2026 Year in Review: 7 Lessons from the Frontier

I can tell within 90 seconds of talking to a CMO, whether they are actually working with AI, or just talking about it. It's not about the budget they have, it's not about the size of their tech stack, you can hear it. And how they talk about their Tuesday afternoon. Are they waiting for a team to bring them a slide deck about AI? Or did they spend 20 minutes last night prompting a model to stress tests their Q4 media plan all before walking into their CFO's office? Welcome to a special episode of Frontier CMO. I'm Josh Vanya. Over the past year, I've sat down with hundreds of the sharpest marketing leaders, creators, and thinkers in the world. And every week, in our Frontier CMO newsletter, I've shared the unvalished field notes from those rooms. Alongside, what my own team inside Google Marketing was testing, breaking, and learning in real time. Looking back across our conversations, I see a clear three-year arc. 2025 was the year of wow. Everyone marveling at the magic tricks their models could do. 2026 has been the year of experimentation. Thousands of pilots, hackathons, and test kitchens. 2027 is the year where we stand and deliver. The whole past is expired. The board wants real, measurable growth. So whether you've listened to every episode this season, or you're just joining us for the very first time, we're opening up the vault and playing the very best extended conversations from the entire year. Seven lessons, 45 minutes. Let's get into it. Lesson 1 starts in the boardroom. Stop defending marketing, become the chief growth and diplomacy officer. In almost every conversation I had this year, we ended up talking about the relationship between the CMO and the CFO. And here's what I realized. CFOs don't hate brand marketing. They hate fuzzy math. They hate it when marketers walk into a quarterly business review, speaking a foreign language of impressions, awareness scores, and canliance. While the rest of the executive table is talking about marginal return on capital, cash flow velocity, and customer acquisition costs, nobody articulated better than Vanita Mira, the chief growth officer at Shine. When Vanita and I sat down, I asked him what it actually means to be a full stack marketer today. And why he believes the modern CMO only has two real jobs. Capital allocator and systems architect. How do you define what a full stack marketer is? How do you define it? How do you bring it into the culture? If you think about the job of a modern CMO in two ways, being a capital allocator to drive growth and being a systems architect, the full stack marketer can go from a systems conversation to a data science conversation to a conversation about the cultural zeitgeist and geek out on the ad platforms and the latest sort of launches that Google has made around automation of the media stack, right? Double click into systems architecture. There's a brand new phrase, and the owner's may not quite understand what that is. The first thing is, if you think about it, it's no longer just about leading a human organization, right? Like I've got dozens of agents doing various tasks that humans used to do. So in many ways, you're not just architecting your organizational design with humans. You're now co-piloting a lot of your humans with machines, right? And the role of machines is no longer just a tool, right? Like a hammer is a tool. The carpenter is like an agent. A hammer is a tool. A carpenter is an agent. And notice what Vanille does with that systems architecture. He connects it directly to how he allocates capital with his CFO. Later in that same conversation, Vanille and I got into the eternal civil war between East Coast brand builders and West Coast performance marketers. Why he coined the term performance storytelling? And then we literally roleplayed how to handle a CFO who asked you to slash brand spend late in the quarter. You know, for so many years, there's been this sort of almost marketing civil war or like a two-pack biggy West Coast East Coast thing around sort of performance marketing and brand building. It's almost like West Coast is like, we do performance marketing, right? And East Coast is where brand builders. The honest truth is, you can't performance market and, you know, again, I'll come back to I hate that term, but you can't performance market your way. It out of a brand narration and differentiation problem. And you can't use brand marketing to get out of a funnel kind of performance marketing funnel problem, right? What I've tend to do is I've coined this term called performance storytelling. And the reason I don't love the term performance marketing is because everything performs, right? Brand performs. It just does a different part of the performance. What I would say to a CFO, you get into these moments of sort of, you start talking about marginal return on your dollar, right? So let's say you're short the quarter a little bit and you have to make it up. There's only a few ways to do that, right? Either you get more dollars and sometimes the CFO will say, hey, if you spend a little bit more money this quarter, can we get this up? There's been many times where our CFO has come to me with this kind of a conversation. I said, no, thank you. I can't spend the money