Nissan Global CMO Allyson Witherspoon, Page 2

Greg Stuart: This is Building Better CMOs. Let's get back to my conversation with Allyson Witherspoon, the global CMO of Nissan.

Let's go here to the main topic. I think this is kind of a good segue here. So listen, you're talking about being better. So the thesis of the MMA, as I've mentioned to you: as a nonprofit trade association, what do we do to fix stuff? What do we do to make marketing, marketers better? And so I always like to ask the guests, given the unique perch that you have, the place that you sit, what do you think — and this is not to be negative to others or anything else — but it's like what do you think marketing or marketers don't get right? What do they maybe not understand? What do you think they could be better at? What's the missing gaps? I mean, if it's something I can work on, maybe they MMA takes it on. But what do you think we as marketers don't appreciate enough, Allyson?

Allyson Witherspoon: I think where we need some improvement right now is really in creativity and the importance of creativity. And the reason why I say that is because we have so much technology. There's so many channels, there's so many tools to deliver an efficient message that I think we have lost the art of how to create an impactful message. And I think about DCO and even kind of AI. To me, technology and tools are a means to an end, but it's the creative that's actually really going to impact consumers, connect with consumers, impact them, help change perception. And I think we need to find the balance of how do you do that leveraging these tools and this technology?

GS: Okay, I probably should have figured that out. I think in LinkedIn, isn't your banner up there, it says, "Creativity is Queen," I think. Is that right?

AW: Yes, yes, that is right.

GS: Okay. So creativity, first off, it is the underlying foundation of the business and that's probably why most of us got into the industry. So that's great. Let's go down that path. Is it about the big idea? Like I said, I know Jon Bond pretty well, and so I watched that agency... I remember when I was a young pup in the business when they started — it's been that long — and they were about the big stunt more, I think.

AW: The big idea.

GS: The big idea, yeah. Okay. But is it about the big idea — which is important, so maybe riff on that. I know you're going to go there on that. But is your thinking just really that we're communicating clearly or that we're communicating uniquely with the consumer? What's the filters, the questions you ask yourself as you're looking at work? Maybe is one way to look at that.

AW: To me it's about how do you connect with consumers? How do you make something that's compelling that will connect with them?

AW: I 100 percent believe in the big idea, and I think everything needs to ladder up to what that big idea is. And that's essentially what do you want consumers to take away from this? And we have three seconds, six seconds, 15 seconds, 60 seconds, or you have less than split seconds. How do we communicate that key takeaway that we want consumers to understand? How do we communicate that in a compelling way? And I think automotive, it can be highly technical and if we get lost in trying to explain in a six-second ad about how a hybrid engine works, we're going to lose people. And so how do you actually have a message that's super clear about what the benefit is to them and something that will visually engage them?

And so to me, I think that's where, again, I think DCO is great because that way you can create a lot of assets. But you still have to think about what is that visual, what is that message? And I think that that can get lost in the objective to create content factories, these massive creative libraries. And I've done that. We've done that. And I think some of that is because there's so many different ways to reach consumers. It's just the nature of the beast. But it doesn't remove the importance of actually what you say to consumers. It doesn't remove that at all. It actually becomes even more important.

GS: I heard you talk about DCO, and you've mentioned it here a couple of times. I want to talk about that because there's a part of me... I remember when DCO was first created, in fact, I almost went and ran a DCO company, but I never really thought the performance justified the energy and effort. It didn't go far enough. I will say, to be fair to you, the MMA has been running a series of AI personalization studies and it's basically, it's kind of DCO on steroids. Okay. It's really just amped at a level I've never seen, and the performance is extraordinary. So there's a part of me that says, okay, well that's great for performance because now I'm personalizing ads, I'm making that work. But you're right, DCO is... it's a manufactured ad. It's like a synthetic ad. It's not like a real ad that somebody sat and put the elements together. So would you have in your mind how you balance those kind of dynamics?



AW: Yeah, and I think to me it is more synthetic, but I think it's the personalization piece of it. And I think that's what makes it really impactful because I think there's a creative message, but there's also like how do you connect with that person? And I think that's where personalization... it's also a method of creativity.

