Travelers CMO Lisa Caputo

LISA CAPUTO: You get to work with great people who really, really, desperately want to do the right thing, all the time — whether it's for each other, for the communities where we operate, for our customers, for our agents, it's in the water here. And to be able to work with those kinds of people and to feel — daily — the kind of impact you can have is incredibly fulfilling.

GREG STUART: Lisa Caputo, welcome to Building Better CMOs today.

LISA: Well, thank you for having me. I'm delighted to join you.

GREG: I know, and I'm really excited about this one. So just for the listeners, so they'll have context in case they didn't read wherever they got here or however, so you're EVP, chief marketing, communication, and customer experience officer at Travelers.

LISA: Yes.

GREG: Yeah. I mean that's a full suite. I mean, the bigger the marketing, right? Well, it's a mouthful. I don't know if I mentioned this to you, but some of our research has actually shown that when the CMO owns customer experience, the financial performance of the company is better. Isn't that something?

LISA: Oh, well, I love that statistic. I like to say that big-M Marketing is like a four-legged stool, right? It's all of the basic pieces of marketing: advertising, media, digital, all of those pieces. Then there's customer experience, which runs the end-to-end gamut of the customer experience, and in our case, also the agent experience. All the way from onboarding to what happens in a claim, what happens in renewal. Then you have research, which is the nucleus of all, right? It's the insights. Insights from consumers, from customers, from prospective customers, from agents and prospective agents. And then you have communications: internal, external… they all work in an integrated fashion. So I like to call it the integrated four-legged stool.

GREG: Hey, Lisa, do you also own, then, investor relations? Is that part of comms? No, separate?

LISA: No. Investor relations sits within finance. We work really closely, our communications team, with the investor relations team, certainly around all of our earnings announcements and all of the regular financial communications that we do.

GREG: Totally. But you're right. I mean, I saw that in your stuff, right? You've got research, creative services, digital. I mean, you've got the whole branding, everything. It all sits there and customer experience. And customer experience has got to be a little complicated, too, because you're dealing with agents who are semi-independent from the company, obviously. Yeah.

LISA: They are independent. They are independent. So we want to make sure that their experience with us is the best it can be, right? Whether we're onboarding a new agent who might be working to sell some of our products, whether they're onboarded correctly in the use of the online agent portal that we have available. We've got marketing tools that they can use. And we also support our field management sales operation who work very closely with the agents who work with us. But yes, they are independent, and so we really want to engage them in a positive experience with us, but also we want to keep Travelers top of mind for them.

GREG: Absolutely. Oh no, I can't imagine the complexity.

GREG: Now, here's what's interesting, though, about your background that I saw, so I'll just bring it right upfront. You have a master's in journalism?

LISA: I do. I'm a recovering broadcast journalist.

GREG: That was your driving interest, right? But you ended up as a press secretary for both senators and then ultimately Hillary in Washington, right?

LISA: Yes, I did.

GREG: Wow, that would be so exciting.

LISA: It was an incredible ride. I loved every minute of it. I went to Northwestern and got a master's in journalism because I had a passion for writing, and I spent my summers interning at local newspapers. I loved broadcast journalism, and I really thought that I wanted to go down that path. And I quickly saw... I had a job offer from a television station in the Quad Cities. And when I was finishing my master's in Washington, DC at the Medill News Service, which was part of the Medill graduate journalism program, I was covering Capitol Hill as a journalist and I was assigned to different client stations. I said to myself, 'Wow, I think I'm going to wait on going this broadcast journalism route.

I want to learn the sort of legislative process firsthand, up close and personal, and if I do that, I will be a better reporter in the long run.' And what happened was I got on a train that just led me in a direction that I never would've believed and landed me in the White House running the first lady's communications and serving as her chief spokesperson, and then also managing the communications for the first family. And it was an incredible experience. And I will say I really honed so many skills that I didn't know I had. Things become second nature when you're working in a high pressured, very rapid environment like the White House.

GREG: Dare I say, you would've been pretty young doing that, right? I didn't add it all up. I'm not asking you to disclose, but you would've been pretty young in an unbelievable... I mean the world's leader as they navigate incredible complexity, and especially with Hillary's sort of orientation... Well, she eventually became secretary of state, but I mean, just what an amazing opportunity.

LISA: It was an incredible opportunity. Yes, I was very young. And that was the thing about the Clintons, I mean, that campaign in 1992, we were all very young. And Governor Clinton was—

GREG: So was he, right? Wasn't he elected at 42, 44, something like that?

LISA: Yes, yes. And so they were baby boomers coming into the White House for the first time. And in so many respects, they were really transitional figures in history, and so they did a lot of things that were different. And the staff, the White House staff, the senior White House staff, many of us were very young. Fortunately, many of us, like me, had worked on Capitol Hill in the House and in the Senate, and there were very seasoned people in the West Wing.

That's not to say we didn't make our mistakes. We certainly made our fair share of mistakes, which you learned from. But that experience, that life experience and kind of being under pressure like that all the time and having to pivot from issue to issue constantly and doing the juggle was an incredible, not just life experience, but work experience because all of those skills that you hone in those very high-profile, high-pressured political jobs translate unbelievably well into the private sector.

So it's, I think, why you see a lot of people go from the public sector into the private sector, or you see people who've had very distinguished careers in the private sector then go into the public sector. So I highly recommend to young people to go work on a campaign for somebody you believe in or an issue that you're passionate about. I think it's really great experience, and if you can try to serve, try to have a stint in government and not only give back, but realize what you're going to take away and learn for your future and for your career.

