Global CMO Growth Council Unveils Leadership Roadmap in Cannes

By John Wolfe

Day Four of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity was a big one for the ANA as the Global CMO Growth Council officially unveiled a leadership roadmap for driving business and brand growth.

And the plan presented was nothing if not ambitious — the Council's goal is to reshape and, in effect, reinvent marketing and the CMO role and increase revenue for marketers worldwide by one percentage point, or more than $500 billion, over the next three years.

The plans were announced during an afternoon session at the Festival before an estimated audience of about 200 attendees.

The Growth Council is an impressive group; it's a global community of CMOs representing many of the world's biggest brands. Its leadership body is comprised of 25 CMOs and is chaired by Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer for Procter & Gamble and ANA Chairman.

At its official launch at last year's Cannes Festival, the Growth Council identified four strategic priorities to drive growth and achieve marketing objectives. Since then, the group developed plans to address brand and business building opportunities and presented them today at the Festival.

Here's a brief look at the four areas of focus along with a sampling of the Growth Council's goals for each one:

• Brand Innovation, Creativity, and Experience: Reframe marketing and the role of the CMO through a customer-first lens that requires building brand equity in creativity, sharing knowledge and combining brand experience with media. This includes the launch of a first-of-its-kind Global Center for Brand Innovation and Creativity to equip CMOs with assets to help them redefine the basic tenets of marketing. Among those tools are assets to equip CMOs with the measurement and tracking of a brand's value.
• Data, Technology, and Measurement: Create tools and assets to guide CMOs through the dense and complicated worlds of programmatic media buying, advanced digital technologies and new forms of cross-media measurement systems. Establish a set of universal best practices for martech that specifically drives business growth.
• Talent Development and Organization: Establish three strategic areas of focus. First, transform the academic curriculum to align with the business community while establishing a new campaign to "market marketing" as a career choice. Second, train marketer and agency staffs to upgrade existing business performance. Third, elevate CMO development as a cornerstone priority to better navigate the complexities of the CMO role.
• Society and Sustainability: Become the gold standard for helping CMOs drive innovative outcomes that benefit both society and business by focusing on three key areas: gender equality; propagating brand safety by eliminating hate speech; closing the gap among marketers claiming support for sustainability (70 percent) and those who are actively promoting sustainability (30 percent).

Growth Council leaders said they plan to utilize the assets and capabilities of a wide range of "business machines" created by the ANA that specifically address the four key areas. These include the ANA's #SeeHer gender equality initiative and the Talent Forward Alliance, a cross-industry initiative designed to create a unified movement to elevate marketing and advertising as a career on university campuses, among others.

Additional resources include the ANA's Center for Brand Purpose, which is designed to fuel business growth by helping marketers create purpose-driven, strategic programs and solutions for their products and services, and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media. The latter was announced earlier this week at the Cannes Festival by 14 global advertisers, the five leading agency holding companies, leading media companies and top trade associations, including the ANA.

Read our wrap-up of the first day of Cannes here.