Zillow SVP of Marketing Ravi Kandikonda

RAVI KANDIKONDA: What I see is a severe shortage of marketers who can do that — by sitting in the rooms where they are talking to their product counterparts, or experience delivery counterparts, or design counterparts, or engineering counterparts — and having a clarity on what is the product or experience that we are actually marketing to customers? And how does that customer actually receive that experience and, therefore, what are the employees doing to deliver on that experience? And how does a company actually make money both in the short term and long term?

GREG STUART: Welcome to Building Better CMOs, a podcast about how marketers can get smarter and stronger. I am Greg Stuart, the CEO of the non-profit MMA Global. And that voice you heard at the top is Ravi Kandikonda. He is the SVP of marketing at Zillow. Now, before he joined Zillow in 2020, Ravi spent four years as managing director at Ogilvy, and eight years in marketing leadership roles at Comcast NBC Universal.

Today on the podcast, Ravi and I are going to talk about how brands remain culturally relevant … in part, in his collaboration with Ryan Reynolds; why empathy in brand advertising messages an important tool; the importance of the whole company working together around customer experience; and then a little bit too at the end about the nature and state of AI, in terms of marketing.

The Building Better CMOs podcast is all about the challenges that marketers face and unlocking the true power that marketing can have. Ravi is going to tell us how he did that, right after this.

Hi, this is Greg Stuart, host of Building Better CMOs, and I'm here with Ravi Kandikonda today, the CMO of Zillow. Ravi, welcome. Thank you for joining me.

RAVI: Thank you so much for having me here, Greg.

GREG: Very excited. This feels like there's a lot going on in the real estate marketplace today, correct? I don't know. Maybe it's always top of everybody's news because it's the biggest purchase that anybody ever makes in their lifetime, I think, right?

RAVI: It is. It is. And on an average, a customer buys or moves every seven years. It's a pretty substantial decision a family or an individual makes. So yes, there is a lot going on in the real estate sector, especially with how we are seeing higher interest rates, lower inventory, and there is so much pent up demand, especially from newer generation of movers to find the home that they aspire to have and cherish to live in. So yeah, there's a lot going on right now.

GREG: Yeah, it's a lot going on. It's a big deal, too, especially if you're making your first-time purchase. And I think I mentioned to you... By the way, you live in Seattle, too. So I'm born and raised Seattle.

RAVI: Oh, you are?

GREG: Yeah, I lived there. I went to University of Washington. When I graduated undergrad, I moved to New York City, so I've been here ever since. So I have a special fondness both for the development of the city and businesses like Microsoft and Starbucks and Zillow and a bunch of great companies have come out of... Amazon, obviously. A bunch of great companies have come out of Seattle. Maybe I should have stayed. But listen, I love Zillow, too. As I mentioned to you, my wife's in real estate. She sells real estate out in the Hamptons here on the east end of Long Island, which is kind of a bougie, sort of fancy marketplace.

GREG: But it's interesting, I kind of pay a little more attention to the market dynamics and what's moving. I mean, I saw some data just here recently said that in some markets, pricing has actually gone down. Pretty rare for housing. And yet there's a lot of places there's just no inventory, and then you've got this stalled market because of the higher interest rates. It's a very funny time it feels like for real estate right now.

RAVI: Especially given the low-interest environment that we were in until 2022.

GREG: Correct.

RAVI: On an average, most of the homeowners are locked into their mortgage rates around 3 percent.

GREG: I have two under 3 percent mortgages. I am never, never, never letting those go.

RAVI: So there you go. That's exactly the reason why the inventory is as low as it is right now. And then you have a whole generation of customers, young customers who are coming in and who, I think, pre-pandemic thought they will never actually own a place. All of that changed, and now home has become that much more important. And therefore, there is so much pent-up demand, low inventory, high interest rates, all of that actually suppressing the affordability of many of the customers. And we are hoping 2025 is the year that it all turns around and we start to see some momentum come back in.

GREG: Yeah, listen, that pent-up demand is going to release at some point here. It just is what it is, and I think we get a new order. I mean, my wife and I have been thinking about whether or not we would buy again, and we're like, well, high interest. It's like, okay, if that's what happens, that's what happens. I think we're adjusting to it at some level.

RAVI: Right, yeah.

GREG: I will say, just if I can put a little plug in for my wife now. She never listens to the podcast. I don't suspect she's ever heard any one of these. She never read my book. She never did any of that stuff. But I am going to give her a little plug and just say, if I could call out here, she did actually have her biggest sale just this last year. She just closed it in, I think October, November of $21 million.

RAVI: Wow. Congratulations.

GREG: That's a big home transaction. I want to be very clear, I was neither the seller nor the buyer of that house, so just to identify for the audience. But I was very proud of her for the time she's put in to have finally gotten to that level. I mean, not a lot of people get an opportunity to sell a house of that scale anywhere in the world.

RAVI: Well, that's a big milestone, Greg. Congratulations to her.