GREG: Oh, I would think it'd be phenomenal. I wasn't per se a political person, but I did end up being student body president at one of the colleges I went to. And I found the experience of... Now I've run two trade groups, which are politically oriented, maybe as much as any company today. So I actually really appreciate it. In fact, I'll tell you a very funny thing, Lisa. When I took over the IAB, my predecessor there said, they said something about the IAB. The board was letting them go, it's a longer story, it doesn't matter. But they said, "Oh, this industry, it's just so political." And I kind of remember, I didn't say anything at the time. I remember going, 'Well, why'd you take the job if you don't like politics?' I mean, the fun of the thing is trying to figure out how to navigate that. But the level you were doing that and the pressure, you're right, that you would've been under because listen, when The Washington Post calls and said, we're going to release a story, you don't have time to go gather all the facts. You don't have time to figure out what's right. You have to give an answer and a response and navigate that very quickly. I can't imagine.

LISA: That you do. You do. And I had the great privilege, I like to say, not only to serve the president and first lady, but to build relationships and interact with some of the most brilliant journalists of our time. I mean, you didn't always want to be on the receiving end of a phone call from Bob Woodward, but you had to respect him so much as a journalist, as a reporter, trying to tell the story in as accurate a manner as possible. And I feel so fortunate to have walked away from that experience, not only with just such a strong bond to both Clintons that carries to this day, but also with so many countless journalists who I now call friends and I stay in touch with. So I feel so fortunate to have had that experience at a very young age.

GREG: Okay, so now it's very funny, though. So you went from one of the youngest ever administrations. I mean, there's some time gap in there, but I'm going to jump ahead to a company that is, what'd we determine, 161 years old, we think? Is that how old Travelers is? Oh, the legacy of that, the history of that. I can't even sort of imagine what it means to hold that responsibility, too.

LISA: Travelers is such a phenomenal company. Again, I've had great fortune to have worked for great brands. I worked at CBS, I worked at Disney, Citigroup after Sandy Weill merged what was then the Travelers Companies, which incorporated Smith Barney Asset Management, Primerica. He merged with Citibank to form Citigroup. These were incredible companies I worked for. And then to have the privilege to come work at Travelers, I actually came at the behest of the late chairman and CEO, Jay Fishman, who was just an extraordinary person. Such a humble, thoughtful, down-to-earth CEO. And he tragically died of ALS about 10 years ago. And he and I worked at Citigroup together, and he helped me figure out how to build the women's business that I was tasked with building from the ground up and launching and growing at Citigroup. And I remember him describing this industry to me, because it's not an industry I certainly would've been drawn to, and the way he explained it with such passion and the intricacies of it, which I quite found fascinating. But the thing he really talked about, which stood out to me, were the people.

And to me, it is all about the people. And you've got to love the people you work with. You want to respect the people you work with. You want them to be people who share your values and who have great integrity and ethics. And that's what I have here. And I feel so lucky. You get to work with great people who really, really desperately want to do the right thing all the time, whether it's for each other, for the communities where we operate, for our customers, for our agents, and it's in the water here. And to be able to work with those kinds of people and to feel daily the kind of impact you can have is incredibly fulfilling.

GREG: Didn't I see a mission statement somewhere that says excellence in empathy? It summarized your mission statement. Is that true for Travelers? I saw that somewhere. It could have been an AI summary of something.

LISA: Yes, excellence in empathy are certainly some of our core principles, but we really are focused on this notion of care as a centerpiece that we care about each other. We care about the customers we're privileged to serve. We care about the communities where we operate, and we care about our distribution partners. And it's really true to who we are. I like to say we don't have to turn ourselves into a pretzel to aspire to be something we're not intuitively, this is core to who we are.

GREG: Well, and that reflects... so you have a campaign that's called Who Cares, and "Remarkable things happen when people care," sort of the subhead that I've heard to explain that that is a positive. And I've seen the ads. I mean, they're incredibly compelling. So talk a little bit about, Lisa, the insight that you got to that that was the communication and just a little bit more about that campaign.

LISA: Sure. Well, thank you for the question and thank you for the good wishes about the campaign. The credit here is due to our chairman and CEO Alan Schnitzer. He and I were talking about whether we could have a manifesto, and he said, "Talk to me more about that." And I shared with him the Apple manifesto and a couple of other examples, and he said, "I really believe in this." And he said, "We are in such uncertain times. A lot of people feel, and businesses feel that the world is somewhat upside down, but when there are small acts of care, it really does make remarkable things happen." So this was driven by him, and it was his passion and his insight that really led us to this manifesto. And I'm so proud of it. It's been a galvanizing force in the company because, as I said earlier, it's very true to who we are.

And so we developed this manifesto really at a very high level. And we talked about various acts of care globally, whether X millions of people globally volunteer or in the US volunteer down to the small acts of care where somebody is helping somebody in a snowstorm push their car out of a snowbank.

And this for us is kind of the platform from which our ads then hang off of. And our ads are inspired by real events, and they're articulations of true stories that have happened, whether it's with one of our claim professionals literally going down into a drainage area under a street, a sidewalk in Manhattan to find one of our insured's engagement rings. I mean, that's the length he went.

GREG: I love that one. I love that one.

LISA: Or some of our professionals who insured a young man who was on his way to a college reunion and had his dog in the front seat and got into an accident and was injured, and the dog kind of took off, and our person sort of wasn't going to stop until the dog was found. It was important to our insured. And sure enough, that happened.