efficiently. That is an unbelievable answer to give to a CFO, right? You've got to be able to understand at all times what I put an extra dollar in. Well, my cost of acquisition cost be of that dollar. Number two would be do need to reallocate capital from some of the longer term areas into the shorter term areas. And again, to do that, a lot of people will just say, hey, I'll take brand dollars and put it into sort of my direct response budget for the last month of the year and hit my budget, you know, hit my numbers. So in those situations, I'll say to the CFO, sure, I can do that, me, I'm going to reallocate, just know that we may pay for that in this way in Q3 or Q4 based on the internal modeling tools that I've got. The CMOs have to be able to sort of understand and connect their dollars to revenue, EBITDA, and EPS at all times. It's the only way I think you can have an effective conversation with a great CFO. Think about how different that conversation is. When you tell your CFO, don't give me the next dollar because it breaks our marginal efficiency curve. You never have to beg for budget again. That same thing came up when I sat down with O Gandon, who joined the Estee Lauder companies as chief digital and marketing officer to lead transformation across more than 20 iconic beauty brands, from Lamar and Kaniq to Mac and Tom Ford. O told me she walked into her new CFOs office with a line straight out of Jerry McGuire, and then she and I had one of my favorite exchanges of the year, and why the best CMOs also have to act like 19th century French diplomats. I've always said if you want to be successful in marketing, you definitely need to make sure that you have a CFO. Understand that marketing is actually a gross engine. And for me, you know, the best I have a CFO, the CFO. We need to spend time to make sure that there's something we do. I've always done this. I'm very Jerry McGuire, you know, show me the money at one point. If you don't have the money, there's nothing you can do. But so really making sure first that everybody understands it's not a cost, it's an investment. I know it can sound obvious, but it is not obvious, especially when companies have to make so much investment. And I was just thinking about the role of the chief marketing officer and chief ditched officer and some of these titles. And one of my favorite characters in history is the French diplomat, Talawar. He was sort of the chief diplomat for Napoleon Bonaparte, and then for 50 years, he basically led the French state through his diplomacy. And it just struck me this notion of diplomacy, when to push, when to negotiate, when to concede, feels like a skill that CMOs need in abundance, the ability to be the chief diplomatic officer within the C-suite overall. Does this make any sense? Do you agree with us? I love your reference to tell Errol, because I think he's one of the most interesting characters in French history at least. We also have a role of diplomacy. I think it requires focus on what exactly do we want to really deliver, and therefore what is very important to push for, and then what is not that important, and that's why you can sometimes as well compromise. It also, I think, requires an ability to listen, and usually very good marketers are the one who knows how to listen. And here, what is being said, but also what is not being said, you know, sometimes the unsaid in a meeting is actually what is going to provide you the best information, understand in this kind of multi-function, multi-layers organization, who is really going to make the decision. And then I think it's a question of courage. We sometimes, I think, don't talk enough about the importance of courage, because it is not pure math marketing. There's more and more math, because we have more and more data. But there's a lot of it, which is, you know, not math. And so when you feel like you have a clear pass and a clear swatting gene, then you also need to get the courage to kind of take everybody with you and say, no, no, you know, I will carry it and I will deliver it. And that's also what diplomacy is all about. I think the big diplomats were usually people who knew how to listen, how to build teams of people together, why influencers, but then have the courage sometimes to make big decisions on behalf of the whole team. And what happens when you get that commercial alignment and creative courage working in log step? You get what Damon Berger and the team at Gap have pulled off over the last two years. I sat down with Damon live on stage at Google's rethink retail event in September. Gap has delivered 11 consecutive quarters of positive growth. And their cat side denim campaign racked up more than 83 million views on YouTube. We had a very animated exchange about the age of debate between brand and performance. To us relevance is culture and thinking about when you can really think about what people love about entertaining aspects of our brands and entertainment in general and what creators create. Those are the things that ultimately add up to culture. And being talked about by people without having to us having paid for those types of mentions, that's really where culture happens. And I think culture happens faster and on social and on YouTube more than anywhere else today. So