As a marketer, it's more of some of that is happening behind the scenes. It's happening through data, audience segmentation. It's happening through insights that are coming through in split seconds. But to me, that is the impact. But that's why I think it's important. You need to understand what the audiences are. You need to understand what are their motivators, and then how and where do you connect with them and what do you say? And I think all of that is important. And I think then DCO just becomes the tool to enable that.

GS: Got it. Got it. I mean, listen, you're going down the path to... we've all worked now with Chat GPT. We've all had our fun, and we've tried to have it write our speeches or blogs or whatever. Okay. And I think today, so far, I've had some success, but it generally feels like it feels a little flat. It somehow takes the creativity off. It takes the edge out of it in some regards. It just doesn't feel like it kind of accomplishes it. Is that kind of what you're talking about, that it becomes sort of dull at some level?

AW: Yes, but AI, generative AI is another example of that because I think it's an enabler. I think it helps at the starting point of something. We use AI in vehicle design. I think the buzz about AI is it's foundational in what we do, actually, at this point.

It's an enabler, but I think a brand still needs to differentiate from everyone else. And automotive is incredibly competitive. And so if everyone is using AI and the dataset is the same for everyone, then what's going to be differentiated if everyone uses the same thing? And so that's why I think you have to have a very clear view of who you are as a brand. And then these become enablers and tools, but you still need that creative mind. You still need a strong point of view as a brand and as a marketer in order to fully leverage that capability. It's a means to the end, but it's not what's going to drive results.

GS: I have a corresponding podcast I do for the MMA's AI work called Decoding AI for Marketing. And we had somebody on there, and I'm not going to get it exactly right, but they pointed out that... By the way, I'm a huge believer in AI. I do think it's the future, the revolution, and I'm all in, and I'm just super enamored to see where the world's going to go and what's going to happen. We're at a phase right now. But they said a funny thing. They said when they have a creative brainstorming, they go, if AI came up with seven of their 10 ideas, they didn't do it well enough. And so in other words, what he was saying is that AI is okay, maybe starting point, but you've got to get beyond that to really bring in the soul, I think, of what you're trying to get out of. That was a funny point.

AW: I fully agree. And I think, to me, it's the starting point of something. When you first start to sit down to write a strategy, that takes a lot of time actually. And I think this can actually be an accelerator. AI can be an accelerator in moments like that. I think AI is definitely an accelerator in a lot of things that we can do creatively, but it does take human thinking to get it above and beyond. And that's even in discussions with our head of design. It's the same thing. It's a starting point. It's the accelerator. It will help get to it faster, but the final product is not going to be fully generative AI.

GS: When you're looking at ads, when you're ultimately reviewing these ads and you're looking for the creativity dynamic, I'm just wondering, do you look into more design? Are you looking more at the communication in it, the visuals that there's an art to it, if there's people or something else? What do you think you're keying in on? Do you know what you're looking for?

AW: It's interesting because in 2020 when I was CMO for the US, we set out to kind of do some repositioning. We needed to move beyond some of the things that were happening from our recent past. And so we did a positioning. We really sat down and it was cross-functional. It one of those scary meetings where it was R&D, HR, purchasing, finance, design, captive finance, sales, everybody.

GS: Why is that a scary meeting, by the way? I know. I just want you to say it.

AW: Yeah. Because everyone has an opinion. Everyone has an opinion, and sometimes navigating everyone's opinion is actually a very difficult and skilled thing that is required of marketers.

GS: Really? I'm surprised. And you're in the center. You're going to laugh at this. Not to sideways too much because I want to come back to what you're looking for in the ads, but I'm in the middle of doing a positioning now with the MMA. So my meeting the other day was working through the positioning of the MMA with the CMOs of AT&T, McDonald's, General Motors. I was like, "Oh, I'm way in over my head on this." Imagine the world's greatest marketers...

AW: Yeah, exactly.

GS: ... looking at my little company's positioning statement.

AW: That's great, though.

GS: It's very funny. It's a very intimidating kind of environment. You think you got it right, but you don't know if you got it right ever.

