TIAA CMO Micky Onvural

MICKY ONVURAL: I think as marketers, we can't just respond to the bottom line. We can't just say, well give me a million dollars and I will give you this many customers or this many clicks. And if I do the right kind of mathematics, I'll give you this kind of lifetime value that's going to deliver you this to the bottom line.

I think you actually have to connect further upstream with the CFO and not actually connect with them almost at the financial, mathematical part. But you have to actually connect upstream with the considerations that they're making around strategic trade-offs that then obviously lead to investments that obviously then lead to the revenues and lead to the bottom line. But I think it's about starting the conversation upstream with the CFO and really, frankly, a marketer should be really good about this, by the way. Really trying to empathize with the things that are on their mind and what they are trying to deliver.

So we should, as marketers, be excellent at that and excellent about therefore influencing, but I think we're so busy feeling sometimes that we have to prove the value of our craft that we rush to the bottom line and the unit economics of an investment.

GREG STUART: Welcome to Building Better CMOs, a podcast about how marketers can get stronger and smarter. I am Greg Stuart, the CEO of the nonprofit MMA Global. And that voice you heard at the top is Micky Onvural, the CMO of the financial services firm TIAA. She's been there for three years, and her past marketing roles include several years at eBay, Trulia and Bonobos. Also at Bonobos, she was the CEO from 2018 to 2022.

Today in the podcast, Micky and I are going to talk about helping the people you manage discover their best selves, the dynamics of communication between CMO and CFO, and the power of “I don't know.”

Now this podcast is all about the challenges that marketers face and unlocking the true value that marketing can have. Micky is going to tell us how she did that, right after this.

GREG: Micky Onvural, welcome to Building Better CMOs.

MICKY: Thanks, Greg. Good to see you.

GREG: Yeah, this is really nice. For the listener who hasn't really listened to the liner notes, I guess on the cover, Micky is CMO over at TIAA. And Micky, TIAA 105 years old?

MICKY: That is correct, 105. But we actually own Nuveen, the asset manager, too, which is 125 years old. So we trade in heritage brands around here.

GREG: And Andrew Carnegie started the business, but to serve what purpose at the time?

MICKY: Yeah, the purpose at the time was frankly to secure the retirement of people who were in the teaching profession, specifically in higher education. We carry that forward now, but with a sort of broader remit in terms of securing retirement for people that are not just in higher education, education more broadly, but also health care and government organizations under the TIAA brand.

GREG: So forgive my ignorance. So it's not just restricted obviously to the teachers anymore, it's much broader. Can any consumer, any listener here get involved to TIAA?

MICKY: So we're actually a B2B business, so really it is about whether your institution that you work for gives you access to TIAA's products and solutions.

GREG: I understand.

MICKY: Our main business is in education, health care, and government. We recently, this year, we actually launched into the 401k market with a partnership within Empower. So we are moving even more broad, but it's not really a consumer play per se.

GREG: Understood. But at the end, right? So consumers can't call you and sort of sign up, but any sector really could do.

GREG: And so I heard you talk in some of the other podcasts that I've heard you on about the challenge that America has around retirement that we're not prepared. Do you want to give a little bit more on that?

MICKY: Yeah, it's a little terrifying. It's actually one of the reasons that I joined the organization. So 40 percent of Americans will not actually have enough to be able to retire. And I would say that's something of sort of an epidemic in this country that's actually only set to worsen as social security dwindles over the course of the next decade or so. And even more terrifying is actually how that impacts certain subsegments of the American population. So adversely impacts women and all communities of color as well. So I think one of the things for us as an organization, it's about how do we create equal access to retirement solutions for people in this country, but then how do we also make sure that we're leveling the playing field for some of those communities that are even further behind the average?

GREG: Right. I was actually listening to Steve Ballmer over the weekend on a thing. He's got a thing called USA Facts, and he was talking about the budget and social security is, I don't know, 25, 30, 40 percent. It's a pretty big percentage of the federal $6 trillion budget. And I don't know when you're the biggest... I mean, that's why I think all this talk about social security because really people could be left in sort of dire straits if the government fails to perform the job we expect. And that's where TIAA comes in, I guess, to provide sort of underlying level of support for everybody, right?

MICKY: Yeah. Yes, exactly. And I think that even for those who do have access to social security, the reality is that social security will not be enough for the vast majority of Americans to be able to retire securely. So that is our purpose and our mission, if you like, which is to give millions more people access to something specific. We give them access actually to something called lifetime income, or we call lifetime income, or a guaranteed monthly paycheck in retirement. This idea of how can you count on a steady income stream through retirement so you know where you stand? Because so many Americans don't actually even know where they stand, whether it's on the path to retirement or even once they've retired. And then they get into that situation where it's like, can I afford this or can I not afford this? And that's not a place where you would hope that anyone is in the kind of later stages of their life, particularly if they've had a life of working and contributing for many decades.

GREG: I think that part of what's going on in America right now, not to get too distracted by this, is that there's just a heightened level of fear, I think is what's happening in our politics. So I respect that as a common human emotion. It's funny, I don't know that I would've grown up thinking that we need to provide a level of support for people, but I am starting to really believe we do. I used to be kind of like everybody go work for themselves, but the world's just not that simple. People really do need help and we need to work together, otherwise we're just going to get all sorts of trouble with ourselves.

MICKY: Yeah, I think that there's two things I would say to that. We talk about uncertainty a lot, that this is a world full of increasing uncertainty, whether it's economic, political, financial, all of those things. And those are things that really come together for an individual, but actually rely on the ecosystem in which you live, the community in which you work, the community in which you live, whether it's your family or your broader community, and all of those things. To your point, it's an ecosystem and there's not going to be one silver bullet that solves all of that.