if we're relevant on those platforms, then we end up generating revenue from that relevance. I got to tell you brand is performance. There's no question that we have seen as the brands have become more connected to culture. That's where you start seeing performance outcomes happen. But the fact is as brand performs, you see row as outcomes, you see performance outcomes. Relevance is revenue brand is performance. Stop walking to the boardroom to defend a marketing budget, walk in as a capital allocator and as a systems architect who speaks the language of growth. That brings us straight into lesson two. Once you realize that cultural relevance drives performance, you hit the next wall every CMO is wrestling with right now. How do you actually earn relevance when consumers have tuned out traditional corporate advertising? You recognize that the audience is boss now and you give up some control to win with authenticity. When I was walking down the closet a can this past summer, I wrote in our newsletter, "Move over madmen." Every way you looked, creators weren't just invited to the party anymore, they were running the studio. Inside Google Marketing, we lead all the way into this. To promote Google Pixel, we partnered with Alex Cooper and Unwell Productions to create a multi-episode vertical micro-drama called Moving On. Why? Because you can't interrupt culture anymore and expect people to care. You have to be the entertainment they choose to watch. Nobody understands that dynamic better than Colin Rosenblum and Sumeer Chowdry, the host of the Colin and Sumeer Show and the sharpest chroniclers of the creator economy. One thing that we say to marketers quite a bit is you have to imagine like for us as creators, when we evaluate working with a brand and how they show up in our world, it's very similar to us showing up to a party with our close friends and bringing a friend, right? And so if you bring someone to that party and everyone in the room is like, why did Sumeer bring this guy Steve? He's kind of strange and I don't get how he fits in here. Like what does he bring to the party? If I do that over and over and have no context to my friends of why I brought Steve, then you're probably gonna stop letting me have a plus one and then eventually maybe you'll stop inviting him to the party. I've heard you guys talk about being strategic like treat creators, it also strategic entrepreneurs. - Yeah, for sure. I think sometimes we get treated as talent, but we're distributors, right? We have to think about how an audience is gonna react to what we put out there. We're not just show up and get on camera. Like we're sitting in a room thinking through what's going to connect. So we're like, we're also the studio executive. Bring us in at that stage, at the early stage, where you're like, this is what we're trying to do. What do you recommend? They should be audience members first so that you even know where to place your bets. And I think it's your job as a marketer now to understand and find those pockets. - How do you prove something to a marketer to yourself that this is actually gonna have a business return or some sort of positive impact? - I think for us, one of the obvious metrics that's like data, empirical data is watch time. We can tell you if we're connecting both on watch time and comments are people watching for a long time. So like, just about 50% of our viewership comes from connected TV and on connected TV's people are watching for 48 minutes. That shows us like, alright, people are really watching this. - 48 minutes on the living room TV. When Samir told me that, I shared with them how we sold our creator investment. We call it the two voice model. There is the voice of the brand, what Google says about our products, and there is the voice of the trusted third party. What a creator says when they actually put the product to the test in their own world. You need both voices. That's true whether you're a tech brand or a legacy CPG giant. Leandro Borretto, the global CMO of Unilever, told me this season that they scaled that exact model to 300,000 creators. By realizing brands don't build worlds anymore, they just join the communities that already exist. And if you wanna see what happens when you take that anti bureaucracy mindset to the extreme inside your own creative process, listen to my exchange with Benoit Vetter, Chief Media and Digital Commerce Officer, a liquid death. The canned water company that turned a commodity into a cult entertainment brand. - So it feels like you have the dream brief. Just do epic shit. - Exactly. - Do epic stuff. - We do not have briefs. We do not write briefs. - How do you make these big swings happen? - It's my style, the CEO and founder is a creative genius. His thought is marketers are the least creative people on earth. So we should not have marketers doing creatives. You start with that. Then for us we pick all in which was being funny. Comedy. Comedy is very difficult to do. But for him, the perfect setup was for when you look at SNL skits and the setup for us is exactly the same. We have a board room in LA in our HQ where we show up on every Thursday for four hours. No phones, just a room with M, with me, with the creative team. But the creative team is made of producers and made of