February 27, 2025 • 18 mins
As global ad spends topped 1 trillion dollars for the first time in 2024, it’s never been more important for brands to stand out from the crowd. But amidst such volatility, how exactly do you do that? Join Mark Weinstein, CMO of Hilton Hotels and Omnicom Advertising Group CEO, Troy Ruhanen, as they explore how brands can rise above the noise in times of uncertainty – to own the chaos instead of being owned by it.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Yata okay asalama lek, Hello Doha.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Great to be here again for the second edition of
the Web Summit cut our congratulations to the organizers. What
a fantastic event again. Lovely to see you. Troy and Mark.
Let's dive straight into the topic of the dollsness advertisements.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Or the opposite.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
So tell me Troy. First of all, why is distinction
so important? We've heard it global edgevent top the one
trillion US dollars in twenty twenty four. Incredible, So why
does distinction matter and standing out from the crowd?
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, our job is to be able
to create breakthrough and to be able to get not
just attention, but to get conversion. And unfortunately, as algorithms
get further along, we end up in more similar places,
and ultimately, I think algorithms are flattening culture in many ways.
So what we get then is the cost of that
is a bunch of work that feels familiar, that feels invisible,
(01:16):
and then ultimately that becomes quite dull, and that costs money.
It costs in the vicinity of about one hundred and
nine million dollars not to be dull. So for our clients,
we obviously need to go and break through, and distinction,
on the other hand, is really important. So if I
look at a slide that we've got here from our
good partners at Interbrand, this slide which will come up
(01:36):
at some point, we'll make sure it goes again. Here
is a slide that talks about from the world's top
twenty five brands. It looked at the top one hundred
brands of the last twenty five years, and what's quite
amazing about that is when you see the performance of
those brands. We all know what the S and P
looks like, and the S ANDP has been on a
very good run for the last twenty five years. But
(01:57):
whether you then look at the performance of the brands
that have been occurring over twenty five years that are
the top one hundred brands, it far outstrips the performance
of the S and P. Then those brands that are
the most clear, that have the most distinctive assets, that
then move into the most new experiences that could extend
that promise, they again outperform the market share. So there's
(02:19):
a business case for actually being distinct that's measured over
twenty five years that has been confirmed by Nasdaq and
really validates ultimately the mission that we all know that
it's so important to break through and to not be dull.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Mark over to you, why is distinction so important for
you and for Hilton Hotels.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Thanks for the question and for being here with our
partner Troy. I mean, if you think about it, every
single day, we as humans will make I think thirty
five thousand decisions. Five thousand brands will try to get
into us as we're making those decisions. And I'm sorry
to report the human attention span is less than seven seconds,
which means if there was a steering contact with a goldfish,
you would lose.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
And so as a brand, we're trying to make our
narrative come across in that environment. And never, I think
ever in the of course of human history has it
been easier to buy access to customers, and yet you
have to earn your way into attention. It's a true
seay have sameness in our category. I think a lot
about the fact that our competitor is not any one
of the hotel brands. It's indifference. It's not caring which
(03:19):
hotel brand where I stay. And so we had this
interesting moment in twenty twenty we had an extra free
time as we set out the pandemic and we're trying
to figure out how to recover the business. We called
our partners at TBWA and said, we need to disrupt
the marketplace. And what we noticed time and time again
was people were advertising the category. If people were advertising travel,
but not our role in the story. Look, it's very
(03:40):
easy to market travel. Open up your window, look outside,
beautiful sunset. There you go, and every advertising was found.
The troops of people on paddle boards doing goat yoga
with gojiberries. That is not my experience traveling most nights.
And in fact, we're not in the travel business. We're
in the business of the stay. And what we unlocked
was our role starts when you the transom of our
(04:00):
hotels and come through those doors. And that's when the story.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Of this day and you just mentioned thisa Kyruda, it's
about to stay about the experience. And with the hotels
you have this campaign for to Stay it's cold, So
it seems like building distinct brands really works. Can you
share more about that.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Yeah, Look, at the end of the day, we're in
the franchising business. Our job is to create brands. The
customers love the command market premiums that cause other people
to invest in building more hotels. At any given time,
we have about fifty five billion dollars of other people's
capital building great hotels because they out deliver the market. Well,
why do they out deliver the markets? Because we know
our unique role. We know our role and culture. We
(04:43):
know it differentiates our hotels across all twenty four brands.
So in a market like Katar, you've got sixteen of
our hotels in the market too, Walter for Astorias, and
number of other brands. How do we tell the story
of what makes each brand different but also together as
one narrative around Hilton, we thought about it. This stay
is what we were outed upon. Our founder one hundred
and five years ago said it was our job to
(05:03):
fill the earth with the light and warm of the hospitality.
He didn't say we're in the lodging business. He didn't
say we're in the travel business. He said, we're in
the stay business. And for us, that stay comes together.