GREG: It is.

GREG: And listen, Zillow's had a bunch of milestones and stuff, so let's get into marketing here, obviously, the point of the podcast and Building Better CMOs. You guys had an interesting tie-up with Ryan Reynolds here in the last... year or two years, whatever it is. He's sort of all over in marketing. Ryan's like, you always like to hear a good marketing story about Ryan. What's the Zillow story about Ryan?

RAVI: Yeah, so it's super interesting. Are you familiar with the children's show called Bluey?

GREG: Vaguely. My kids are a little bit older now, so I'm not seeing much, but yeah, I have some sense of it. But maybe explain it for the listener so that they know.

RAVI: It's a very popular show, especially with families who have young children at home. And then there was this one particular episode where the Bluey family decides to move, and it causes quite a lot of anxiety to the children in the family. They go through the usual emotions involved with moving and eventually, at the end of the episode, choose not to move.

So Ryan Reynolds sees that episode with his family and then reaches out to Zillow through his agency, Maximum Effort, and goes, 'I would love to partner with Zillow in telling the story that moving can actually be good.' And we said, we agree. Moving opens up a lot of new avenues. So our interests aligned, and we did a quick collaboration with him in a matter of days where we put out an alternate version of the fact that moving can actually be good and used one of the voices of the character that is actually in the show to tell that story. And we launched it just as an alternate version of the story, and then it got picked up by Today Show, USA Today ran a story around it. The whole point is it was a very culturally relevant moment where we could actually tell a story that feels authentic, that is actually real, and it actually supports the whole brand purpose of why Zillow exists, which is to help more and more people get home. So it was a cool collaboration.

GREG: That's kind of Ryan's thing, that's his thesis in marketing is cultural relevance, I think. Correct?

RAVI: Yes. That'd be correct.

GREG: And he just reached out to you and said, 'Hey, I think I got some ideas here, could be interesting and fun?' Or was there something in his life that prompted him to sort of think moving was good? I don't know what that means.

RAVI: I think it's a combination of both. I haven't talked to him personally, but what I heard from the team is moving in particular is actually interesting, right? Because you get whole new experiences, and you have a whole new way of experiencing life. But then the reason why he reached out to us is essentially what makes Zillow the brand it is. The moment people think of a home, people think of potentially a move, the first brand that comes to their mind is Zillow. And we don't even try to force or try to artificially get that consideration because it happens very naturally because of the authenticity of who we are, but also the products and services that we build that are entirely focused on making that moving journey that much more easier.

GREG: I can't imagine that anybody going through a moving process or rethinking of buying or selling doesn't at some point in that process step into Zillow. Obvious, got to be.

RAVI: Ninety-plus percent of customers who move, start or use Zillow at some point in the journey. So we have a pretty high consideration rate and as a brand and as marketers, we always talk about awareness but also consideration. So our unaided awareness is up in the...

GREG: Eighty, 90...

RAVI: ... 70 percent and aided awareness is 90-plus percent and consideration rate is equally high. And that's a very privileged place to be, and we take that very seriously.

GREG: So Ravi, I'm going to tell you my own sort of story about children and the anxiety of it. Okay, I'll let Eric decide, our producer here, if he wants to cut it out in post. Here's the story. So when my daughter, I have twin daughters, they're the oldest. They were 15, and my wife and I went to them, went to all the kids and said, 'Listen guys, we have some really good news. Your mother and I are always up for new challenges in life. We're willing to make positive changes in our life and we're always looking for new opportunities that we think we can make the family better. So your mom and I have decided that we're going to move, we're all going to move back to New York City.' We were living out in Long Island at the time. My 15-year-old daughter stood there. She looked at us, she goes, 'I am not moving to New York City.' So I gave it a half a beat and I said, 'Well then you'll need to make other arrangements.'

And she goes, 'What do you mean?' I remember this whole conversation completely. I remember where she was standing and everything. She goes, 'What do you mean? I don't have any money and I don't know how to get a job, so what am I going to do?' I said, 'Well, that will be part of the new challenges you'll have to solve on your new adventure, but your mom and I have made this decision to go do this.' Here's the funny epilogue. Here's the whole point of the story. We put her in a high school in New York City. Two years later — I did not see this coming, to be clear. I mean, we were making the change for ours and the good of the family, and there was a bunch of reasons going on that we wanted to do that. Predominantly, I say my wife and I, but we weren't going to let the kids dictate if that was the thing. We thought it was the right thing to do. So two years later, I heard through a source that apparently my daughter told her high school guidance counselor, 'I will never tell my father, but moving to New York City was the best thing we ever did.'

RAVI: There you go. How awesome.

GREG: I want to be clear. I didn't see that coming. I didn't know that that would be the outcome. I thought it was good for the family, and it turned out to be the best. So I mean, just to your point, I hear a lot of people say, oh, we can't move because of the kids. I'm like, eh, I don't know. I'm not so sure that's always just the right answer sometimes. Sometimes it's good to move.

