love if we could come up with a ... And I think the Edelman guys have done a lot of [this]. Richard's been in a lot of work around the trust dynamics and the importance of that and the dismal state of it in the world at large. [It's] not just an American phenomenon, right?
DAVE: Sign me up, coach. I'll join you in doing that.
GREG: We got work to do. Well, Dave, listen, I can't thank you enough for you and Webflow coming on here today. Really engaging conversation. I kind of could tell it was [going to be] and we way over delivered on it. So thank you very much.
DAVE: I appreciate it, Greg.