GREG: There's the playground example. I mean, people can go to the website and see that. It's easy to find these. Yeah, but they're amazing, right.

LISA: Our CEO, Alan Schnitzer, he has a wonderful phrase. And we celebrate annually our frontline customer service reps who really do go above and beyond. And he has this phrase to really describe what they do every day. And he said, "Your ordinary is everyone else's extraordinary." And I said to myself, what a wonderful way of putting what we do for people, what our frontline customer service people do for people. And I think that just captures the ethos of our company.

GREG: Hey Lisa, how do you get to a company that then has — it comes up in the ads, it comes up in what you've said here — this sense of empathy and so on. Do you just hire for that? Do you train for that? There's tens of hundreds of thousands of employees here. I mean, this is a big company. How do you get that through? Do you know?

LISA: I think it's a tone at the top.

GREG: Yeah, of course, always is.

LISA: A hundred percent. Yes, tone at the top in what we do, how we conduct ourselves. It's absolutely a tone at the top, but it's also from the bottom up. And I think it just goes to values. Core values of who we are, not just as a company, but as people. What I find here, and it's truly extraordinary, is people have the same kinds of values. The way they were raised to do the right thing, to get up every day and do the best you can, meritocracy. All these things that I was raised with by my parents. And fast forward to Hillary Clinton talking about her father saying, "He taught me to get up every day and live up to my God-given potential as best I could." And I think those are shared values around here. And again, while it is set at the top a hundred percent, and it's how Alan is, it's how he comports himself, it's how he runs the company. It pulls through all the businesses and how we interact with our distribution partners, our customers, but it's also from the ground up. And it just makes for the perfect cocktail.

GREG: It's sort of crazy that could happen in sort of corporate America today at some level to me... Don't you think so?

LISA: I agree with you. I think it's very unique. And as I said, I've worked in other incredible brands, whether it was CBS or Disney or Citigroup, I've not seen this kind of recipe if I may say.

GREG: The other point, too, Lisa, and listen, you and I don't need to go off to solve all societal issues. We'll kind of move on here at some point. However, it does feel like that sense of who I can trust or that somebody cares is somehow really lost all of a sudden. And I find that kind of disheartening. I don't know. I don't know where we go after that if the world's really going to change. I was raised by parents who did their best to install good values into me. And certainly I knew where I was. I did cross the line. I knew I was crossing the line, though, at least sometimes. And I'd ride it back to the right side of that, which I think is what that upbringing can bring to you over time. But I don't know, it feels like we don't value that or appreciate that. It's funny, there's something going on, isn't there, in the air?

LISA: I think so. And I think in a world that does feel upside down, whether it's the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, now we have Israel and Iran, we have people not sure about their own personal security or their own financial security. Everything feels that it's on its head. And so I think they're in search of someone or some entity that they can trust to have their back. And I really think we play that role at Travelers that we really help people have the ability to aim higher, to thrive, knowing that we have their back. They can aim higher, they can strive to do what they want to do. And I think in uncertain times, people are looking for that beacon, if you will.

GREG: I agree. We had John Heilemann speak here... And I'm trying not to make it a political thing. I don't know if that's helpful. Politics are a moment in time in what has otherwise been a pretty good system that will likely continue. But we had John Heilemann speak to the board at one point, and he made an interesting point. He goes, "I don't know that it's government that's going to lead us forward. I think it's really going to come back to corporate America to lead us to the next generation." And you can see that with some of the power that they're accumulating in the tech business and other places and companies have certainly gotten big and rich and so on. I don't know what that means, if that's where we go and how you keep that right. But I do agree with you, as a general rule, companies are good. I mean, there's bad actors everywhere, but companies try to do the right things.

LISA: I think so. In a utopian situation, I mean, to me, sort of nirvana would be the public-private partnership where corporate America and companies come together with government for the good of society. And that to me is sort of optimal. Now what shape that takes and around what issues would be to be determined. But there's lots of opportunity there. And when you look at somebody like Eric Schmidt who built Google and then went in as an advisor to previous administrations, and that's a gift to be able to have that corporate experience and insights that you can give into government or try to help forge partnerships around issues that really matter to Americans and to society at large.

GREG: Or look at what Bill Gates is trying to do. I mean, he turned out to be the most admired man in the world, I think, to me.

LISA: Yeah, absolutely.

GREG: Okay, well here, so you and I could go on and on. We're going to move on to next. And it kind of brings up the question of some of these great people that you've worked for. I mean, really, they're astonishing. And in fact, if I had advice for my kids or if they were open to my advice, it would be, 'Find the best people in the world that you can work for.'

GREG: But listen, along the lines, you've worked with some great people, and maybe it's not from some of the famous ones or others, but what's the best advice you've ever been given? Listen, if you want to make it personal or you want to make it business, you want to make it for the company, just go in any direction you want. I'm just curious, what's kind of left an indelible mark on your psyche as you go forward that still guides you today in how you look at the world and the work that you do?

LISA: I appreciate the question so much, and I've been privileged to have incredible mentors throughout my career, incredible mentors. Not only people I worked for, but people I worked with who kind of took me under their wing. And there was one in particular, he was Geraldine Ferraro's press secretary. He actually served on the Watergate Committee with Hillary Clinton. And to this day, I still call him for advice on things. And he said to me, "Whatever you do, don't have a grand plan." And I said, "What do you mean?"