And again, what we uncovered in doing the research with
our partners at TBWA is the stay is the combination
of great physical design, beautiful spaces that inspire you great
service design, people serving people with human hospitality, all enabled
(05:26):
by great technology. Any one of our competitors can pick
one of those things and migrated it. But the combination
of the three together and then activated by great storytelling,
and that's how you break out and distinctly make yourself
more distinct in an otherwise crowded marketplace.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
And this is so important because here in the gold
of our region, and especially in Doha, I see new
hotels mushrooming every day and I'm feeling like I spent
every night in a different hotel. It's absolutely booming the
hospitality sector and the quality and the service industry of
course as well. Now in practice, Troy, how do you
actually build distinction and how can you use platforms and
(06:04):
ecosystems to support that.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
So you have to have a very clear impression of
what is the convention of the category, and unfortunately there
are more and more conventions as we all go through it.
As Mark said, in the travel industry, there are a
lot of cliche, a lot of images that appear, and
we have to have a really good understanding of that.
But you also have to have a very clear, defined
point of view about what you want to be as
a brand, and I think in the case for Mark,
(06:28):
I mean they were very clear about what assets they
wanted to build. Bringing parents back into the franchise was
really important. She was a key figure in helping us
bring back another level of personality, but also helping to
define the things that I think we could then extend
as well. So if you think about it, it's not
just advertising. Some of the experiences that market these team
(06:48):
were able to create we're pretty unique. You know, the
Wicked experience that you can kind of see on the
screen up there, others there that people would pay a
premium to be able to have that experience. It redefined
what actually traveling was and it was truly about staying
in such a unique place. So clarity is really important.
Breaking the convention is necessary, and then I think being
(07:10):
able to make sure that once you have that platform,
that when you stay with it for the journey, but
you try and find new ways in which to express
it and put that into new experiences. And the Holden
team has just been an incredible partner to be able
to do that. They're looking for opportunities all the time.
They embrace innovation, which is hugely important as well. I mean,
one of the great examples of Mark's team is that
(07:31):
they came to us to talk about Hilton Honors and
how to launch that program. They were the first people
ever to crack a ten minute TikTok. Normally it's seven seconds,
of which they will maintain their level of presence. So
imagine going to someone to say we're going to do
a ten minute ticko. No one's going to watch that. Well,
yes they did, and it broke all the records that
you could imagine, and the impact was great. So you
(07:52):
have to have bravery as well. And I think what
we love in our partnership is the honesty, the experimentation,
but also the commitment to when we said that we've
got a strong platform, now let's go find ways to
express that that can break through and not be like
everyone else in that category.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yes, and especially as you mentioned, experiences are so important
and also money can't buy experiences. All about the adventures,
I guess in the travel business as well. Now, Marca,
what about you like how to build distinction and how
to expound platforms like these?
Speaker 3 (08:26):
I think Trey hit it right on the head. I mean,
so many marketers are going from advertising campaign to advertising
campaign it's tempting to do. And the analog I would
give you be like trying to go to the bar
and try to find your future spouse by announcing it,
who wants to marry me? Right, and just having one
shot at having that happen, versus saying who wants to
go on the next date with me? Who wants to
go on the next date? And you go on this
journey one step at a time. That's what a platform
(08:48):
alacks for you.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Right.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
You don't have to win everything in one fell swoop.
You have a chance to tell that story. And so
what we did with TBWA is we first found the convention,
as Troy said, we found how we're going to push
back to it. We decided our unique role in culture
and everything we're doing is just asking for the next date.
It's just asking for the next moment to have a
go at it. It makes you, in some ways braver
as a marketer because you're not going to lose much
(09:10):
the ten minute TikTok. When the team pitched it, I
didn't get it, if I'm being honest, checked all the
boxes right. It fit our purpose for who we are
in a world that's on the go would you stop
and stay it embraced innovation. If it didn't work, okay,
you moved to the next thing. If it did work
like it did, you triple down on it. You invest,
You put more dollars behind it and invest and move
it forward. The tricky part, as Troy said earlier, is
(09:34):
as a marketer, not getting bored with your own work.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Right.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Consumers need to see it over and over and over again.
Deliver through different modality is different creative, different ways of
saying the same story, but the same story over and
over again. That's how you become famous, That's how you
become distinctive. And having a platform has made us braver
as marketers.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Absolutely, now mark you are to CMO off Hilton Hotels.
And obviously we just heard it from Troy. This is
an expensive business advertisements as well. The costs are rising
and so on. How do you sell this beautiful package
to your CEO and through your stakeholders as well?
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Yeah, you know, if it may be so bold, I
think where most cmos go off the rails is when
they don't understand how their company makes money and they
don't understand the business they're in. And so when I'm
at the table having a conversation. Marketing is my tool,
but I'm there to deliver performance on behalf of the company.
What is our capital allocation strategy? How do we make
money for our fiduciary responsibilities to all of our franchisees.