AW: And I think in this situation, we went through this and we started first with there's a little bit of catharsis of this is where it hasn't worked. And then we really quickly got into, as a brand, this is what we've done really great in our history, and we landed on this, "Thrill people at every turn." We then turned that into, okay, how does that become a communication platform? And as I started to review creative, now that we had that, you could feel whether or not we were doing that. And so to me, to answer your question, I think it's much more in the communication, but communication being the visual and the copy and the emotion behind it. And we got to the point with the team that we felt it. We knew whether or not it was there on just straight feeling.

GS: And what I heard there, too, I think was that it tied back to the strategy of what we're trying to capture.

AW: Correct. Always tie it back to the strategy, always tie it back to the strategy.

GS: You wouldn't have known this about me, but I had the opportunity to co-found multi-touch attribution about 20 years ago when I ran the IAB.

AW: Nice.

GS: And what they did is they put us in working with, at the time, we did probably two dozen studies with marketers trying to understand the dynamics of what... we didn't call it multitouch attribution at the time, we just called it a new measurement technique. But it got us into the brands at a very deep level. Our takeaway was, our conclusion after all those studies is that ads had to survive on three different things. It was basically you had to get the strategy right, you had to get the messages right, then you had to get the placement right. Okay. This strategy and messaging, because we were extensively testing if we had to —

AW: It's creative.

GS: — right, that script. But it failed 45 percent of the time. And even if you got the strategy right and the message... you had to get both. You could muscle by a little bit with maybe good messaging. There was some nuance to that, obviously, but we were surprised the number of times that it failed. But you're right, so right, you have to get it right.

AW: Yeah. And I think the placements, I wouldn't say it's a given because there's still the brand safety issues and things like that, but placement is, at this point, it's such an automated...

GS: Little bit.

AW: You need to have some eyes on that because as somebody who manages a very large budget, you've got to know where those ads are showing up. And you have to make sure that... And also every single one has to have impact, which is just, I think that's a scary part of being a CMO, is that you have to be able to show how it's driving whatever the KPI is that the brand is kind of hanging their hat on. You have to show how it's driving that.

GS: I don't want to call anybody out here, so not important to this, but are there times when you think that the team or you just kind of got it wrong on creativity? Where it just kind of didn't work? What would be an example of that if you can share?

AW: I think there was something that we'd launched. We moved into this brand, kind of a more branded approach. And typically in automotive, it's like product on, product off, product B, on/off, product C, on/off. And typically that doesn't — from a consumer standpoint, especially if you stack them — it's very difficult to try to capture attention. And so we moved into the strategy of more branded messaging. And then right before I moved back to Japan, we were focused on design and the design as one of our brand messages. And I didn't feel like... I think at the end of the day, I don't think that we hit our mark. The environment had shifted and we didn't react quickly enough to it. And that's where, if I could do it again, I would've tried to push harder. We were just slightly off where the market was going.

GS: So you're suggesting it could have been right at a moment in time, but it was no longer right? Oh wow. That's really hard.

AW: Yeah, that is hard. That was hard.

GS: I had the chief officer from Adobe here on one of our recent podcast episodes tell me that they had created a campaign with 5,000 creative assets. Is that true today?

AW: Yeah. And sometimes every once in a while I hear even some of our marketing teams in different parts of the world, it's like, oh, it's 3,000. And I've definitely done it, too. A question that I get a lot is like, so does your production budgets go up? No, they don't. We actually have to be smarter and probably go down. But yeah, and I think the reason for that is because there's so many ways of reaching consumers now.

GS: It's crazy.

AW: And we know so much about what they're motivated by. And so you have all these insights and then all these channels and all these different ways. And then you have creative fatigue in social media is much different than it is on television. I think that's why you get to that. That's why I still go back to every single one of those has to have impact. If it's something that's going to be more dynamically generated or generative AI, that's why it's like, what is the data that's going to be driving that? And then what is that messaging formula that you have that's going to be attached to that? That's what becomes really, really important.

GS: Wow. I can't even imagine having the oversight. I mean, even if you laid that out end to end, it probably wouldn't fit in anybody's office. Yeah.

AW: No, and I think sometimes it's — and I say this to my team a lot — I think sometimes marketers can be disconnected or they can feel disconnected from other parts of organizations because it feels like it's very creative, but actually it's very, very business oriented. And marketers, ironically enough, we don't necessarily do the best job of marketing what we do.

GS: Oh, no, no, no. We're terrible.