GREG: Wait, wait, wait. I thought that's contrary to what we've been told, Lisa! Go ahead.

LISA: If you have a grand plan, you're going to have blinders on, and you're going to be so uniformly focused on getting from point A to point D that you're going to miss, through peripheral vision, possible opportunities that could take you on divergent paths that could be completely exciting. So that was the best piece of career advice that I ever received. And I would say the best piece of professional advice really was to always stay curious and embrace change. That change is opportunity and continuous learning and adapting, especially in an ever-evolving landscape, particularly today with new technologies and cultural shifts. To me, staying curious and embracing change is a great piece of professional advice and personal advice.

GREG: You know what, I think that those really actually kind of very fit together at some level. The last of my children now has just finished his second year of university. And I told him — and I said the same thing to my daughters, too, who are a little bit older than him — I said, "Listen to the best of your ability because somebody's going to say something that's going to completely transform your world."

LISA: Totally.

GREG: It always happens at university.

LISA: Yes. Or after. I mean, for me, yes, I was inspired by a professor at university that I think led me to explore the political world as a detour from journalism. But it was then-Governor Clinton when I was fortunate to attend a meeting and a group of us assembled in a room with him when he was thinking about running for president. And I was—

GREG: Wait, you were there at that moment when he was first considering to make a run for president?

LISA: Like all of them do, he was one of many who was sort of thinking about it. And to hear the way he spoke about issues and his depth of knowledge and his conviction, for me, as a young person at the time, I was transported. I had never heard anybody talk like that. So it just goes to show it can happen at any stage of life, really. But you're right. Listen to those around you. You never know what may inspire you in a certain direction.

GREG: And you also don't know, at least in my own experiences, you don't know how things build on themselves. I mean, listen, my whole life has been about being on the front edge of next. So I was at Y&R when I had a guy come in and explain to a group that I had this WWW thing. That's how we explained the session. Isn't that funny? It was April of '94 when Mosaic was launched, and I was on the front edge.

This was originally the Mobile Marketing Association. I've now transitioned into AI. I have another podcast in AI. So I've always tried to stay in the forefront. And a lot of that's predicated because I had a moment of boredom at a job. Our client, FritoLay, had fired us. I had really nothing to do, and I got into media and technology, and it was that time I took to write that paper that then set my whole career to be now technology. And listen, I mean, getting into tech early was a good idea, obviously. But it's very funny. You just don't know.

LISA: Don't know. You don't know. I mean, for example, today I had lunch today with somebody I've known a long time in the marketing industry, and he was very high up at McCann Erickson. And he is now running a startup in the AI space. And I was just on the edge of my seat listening to how he's getting his hands wet, what he's doing. So you just don't know. And that's why I say stay curious and embrace change. It will serve you well.

GREG: Are there other moments where things just totally... I mean, so hearing Bill Clinton get... And I do think he's incredibly inspirational. I've always been a big admirer of what he's done and how far he's got, and the way that he talks about the world and his command of the details and the issues really always phenomenal. Anybody else along the way that really inspired you in that regard? I'm just curious.

LISA: I would say I owe so much to Sandy Weill. I knew nothing about financial services, nothing. And I was an executive at Disney. And prior to going to Disney, when I worked in the White House, I had met Sandy at a White House event and we just chatted for a bit, and he's an incredible mind. He stayed in touch with me and his then-CFO, Heidi Miller, absolute force of nature. Heidi had this idea to start a women's business at Citigroup, and she pitched it to Sandy and Sandy said, "Call this woman, Lisa Caputo," which is kind of a remarkable thing. I remember getting this phone call to my office at Disney and the message read Heidi Miller Citigroup, and I said to myself, 'Heidi Miller at Citigroup? She's on the cover of Fortune Magazine as one of the five most powerful women in business. Why is she calling me? I don't know her.'

Anyway, it's a testament to both Heidi, who remains a dear friend to this day, and Sandy, who remains a mentor to me about seeing a possibility and being willing to take a risk on an idea and a person. The idea, a women's business, the person, me. And so they proposed this to me, and it was a big risk. And I said, 'How do I not do this? It's a startup in the world's largest financial services supermarket.' And what I would say to you is that Sandy fostered an entrepreneurial culture within this massive behemoth, and that was incredible. I mean, I got an on-the-job MBA at Citigroup, but what he also did was he acquired, if I can say, incredible talent. And I'd never seen such incredible business talent like this. I used to call them the White House of business.

You have the most incredible, political, intellectual policy minds in the White House. At Citigroup, he had the most incredible business minds, business operators. And to this day, I learned from them all. I learned from all of them, they all helped me. They took me under their wing.

And to this day, when you look around Wall Street, I mean a lot of them started under Sandy Weill, including Jamie Dimon, who by the way, extraordinary story. Heidi took me to meet Jamie. He had left Citigroup by the time I had come in, and I met Jamie and he was deciding what he was going to do next. And don't you know, he would call me periodically and say, "Hey, who have you talked to this week inside? So who's helping you figure out this women's business?" And he would call me and say, "Here's three people you should go talk to." I thought, how extraordinary that this person who's kind of in the middle of a transition deciding what he's going to do next — and this is right before he went to Bank One — is taking an interest in what I'm trying to do inside Citigroup and trying to help me get to the right people who he knew would help me. Extraordinary.

GREG: Yes. And he took the time to leverage his connections and knowledge of the networks to go do that for you. Yes.