comedians. There are no marketers. There are no agencies. There is nobody besides us. And that's how we create. And he creates by coming up with ideas like a writer's room. We're just like throwing ideas. We don't have brain guidelines. We don't have a brain book. - Okay. So you have no brain guidelines, no brain books. - If we don't have a brain book, we don't have brain guidelines, and our partner is all the time, asking us, can we get your brain guidelines, your brain books? Like, no, we don't have one. - Now let's talk about the trap that happens when marketers get their hands on generative AI without doing the hard homework first. In one of our most shared newsletters of the year, I wrote that AI is the ultimate amplifier. If you have a sharp diagnosis of your customer, clear segmentation and distinctive brand positioning, AI lets you execute with breath taking speed. But if your strategy is mush, AI just helps you generate mush of a speed of light and nobody called out the industry on this more fiercely or more hilariously than Professor Mark Ritson, founder of the Mini-MBA. Listen to our back and forth, and why Mark says, "Markers don't need AI training. Nearly as much as they need strategy training." - I think the tragedy of modern marketing is more than 90% of marketers never have a strategic day in their lives. They live in the tactical bushfires that surround them and they don't even know what they're missing. Learn strategy. Learn to have the discipline to have a strategic plan, which really is only about targeting positioning and objectives. That's really what it means. Have those done before you even touch communications or pro-development or distribution? What is your strategy? - The fundamentals matter strategy before tactics. - I partnered with Ipsos to do a very interesting piece of research. We surveyed a representative sample of marketers in the US, UK, Canada, Australia. And Ipsos asked them a bunch of questions about how they felt about AI and other stuff. And I slipped in 10 questions that are basically sub-undergraduates knowledge questions about marketing. With the single hypothesis, which is, I don't think many marketers know much about marketing. And so, sure enough, what we discovered, and I'm telling you, these are the world's most obvious questions. What does positioning mean? What are the four Ps? Now, what does above the line mean? - I know two of those. - Well, that's good. We found that, yeah, 70% of marketers can't pass a basic test of marketing. And what we've created successfully, I think, over the last 20 years, is the least trained profession in the professional world. And an army of marketers who don't know anything about the thing that they do. It's a disciplinary shit show of the highest order. You have to know what you're doing before you make these tools work. You know, the analogy I use is AI is incredibly fast racehorse. The fastest racehorse we've ever seen. Right. But if you get someone that hasn't ridden before or even been trained in riding to ride that horse, it's going to end very badly. So, I don't think you need to be trained in AI. I think that's a nonsensical idea. I think you need to be trained in strategy and the big picture of marketing so you can operate AI and understand the right questions. That same lack of strategic discipline shows up on the single most neglected piece of real estate in marketing today, your brand's own website. Think about it. Your website is now pulling double duty. It's where your highest intent customer goes to make a decision and it's the primary source of truth teaching AI models what your brand actually stands for. Yet when people show up at that digital front door, what happens? Here's Andy Gasker, co-founder and CEO of Notch. Give us an example of something where you found something out that you thought was going to be high performing for the brand and was not and what underpin that why it wasn't and then what you changed it in. I would say across almost every one of our customers, what we constantly see is that marketers will confuse impressions with relevance and I know that everyone talks about how impressions are vanity metric yet they are the number one metric that everyone still looks at. And so when you see that a let's say piece of content is getting a ton of traffic, you may think to yourself, this is good. Maybe you see that it's getting engagement, you may think to yourself, this is great, but what if people are actually consuming this content asset and not getting what they actually came there for? What if they're actually having a really shitty experience where they're getting to the end of that content asset and they're thinking, boy, this was completely useless and that's what we call corrosive. It's really pervasive, about 60% of the content we measure is corrosive. What I say to all the CMOs that we work with is instead of answering that question from the CFO with the plan for everyone you're going to fire, take that dynamite and throw it into your Martek stack. Your Martek stack has not earned its place in the AI native world. It is so difficult to instrument. It takes 10 engineers in a donkey to change a button on a site. It's just a relic of the past. 60% of enterprise website content is actively lowering conversion rates. So before