And so it's like how do you operate within an ecosystem to provide solutions? So when we were thinking even about how do we continue to deliver on our mission over the course of the next few decades, we actually put a really important word in front of our mission statement, which was the word "together," because we don't think that TIAA alone is going to be able to solve the retirement crisis in this country. It's going to take us working with policymakers, competitors of ours, the institutions we serve, as well as the individual. How do we help individual participants and their families to be able to contribute? So it is very much an ecosystem, and I agree, you can't put it all on one person. And I think that's an evolution in our culture and our society.

GREG: Well, what kind of caught my attention about you is that you really have focus on going after mission-based businesses. I mean, that's kind of your thing, this sort of cultural, sort of zeitgeist. I'm not sure. I'll let you describe it in your own words. But just for the listener in case they didn't notice: Trulia, Bonobos. Am I saying that right? How do you say it?

MICKY: Bonobos.

GREG: Bonobos. Thank you. Sorry. Apologize for that. Bonobos, eBay. I mean, a lot of these were real zeitgeist kind of businesses at a moment in time in particular that really captured the marketplace and consumer's attention. So you like that?

MICKY: I do like that, for better or worse.

GREG: And nobody would've thought going to an insurance company would replicate that. I think that's what I would've initially wondered. And yet, when I listened to some of your stuff and read background, Micky, you really... that is you. TIAA is you. I mean, this is what you do.

MICKY: It is. It's really interesting. I remember when I told people at Bonobos that I was leaving to go to TIAA, first of all, people were like, who? Because we are a B2B play, and we operate in this specific market. First of all, they were like, oh, it's not another big consumer brand. And then they were like, financial services, insurance? That's perplexing. But to your point, at the root of it all is the things that I love are, I love transformation.

So I love working on brands that have really, to your point, tapped into a zeitgeist and they're trying to figure out how to tap into the next, so to continue growth. I love that. And I love working on brands that are really purpose driven and make a difference in people's lives. And I think TIAA is probably the purest manifestation of those two things from a career perspective for me. So it's been really fun because it's kind of the culmination of so much of what I have done in my career to this point, that it's actually, to your point, if you unpick it, it's not as surprising as it might have seemed on first glance.

GREG: Right, right. Yeah, that was my take, too. You've done it for brands that are, I don't know, 10, 15 years old. Now you've done it for a brand that's well, 115, I'm rounding up a little bit, years old.

MICKY: More or less. More or less.

GREG: More or less.

MICKY: And actually that makes the challenge, that makes the challenge even trickier because when you've worked on brands that are 10, 15 years old, you're trying to preserve what's in their DNA and make it relevant for a new chapter. Here, we're preserving multiple decades of DNA and heritage and goodwill and credibility and saying, how do you take all that is good about that and make sure that it is relevant for the next 10, 15, 20, obviously ideally, a hundred years? So that's a really interesting challenge, and on a much bigger scale, obviously.

GREG: Yeah. Crazy, crazy thing. And when Bononos... Sorry...

MICKY: Bonobos. Do you know there's a video on YouTube that is all about how to pronounce it? It's really tricky.

GREG: That's so funny. It is a little tricky. Okay.

MICKY: I know Bonobos, that's the way to remember it.

GREG: It also appears that I've never really learned English properly. So that's probably, that's where Eric knows we run into trouble on this one. Yeah, I was improperly educated as a child, unlike many of my peers. But listen, that was interesting, too, because you went in as CMO and ended up being CEO of the company. I don't know if you got the memo, but they don't often let the CMOs become CEOs.

MICKY: I know. It doesn't happen that often. It's true. It was really... I was not expecting it, and it was a surprise, probably first and foremost to me, actually, when that transition occurred. I joined Bonobos because I felt like I could — to the point we were just making — that I could really make an impact and take it to its next arc of growth as the CMO and came in to partner with Andy Dunn, the founder and then CEO, to do that, and built an incredible relationship with him. And about six, nine months in after we had been acquired, or we were in the process of being acquired by Walmart, he said to me, "I'm going to go and take on this bigger role within Walmart. What do you think about being the CEO?" And I was like, "Pardon?"

I don't have a retail background. I hadn't been in the organization that long. And I was a bit perplexed by the question, to be honest with you. But as I sort of really thought through it and thought about what did I think made a great CEO, I kind of thought it sort of makes sense because if you think that a CEO is the person that is best positioned to tell the story of the organization, internally and out, that they are the people that really understand the customer and really understand what makes them tick and how to solve a unique problem for them, and solve it through any means possible. Product, experience, et cetera, et cetera. And you add to that the fact that I grew up in packaged goods, where as a brand manager in packaged goods has to think about the total P&L and the bottom line, I sort of thought, you know what?

GREG: Not that far off. Right.

MICKY: Maybe I could do this thing. And it was the most extraordinary experience of my career today, and I loved every single second of it.

GREG: What surprised you about going into that role from being CMO? When you got to the seat, what'd you go, I didn't see that coming?

MICKY: Well, this is going to sound so totally ridiculous, but every other job I'd had up until that point, there was a job description. Like, here's the top three things that we need to achieve this year. And all of a sudden I was like, oh, I guess I'm writing my own job description at this point. It didn't take me very long, fortunately, for me to realize that. But I was like, oh. So I think that was probably one surprise. And then I think the other part of the surprise — I don't know if this is surprise or shock now — was the emotional burden, if you like. And I don't mean to sound sort of 'woe is me' on this, but the emotional burden that you have when you're responsible for people's income, frankly.

And I became the CEO not long before the pandemic. Pandemic was not kind to retail, as we all know, and it was certainly not kind to retail that was trading in the higher price point menswear. As we were all putting on our Walmart sweatpants, we were out there as Bonobos trying to sell, at the time, $1,000-plus suits. So it was not kind on that front. And so I think that one of the biggest things for me was how much that weighed on me through that period of the pandemic. But it's also, now looking back, the thing I'm most proud of, which is that we exited the pandemic with a business that was more profitable than we entered into it. And we exited the pandemic with our employee base intact because of various shifts and maneuvers that we made to make sure that people actually could maintain an income for their families.