LISA: Yes. And again, I attribute this to the kind of talent that existed at Citigroup and the people that Sandy Weill managed to have in his orbit who ended up running the company and took it to new levels. Now, the financial crisis obviously hurt the company, but I must say the extraordinary business minds that Sandy had at the helm in the heyday were truly exceptional.

GREG: Yeah, yeah. No, like I said, I don't know him, haven't met him, but one of the greats. Although friends of mine now, I've got a couple of friends of mine who work for Jamie, and just an extraordinary leader there, too. Hey, Lisa, I'm just curious here for the listeners, you said a women's business. What is a women's business, what does that mean? Just go one more step, I'm just kind of curious.

LISA: Sure, sure. At the time, the idea was that the financial services industry, I would say specifically the brokerage business, was all geared to the male head of the household. So one of the first things I saw is all the Smith Barney statements, when you would get mailed your monthly brokerage statement, we're all going to the male head of the household. Even though I may have had an account, it all went addressed to whoever the man of the house was.

And so there was a burgeoning trend across a multitude of fronts. More and more women were going to graduate school. More and more women were the chief purchasing officer of the household. More and more women were the CFO of the household, and more and more women were rising up the corporate ladder. So when you combine all these factors, you had women as a demographic really controlling a lot of assets, a lot of money that could be invested. However, they didn't want, as we used to say, the same financial services wrapped in pink. They wanted something that was custom tailored to them.

GREG: Oh my.

LISA: That's Heidi Miller and Sandy Weill and Chuck Prince, as well, had the foresight to see that and empowered me to build it. And we had an incredible ride. We built out a whole educational piece. But what we saw women really wanted, they wanted a trusted advisor who was going to sit with them and form a financial plan, a financial roadmap, versus trying to sell them independently products. No, give me a plan, give me a roadmap, make me part of the equation, and then empower me to make my own decisions. And that's what we did. It was one of the best jobs I've ever had. I really felt like I was doing a public service in the private sector, and I'm just indebted to Sandy, to Heidi, to Chuck, to all of them at Citigroup who allowed me the great opportunity to build it and to service so many women. And we were really successful. And in many respects, we were ahead of our time.

GREG: Yeah, it's very hard to find businesses where you can feel a sense of mission and purpose.

LISA: Yes, and we did.

GREG: Listen, I'm not here to make negative comments on that.

GREG: It is funny, Lisa, when the IAB board had asked me to step in and just run the organization until they figured out what to do because it was just deeply, deeply in trouble. As I mentioned, the person before me didn't like politics, I don't know how you do that. But I told the chairman at the time who was the CEO of CNET, Shelby Bonnie, I said, "I don't want to run a trade association, Shelby. That would be the dumbest..." What I exactly said was, "That would be the dumbest effing thing I could ever do." I thought running a nonprofit was a career ender. It was a stopper. I don't want to do this. As a board member, I'll step in. I'm free. I can do that, that's fine, but I don't want to do this.

And here I have now, I've run two trade associations, turned them both around for almost 20 years of my career. It's crazy. And it is that sense of mission and purpose.

LISA: Yeah. Look at the impact.

GREG: That's just it. I got to do stuff. I've founded multitouch attribution, the whole viewability standard. I wrote all those standards. I've made all that stuff happen to make an industry come to fruition. And you're right, it's hard to find those. And yet you had those opportunities in the corporate world. I love it.

LISA: Yeah, I'm an incredibly fortunate person. I just am incredibly fortunate. I hope my kids have the same good fortune that I've had with those experiences and those mentors. I really hope that desperately for them, because as you know with AI and everything that's happening, it's going to be hard for these young people to come into entry-level jobs now. They're going to be fewer and fewer because AI is going to be able to do so much of what these entry-level jobs do.

GREG: But Lisa, you know what's even better? You actually appreciate what you've been through.

LISA: Oh, totally.

GREG: There's a difference. Getting the experience is one thing, but having appreciation for it is what makes all the difference.

LISA: Oh, I'm profoundly grateful, profoundly. I feel very, very, very fortunate.

GREG: Hey, here's a funny one. I've got to get to the big question here. We can't go on. What advice have you given your children though, by the way?

LISA: So it's very interesting. My kids, we all say, I have great kids. They're very grounded. I told them to follow their heart, to really go pursue what you love, love what you do, figure out what your interests are, and then go pursue it. And — there's the and — which is it is all about the people. Work for people that you respect, are people of high integrity, have good values, and value meritocracy.

GREG: A hundred percent. Yeah. I met an entrepreneur, he'd started 23 businesses. A guy out in Silicon Valley when I was out there. He started 23 businesses, some successful, some not. Some really successful, many not. And I asked him, you kind of ask these dumb questions and then you hear the greatest brilliance. I said, "What's the most important thing to get right?" And you know what he said? He said, "Know the values of your partners."

LISA: For sure.

GREG: And I've never forgotten that. That has guided me all the time. And values can certainly be a sense of morality and sort of truth and honesty. It has that. But it also has just where are we going and what are we out to do here? Are we here to build a women's business and commit to do that no matter what, to walk over hot coals to make that happen? Or are we just here to kind of run a bank business? That's part of the decision you made.

LISA: Correct. Again, I had another incredible mentor in the late Secretary Madeleine Albright.

GREG: Oh my God. Oh boy.

LISA: She was, first of all, she was a riot. I mean, just funny, but just salt of the earth and just a great go-to. And 'Madeleine, what do you think about this?' And she said something once, and it's been quoted and re-quoted hundreds of times, and she said... I chuckle when I think about it. But, "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."