RAVI: Yes. One of the key considerations in a moving process is also how hard it is right now. If you think about the process from searching a home, to touring a home, to financing, eventually signing the paperwork, and getting all that. It is quite complex.

GREG: The new buyer commission. You and I haven't jumped into the whole new buyer commission thing that happened because of the National Real Estate Association [National Association of Realtors] sort of getting sued by the government. Exactly.

RAVI: Yeah. There is a lot of industry regulation change as well.

GREG: A lot.

RAVI: So Zillow, again, going back to our purpose and promise and why we exist, the idea was let's actually make it better. Make it easier for folks so that they can focus on moments like you with your daughter, explaining the reason why and then being there for her as she transitions into the new environment versus worrying about how did I sign for this, when do I go to our home? And how can we use technology and our services to make some of the process as simple as possible is how we think about it.

GREG: Yeah, real estate is complicated. I've been enough involved. It's hard. There's a lot of complexity to that, and you need to be very careful what you're doing because it is a big purchase. So listen, let's jump in here, though. So that was my advice to my daughter. We're going to move to New York City anyway, whatever that meant. Let's go to yours. Let's go back to marketing.

GREG: What's the best advice that you've ever been given? What's the really great advice? And I mean, I've been given tons of good advice from bosses, managers, mentors. What's the best advice you think you've ever been given?

RAVI: Yeah, there are several that really helped grow myself personally, professionally, and such. But one in particular stands out for me, and that advice was to be an active participant in the rooms that you're invited to or you're part of. And the rationale for...

GREG: What were they saying?

RAVI: ... the discussion was around, there are moments, especially earlier in my career, I would be in rooms and the kind of discussion was always so rich that I would be listening. I would have my listening ears intently open, and I'm absorbing all of these because these are also key learning moments for you when you're earlier in your career. And then I would formulate my thoughts, and then I would jump into the conversation and add my thoughts, which I think was well appreciated.

But my mentor and boss at that point came in and said, Ravi, it's great that you are very thoughtful in your points of view and when you add, but I also would love to hear you think out loud because we are all smart and that's the reason why we are in rooms that we are in. And when you think out loud, it makes that conversation that much more richer. And the kinds of debate and discussion we have results in a much better outcome in respect to whatever is the topic that we're trying to solve for.

GREG: Okay. So was she or he, whoever the mentor was, were they doing it for the others in the room? Were they doing it for you in establishing yourself as an executive, per se? What do you think behind the scenes in that comment would be?

RAVI: I think it was certainly, I took it as it was advice to me to have my thoughts be part of the discussion so that I can be... that people can see my thought process and understand how I process information but also how I then drive outcomes through that process. So it was important, I think, for the others to see. That's a very interesting question you asked because I think there is an inherent benefit to the group as a result. Because I'm sure that he was actually giving this advice to several other folks in the room because that collective room then became that much more dynamic. The ideas were flowing freely. There was a good bit of healthy debate going on, and all of that results in better decisions. So I think it was a bit of both.

GREG: Hey, I have a very funny question for you. I didn't think of this until just now. So don't tell me the company, don't tell me where it was. I don't want to have any context. I'm going to let you open-ended to this one. How would you have rated the psychological safety of that company? Like your ability to be able to speak out and ideas to be heard and to be recognized, if not, maybe then not utilized, but would you have any opinion about that?

RAVI: The particular company where I got that advice, I think psychological safety was top notch. It was always okay to be there and express. However, what I do realize is irrespective of the company environment that one operates in, people are usually very reluctant to share their thoughts, especially when they're not fully formed for fear of judgment.

GREG: Yeah, okay.

RAVI: And I think what this advice did for me was it was essentially called for me to not worry about that perception. Instead, share your thoughts and the comfort that we believe you have good, quality thoughts. We want to hear more. And not everything has to be top notch, but as long as the overall discussion gets to a really good spot, that is what matters more.

GREG: Obviously, they weren't trying to set you up in some regard or something or make you... 'Hey, speak more because you don't sound smart.' I don't know whether that was the issue, obviously. I don't even know whether that's a thought. But it's interesting, on the psychological safety thing, so MMA has done a bunch of research around marketing org design and really what drives marketing organizational effectiveness and contribution to the business. In fact, we've gotten so far on that. We can now tell you what changes in the org will drive sales and what will detract from sales. I mean, that's a very powerful concept. We built a measurement. Separate point, but it means we've got to measure orgs in different dynamics. So the thing, let me do it this way, the two things that don't matter to organization's impact on sales and performance of the business are insourcing versus outsourcing or centralization or decentralized decision, which from what I understand is mostly what consultancies focus on. So that's a little bit of a cynical point of view. Set that aside. One of the elements, though, that we do find drive marketing success is psychological safety, is the ability to express ideas and concepts and be heard. And I don't know that I would've given that sort of business value. I don't know.

RAVI: Psychological safety is one of the most... I'm not surprised, first of all.