GREG: You do feel a very strong sense of responsibility. I mean, listen, I know what you mean. I run a nonprofit. This thing was, and I know exactly what you're saying, this thing was insolvent when I got here. I mean, probably insolvent to like 75 percent. We had a deficit equal to 75 percent of our revenues, which is... that's bad.

MICKY: Yes, that's bad.

GREG: Yeah, that's the definition of bad. I didn't need a job description to tell me that was bad. I knew that was bad.

MICKY: And that was the number one problem to solve.

GREG: Yeah, that was the number one. Cash flow is everything. I mean, if you don't manage cash flow, you can really get hosed. And so I actually have funded this thing upwards of $1 million over the course of its life to keep it afloat and keep it moving in the right direction. Part of that reason, one is I liked the mission that we were doing. But also, because you have a sense of responsibility, I basically just made myself last in every situation, which is what you do. And it's funny, there was a point we ran into trouble with... There was one point where I got really too close to the edge. And so I was having a conversation with the board and there was a bunch of CEOs and every one of them says, "Yeah, we've funded payroll with a check." Every one of those CEOs, startup CEOs. So that's what you do when you're in that situation.

MICKY: And I'm lucky that I didn't join... We weren't in that kind of a situation. I wasn't that early in our experience.

GREG: You had already sold to Walmart at that point. Right?

MICKY: When I became CEO, yes, we had already sold to Walmart. And that's why I say it was the emotional burden that I just wasn't expecting. And I think what that has done for me as a leader is just even more made me sort of a human-centric, people-centric, people-first leader. That experience, which really just sort of brought it home to me, is how much people are relying on you.

GREG: Yeah. The other thing I noticed, too, the first time — it was now some couple of decades ago — first time I got to run a small business, was the number of times I had to make decisions based on my own belief in what was morality. There was no guidance around what to do. There was no book to look it up. I wasn't even sure there were people I could really talk to — maybe the investors, maybe the board at some level — but you're just forced to make decisions based on what you believe to be right and true in the world and how to act.

MICKY: And stay true to it.

GREG: And stay true to that. Yeah. Really caught me off guard at the moment. I remember that. I go, oh, geez.

MICKY: I remember not very long ago, actually, someone I know said to me, "Well, you have to sleep with yourself at night." I think I didn't just murder that expression. But anyway, the point being is at the end of the day, you have to be able to rest easy and feel like the decisions that you made were congruent with your values.

GREG: With what my sense of values were. Exactly. Before, you make a decision, you run it by your boss. So I just wasn't put in that sort of standalone position. It was very funny to me. I was like, oh, geez.

MICKY: Like let me talk to myself about that.

GREG: The world just changed. Exactly.

GREG: So Micky, let's talk here. So back to this point about just being a CEO and then having to make your own decisions and feel the responsibility. You've worked at some great places with a lot of great business leaders, no question about it. What's the best advice that anybody's ever given you that maybe even sticks with you today?

MICKY: Yeah, so I'm going to go flip side of that, which is the worst advice I ever got.

GREG: Oh, I love it. I love it. Start there.

MICKY: So the worst advice I ever got was in my first job out of college, and to quote, because this is 25 years ago and I still remember it like it was yesterday. The quote was, "You need to leave a little bit of Micky at the door in the morning."

GREG: What?

MICKY: Exactly. And I remember being perplexed by the feedback. I remember being hurt by the feedback and thinking, oh, so I'm supposed to put on this alternative persona when I come into the workplace? I'm not sure how that's going to work for me.

GREG: Were they trying to subdue you? Is that what this is? Is this sort of like a British kind of, 'Hey, we don't act that way here'?

MICKY: Yes, that's exactly what that was. That's exactly what that was. And I think the reason it has stuck with me so much was that as I got more senior in my career and I read lots of books about leadership and all of those things, one of the books that really has been sort of a seminal work for me, which you probably know, which is Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham. And this concept of we all have innate strengths, we should know what they are, and we should lean into them and put ourselves in teams and positions and organizations and roles that really take advantage of that to be truly successful is actually, therefore, the best advice now that I've ever got.

And I got it from a book, which is let's really play into those strengths and that is when you can continue to shine and soar. And that has been a book that's been really important for me, but also one, as a leader, that I've used so often with teams. Let's figure out what we're all uniquely good at and let's put together a team and a way of operating that can really take advantage of those strengths that will really propel us forward. So the worst advice sort of turned into the best advice and has become something that's really informed how I think about my career, my leadership, but also how I think about teams and putting different perspectives and strengths around the table.

GREG: Yeah, I was going to ask, I mean the obvious question then, I'd be curious to know what you think quirky Micky is that should be sort of pushed forward to the front.

MICKY: Yeah.

GREG: But we can come back. But what about, let's start with the teams first, though. How do you actually manage people to be their best selves, if I'm hearing that, or to discover their strengths?

MICKY: Well, so there's a couple of things on that. I would say that it starts, obviously as so many of these things do, with a quiz, but the quiz is not the beginning and the end. The quiz essentially gives you... There are 33 different characteristics, and it tells you how they order for you from one through 33. So I don't know what the math on this is, but the likelihood that you find two people with the same unique combination is incredibly small. So it starts with that. But the point of having that is actually about how you then start to introduce a language of how you communicate with each other and how you create a team around it.

GREG: Love that.

MICKY: And so to share with you, because it'll probably help dimensionalize the point about teams. So my top five strengths are, wait for it: positivity, communication, strategic, woo — which means winning others over — and activator. So these are things that I know to be true about myself is that those are sort of where I really shine is against those five characteristics. Then if you think about some of the other characteristics on this list of 33, there is analytical or ideation or futuristic. I can't even remember them all. Relator, there's 33 of them. I won't remember them all. So what has been really interesting for me when I've used it as a tool with teams is to understand relative strengths and how we each play into relative strengths. It becomes a language of feedback.