you use general AI to pump out 10,000 more pages of content, audit your front door and get your strategy down to a single page. That brings us to the question every creative director and CMO is asking me in quiet hallways all year long. If everyone has access to the same models, where does the magic come from? At Cannes past June, the legendary musician Wycliffe Shaw looked out at a room of marketers and said a line that really stuck with me. There's one thing you have over your AI, a soul. To see how the best builders and creative leaders actually collaborate on this frontier, listen to my live conversation from Google Marketing Live with two guests who sit on opposite sides of the brain. Josh Woodward, who leads Google labs in the Gemini app and Robert Wong, who has led the Google Creative Lab for nearly two decades. I ask them how you get world-class creators past the fear of AI and why they built our creative filmmaking tool flow. Robert, how are you staying ahead of this AI wave? I think it's really important to lower the stakes for your team to kind of say like, hey, make them feel really safe because there's a lot of fear like, oh, am I behind in AI? Will AI take my job? All this stuff is in the system. You just lower the fear. Make them feel safe, but at the same time, challenge them not to play it safe. It sounds like contradictory. The two things make them feel safe and challenge them to not play it safe, but actually it's the same thing because when people feel safe and creative people are some of the most insecure people on the planet myself, they take bigger swings and you want people to be relaxed to take the big swings and if you ever use AI, you realize, oh shit, it's really, really hard to get it to do amazing things, especially in the craft high-barper. Not so much the scale and efficient part, not much is really, really good at. But it's very much an exploring, refined process. It is not a slot machine, hit the button or pull the handle and sort of get what you want. I would say the talk about the soul of a product. It came a lot from creative lab and thinking about how do we build a tool that respects the creative, that respects the process, the craft. I love that. Robert, I want to give you the last word and I've worked with you a long time and you have always been maniacal about the fundamentals of marketing. You were just telling me again backstage, what really matters to make our marketing? I said it should be the same as it always has been, ask for great work. Don't ask for great AI work. That'd be like asking for great Photoshop work. The tools doesn't matter. Just ask for the work that will connect people in new and better ways. Just ask for great work. And why does human taste matter so much before you can even open a creative tool? Because an AI model can spot patterns and data, but only human gut instinct can feel what a customer needs before they even know how to ask for it. Nobody embodies that combination of operational rigour and gut instinct better than Emma Greed, co-founder and CEO of Good American and founding partner of schemes. One of our very top episodes of the entire season. I asked Emma why she launched a product the entire fashion industry told her was a mistake. What AI should never touch and how she built her superpower of taste? Size 15 is a great, it's a great example of something that really actually came out of me seeing, listening and looking at comments, coupling that with returns data. And then, you know, being a rookie as I was at that time, not really understanding construction and exactly how garments made. Now, in the fashion industry, you would look at that and believe that it's a junior size. So immediately there was this pushback saying, it won't be understood by the market. And I was like, but it will be understood by the body. And that's where you've got to take your gut instinct and say, you know what? I get it on paper, it's going to be really hard. But if you give me a second to explain this, and of course, we have this kind of beautiful reality of our businesses now that you can take long-form content to people. We're not dealing in 15 and 30-second ad spots anymore. So if I take the time to say, here's the problem, here's how I'd solved it. And I'd really like you to try this product. You know, I think it's a really good example of something everybody didn't know they needed, but it was an actual real need. The way that I am using AI, both personally and in the business, is kind of interesting because I think that there's a bunch of things that are just non-negotiable. Like when it comes to the data and automating data and creating like intelligent dashboards, there's no amount of people or expertise that can do that as well as AI is doing it right now. All of that has to kind of be, you know, AI first. And so it's a superpower, I think, for patent recognition, for all CMOs and for everyone across the business. This idea of the best CEOs and the best sea level people, it's not those who make the best decisions. It's those that make the most decisions, and you get better and better at making good decisions. And that's where I think I am. I just do a lot and I move and I don't procrastinate. And when I get stuff wrong, I'm like, great, thank you for that information. Let's