GREG: Wow, okay.

LISA: But that's what this women's business was all about. Women were really rising in corporate America, and today still, it's still true. And we should be helping them with a financial plan, a financial roadmap, and investing their money smartly and making them feel financially secure and independent.

GREG: It's kind of shocking when you stop to think that it was just a little over a hundred years ago when women were given the right to vote. We had to think about that. Are you effing kidding me?

It's so hard to conceptualize that in today's times, but a hundred years is not that long ago, everybody.

LISA: No, not at all.

GREG: Okay, so listen, you know the big question here, and it's kind of in the context of almost everything we've talked about here. As you look out at the marketing industry, as you've now been CMO in a couple of different places, you've certainly been in the marketing industry for a long period of time in different roles. And this is my job as a head of a trade association, I'm supposed to go fix stuff, so I'm building a list of things that we go fix. As you look out, where do you think we marketers, CMOs maybe missed the mark, maybe we don't understand, but we should, or there's an area we should go work on, or there's really something that maybe we don't appreciate fundamentally enough? If you had your magic wand to go make me fix a problem or we'll fix it together, what would it be?

LISA: Well, I think I'm going to answer with a multitude of things and then if you want to focus on one, but I think...

GREG: There are many challenges, Lisa, that's true. That's why I have a team of a hundred.

LISA: There's a lot of challenges. So obviously the first one is AI, and how are you leveraging AI in your roadmap to use it as a tool and use it smartly and wisely and creatively? I also think the non-traditional data and psychological and cultural insights are super important.

We can better understand why customers are making decisions if we're leveraging advanced tools like behavioral science platforms, and you combine those insights with culturally informed strategies. And that's an area because it'll lead to enhancing relevance and predictive accuracy and, I think, sustained customer connection. I also think understanding the evolving customer experience, that it's really kind of the end to end. But in our case, certainly, it's also about the independent distribution partners we have.

The third one I would say is how do you build and nurture talent?

How do you spot that talent? How do you mentor that talent? There was a period of time when everybody was doing reverse mentoring. How do you prioritize? How do you impact change at scale? Those things. I think, though, also, if I could say a fourth one, which is transformation.

Marketing organizations at different companies are structured in different ways. Some of the functions are centralized, some are decentralized, some are matrix. The point is how do you lead in whatever structure you're in across departments, even when those departments may not report to you because everybody's got differing KPIs and goals. How almost do you influence manage toward transformation? And I think that that's really critical for marketers today because the days of traditional marketing are gone. The marketing funnel, that's gone

GREG: Dead.

LISA: Long gone, right? Customers want things when they want it, how they want it. And so I like to say marketing funnel's a plate of spaghetti and brands and companies have to be relevant at any point in time, any point in time because a customer can engage with you at any point in time. So I just think that's revolutionized the way we think about talent, but also the way marketers lead and have to collaborate and influence manage across their organizations to service the customers and to truly be a customer-centered organization.

GREG: Okay, so listen, there's a lot of things. I think it's not just be curious, but be concerned, I think is also kind of the tone of that. You just picked on a bunch. And this is what's going through your mind as you think through Travelers and where you go to the next level and so on. So there's a lot of things in there. Let's come back, though. I do think there was an overarching one there around transformation and leading that change. That really is the hardest thing. And it's all being sped up partly because of AI, partly because the insights and knowledge change, partly because consumers change. You look out at the world. I like to talk about this one a lot. I mean, Uber reset our entire expectations to customer experience. 'I want to know where the damn car is. I want to know when it's getting there. And I want to know by the minute, and if you're two minutes later than the five minutes you told me, I'm pissed.'

LISA: Yeah.

GREG: I mean, talk about a consumer rethink.

LISA: Yeah, for sure. And look at what's happening today with the rise and power of social influencers. I mean, we've embraced that wholeheartedly at our company. I mean, I will tell you we're in the middle of tournament week for the Travelers Championship, and we have a couple of initiatives going with big-time social media influencers where we're leveraging them with some of the golfers on the tour in an attempt to sell tickets as well. So that's powerful. We want to attract a younger audience into the game of golf, into viewership of our tournament. So how do we think about it? We can leverage social influencers.

We did a whole streaming thing on Twitch where we got younger people involved, and we had a whole challenge around raising money for charity tied to the golf tournament because all of our proceeds at the Travelers Championship go to charities. It was incredibly successful because we had two Twitch influencers that raised, I don't know, roughly $43,000 for charity because it was a six-hour stream and engaged the younger audience. So, in many respects, that's a transformative element now happening within marketing.

GREG: Totally. Lisa, you want to hear something funny? So a CMO just said this to me about four or five weeks ago. It was really funny. This is exactly how she said it. She goes, "Greg, has the MMA done any research around understanding—" and the backbone of what we do is trying to prove, validate things as best we can along with the thesis we have. But she said to me, "Can you prove out the value of authentic advertising—" meaning influencers, "versus inauthentic advertising like we do now most of the time." It was very funny, like this awareness moment, and I was kind of listening to her. I go, 'Oh my god, she's right. The world just changed. It just changed.' And listen, I'm not here to pick on ads or how it all comes together. I don't want to go down that path. But it was very funny that that's how she framed the challenge she was in. And then, Lisa, you also have to get a team. Listen, I listened to the board of the CMOs of the MMA, and I think one of their challenges is how do you actually motivate a team to move in anywhere as close or as fast as the world around them is moving.