AW: And that was a huge learning for me. We're terrible at it. We are terrible.

GS: Terrible, terrible, terrible.

AW: Because we're scared. We want to protect it, and then we don't tell anybody. And what I've learned is that you have to get it out there. You have to like, "We're doing this and this AI, on it here." And we can't shy away from those conversations. And we need to proactively... Don't wait for the CFO to be asking how you're leveraging generative AI. Don't wait for the CEO asking you about these things. And you have to market what you're doing. And there is a situation where a very prominent person went and pitched AI leveraging audience segmentation to one of our local CEOs, but as a new idea. It was so funny because the marketing team in the room was like, this is so run the business. This is foundational. And of course, everyone's trying to get more business and stuff. And I think the learning from that is if you're doing that, find a way to make sure that everyone knows that you're doing that. Just find ways to drop those little tidbits and sound bites to prevent the distraction that things like that can become.

GS: Well, I used to have a guy I worked with that called it merchandising. He says, "Always be merchandising" was kind of his phrase. Yeah, exactly.

AW: Always.

GS: Okay. Hey, let's wrap up. Let's talk about AI for a little bit. You mentioned it a few times here. I know that it's a big deal for you. It's a big deal for the auto industry already. I mean, this is nothing new for design and everybody else. Have you given an overarching... I mean, how are you looking at ingesting AI — either generative AI or machine learning, any one of those — into marketing? What's the mandate maybe you've given the team? What's the direction? Is there a goal that you've set? What are you thinking of? Eventually, I want to get to where's there real opportunity, you think?

AW: Yeah, and I have given that challenge to the team. What I've told them is that we need to be open to this, and I want to see the teams experimenting with it. And so the challenge has been more like let's start experimenting with it. And the way that I view it is as an accelerator.

Really an accelerator. Like we discussed a little bit earlier, it's the accelerator for that starting point. It can become this accelerator enabler. And so that's what I've been encouraging the teams to be doing is just start experimenting with it. Obviously, we use it in a lot of, like we said, audience segmentation. Buying is so foundational when it comes to media at this point. And so some of that is already foundational, but it's more about how can we bring it into strategy. If we're stuck on a problem or we're stuck with how to solve something, then how do we leverage AI? And things under my responsibility is kind of all the brand merchandising. We have a concept of an idea, and I think the teams were not quite sure how to start it. And so I was like, well just use generative AI just as the starting point. Where is there quality manufacturers of this type of merchandise? Apparel, as an example. And it's like, just use it just to see. And so that's how I'm trying to encourage the team. An internal objective of ours is to do these kind of proof of concepts. And so to me, it's more about how do we just start to expose ourselves to what the technology can deliver and experiment with it?

GS: Do you have examples of either experiments you're running? I think ultimately what listeners would find helpful is where do we think the heat map for opportunities are? Like I mentioned, we're doing this AI personalization, a kind of a DCO on steroid, and it's crazy. I've been doing a lot of measurement of media marketing for a lot of years. I've never seen anything like this. So for me, that concept of personalization, using, in this case, machine learning is really powerful. Where do you see some of the opportunities?

AW: I mean, I think that's the perfect example. And like I said, social media wear-out happens so much faster. So how can you refresh assets leveraging AI, particularly backgrounds and things like that. I think the other thing where we really see it is that — and this is such a tactical example — but storyboards. And remember, it used to take two weeks to get the storyboards, and that's AI. We use AI for that. It's been inspiration for us. But the design team, we went to our design center — which is kind of an hour away from our headquarters here in Japan — and they did an entire presentation through AI, which I thought if we can help alleviate a lot of resource spending writing PowerPoints, I'm all in.

GS: All in, exactly.

AW: I'm all in on that. And so to me, it's really about those starting points of things and where are the pain points of where do we see that things take a lot of time? How do we inject generative AI into that? Because I think machine learning when it comes to media and AI, when it comes to that, that's pretty foundational. That's not new after a few years of this.

GS: And not so uncommon. Correct.

AW: Yeah, exactly. But it's just more about what are those other opportunities? And like I said, naming is also kind of part of my purview, and sometimes you can get really stuck on names, and so the teams are now starting to do here's some AI-generated ones, these are our generated ones. And so I think it's just helping to speed up a lot of these processes that have been pretty manual for a long time. It's helped us to speed that up.