keep moving. That's really how I operate. Now, suppose you have your strategy on one page, and you have human taste driving your creative. Why does so many campaigns still move like molasses and under the liver in the marketplace? Because of lesson five, for the last 20 years, our industry unbundled creative production and media into separate silos. Think about how traditional marketing still works in too many companies. Strategy writes a brief and throws it over the water creative. Creative takes months to make a hero film, handed to production, and then two weeks before launch, someone emails the finished assets to the media agency and says, here you go, buy some media and make this work. And if you put fast AI on top of that broken assembly line, you just create a high speed traffic jam. When Gary Vaynerchuk, chairman of VaynerX and CEO of VaynerMedia joined me, I said something to him that I've observed for years inside Google. Media is always at the scene of the crime. Whenever a campaign flops, the media team gets blamed first because that's where all the live data sits, even though creative is the number one determinant of success. Listen to what happened when Gary and I tore into why creative production and media have to be rebundled under one roof. And why Gary says he gets along better with Fortune 500 CFOs than he does with CMOs. What is it for you that the great markers need to be doing embracing? What's your philosophy on all this? I think all marketing should be measured based on business results both short and long term. But the biggest issue for everyone, Joshua, is creative. I think the winners in the next generation are going to be the most creative and strategic people on earth and the people that do great work in real life production. Creative is the variable's success. I believe that production along with creative and media should be integrated under one roof for agencies. I now talk internally at Vayner that we're a production company that happens to do media creative and strategy. Now, pair Gary's point on rebundling creative media with what it takes to rewire the workflow inside a massive global enterprise. I sat down with Carlos and the global CMO JPMorgan Chase. Carlos leads thousands of markers across one of the most regulated industries on earth. When I asked her where companies go wrong when rolling out AI across their marketing teams, she gave me a rule every leader should literally take to their monitor. Putting AI on a crappy process is just a crappy process now with AI. No, we talk a lot about AI changing everything and AI replacing jobs and of course it absolutely, it absolutely will. But the example that I usually give, and I'll give it even in just how our media team thinks about even old school terminology now, search engine optimization. But writing the articles and all the stuff that is driving our quantitative content. And again, historically, had X number of people, and those people are writing those articles. They are writers. Today, those people are editors. And we have seen an increase, an efficiency of 30% so far. We've also seen our ability to double the content that we're producing because of the tools that we're using from the diapers, some marketers. One of the things that we have spent a lot of time on as my marketing organization's process, because I do think that what ends up happening, particularly when something novel has come to the world and something new. I think that people immediately go, oh, let's take that thing and let's put it here on the current process that we have. And one of the things we are realizing in the marketing organization is that putting AI on a crappy process is a crappy process with AI. And you can move as fast as you can when AI does speed out the process. The notion of the separation of creative, of media, of design, of social, of comms actually becomes kind of a distraction and not helpful. And I'm just wondering whether you're seeing that trend towards some sort of re-bundling of bringing people together is happening for you. 100%. We just actually had that conversation with someone today. This idea that like, you know, you hand off something to someone else, and then they come up with a media, that way that you have created. I mean, we were already starting to say, you know, how do we think about integrated briefs when we're talking about all of the work that we're doing? Did you catch what Colin just said? 30% efficiency gain and two times the output. Lesson six. Bank the efficiency dividend and invest $2 in talent for every $1 in tech. Sometimes commentators talk about everyday AI productivity wins, writing copy faster, automating localization, summarizing research, as if efficiency is small ball. Let me be super clear. Getting AI to do routine work faster is awesome, because that efficiency dividend is what buys your team the time and the budget to do more valuable growth work. It's not efficiency or growth, it's expansion. Legendary strategist and author Rashid Tabakawala laid out a mathematical rule for transformation that every CMO should bring straight to their CEO. For every $1 you invest in technology, you must invest two in re-skilling your people. Listen to how Rashad and I unpacked why most transformations fail. Give me one or two