LISA: I personally think you have to blend innovation with empathy and effectively combine data-driven insights and creative storytelling. To me, that's a magic combination. And if you ask me kind of who's a trailblazer in this regard that I admire, I would say — I'm going to date myself — but David Sawyer and Scott Miller who formed Sawyer/Miller revolutionized that in political advertising. Oh, so many years ago. They were the first out there. But I would also say Maurice Lévy has trailblazed on that front, and he remains certainly at the cutting edge of data-driven insights. Even though he's, I think, chairman emeritus of Publicis, he founded Viva Tech and he's fostering that whole conversation. And I just think it's a magic combination.

GREG: But listen, transformation, though, Lisa, it's really hard. Here's the thing, so I've always been interested in the future, I've always been open to change. I've never had resistance. But I realized on some level, if that's where I sit on what is probably a bell-shaped curve, there's a whole nother side of that curve of people who resist change, don't like change, are uncomfortable with change. And so I respect that that's where they might be. So how do you move? How do you move them? How do you create transformation? Do you have an example of something that was eye-opening for you in doing that? But I agree by the information and empathy makes a lot of sense to me.

LISA: So in my own example, I made the case that we really needed to have a customer experience or experience management discipline in the company. We were very product centric, understandably so.

GREG: That didn't exist before. So you've got the product, it's insurance, and there's quants who support that, but then there's a hole on the side.

LISA: Maybe a group of people would sit in a room and say, we should have an insurance product for weddings. Then they would go name it wedding insurance. All makes sense. And I went to our CEO and I said, "We have an opportunity here to really be customer centric." And gosh, goodness, to his great credit, he said, "I agree. Go do it." And so he empowered me. It wasn't the type of thing where I just said, 'Oh, okay, now I'm going to go build this in an ivory tower.' What I did was I sat with all the business heads and the chief technology and operations officer, we whiteboarded it and said, what should this be for our company? Not kind of, here's the template from the internet of here are the elements of customer... What should this be for our company? What could succeed here if we built it? And everybody had skin in the game.

And so that was step one, getting my business partners and my functional partners to not only embrace the concept, but to be authors of it. And so everybody weighed in when writing the job description of what would we want in a head of customer experience? What would be the qualifications and what are the elements of the job? Everybody weighed in on that. And I think had I not done that, we never would've gotten off the ground because everybody had skin in the game. And so it enabled me to hire somebody.

And that person went through, I don't know, a lot of interviews with all the business heads and functional heads because not only had to be a culture fit, but the philosophy had to align with how we saw customer experience. And then because everybody saw the value that this could bring to their businesses, we were able to build from scratch, from nothing a customer experience discipline, a function. Sits at the enterprise level.

We have customer experience teams in the lines of business. We have NPS, we measure stuff. There's a lot of diligence around this. And we've done a number of journey transformations across different lines of business. So I think that's just an example of partnering with your business partners, right? Because we are in service of the business at the end of the day, we're helping the business achieve their goals, but partnering with them, making them every much a part of the process, and then showing what this new capability could deliver for them in their business to their bottom line.

GREG: Do you remember? What did you say to the members of the company that got them committed that customer experience was a place to invest time and energy? You said something there. There had to have been a thesis that you had just to draw them into the meeting for the first time at some level, right?

LISA: Yes. Little things, I mean, if you cut the time it takes to potentially onboard a new customer. If they have a positive experience as they're being onboarded...

GREG: And you could pull that data?

LISA: ... they're going to stay with you, right? Yeah. They're going to stay with you if they have a positive experience. And then you don't only get to sort of that they become advocates for your brand, but they start telling everybody what a positive experience. And then you can show customer lifetime value. You increase share of wallet, you can cross-sell other products. But when you can look at the data and see where a customer or a distribution partner may have a pain point and isolate that and go in and really talk to the customers or the distribution partners about those pain points and what would be an optimal experience, and then you journey map it, and then you see the results. It's very compelling.

GREG: So in some regards, Lisa, you kind of did what's required, right? You did your homework, you had a series of insights and perspective that would push them in the right direction, maybe drew some data around it. You engage others, have conversations, involve them in the process. I also heard you say in there you created measurement, which I think is absolutely critical.

LISA: You have to have measurement. You have to have measurement.

GREG: They had to see and feel it and touch it. 'Hey, net promoter score is better here than here. Lifetime value is better here than here.'

LISA: Absolutely.

GREG: So why doesn't everybody do that?

LISA: Well, that, again, I can't explain. It all goes to culture, doesn't it?

GREG: I guess. Yeah. I think it goes to talent, too, Lisa. You strike me as a person maybe that was always trying to figure out better. I don't know if it's never satisfied or always... you used the word curious before. I think it's beyond curious because curious lasts for a while then can lose its momentum, especially when you run up against the difficulties of a company. Companies don't necessarily want to change. I mean, they really do struggle with that in a very big way. It's funny to me. I mean, I work with all big companies. It's very hard.

LISA: Yeah, it can be hard, but really, it's just about trying to do the right thing. And if you keep focused on that, I think you prevail.

GREG: Yeah, I think I hear you. But I still feel like somehow it's a little more complicated than that. Because if you remember, I mean, we're probably both old enough to remember. Remember Cher had that ad a number of years ago. 'If bodies came in a can, everybody would have one.' It was some variation of that, it was sort of funny. She was selling her exercise thing. But I think there's true. If it was easy to do, everybody would do it. But they don't. They really don't. There's just such resistance. And I'm fortunate because I have a title that allows me to get away with forcing change in an organization. So I get to lead the change.