GREG: Yeah, that's kind of what I'm asking. Yeah, what's your reaction?

RAVI: If I think about the healthy team dynamics and how debate happens, and we are very lucky here at Zillow because we have a very open debate culture and high...

GREG: I would think so, classic tech.

RAVI: ... very heavy debate. There is no hierarchy, a very junior person, he or she has a great idea, bring it out, challenge the assumptions and all of that results in good outcomes for the team. So I've noticed even within our setting, teams where there is a higher portion of that kind of a debate and healthy discussion going on with clear, tangible outcomes coming out of it, those teams tend to perform at a much higher rate than the teams that have probably similar kind of setting but maybe a little less openness to dialogue and discussion.

GREG: Yeah, very interesting. And I think you're right. I think you guys would probably be informed somewhat there by Amazon's culture. I think wasn't Bezos' thing like 'debate and decide'? It was some variation of that. I think 'debate, decide, and commit,' I think was actually the whole thing.

RAVI: Disagree and commit.

GREG: What is it?

RAVI: Disagree and commit.

GREG: Oh, disagree and commit. Yeah. I got the thesis of it, but yes, you're right. Yeah, I love that idea. Let's all throw it on the table. And in fact, if I remember right, I think he's admitted that he was opposed to either the cloud business or the advertising business, one of the two, both of which are $50 billion+ revenue. It's allowed me to get all my paper towels cheaper or something, I think is what's going on there. If I understand. I don't know. I think that's how that business is working. Okay. Well listen, Ravi, that's good. I appreciate you sharing that. I do think we've all been given such great advice along the way, and I think sometimes it doesn't get heard. And it's better heard with some others and what impact it had on me tells us a little bit about you and others.

GREG: Okay. But let's skip to the big topic here. Okay, ready? So I told you this is how it works, Building Better CMOs. I run the MMA nonprofit trade association. Hopefully the listeners know, nonprofit trade association here to make marketing better for CMOs and marketing departments. That's the fundamental thesis. My job is only to find things that we as a nonprofit, sitting in the middle, can go fix, address, make better, create standards, carry alignment, new insights, new research, whatever it might be. Okay. So the question I always have for CMOs is — and listen, I'm not here to make it a negative question, although it is — but it's like, what do you think we don't get about marketing? What do we as marketers, CMOs not fully appreciate? Obviously, your answer is going to be like, what do you think if we understood better or were more focused on would be better? Maybe the MMA will choose to make this an agenda. But I'd ask you: what do you think, as you look over your experience, maybe it's a current situation, what do you think marketers just don't appreciate enough?

RAVI: Yeah. Maybe I'll start by my hypothesis of what modern marketing is, and then I'll use it as way to answer your question.

GREG: Let's do that.

RAVI: My hypothesis of modern marketer is an equal parts mix of creativity, performance marketing, technology, business, and experience delivery. So a marketer who is well honed and has built a broader perspective across these areas is going to be one of the most important voices in any company. And therefore, what I see is a severe shortage of marketers who can do that. By sitting in the rooms where they are talking to their product counterparts or experience delivery counterparts or design counterparts or engineering counterparts in having a clarity on what is the product or experience that we are actually marketing to customers and how does that customer actually receive that experience, and therefore, what are the employees doing to deliver on that experience? And how does a company actually make money, both in the short term and long term?

So a broader perspective of the products and services that we are marketing, how does it actually manifest to a customer in a day-to-day life? It's very, very important that we have that clarity, and I don't see a higher percentage of marketers being great at it. And those who are really, really good at it do command higher premiums in the marketplace but are also super impactful in driving better products, better ideation, better experience delivery, and better business outcomes. And do end up leading those initiatives versus being what I consider as a shared service kind of a setup that marketing usually gets tagged as.

GREG: Yeah, marketing is a coalition, not a function. That's where I think a lot of markets get wrong. We agree. Okay. So there's a lot to unpack in that. So let me break some of that down because if I heard what you just did there... And don't let me drive it. You bring me back if I missed it, that's okay. The listener will appreciate that, too. So there's a lot of elements, there's a lot of things that a marketer has to understand, from creativity all the way through to engineering if we just go that far and business, too. I totally agree. Yeah. One of the best CMOs I have on my board is a guy who was originally an i-banker. Very interesting background for marketing, I think. But I think what you brought that back, if I heard you right—and then you talked about operating within the company back to coalition. We're not just shoveling shit out the door or whatever, arts and crafts, whatever.

RAVI: Just be the creative campaign. We have a product ready, and that's the wrong time to involve marketing.

GREG: Hate it, hate it. Okay. But what you brought that back to was a customer value, which is rooted in customer experience. So am I hearing that right in what you're saying, that it's about building the better relationship with customers, the better experience for customers, the better...? Keep going on that a little bit.

RAVI: Yeah. So I'll use a tangible example here.

GREG: Okay, good.