examples of stuff which was incredibly hard that you hadn't accounted for. So tell me about the mistakes. I made, so one was we underestimated the willingness of people to change. That change sucks. We kept saying change is good, but when you change it's really difficult. And the more senior you're the harder it is. So I eventually basically decided to change sucks, but irrelevance is even worse. Say that again. Change sucks, but irrelevance is even worse. Tell you what the six keys to change are. I'm going to hold this up, I'm going to run through this rapid fire. So the first one is have a strategy, right? And a strategy is called future competitive advantage. Understand where your customers or your clients are going to want in the future. Understand who you're going to compete within the future. You get an edge. That's one, have a strategy. Number two was once you have it, you begin to realize that you don't have all the skills you need. So you start investing in either upgrading your skills, or you buy companies, which is M&A. Third is you reorganize. But the big thing is everything is easy to people get in the way. Because four, five, six is you have to explain to the teams why this strategy and M&A and organization is good for them. And then the last thing was we needed to invest in training. So the idea basically is having a strategy, having M&A and having reorganization, all are very hard to do, we did those. But even harder is why is it good for the people? How are people incentive correctly to do the right behavior? And where is the training for the new skills? And what I'm scared about is many companies are going to be repeating our mistake in this AI age. Because they're all fixated on AI, AI, AI. And I actually believe that every advance in technology puts a premium on talent. That this is the time that for every dollar you invest in technology, you need to invest two dollars in talent, not basically take out talent to buy technology. And if you want to see what that $2 in talent for every $1 in tech looks like in practice across 37 global brands, listen to my conversation with his meter to bay, Chief Digital and Markly Officer at L'Oreal. What we say is we augment marketing, we want to flex the dual muscle, we want to do it with both creativity and technology. And also while we embrace technology, we want to keep everything that is creative in the DNA of our brands and brand market years. And therefore we call this math and magic. What have you done to help stay ahead, grow and learn through these unbelievable transformation times? We are people who we say that we are both poets and peasants, but we can be very visionary in terms of where the future is coming. Then we roll our sleeves and we are into the executional excellence. Innovation is in the DNA of our company. There has been a massive focus on the last few years and even now on skills. We have taken the whole organization and kind of broken it down into more than 500 different skills. Within marketing digital, there is about 50 to 70 skills that we say, okay, good at brand building on idea generation, on CRM, on media, on advocacy and influence. Just to give you an idea, when we talk about AI, and a lot of companies are doing that, but what is the internal LORIAL GPT, more than 70,000 people are upskilled on that. That brings us to our seventh and final lesson. And it's personal to every single one of us sitting in a leadership chair. Your team does not need a CMO who pretends to have all the answers. They need a leader who learns out loud with their own hands on the keyboard. Inside Google Marketing, I block time on my own calendar for AI Fridays to test new tools myself. And every quarter our leadership team runs demo slams where our marketers come in and showcase the solutions they've built with AI. I learn amazing new things every time and it changes the way we work. Shelley Palmer talked about why the only way to build intuition is to build a personal weekend project yourself, and to gamify tech Thursdays with your team. If absolutely all AI research and all AI advancements stopped today, as if we just put a stop to it, no more advancements in AI. We're five years away from realizing the efficiencies that can be achieved right now in big corporate. Because this is not in any way a technology challenge, it is a leadership challenge. And what I mean by that is you are giving people, unless you're properly leading them, you find me a human being anywhere in the world who wants to do three years worth of work in one year and get paid for one year for three years worth of output, you're not going to do it. I'm a CMO. I know nothing about AI. I need to get up to speed. What are three practical things as an individual, as a martyr, as a leader that I should be doing every day or every week, to learn about and actually train myself about AI technologies and marketing? Personal projects are my favorite go to, I don't care what it is. You pick a project, one of my clients did something fantastic. She had a kid in travel soccer and she decided she was snack parent and they wanted to do a rotation of like the people who bring like orange slices and Duncan Munchkins and whatever you bring to after soccer. So what she did was she built an app that they could sign up. She