So in my time at Bonobos with my leadership team, my CFO had analytical as a strength, fabulous quality in a CFO. What it did sometimes mean — and he would not be upset with me for sharing this in public forum — is that he also had learner, which meant that he wanted to see every piece of information and analyze every piece of information. So then we had to use that in concert with my activator, which is someone who likes to get shit done, and we had to find the common ground. And I had to say to him, you're in learner overdrive now and you're frustrating my activator, and we have to find the common ground to actually move things forward and get things done. So for me, it was a language of feedback, a language of teamwork, and a language of how do we move things forward in the right way for the business, recognizing different ways of operating.

GREG: I love that. And it's so important, too, and it's very hard. So a similar one for me is that I had a guy who would do assessments of the team, and he would put it in a bell-shaped curve about where you stood in certain dimensions. And what was interesting to me about that is that you have no idea where you are on a bell-shaped curve. You can't objectify enough, abstract enough to understand where the hell you are. And everybody, I think, thinks they're probably in the center, and yet you would be 98th percentile.

And I had a guy that worked with me, very smart guy, Columbia MBA. A very smart guy. But what I noticed with him is that he was very relaxed, and I'm much more New York, lean in, aggressive. And so here's what happened. It's funny, I'll do a visual on this. When I would go to him, I would watch him physically lean back and the more he leaned back, what happened? The more I leaned in.

MICKY: You were like this.

GREG: So I realized at one point I had to kind of take a half a breath and stop. And what I had to do because he was so relaxed, I just had to say, what's our actual time? He would have little sense of time. It wasn't a bad feature, still a very smart guy, but he didn't have the sense of time and urgency that I did, and I just had to establish and get agreement to what we were doing. And it took the tension out of that relationship that otherwise I could have set off to no benefit to anybody, just harmful to the business. I love that.

MICKY: And what I particularly have loved about it as a language of feedback, too, is it's not about telling you what you are not good at. So we spend so much time with developmental feedback, and so often that developmental feedback is asking you to build a muscle or to be a way that is actually not someone you're ever going to be.

And so that feels like a giant waste of time to me as opposed to what are the strengths that you have and how can you optimize those and put yourself, as I said, in teams, roles, organizations that really play to those strengths. I mean, I would be a terrible CFO for lots and lots of reasons, but a CFO who has learner and analytical is probably great. A chief marketing communications officer that has strategic and woo, which is winning others over, is probably a better fit for me.

GREG: Yeah, yeah. But I also like, I think what you got there is that you have a language around how to describe it that becomes non-judgmental. Because we could, I mean, I wouldn't have said this to the guy like, "You're lazy. You don't get stuff done." I mean, I wouldn't have said that, but just to illustrate the point, that's not helpful. I just say, "I understand that you don't have the sense of time that I do, so let's negotiate what that is and agree." And once the parameter is set, then we could both work against that to a better end. It's very funny.

MICKY: And it's an easier feedback tool for people more junior than you, too. So my team can now say to me, "Micky, your activator is in overdrive. Slow your role." So it becomes a language for feedback, peer feedback, upwards feedback, downwards feedback that, to your point, is much more judgmental. And actually just like it did for you, can make the person laugh and be like, "Yeah, you're right. My activator's totally in overdrive. I'm really sorry." Or if I can feel I'm doing it, I'll say to them, "I'm sorry, my activator is in overdrive. I need to put the brakes on."

GREG: How does the activator come up? I'm curious. Give us an example.

MICKY: The activator is the fact that... The definition of what it means to be an activator is a catalyst for action. So very often I'm trying—and I have a strong dose of intuition in there. So often I'm trying to get to the end before maybe some of the team have understood either the direction of travel or they've been able to look at all the data themselves, et cetera, et cetera. So that's how it manifests. It can manifest as trying to drive to the end almost too quickly for an organization to consume.

GREG: A hundred percent. Yeah, I'm a little bit, I've been accused of being aim-fire.

MICKY: And then maybe a week later, ready?

GREG: No, ready.

MICKY: Oh no, not even a week later.

GREG: Come on, we got work to do. Let's go make it happen, everybody, let's go, let's go, let's go. Yeah. It doesn't really go very well with everybody all the time, right?

MICKY: Yeah.

GREG: Okay.

GREG: Well listen, let's get to the big question here. So this is really good. So as we've talked about, as you know, MMA is about fixing stuff. So I love to use the show to find out like, well, what needs fixing? What do we maybe not get right? What we don't have the right orientation to might turn into stuff. I mean, some of this will be fodder for us developing new research and other initiatives to help CMOs be more successful. So what do you think that we in marketing, Micky, either don't completely appreciate, maybe underestimate, or frankly either get wrong or don't really fully understand, and it would be kind of important that we should.

MICKY: I think... And this might come from the journey that I've had that we already touched on of CEO to CMO. I think that having been a CMO, been a CEO, and then come back to being the CMO. What am I? The CMO again. I think what that has shown me is the importance of the marketing organization being sort of business first. And not just what are the business objectives and how am I going to build a plan, but really be able to speak with some fluency around the business concerns, how a business makes money so that you can really not only craft better plans, but actually be able to speak sort of the love language of the CFO, the love language of the executive committee. So that you can really show how you're driving value to the organization. So it's really about leading with the business conversation as opposed to leading with the marketing conversation.

GREG: Correct. So let's not talk about the clicks we got or the social likes we got, you mean, for example.

MICKY: Yes, and it's interesting. It's totally true. And even at sort of a level above, this morning our CEO, in preparation for board week, sent a note to all of the executive committee and said, "What are the things that are keeping you up at night?" And as I sort of thought about it on my journey to work this morning, and I asked my team, obviously, what's keeping you up at night, to make sure I was reflective of the concerns that they had. And as I was collecting all that feedback and I was thinking about what I wanted to share with our CEO, what I think could have happened is I could have shared the things that were concerning me within the marketing communications organization.