RAVI: But two years ago, as we were thinking of repositioning our brand, which is still known for search and find, to something more than that — which is a transaction aspect where you want to tour a home, you get financing, you want to close it all on the Zillow app, you can do that. But we needed to go tell that story. So we were doing a lot of customer research, and in that research, we found out that the number one barrier for a lot of first-time home buyers is affordability. They just don't know what is the amount of home that they can afford and how much do they need to save. And there are a lot of tools out there where you can kind of do some numbers and estimates and so forth. But when we dig deeper, what we realized was it was the fear of judgment that was keeping a lot of these customers from sharing their financial information with others to get help as to what is the time horizon or the kind of home that they can afford to buy.

GREG: Maybe they were embarrassed about how much they made or either made too much or too little.

RAVI: Or their previous credit history.

GREG: Credit history, right. Yeah. I mean, buying a house gets very personal. It is a magnifier on the life that you've run. Yes, agreed.

RAVI: One of the scariest moments in a first-time home buyer's journey is when they fill out that financial profile and send it, and worry about the person who is opening that one and thinking, oh, what? And judging them.

So that's the scariest part, which is where we basically said, oh, wait a minute. So there is a role to play here for Zillow as a brand to come in and take that fear of judgment out and be the thought partner. So that in sight, if a marketer was just focused on doing customer research and sending that research report out to the product team or someone else, then it's a task. But this particular team didn't stop at that. They did the research, they understood the proof point. They worked with our product teams to design a product that is not judgmental, but actually moves customer forward and worked with the engineering teams and experience delivery teams.

RAVI: Obviously, we branded it. It's called BuyAbility, one of our very popular products these days. And we took it to market, and it's a resounding success. And to me, that is an example of a kind of role that marketing can play. Not being focused on, oh, let's just name this as something, or let's just go do research, or we'll just go build a creative campaign around it. But being part of a coalition, we call it PEM-D: product, engineering, marketing, design.

Being part of the coalition, having clear value proposition, working with the teams, and building the products, and eventually taking it to market and ensuring its success. That to me is what is important in modern marketing.

GREG: Okay. Give that acronym again just so the listener here. Say it again.

RAVI: It's PEM-D. Are you referring to PEM-D?

GREG: Yeah.

RAVI: Product, engineering, marketing, and design. So these are the four themes that we all collectively work together, all the way from ideation of what the customer value proposition is, the problem we're solving, to how we actually go to market.

GREG: Now, what's interesting about that, you had listed creativity, performance, tech, business before, and then you just added in insights to the thing. I heard that also.

So you're really taking a holistic approach. Do you think marketers don't often... are you kind of suggesting that maybe you wonder if marketers don't really think about the customer pain points and then build the product to satisfy that? Is that where maybe part of your comment's going?

RAVI: No, I think what I'm saying is I think...

GREG: That could be true. I mean, that still could be true.

RAVI: Could be true in some settings. But I think what I'm saying is it's important to not stop at a point where we identify a pain point. It's important that we then take the perspective of marketers because we see these customer pain points much more closely than any of the other teams because we are that much closer to the customers. And it's important to take that insight and articulate the potential solution and partner with the rest of the teams in figuring out what the potential solution is. Maybe work with the teams in creating multiple different versions. See, go and test what resonates and then go to market. So the traditional role of a marketer, I think of running a research and sending the research report out with a bunch of pain points to me is no longer sufficient. We need to go past that and help actually shape the solution.

GREG: So if you took the classic P&G brand model, which by the way, I grew up working on P&G business for years, I know that well. And by the way, I think it's the past. I think we have passed that. I don't know that P&G's recognized that, I'm not sure, which was we create an insight, we create messaging that universally — which, anytime you use the word universally in marketing, I think you missed the point — but universally sort of gets to a sense of purpose for people or for consumers. And then positions in their mind that's it, and then they kind of call it a day. And then they also focus on distribution. The other thing the brand manager does in a big way. And distribution does, I know from the science, has a huge relationship to increasing sales. Distribution's like first job. But what you're saying is that that's just not good enough anymore. I don't need to just get the purpose. I need to then know either what barriers... I was going to ask you, is it about barriers or creating a better experience? I thought, well, then it's both. But you were trying to reduce the barriers, which means marketing has to work with... You have to identify the problem, work with the rest of the departments, and then remove that for ultimately a better experience and everything else. That's where the value comes.

RAVI: And guess what, when we do that, we can actually go tell a really compelling story that is easy for customers to then understand. So then the core market, the job of marketing, of marketing a product becomes that much more impactful because we are all clear on what it is supposed to do. And we know that with the promises that are being made in any of the marketing materials will actually be delivered when the product experience actually manifests to the customer. So it makes everybody's life easier.

GREG: Right, and you may or may not have an opportunity to even communicate that we understand your pain points. I mean, not all messaging, not everything resolves itself in that way, but they certainly will at least reduce their barriers. Yeah, you're playing a real valuable role in their lives.