got striped integrated to it. She built some performance marketing campaigns to get the parents to be reminded that they haven't got their snack thing going. She then built a dashboard with analytics to she was in marketing and she says, what can I do? What personal project goes and she was complaining that all the parents in the high school don't contribute properly and appropriately. So she decided to go for it and this thing looks like a business. It literally looks like a business. It's got an unbelievable website and the striped integration was hysterical because the parents if they didn't want to come with snacks could send money, my advice to everybody is choose something you really care about where you would know what the output looks like and I would say to every marketer, I'd say to every executive, tech Tuesdays or tech Thursdays are a must. No one's doing this without getting paid, nobody. You take an hour Thursday morning and you say it's tech Thursday, we're right naps or we're writing, we're writing agents, you're going to get paid to do it and here's a Starbucks card or something. If you get you're the best one today voted by, you know, whoever you're voting with. You've got to gamify this, you have to pay people to do it and you have to lead from the front. Here's Kevin Smith Kenny, Chief Marketing and Growth Officer at AT&T. I spent the first four years of my career actually coding hands-on keyboard coding as functioning as a tech consultant, working on product. I can confidently say that coding is a nice to have, not a need to have. What I would say is much more important is making sure as marketers were cultivating leaders and contributors that have strong analytical horsepower, pattern recognition, a customer-centric orientation, an ability to ask really good questions. close out. I'll call you back. conversations for the year. Listen to how two of the leaders I admire most. Lorraine Tuhil and Rashad Tabakawala put this into practice in their own words. - It seems like today, you know, they're dependent on sort of swings, but athletes today seem to eat more important than ever. And this AI world where we can all do a little bit of everything, having that five-tour skill set or whatever it is, is it seems like a really important thing for us all to be cultivating. - Well, I certainly think people who can pivot to different activities are coping quite well right now because they have to learn it's a high-speed learning curve. That said, I will say that I think now more than ever, you're also need specialists because we're looking at the specialists to define how best we use the tools for each of those activities. Let's just look at our research and insight specialists. They're helping define the research and insights agents that we're all gonna use are creative specialists helping to co-create the creative tools we're all gonna use. Our media measurement specialists are the ones defining how we invest in AI tools for our media measurement. - It is always slightly crazy. You tell them some meeting and you have prototyped and read all the materials and said, "I got this idea, this idea, and this idea." Like, you're doing the work of the marketing in your preparation and it's you using the tools in your day-to-day, it's. - Well, I think notebook LM is amazing. So that's that to me, I would have. My advice to anybody who's just starting this journey is to start by playing with notebook LM. And I can put in, you know, I have a 70-page pre-read before some meeting and I'll put it in notebook LM, summarize it in two pages. I'll then ask notebook LM, what questions should I ask? What would you critique in this? - Look at your calendar for the last two weeks. And put all the stuff you've done into two different columns. Column number one is the time you were spending allocating, delegating, measuring, monitoring, and checking in. How much of your time will you do that? And then how much of your time did you build, sell, mentor, create, or make, or guide? Look at those two. If one of them, this left one is more than 50% reduce it. That's gonna be done by machines. That's the real added value. And part of this whole idea is also learning. If you aren't spending an hour a day learning, you're falling behind, you're faking it. - One hour a day learning, or you're faking it. Because here's the real secret from the frontier. Everything is changing, everywhere, all at once. And nobody has a magic manual. Anyone on a panel telling you there, autonomous, agentic swarm is already running multiple company-wide workflows? Is either lying or hallucinating harder than the first few chatbots? And that's actually great news. Because it means no one can fake it anymore. The CMOs winning this moment aren't chasing every shiny point solution. They're betting big on human imagination and reimagining workflows to find new levels of growth. We're all figuring this out in real time. And there truly has never been a better time to be a marketer. So keep testing and stay close as we write the new playbook. I'm Josh Banya. Subscribe to Frontier CMO from Think With Google on YouTube or follow wherever you get your podcasts. And sign up for our weekly Frontier CMO newsletter. So you never miss our latest field notes from the Frontier. See you out there.