And instead what I chose to lead with are here are decisions that we need to make as a business and strategies as a result of competition, as a result of administration changes, as a result of changing client behavior. These are all the things that are worrying me because we don't know exactly where they're all going to land. Once I know where they're going to land, I'm going to be able to build a marketing communication strategy that addresses it. And so that's just a real-life and very recent example of not operating as the CMO, but operating as a leader of the business. Knowing that if we can resolve this as business leaders, I have every confidence that my team and me together will be able to find the right solutions through marketing communications.

GREG: So listen, it's a common discussion within the boards of the MMA about the CMO-CFO connection. So let's maybe go to that as illustrative of this particular thing. I think you're right. I think it's broader to the rest of the C-suite and the different roles in CEO and up the board, of course. But in working with the CFO, where do you think we as marketers are, and/or have you cracked the code, in how we communicate marketing's impact to the CFO? And I'll lead this one a little bit because I'm not trying to set you up. I don't think we've done it very good or very well. I don't think we've gotten there as an industry for some reason.

MICKY: No, I don't think we have got there as an industry, so to speak. And I've sat in enough rooms where this conversation has come up. And I think it is back to the fact that when you think about what the CFO is worrying about, yes, obviously they're worrying about the bottom line of the organization.

But I think as marketers, we can't just respond to the bottom line. We can't just say, well give me a million dollars and I will give you this many customers or this many clicks. And if I do the right kind of mathematics, I'll give you this kind of lifetime value that's going to deliver you this to the bottom line. I think you actually have to connect further upstream with the CFO and not actually connect with them almost at the financial, mathematical part. But you have to actually connect upstream with the considerations that they're making around strategic trade-offs that then obviously lead to investments that obviously then lead to the revenues and lead to the bottom line. But I think it's about starting the conversation upstream with the CFO and really, frankly, a marketer should be really good about this, by the way. Really trying to empathize with the things that are on their mind and what they are trying to deliver.

So we should, as marketers, be excellent at that and excellent about therefore influencing, but I think we're so busy feeling sometimes that we have to prove the value of our craft that we rush to the bottom line and the unit economics of an investment.

GREG: So what is upstream, then, for the CFO? Do you know specifically what that conversation is, whether it be at TIAA or even some place else you've been?

MICKY: Yeah, I think that obviously at TIAA, what we are thinking about so often is how do we think about net flows from our clients? So bringing in new business into our organization and the associated revenue, but for our CFO, he is trading off a lot of considerations simultaneously. How are markets going to perform? How are clients and institutions going to react? How is the competition going to move?

There's an awful lot of considerations, particularly in a financial institution, that are weighing on his mind. And it's not about, using a fictitious example, I can go and acquire an institution that's going to give me a million participants and it's going to cost me N. That is not the level of conversation or even thought process I think our CFO is in. He's much further upstream around thinking about macro conditions and climates. So I think marketers go too micro too fast, I guess is the headline.

GREG: That was kind of my comment around sort of clicks and likes. We talk about a language doesn't matter. In fact, one of my favorites was a former CMO of eBay came to me one time, and she was telling me what was her favorite story within there. She said she showed up at the company and, I'll paraphrase the story, but basically said the email people said...

MICKY: It's probably an old friend of mine.

GREG: Probably, yeah. I know a lot of the same people. But she said, the email people were saying like, oh, we're up 17 percent. And the social people were saying we're up 23 percent. And the programmatic team was up 12 percent. And she pulled them all together in a conference room and says, "Guys, it's great how well you're doing. It's great that everything's up." And I'm not supposed to curse on this, I know Eric will bleep it out, but she said, "Why the f**k is the business down 5 percent?"

MICKY: Exactly.

GREG: And it's like, I love that story. I love repeating that story because it really, to me, captures the zeitgeist where marketing sort of doesn't get at. So listen, we've thought a lot about this issue, Micky. I'm going to run something by you.

MICKY: And by the way, that story, that's an eBay story, but I will tell you...

GREG: Universal.

MICKY: So universal! And I think the other part, just to double click on that for a second, is that as marketers, particularly in today's marketing environment, we're all thinking about an individual channel. So all of the markets are thinking about an individual channel as opposed to the net or aggregate impact of those channels. And then to my point, it's not even just about the aggregate of those channels. It's how is that playing in the broader context, a more macro environment, which is back to my point about upstream.

GREG: Well, and I'll get off track here, but you've even got the issue that how do you even measured that sort of uptick? What was done? Was that incrementality? I mean, there's so many questions. Was it profitable growth? I mean there's so many others. So Micky, I want to run some by you. I don't usually do this, but I feel compelled to do it with you for some reason.

MICKY: I'm scared where you're going.

GREG: Let's see. Exactly. This is your positivity. I'm trying to discover your strengths here, which one I'm appealing to. No, so I think the issue that we don't... So just tell me if you think this feels right. I think what we don't understand is that what CFOs are faced with often, in particular public companies, is delivering a certain bottom line result. And so part of their skillset is to develop a series of levers that they can pull at the last minute or some time in advance to align the engine because Wall Street puts way too much pressure on exact penny. So that's a separate point. So the issue is that, though, when they come and they cut marketing... If we improve profitability, then we improve enterprise value, at least at the market valuation. That's great. But what we as marketers can't tell the CFO is that, listen, if you take $200 million away from me now, here's what's going to happen a quarter, two quarters, three quarters, a year from now. And it's the fact that we don't know that I think is what gets us in the most trouble. And then I go, well, why don't we know that?