RAVI: And the teams that have the skillset to do that I see are way more impactful in being strong partners to the business and the other stakeholders. To the point, I think I said it before, I see those kinds of teams and leaders actually leading the initiatives for the company in these key forums, and that's where I think the opportunity for marketers and modern marketing is to play the role.

GREG: How did this really come alive to you? Listen, I don't know about you. I tend to have themes in my life. My kids tend to hear about 'em all the time. There's something important to me for a period of time, and then I move on to something else that kind of captures my attention. It's sort of life's journey, I think. So what kind of got you recognizing the importance and orientation of this? I've now done probably two or three dozen, four dozen, maybe podcasts at this point. No marketer has really ever said to me... There's only two or three that have said the same thing about the thing they think marketing needs to better understand, which is sort of funny. So what got you to see that this is the way you look at the world and this is what you see as the challenge and problem?

RAVI: Yeah, so it's part of the evolution of our brand. When we looked at where we were and where we want to be and the amount of innovation that the company is coming up with on the product side and on the engineering side, we needed clarity on what it is that we are telling our customers and what we will deliver to them. So one of the first things we did when I took on the role was to establish our purpose. And the purpose was...

GREG: The purpose of marketing or the purpose of Zillow?

RAVI: The purpose of Zillow as a brand.

GREG: Okay, yeah.

RAVI: The brand purpose is to make home a reality for more and more people. And the power...

GREG: Make home a reality for more and more people?

RAVI: Yeah. We use the word more and more very intentionally because of, I think, the new generations that are coming through, the variety of different customer segments and needs and so on and so forth. And housing is such an important part of their life. We want it to be relevant to everyone and to be able to deliver on that promise, our products and our experience delivery, it has to also be part of that mix. So I can go put a brand promise out there and make a big brand campaign out of it, but then if our products and services don't actually deliver on that value proposition, then I won't actually have a strong brand that will permeate our generations. So it was very clear to me from a marketer standpoint that we had to work closely with our product engineering and design counterparts to be able to build on that vision collectively and not by saying, oh, here's a brand promise. Now just go deliver to me a product that actually delivers on that promise. So that's the need that necessitated us to put together this coalition and figure out our best ways of working, how we prioritize resources, what road maps we align on and how we go to market.

GREG: Okay.

GREG: Are you doing actual brand advertising campaigns at Zillow?

RAVI: We do, yes.

GREG: How do you look at the balance then between what you do, sort of brand advertising as a communications dynamic, and then what are you doing versus sort of building customer experience? How do you allocate either resources or time, your time, the team's time? How do you look at that?

RAVI: Yeah, I believe, and this is core to Zillow's philosophy as well, that our best products are our best brands. When we deliver on the value proposition and the promises we make and make our customers' lives that much more simpler, all the way from search to actually transacting a home, we build a better brand. So that's always been core to the philosophy. So our brand advertising and our broader marketing messaging mix is very well in tune towards the true emotions that we really want to portray and the emotion in most of the situations because of how hard the journey is, going back to the Bluey example. The number one thing we want to come across with is empathy. So our brand advertising and our brand messaging, our colors, the kind of stories we tell all double down on empathy and giving hope, especially in moments like these when we have such low historical inventory that change is possible, that that goal is eventually attainable.

So we want to hit that mix. So that's number one, always. We always lead with that. Now, the way we incorporate experience and product proof points into it is where the skill is, and that's where the core balance of you don't want to come across as, 'Oh, you are thinking of moving? So use us. Here is a product, here's a home loan.' I think there are several other brands and companies and finance services offerings that are out there that do that. And we don't want to be just that, right? We want to be a place where customers think of our products and they think of the empathy, think of the possibility and the aspirational goal of owning a home. And that's how we balance the mix between brand, product, and then the experience delivery and the promise we want to make.

GREG: The CMO, not the current CMO, but one of the previous CMOs of T-Mobile — I can share this — was on the board of the MMA and I got to talk to them. He told me that he spent 70 percent of his time focused on customer experience. I've never heard a CMO have that high a percentage on customer experience. It was funny that I am a T-Mobile customer, and what was funny about that, it really showed and it really changed. And what's funny about that in particular is that, well, T-Mobile's in your backyard there. You probably all know the guys. I mean, very few companies have built the incredible brand they did. So it's not like they sacrificed a very powerful brand, or brand development maybe is the way of putting that, but they were really fixated on customer experience. And that was very interesting to me that that's what the CMO did.

RAVI: And I find it very natural for marketers to be focused on experience and experience delivery more than some of the other functions in that company. Primarily because if that experience delivery doesn't happen, the brand is the first place where it gets manifested. And then it's not going to fit.

GREG: It's all together. There's no advertising in the world that you can do if you're just going to piss me off as a consumer.

RAVI: Right. But I also think marketers are also very well positioned to influence great customer experience outcomes because they are closer to the voice of the customer. They are closer to the value propositions, the issues that they're trying to solve with the products, and therefore are in a unique position to see how these two come together and provide a really compelling solution for a customer. And when you get that mix right, brands like ours and T-Mobile and others actually do continue to shine bright.