GS: The annoying parts of our job can be taken away. Right?

AW: Yeah.

GS: By the way, does it happen there? We were getting the question here from teams, "Oh, is it going to replace my job?" Did that come up there at all? Did Japanese ever ask that kind of thing?

AW: I mean, we've discussed it a lot. I think it's will it replace your job? Will AI replace your job? No. Will a person who can query AI replace your job? Potentially, yes.

GS: Yes, exactly.

AW: That's why I think these prompt engineers, that's a skill that I think everyone, especially marketers, need to learn. Fortunately, I had kind of an expert in this help guide me as I started to experiment with it personally. He was like, take a look at it. And he's like, start a chat and keep it in the same one and ask it to be an advisor to you as a global chief marketing officer. I never say the brand, I never say anything specific. He's like, just ask it to do that and give feedback. Start to work on your prompts. Give feedback if you're not getting it. I was prompting, "How do I influence our CFO for XYZ?" and all these things. It was fascinating to me to see that because the immediate reaction, but also it suddenly meant that research and things like that could be so much faster than having to go through searches and where are these analog, backdated, whatever it is. Suddenly that can be so instantaneous. And that was such a tedious part of a strategy, especially.

GS: Right, and I agree with you on prompt engineering. I think it's a pretty big deal. I've taken a few classes in that. The idea is that you really do have to push the machine to give you what you want. It's kind of where we started sort of earlier, funny enough. If you don't learn how to give good, clear direction, if you don't learn how to sort of massage and manage things... There was a study I saw not too long ago where they actually went into one of the GPTs and they were basically saying, what happens when you're polite to the machine? Do you get a different response with the research that you were doing? And they did. The LLMs are just amalgamations of what people believe. That's why bias comes through sometimes still. But it was responsive to those kinds of things. I don't remember the examples, but it could have been something like if you said pretty please, it would give you a different answer. Or they say, "Could you really, really try at this for me?" You were giving a more human kind of reaction and the machine responded to those. They had different reactions. Crazy.

AW: And that's what I just find absolutely fascinating. And I remember, somebody sent me an article. Nike — incredible brand — they were trying to see if AI could generate a more impactful headline than... I forget. It had to do with the NCAA, the finals, and Caitlin Clark. And it shows what the prompts were, and it's just really fascinating to how the LLM responds to you and how you input information. I feel like — and I think this is an important trait for anyone in marketing — but I'm an endlessly curious person. I can get to the end of the internet on any kind of topic if I really have the time to do it.

GS: You would do it. If anybody would do it, you say you would do it.

AW: I would absolutely do it, but this is where I just think it's like I'm so curious. I'm excited, I'm curious. I'm a little scared, but that's why I encourage my team to really lean in and see where it can complement us, complement what we're already doing. How can it complement and accelerate what we're doing?

GS: I am totally on board with you. I think it's going to be the most exciting thing ever. I can't imagine what it means. I hope still I keep up at my age. I am curious. I think I will, but is this the one time the world moves beyond where I am? I don't know. And it is moving so fast. It's just sort of crazy.

AW: Yeah, it is crazy. Yeah, it is.

GS: Allyson, I can't thank you enough for doing this. It's been so much fun. I listened to one of your other podcasts. I went into this one, I go, "Oh my god, she's going to be so easy." You're just so easy to communicate and talk, and you do have that natural curiosity. I didn't know exactly what it was. I didn't form my thoughts on it, but that's right. You just have a curiosity to try to figure out the world. What a great trait for a marketer, obviously why you're CMO of Nissan, so congratulations. Thank you. You're the best.

AW: I appreciate that. Thank you.

GS: Thanks again to Allyson Witherspoon from Nissan for coming on Building Better CMOs. Check the description of this episode for links to connect with Allyson. If you want to know more about MMA's work to make marketing matter more, visit mmaglobal.com. Or you can attend any of our 44 conferences in the 16 countries where MMA operates, or really just write me: greg@mmaglobal.com. Thank you so much for listening. Tap the link in the description to leave us a review, and 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 buildingbettercmos.com. 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. This is Greg Stuart. See you in two weeks.