MICKY: Yeah. And I think that, look, this is the age-old brand versus performance. Is it brand or performance? Is it brand plus performance? Is it brand times performance? You've seen every kind of formula out there. And I think those are all played directly into this sort of long-term, short-term trade-off. I think that in my experience of working with all sorts of different CFOs and private companies, publicly traded companies, and everything in between, I think that the reality is that where I have found success in having the conversation about the long term is just frankly the power of case studies and looking at other organizations that have built enduring value through investing in their brand. I think that's one thing. And then I think it is about decrypting. What does it even look like to invest in brand? And I think that — and this is evolving and changing in the CMO conversations I'm in — but that was once upon a time, write me a check for $20 million for advertising. I think what you'll find now is there are more and more CMOs, certainly in the rooms and conversations I'm in, which is write me a check for $20 million, but it's not going to go against advertising, it's going to go against the experience.

And I'm going to share some of that wealth with my client experience partners or my engineering partners. Marketers are thinking ever more expansively around what it means to build a brand and realizing that the role is not just about the things that they directly own or control, but actually about how do they partner across the organization strategically, creatively, or even financially, to my point about write the check. To think with their partners across the organization, how they're going to build the client experience and how are they going to build client engagement. And I think that's an evolution in the role of the CMO in the craft of marketing that is frankly newer and a newer conversation certainly than when I started being a CMO 10 years ago.

GREG: A hundred percent. And listen, it's still pretty high percentage of CMOs who don't own customer experience, which feels a little funny to me. I think that's a remnant of the past. But yeah, I totally agree with you. And we actually have research now that backs up that the companies who perform better are those where the CMO does run customer experience. We've actually done a whole analysis for that in academia.

And what it begins to suggest... Now I'm going to make a leap. That I can validate, this I can't. But it's where I'm kind of going in the kind of conversations we have with the board, is that I think the world's not about brand. And it's not to say brand isn't important. I was raised in that world, so I agree, but that I think the future of marketing is learning how to be really good at customer experience. That's my sense. So we were going from a P&G, L'Oreal. I was P&G, you were L'Oreal. From that world to now being about customer. And I think that's a tough transition for CMOs to make, I think, today's CMOs, right?

MICKY: Yeah, I do. But I think I would just challenge you maybe in as much as I think that we as marketers have put brand in a box. But if you think about back to your early days in your career, and certainly to me as a brand manager at L'Oreal a million years ago, it really was about the total experience. It really was about what's the product going to look like? What's the packaging going to look like? How's it going to appear on shelf? What's the pricing? The classic four Ps.

For me, that was experience and brand always did equal experience. I actually think what's happened is, in an increasingly digital world, what's happened is that that more holistic way of thinking about brand equals experience has got disaggregated into all of these channels and touch points. And that is where brand has become... we've done it to ourselves in some ways. We put brand in this box of advertising and stopped thinking about it expansively as experience because we've disaggregated all of these pieces and parts either within marketing or, to your point, across the organization.

GREG: Yeah, I'd love to do the work to try to figure out how the relationship between all those elements actually come together. And I don't want to turn it just into a formula, but there should be some understanding, some framework around how all those connect and how I begin to balance. And I've not had the board ask me yet. I'm a little surprised. What should be the relationship between brand advertising and customer experience? And then you kind of get into the question, what's the value of data that informs customer experience? And then what parts of customer experience really drive greatest value? I mean, there's so many questions that I don't think we as marketers have begun to answer yet.

MICKY: And it also points to something that I feel pretty strongly about, which is there's how you demonstrate that value to a board, to an executive organization, and you think about, to my point, how you invest holistically around building an enduring brand and business for the long term. I actually think that this is also where people coming into the profession of marketing today are at a disadvantage versus when I came into the profession as a brand manager at L'Oreal a gajillion years ago, which is if you come into the marketing profession right now, you're coming in a very thin sliver of the organization. You might work in CRM, you might work on SEO, you might work on the public-facing website. And the problem is with that is you become a real domain expert in that particular sliver of marketing. But actually some of the fundamentals around customer insight or messaging or how those channels all come together get lost.

So this is also a cycle that we're going to make worse, if you like, in terms of the value of marketing and showing the aggregate value of marketing and marketing equals brand equals total experience equals enduring business value. Because we are training marketers to be really good at one specific component as opposed to, to your point, how will those components come together? So that is something that I, as I think about next generation of marketers, feel really strongly about. And I feel strongly enough that in the organization at TIAA, one of the things that we are really focused on right now is how do we give people gigs in other parts of the organization, whether short term or long term, to actually just broaden the purview and have people connect the dots.

GREG: How much...

MICKY: You've got me on my soapbox, sorry.

GREG: No, no, no. This is a really good topic here. And by the way, I don't know if I had this kind of conversation with people, so it's kind of got my attention. So it's what we kind of have called integrated marketing for years, which means you manage... And a brand manager, like I said, I was an agency guy, I worked at P&G. But I got to watch from that perspective and the brand manager, I mean, that was the classic model. They had the full command of the business, everything that they saw, so they integrated it all. And so your point is that too often your sense from organizations is that we're just not giving, we're not somehow rotating marketers around. I mean, that's a very simplified view of it, but we're not rotating marketers around to make sure they have a holistic view.

MICKY: Yeah.

GREG: Well, I have another big one for you, too. Now we're really off track. You ready? So I have come to the conclusion recently that marketing is not a profession.

MICKY: It's a calling? Where are we going with this?

GREG: Yeah, it's not a job, it's an adventure. No, no. Here's where I'm going, is that I don't think that there's a codified body of knowledge about marketing that we all agree with. Okay, so let me give a contrast to that. If you take the medical profession, people are deeply trained in to be a doctor. They run through a whole series of residencies and other practices, and then eventually they're board certified and change every year. And engineers, same kind of thing. The good news there is that lives are on the line, so we appreciate that kind of thing. The problem with marketing, nobody's dying. So as a result of that, we've not really developed what do we all believe to be true. At some point, you have to know the strength of metal. You have to know under what tension it can perform. You have to understand a whole series of things in engineering. We don't have those in marketing.

MICKY: And what's so interesting about that, and I agree with you, is that because we don't have that, let's call it sort of path of certification or something, but something...