GREG: Ravi, the funny thing about your background — which the listener, I don't know if they looked it up here while we're online — but your educational background, which I think informs a lot of where people go with things, is that you have a master's of science in operations research. I don't think I've ever seen that, by the way. And then also compsci, undergrad in math. Oh, actually applied math even. Okay, okay. Yeah. And stats. Okay, got it. But it does give you a very unique perspective versus most marketers, and in fact, I'm very enamored by the way you do speak about brand articulately. Some of your companies would lend you there, but it wasn't necessarily what your educational background was. What is operations research? What is that doing, and how does that come into what you're doing in your job?

RAVI: Sure. Operations research, I think is also referred to as management science. And what it does is it's basically mathematics associated with optimizing an outcome. So if you are trying to build a strong brand with a set of resources, how do you do that the best way and get there faster with more optimal allocation of resources? Essentially what OR is. Now, the initial applications of OR were in World War II when, I think, Britain was trying to figure out how to distribute their resources — think all the ammunition, medicals, et cetera — to be able to counter the opponent in the most effective way. That's where it all started.

GREG: So it was operations as supply chain kind of.

RAVI: Right. OR is very widely used in a variety of applications today. So as an undergrad student, I really loved the objectivity of that because you can take that thing and just like how I shared the example of brand, you can explain, you can put it to media, you can put the same kind of skillset to work on supply chain management and so forth. So it gives you a broader perspective of how to optimize and get to a better outcome.

GREG: Got it. Got it. Very interesting. Yeah, it's very unusual. One of the things that one of the marketers said to me that really kind of caught my attention in a previous episode, it was Heather Freeland actually from Adobe. She was telling me that she had produced an ad campaign — or her team had produced an ad campaign, I should say — that had 5,000 creative assets to it. I mean, man, I've been doing this a lot of years. I don't think I've ever heard a number quite that high. That's sort of crazy.

RAVI: I think we are getting into a reality of hyper localization, which means the story that you're trying to tell with the advances in AI, data, technology and being able to deliver and all of that, we can actually customize creative to each individual.

GREG: Is it personalization or localization, or are those the same thing?

RAVI: I think it's both. So localization in the sense if you are a buyer, you are buying a home and you have a budget in mind, that to me is personalization. But if you are looking to buy a home in Seattle versus in Long Island, that to me is localization. So to be able to do both of those by using near real-time signals that the customer data is spitting out these days is where the new age of marketing will get us to identify winners versus not.

GREG: Right. Well, and let's be clear, if you're buying a home in Long Island, you should call my wife.

RAVI: That sounds good. Although I don't know if I'll fit into the price range that she works.

GREG: They're not all that. No, no. She did a $6 million deal right after that. So she's really down market, too. So it's the market, it's a funny place, whatever. This is actually incredibly interesting. I love the diversity of experience you bring to the table and an incredible appreciation for brand. That's what sort of is striking me here. It's unusual and it is very operationally oriented. And you're right, the experience is troublesome and there's issues and it's a big purchase and not for you all to pay a ton of attention. And like I said earlier, the fact that the CMOs who are involved in customer experience, the companies perform financially better. In fact, I'm starting to believe that maybe customer experience is the marketing strategy of the future. It's not brand, it was all about brand before, but I think it's now about customer experience.

RAVI: Yeah, I don't think you can build a great brand without having the best customer experience.

GREG: A hundred percent. And you've got to balance both of those and whether or not you're going as far as T-Mobile did to be 70 percent of the CMO's time focused on that, that's sort of unusual. Okay. A couple of quick lightning rounds and I'll let you out of here. Okay. You ready?

GREG: So I'd be remiss not to ask you about the nature and state of AI. What's your take? What are you telling the teams? How are you looking at AI now in its application to marketing?

RAVI: Yeah, AI I think is going to be — and we are already seeing some examples of it — it's going to be transformational in terms of how companies operate internally and also deliver experience externally to customers. So to me, those are the two manifestations of AI. And marketing needs to be taking advantage of these emerging tools and capabilities and be at the forefront of the change in how we communicate, how we create assets. We talked about those 5,000 creative assets from Adobe. We have 35,000-plus creative assets across in our repository that we have to determine which ones we send versus not. So all that decision-making is going to be that much more faster with these. So I'm looking forward to marketing actually leading some of the adoption of these technologies and tools versus being a follower.

GREG: Listen, I tend to look at AI like it's either efficiency, so how do you reduce the time it takes to get things done or operate around stuff? It's effectiveness. The Consortium for AI Personalization, the MMA has been doing, which I think personalization is big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big. The other one is crazy wild-ass new ideas from AI. I've not seen this yet. I've seen efficiency, I've seen effectiveness, but I've not seen crazy. Like new business models. In mobile, it was Uber that was the revolutionary transformation of how that tool got used and transformed an entire massive billion multi, multi, multibillion-dollar industry. But I don't know what the crazy-ass new idea in AI is around marketing and businesses. Do you?