LISA: But remember, I do think it goes back to leadership at the top of the house and having a CEO and a leader who is forward thinking. And we have that. I feel so lucky we have that here.

GREG: Yeah. Yeah. And I guess then that culture and tone or expectation would permeate everybody else who's around you. So who's the other member of the C-suite that's going to say, 'Well, Lisa has an idea that we should at least hear'? They can't dismiss it out of hand. That wouldn't fit into the culture of the company, I think is part of what you're saying.

LISA: Correct. But also, I invite the conversation, the dialogue, the pushback. People are coming at it from different points of view, and we should... Nothing's going to be dismissed, never by me, but not by my colleagues either. Again, it goes to the culture where we talk it through and people appreciate and respect that other people have diverging viewpoints or different business agendas. And so you get in a room and you kind of figure it out. And it's not easy, right? It's like watching the sausage being made. It's hard. If everybody's willing to play ball and have the hard conversations, you get to the right place eventually. It may take time and you have to be patient, but you get to the right place. And I do find that is very true where I work. Very true.

GREG: Yeah. I mean, everybody you talked about there earlier — Sandy Weill and Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton and Madeleine — they were all pursuing something better. There's an internal flame that drives those people to somehow never really be satisfied.

LISA: I think that's right. The always striving to do better and to have an impact is certainly the way I was raised.

GREG: What advice did your mom and dad give you? By the way, Lisa.

LISA: Just to do the best I could, just to do the best I could. And my father was a big believer in meritocracy, that if you put your head down and you work hard, you will be rewarded.

And that's not always true for everybody. But in companies with good cultures like ours, it is, but it did serve me well. I mean, I did find that to be the case that if you work hard, your hard work is recognized. If you don't have an agenda and your sole mission is for the betterment of the organization or the mission for whom you're working, if you work hard toward that, the hard work's going to get recognized and rewarded. And I benefited from that advice because it's how I approached my life, my career, most certainly. And it landed me in the White House, for goodness sake. I never aspired to land in the White House, and I landed in the White House at an early age, which then catapulted me into the business world in ways I couldn't have imagined. So not only do I owe the most profound debt of gratitude to my parents and my father, in particular, but also to the Clintons. I mean, they took a risk on somebody at a very young age, and doors were opened for me that otherwise wouldn't have been. And I went through them with that same mindset of working hard and striving to make an impact.

GREG: Is that what you think? What did they see in you? Have you ever asked them what they saw? I asked one of my bosses one time, "Did you have the confidence I was going to succeed in this?" And I don't know why he did. It was very funny to me.

LISA: I never asked, but I'll tell you that Hillary Clinton and I used to joke around. David Letterman used to have the top 10 list, and I used to have the top 10 list of falsehoods about Hillary Clinton that were written in the media and what have you. One of them was that she was a championship diver, which was just not true. But it started a conversation with her about athletes. And I was a competitive tennis player as a young person and then played two collegiate sports at the Division I level in college. And she and I both were of the belief that there's something about student athletes in the lessons you learn on the field. Collaboration, teamwork, communication, tenacity, fortitude, focus, those all translate into the business world. And it's something I'm very proud of for my own children, both of whom are Division I lacrosse players and excellent students. And I can see, today it's like having a full-time job in college when you're playing a Division I sport.

GREG: Huge.

LISA: And that's translating, I can see it already. Their discipline, their focus, their mindset, and it's going to serve them well in business. And maybe that's what served me well. I think it has. And Hillary Clinton and I, we would talk about how student athletes were really great employees.

GREG: Yeah. You saw the pattern. Yeah. It's funny, I think I resented a little bit my father in particular who happened to have been a semi-pro baseball player back when it was for the love of the game. There was no money in it. It was all love of the game. But he pushed me in all those sports, and you know what? I am talentless when it comes to sports. It's not my thing. I'm never going to be great. I'm never going DI or anything else. However, I agree with you that the lessons and the perseverance and some of that I learned from that, and the camaraderie, the teamwork, and all that, really. Leadership. I mean, my leadership came from those days.

LISA: For sure. For sure.

GREG: Listen, Lisa, I can't thank you enough for being on Building Better CMOs. It really has been the most fun. I knew it was going to be like this.

LISA: Oh my goodness. Thank you so much for having me. I believe we could have talked for another hour or two. I've had so much fun. I hope you'll have me back.

GREG: Absolutely. Absolutely. We'll have to find a new transformation that you have and sort of leverage off of that. And maybe we can focus on one in particular. I do agree, change is everything. You've got to figure out how to do that and execute it.

LISA: Totally agree with you. Thank you for having me.

GREG: Yep.

Thanks again to Lisa Caputo from Travelers for coming on Building Better CMOs. Check the description of this episode for links to connect with Lisa.

If you like this episode, you might also enjoy my conversations with Michelle Barbeau from eHealth Insurance, Esther Mireya-Tejeda from Anywhere Real Estate, and Andrea Brimmer from Ally Financial. You can find those episodes on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're hearing me now.

At MMA, we are working to make marketing matter more through conferences, research and education. If you'd like to know more about MMA, please visit mmaglobal.com. You can also email me directly, greg@mmaglobal.com.

Now don't forget, Building Better CMOs is on YouTube. Just go to bettercmos.com/youtube to start watching.

Our producer and podcast consultant is Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm. Artwork is by Jason Chase. And a special thanks to Angela Gray and Dan Whiting for making this happen.