GREG: Yeah, that would be one attempt.

MICKY: ...that shows maybe one way of solving the issue. I think what's interesting about that is it would have a couple of different benefits. One, it would give people path and learning journeys in their career, but I even think for the non-marketers, it would actually start to give some credibility to marketing and that it wouldn't just be that everyone can do it. So to tell a funny story, 15-plus years ago...

GREG: If this is going to be about how people don't think we know what we're doing, it's usually not that funny, but go ahead.

MICKY: No, no, no, no. Fifteen years ago, one of my best friends from college, he's a lawyer and he's a very successful lawyer.

GREG: A profession.

MICKY: He said to me, "I just found this little yellow book and it's about marketing," and he goes, "It's about this thick." So it was 30 pages. "And it's everything you need to know about marketing." After I had picked myself up off the floor and felt like punching him in the face, as you can imagine, I said, "How does anybody think that they can be told everything that there is to know about marketing in a 20-page book?" Anyway, therein came a very lively conversation.

I don't know what the book was. But what I said to him at the time was, "I'm going to start a blog and it's going to be called the Little Yellow Blog, and I'm going to be writing it for the rest of my career telling stories of adventures in marketing because there is absolutely no way it can be told in 30 pages." Anyway, that is a sidebar. That is a sidebar conversation, but I think the point that you are making, which is not only how would it give career growth and learning, but how would it build the credibility and therefore maybe it would no longer be a profession where everyone said — non-marketers and marketers alike — have you tried or haven't you thought about or what about...?

GREG: Yeah, no, no. I'll mention because it was pretty good. Dara Treseder from Autodesk, she spoke at an MMA event here a couple years back. She was talking about the Peloton example. She goes, "Because you know everybody in the C-suite does marketing as a side hustle."

MICKY: Totally. She's right.

GREG: Her saying that it got quite a crowd reaction of marketers. You could certainly understand.

MICKY: Yes.

GREG: But it's not their fault. It's our fault. That's the challenge. I work with a bunch of professors, some of the leading marketing professors in the country, even worldwide, and I don't get a sense that they've all agreed what the marketing curriculum should be anymore, let alone, I doubt it's very caught up to everything.

MICKY: Well, it's really interesting, so maybe seven or eight years ago, I partnered with General Assembly and a bunch of CMOs — some of whom you probably know — to say, could we put together a curriculum that could serve marketers over the course of maybe the first five to 10 years of their career? While it was a very lively group, it was a lot of fun, and we did codify it. I don't how much traction, I'm no longer sit on that board. I don't know how much traction it actually got, but there was a lot of conversation of we can't just have the module, you need the rubber stamp, you need the equivalent of CPA on it, otherwise it's not going to have the kind of credibility that you want it to have to travel.

Here's the arguing against myself on this, is I think that yes, that could be super valuable. What I would want to make sure of is that when you think about professions that you're talking about, so whether it's in law or financial services, medical, et cetera, those are professions where you would at least hope that they are driven by data and super logical.

And whilst I believe that marketing is increasingly data driven, I do believe that you can't over rotate so far on that, that you lose intuition and you lose the power of creativity.

So that's the dance that I think you would have to take is you can't put a CPA certified or whatever it is on every single thing that a marketer does, because otherwise I think you constrain the craft to the point where you won't get the kind of innovation and creativity that I think is the lifeblood of so many enduring brands and businesses.

GREG: A hundred percent agree, and the X factor is creativity. What we broadly call creativity is a very big deal.

GREG: Hey, Micky, why'd you get into marketing originally, by the way?

MICKY: That's a good question. When I graduated from university, I wanted to go into an international business...

GREG: And by the way, for the listeners, you went to Cambridge, right?

MICKY: I did go to Cambridge.

GREG: Very nice.

MICKY: And I did French and Spanish, and I wanted to go into an international business. And so I was looking at all these different businesses, and I tripped over the rotational program at L'Oreal and I thought, well, I'll sort of try that out. At some point, I'll be able to use my French. Well, I never used my French. And I went in and my first stage or session was three months in market research.

And I will say that after I did my three-month market research, which I loved and had the most extraordinary experience in, the end of the three months, I came in on the following Monday and I was supposed to go into sales. And they said, "Actually, we're pulling you out the program. We're putting you in this brand manager role managing these three hair colorant brands because somebody has resigned." And I sort of was like, "Pardon?"

Goodness me. And I went and I did this job as the brand manager of these hair colorants brands. And I think off the back of everything I'd learned about the customer in my first three months with the organization, I became fairly successful fairly quickly. And by then, I just sort of found my feet. So it was not some great intentional move. It's not the thing I grow up thinking I was going to do. It was a combination, I think now, of putting myself in the right place with the rotational program, heavy dose of luck, and frankly finding a job quickly that really played to my strengths. Back to that conversation.

GREG: I love it. You going to go back to being CEO someday? Maybe?

MICKY: Yeah, maybe. There was a lot that I loved about it. I think that it wasn't about the buck stopping with me. That's not the thing that I loved. The thing that I loved was this intersection of the culture of the organization with the customer, with the promise that we made to both every single day. That was what I loved about it. And being the champion of staying true to that, delivering that, whether it was through the zippers that we put in the pants or who we hired to run stores or how we even thought about the technology that would connect the dots between the stores and our e-commerce business. So it was about the intersection of those three things. That's what I loved about it.

GREG: Did you like that part? There's so many little details. You have to start with finance, then all of a sudden your head's over into production, then you're looking at operations, then you're back to marketing.

MICKY: Yes. That's what I love, too.

GREG: Oh my god. Yeah.

MICKY: I think that one of the things that doesn't appear in my top five strengths, but curiosity is something that really drives me. And so every day, to your point, learning about, "Oh my goodness, what do you mean there's a boat on the way from China that's burning and all of our zippers are on it, and what are we going to do about that? And how am I going to think about supply chain?" to learning about, in that business, fabrics to how do you think about a real estate deal for a new location? So that kind of constant learning journey was something that really drove a lot, filled my bucket, so to speak.

