- After a weird and winding career path, I finally landed my dream job as chief marketing officer at Indeed.
- The CMO role is demanding and requires that I stay on top of current events, technology, and our business needs.
About eight years ago, I decided I wanted to be a chief marketing officer.
I have had a weird and winding career that has spanned management consulting, running internet businesses, product development, and marketing, and it felt strange and refreshing to finally know "what I want to be when I grow up".
So I charted my course. After running product marketing for a division of Apple, I moved on to lead various parts of B2B marketing for Facebook.
In November 2019, I joined OpenTable and Kayak as head of marketing — just three months before the Covid lockdown began in North America. Let me assure you that working in the travel and dining industries during Covid was not relaxing. Sadly we had to downsize a lot, and I learned a lot more than I wanted to about crisis management.
Now I have my dream job; I'm CMO of Indeed, a leading matching and hiring platform. Our mission is to help people get jobs – and we do that all day, every day. I get the honor and joy of working with 500 marketers around the world, overseeing our brand, performance marketing, external and internal comms and more.
While it is awesome and exciting every day, it is also a lot of work, and there are moments of real nail biting. As Just like I talk with my other CMO friends about these topics, I thought I would share some notions on what it means to be a CMO today, and how we keep the boat afloat in choppy seas.
Be a geopolitical and social upheaval expert, every day
If you work on a global business, or even a big US one, you are expected to know about every social or political challenge — every war, mass shooting, anti-gay bill, new health legislation, and more.
You need to not only stay on top of them, but have a perspective on how your business should address them — how your CEO should talk about them internally, whether or not to engage externally, or what actions the business should take to remedy the situation, if applicable. It's a constant avalanche and the world is getting crazier every day.
That's why we developed a framework at Indeed to help us assess where, when and how we should engage on these kinds of thorny issues. Of course every organization has their own mission and values, but having a framework helps take the panic out of decision making on these topics.
At Indeed, we evaluate issues for if/how we should engage based on first, does it relate to our mission and our core values? Second, does it impact our employees? Third, can we drive positive social change? Finally, does it impact our company reputation?
If the answer to most of those questions is "yes", then we need to take a stand, internally and publicly, just as we did with the Supreme Court overturn of Roe v. Wade. We had to voice our belief that all people deserve safe health care.
Understand measurement, technology, privacy legislation, AI (lions and tigers and bears, oh my!)
CMOs once upon a time were largely responsible for making great ads, acquiring customers, and keeping the company from looking bad in the media. Now we need to understand 72 tech platforms, privacy policies that vary by state and country, and advanced measurement systems.
We also have to turn marketing from being seen as a cost center by CFOs and boards into being viewed as a critical growth driver. CMOs have to love math and art. They have to be versed in media-mix modeling, statistical analysis, and be able to evaluate visual and text creative production. Add AI tech to the mix and things get even more exciting.
The keys to thriving in this complex web are to hire super smart people who have very different skills than yourself, to leverage experts inside and outside the company, and to spend time trying out and using technologies. You also need to build a fantastic collaboration with the CFO, CTO, and CEO, and demonstrate the growth-driving work and ROI of marketing on a regular basis.
Overcome organizational silos and build bridges
Time and again I have come into companies and found product organizations pursuing their own plans, sales organizations trying to keep up with product developments and serve clients (not always in aligned ways), and marketing over on the side, making cool stuff that may or may not reinforce the business' growth goals.
The role of the CMO is to bring disparate parts of the organization together to try to tell a cohesive story to customers and the market.
This is hard work, and the bigger, more global and multi-product a company becomes, the more difficult it is. Building relationships at the C-suite is critical, but I also have to ensure that my teams are fully engaging with the right people deeper down in cross-functional organizations. This work requires the trust that we will call BS on ourselves ("Hey that press release really wasn't clear, you're right– we will do better") and that we will also hold our partners accountable.
Get inspired, and inspire others
I need to find creative inspiration for our work every day, and it has to be relevant to very different markets and audiences. For that reason, I spend a lot of time watching ads and campaigns from various countries online, TV, in streaming audio, as well as advertising and marketing awards sites.
We have to inspire our people to do great work, but also take care of their minds and health. The mental and physical toll of Covid is still with us. People are suffering from burnout like never before. I have to model taking vacations, stepping away from work on the weekends, and help people acknowledge when they need help.
My leadership team is very good at being honest about their needs and supporting their teams, which is a blessing. And maintaining and building personal connections across our teams when some people are in office, some people are working from home takes extra effort and finesse.
Overall there is a ton of juggling and complexity, but I wouldn't trade this job for any other. I'd love to hear from you what you are seeing in the CMO world and share ideas and learnings with each other. jjensen@indeed.com