RAVI: Yeah, I don't know yet either.

GREG: Not seen.

RAVI: However, I think it's coming because...

GREG: It's got to be soon.

RAVI: ... there are some pretty impressive ways how customer behavior, sometimes... We have a natural language search capability on our site where you can actually go into the thing and instead of selecting filters, you can type in like you would, like normal words and the search engine parses that information, puts relevant search results in front of you in terms of the homes that you'll be interested in, and customize it as you continue to click and view. All of that behavior shift is going to be very different in the next two years than it was in the last five. So I think it's coming, but I agree with you on the efficiency and effectiveness side. That's where I think the initial use cases are focused on.

GREG: Yeah, and I mean we're barely inning one, inning two maybe. I don't know if everybody understands a baseball analogy around the world, but I mean just barely started. Correct.

RAVI: I agree. Yeah, I think we are just in the... I would call it inning one. A lot, lot more to come.

GREG: We interviewed Shelly Palmer on my Decoding AI for Marketing podcast just over the weekend. We wanted a recap from him for some post-CES, and he made a really good point. He says, "AI will never be as dumb as it is today." Okay, it'll be better tomorrow, which, it's an obvious statement. But the thing that really caught my attention is he said, "It's more than enough to completely transform what you do and how you do it today." That's a crazy idea to me.

RAVI: Yeah. Some of the agentic AI solutions that we are seeing in terms of how they can help you on your day-to-day basis, some of the use cases are revolutionary.

GREG: Wait, we'll do that. Then we'll wrap up. So agentic, it's all the buzz, blah, blah, blah. I get really nervous when the whole world talks about agentic. I love it. I think it's a big deal. I totally agree. I don't really think it's going to happen in 2025. I think it's more complicated than the world has suggested. It's a '26, '27... And you, with your background, you must have a strong orientation to AI, I'm guessing computer science, right?

RAVI: Right.

GREG: So do you have a perspective on what it's going to take to do agentic? I love the excitement of it. I agree with you. I'm there, but I don't know.

RAVI: Yeah, your point is very relevant. You're saying there are going to be early cohorts of customers who will start using some of these capabilities based upon their background or their comfort level with new technology and their curiosity to test these things. I think those are always going to be the early adopter kind of segments that exist.

GREG: And OpenAI just released tasks, which is a precursor to agentic, but it's like I've read it, but I don't know what I'm doing with it.

RAVI: That's where I think, to our earlier conversation, we are still in inning one. I think this is going to be playing out in the next two to three years and not immediate, and some of this is not going to be a revolution right away. It's going to be an evolution that eventually catches on and changes how we go about our day-to-day business.

GREG: Yeah, I'm not so sure we built the data sets to understand me to then go make agentic decisions for me yet.

RAVI: That is a key dependency. Something that I'm talking to my marketing technology and our broader AI organization about is how do we actually prepare our teams for a future where these data sets, schemas, tags are all available so that we can actually measure and understand what is resonating with customers and internal employees and process experience delivery folks. Especially if you think of sales enablement or how we actually intersect with the content side of the equation. There are a lot of applications which we need to start thinking about now and building out the capabilities for.

GREG: So, Ravi, this is great. I was really excited to talk to you. I'm a big Zillow fan, if you didn't kind of figure that out. Like I said, the business is based in Seattle. I absolutely look up the home value of everybody I ever go to visit. I'm one of those people, I'm sure that's in your persona profile.

RAVI: Never done that.

GREG: Never heard of it, never. I checked my own home values very regularly to know how I'm doing. It's become a major of my success in life, I guess. I don't know what the hell it is. I'm silly. But it's a pretty powerful tool, and it's been there. Zillow's had real staying power in trying to help with an otherwise pretty complicated consumer process. So I love your orientation to it. Thank you.

RAVI: Yeah. It's pretty exciting to be able to represent a brand like that, but also I think it's focused on solving real problems because then you can actually use that flywheel to build strong brands and strong customer affinity.

GREG: Totally. So, appreciate it. Building Better CMOs. Appreciate it. Thank you.

RAVI: Yeah, thank you very much for having me, Greg. Take care.

GREG: Thanks again to Ravi from Zillow for coming on Building Better CMOs. Check the description of this episode for links to connect with Ravi. If you want to know more about MMA's work to make marketing matter more, visit mmaglobal.com. Or you can attend any one of our now 63 conferences in 16 countries where MMA operates, or write to me, greg@mmaglobal.com. If you're new to the show, please follow or subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, iHeart, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can find links to all those places and more at bettercmos.com. Our producer and podcast consultant is Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm. Artwork's by Jason Chase. Special thanks to Rob Floyd, Angela Gray, and Dan Whiting. This is Greg Stuart. I'll see you in two weeks.