GREG: My wife was in fashion and stuff. And so in an environment where you have no idea, you're making good guesses with consumers, but you don't really know.

MICKY: Well, the good news was that I was in men's fashion and men, I'm sorry to say it, Greg, they're much more predictable. We used to say creatures of habit.

GREG: Is that the positive way you put that?

MICKY: Yeah, that's the positive way. If you buy one pair of pants and they fit you and they fit you well, you're going to go and buy them in five colors, and you will come back every year. You'll get the same.

GREG: Is that where the Evolve The Definition campaign came from?

MICKY: Yeah, it did actually. In some ways, which was this idea of...

GREG: Maybe explain to people what it is, just maybe so they know.

MICKY: So this is some time back now. This is back in, I guess it was probably... Gosh, time machine. Where did the time go? This is probably back in 2017, early 2018, where we were really trying to, as I talked about earlier, get to the next growth curve of the business and really think about how could we express who we were as a brand to a broader audience. And so we came across this kind of concept and this idea, which was the fact that how could we actually take a new approach to how people thought about masculinity and how they thought about clothing as a part of an expression of masculinity.

And the campaign Evolve The Definition, what was really amazing about it — and this is another lesson in marketing — is we created this fabulous 30-second ad that we had numerous shapes and sizes. I think there were 33 fits and sizes that we offered in any given pair of pants. And we cast 33 different men, and we created this beautiful, beautiful ad of these 33 different men of all kind of shape, sizes, et cetera. Well, we did the ad, but what was really interesting was as each gentleman came off the set, we took them into a little room, not unlike the one I'm in right now. And we asked them, what does it mean to be a man today to you?

MICKY: And we spent less than $100,000 on doing this whole thing. And once we got the edit together, it came back and the agency showed me probably like a two and a half minute film at that point. Showed it to me, and I went, there's the spot. That's the story. That's the spot. Not 33 men on a soundstage looking gorgeous. What the real story is here, and the thing that's really going to break through and start a conversation, is men playing back to the world how they see the definition of masculinity evolving. And the marketing lesson there is pretty self-evident, which is you've got to be open for the surprise. And that's the previous point. That's about the creativity. And we didn't test that. You could just tell as a marketer that that was the story and that was the piece of video content that was a real breakthrough for that business and that brand.

GREG: I love it. I love it. I love that point, too, is that if you listen carefully enough, they will tell you the answer. If you listen carefully enough. Yeah.

GREG: So listen, let's wrap up here. Let's turn it around. What's the advice you want to give to... I don't know if you want to think of somebody in your mind, maybe it's your kids. What's your oldest, by the way, can I ask, what's your oldest?

MICKY: 13.

GREG: Okay. Okay. So not picking careers exactly yet, but...

MICKY: I don't know, she's watched enough Grey's Anatomy to think that she's going to be a doctor.

GREG: Oh god. I mean, okay.

MICKY: No lie told.

GREG: Okay. So what advice would you give to marketers... If you wanted to be remembered for the advice you'd given to somebody young in the business, do you know what that is offhand, what you would tell them?

MICKY: I think it would be, remember the power of "I don't know."

GREG: Oh.

MICKY: You're like, oh, what does that mean? Or is that self-evident to you? The power of "I don't know" is...

GREG: Stop thinking you know it all.

MICKY: Stop thinking you know it all. It's about an insatiable appetite to learn. It's about vulnerability, and it's about humility.

So when I think about the people that I hire, even at the most senior levels of our organization, I think about vulnerability, humility, and curiosity as three of the most powerful traits because I think they allow you to connect with people. That's sort of the power of vulnerability. Humility and curiosity are two sides of the same coin in terms of that appetite to always learn and stay on the front foot, and not just within your sphere, but broadly around the business and the context in which you operate.

GREG: Are you able to actually interview and assess for those three qualifications or characteristics, I should say?

MICKY: Well, you remember when you were learning how to interview for the first time back in the day, and they would say, "Here are the five behavioral questions you should ask." I've never been a giant fan of that, but I will tell you that some of the ways I try and get at it are asking questions like, what do you want to learn in this next chapter of your career? Because often when someone comes to an interview, they are so busy trying to tell you everything that they already know, that it can be a little bit of a surprise for them to get a question around what do you want to learn. And how they respond to that question is often a bit of a tell as to their appetite to continue to grow.

GREG: Do they have intention?

MICKY: And are they willing to be humble in the interview itself?

GREG: Correct. So do they have an intention? Have they thought through about what they need to know next? Do they have a sense of where they're going? Right. It's a variation of the what do you want to be when you grow up question. But it doesn't really get at that as much as that question does, I don't know. Are we still asking what do we want to be when we grow up?

MICKY: I definitely am still asking that.

GREG: Exactly. I think that's very true. If you're humble enough, you know that that's the question you're asking. Exactly.

MICKY: Constantly.

GREG: Micky, this was so much fun. I heard you on another podcast. I thought, "Oh my god, this is going to be the best conversation ever." I knew it. I saw it coming, and it totally was. So I can't thank you enough for doing this.

MICKY: My absolute pleasure. It was so lovely to chat with you.

GREG: A pleasure. Absolutely. Thank you.

MICKY: Alright, take care.

GREG: Thanks again to Micky Onvural from TIAA for coming on Building Better CMOs. Now check the description of this episode for links to connect with Micky. 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 64 conferences in 16 countries where MMA operates, or write to me, greg@mmaglobal.com. Thank you so much for listening. Tap the link in the description to leave us a review. If you're new to the show, please follow or subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, 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 is by Jason Chase. Special thanks to Angela Gray and Dan Whiting. This is Greg Stuart. I'll see you in two weeks.