(10:29):
What is it that moves the needle forward? And so
people fell in love with the idea of creating a
brand platform. That was very easy right away. But we
turned into the team and said, well, show us companies
and the S and P five hundred, how do they
perform those who don't have a platform versus those that do.
At the end of the day, it's not that you
can't measure long term performance. We're really addicted to measuring
(10:49):
short term returns. We're really good at thousand industry. We're
less good about telling the story of companies that take big,
bold risks, that know who they are in culture, that
show up disruptively. That data will show you that it
actually outperforms the S and P five hundred that actually
outperforms other stocks. Our job is not to control the market.
Our job is not to control the macro conditions. It's
to outperform and get alpha on top of it. And
(11:11):
when you can show that empirically that clear brands not
only feel good but actually outperform. It's a no brainer
with our CEO, with the board, with all the other
stakeholders around around the table.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Now we're here at web summa'ge Troy, one of the
largest technology conferences, if not the largest technology conference in
the world. And of course AI is the name of
the game.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
Oh is it interesting now.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Use AI and still be unique and distinct and special
and not just follow the crowd.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Yeah, I mean I think it's difficult. Look, I have
a lot of empathy for clients. I think in the
world that we operate in, we're regularly developing content. We're
quite comfortable with that, and we will spend weeks at
a time or days at a time developing something and
then we put in front of a client and we
look at the and say by it and it's quite
a ridiculous kind of scenario if you think about how
(12:05):
to go through it. So I have a lot of
empathy for that. Also for us to have confidence to
go into a client with the right solution. In the past,
a lot of it is relied on an intuition. It's
relied on our ability to recall from somewhere else, you know,
something that we knewed could be a way in which
to be effective, or that we had some other reference
point in culture that was going to be able to
(12:25):
help us. But a lot of it was in the air, right.
There was a lot of it was conversation, a lot
of it was trust. And so how do you provide
confidence to both clients? How do you provide confidence to
our people because the truth of it is between a
client and an agency relationship. A lot of the time,
there's sometimes people are worried about hurting the other person's
feelings and they don't always give them the candid feedback,
(12:48):
they don't always give them the instruction.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
That they need.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
So what we developed was a tool called the Brave Thing,
which will hopefully come up in a second here, and
it's a bot that's been built in order to be
able to help drive an analysis to go on what
is going to be distinct work, what is the kind
of work that's going to break convention? So in this spot,
basically what we now do is we're able to upload
(13:13):
creative that is going into this evaluator that has five
criteria that it's going to score out of one hundred
and it gives you feedback that gives you real direct criticism.
In this instance, this one's called the bray Thing. It
marries up with a company called TBWA that has a
platform called Disruption. And in that sense, we need kind
of feedback that is a little sharp, a little edgy.
(13:36):
And so in this case the voice giving you feedback
is Gordon Ramsey, the Gordon Ramsey of advertising. So Gordon
Ramsey is evaluating our advertising and basically telling us are
we really breaking convention? Are we really being distinct and
is this worthwhile going to market with? So the category
that you're looking up there is telecommunications. I think I
could you could picture a Telco ad in two seconds
(13:59):
right now, someone holding phone, And unfortunately people do that
a lot. They think if I signal this, you're going
to remember the brand. Well, it doesn't work. It isn't
brave and basically it's a xanax for advertising. So I
think in this case we would do that and then
we would put our work into that system to say, okay,
are we living up to being brave and are we
(14:20):
really going to be able to cut through with that work?
And so we did this in the case for Telstra
in Australia and that work. I think that work there
scored a twenty eight out of one hundred. That's the
convention of the category. The work that we proposed put
in front was an outdoor campaign. It's called eighty seven
out of one hundred. But even with eighty seven, it
still tells you what are other areas which you could
improve upon that they would ask us to be a
(14:40):
little bit more inclusive though maybe we could be able
to have a little bit more empathy. So even at
that stage it's there to do that. But what it
mostly does is give us confidence. And what it's built
off is thirty five forty years of Omnicom's great creative
case studies. So our lifetime of taste will give you
a different answer than anybody else's. So we could come
to Mark with solutions and share the evaluation and kind
(15:04):
of say, look, this is what the critique is versus
everyone else in this category, this convention, and that is
me being a petted partner to Mark. That is us
together taking a step rather than saying be brave.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
That's not a great partner, amazing partnership. We need more
collaborations like yours in the last two minutes of our
panel here on stage, let's talk about the future trends
as well. We were talking about the costs of being dull.
I'm sure you have a lot in the pipeline not
being dull but exciting and innovative and disruptive. What is
(15:38):
cooking in your kitchen at Hilton Hotels now?
Speaker 3 (15:41):
What is not cooking at the moment? The key is
back where we started, is being focused on what role
culture needs you to play, and we're all about to stay.
We're all about that no matter what you're trying to do,
whether you're a McLaren not one who's been our partner
for the twenty years. Did every weekend are effectively playing
a home away match right they're away from home, it's
still having to be their best single race weekend. If
(16:01):
our hotels can do that for them, what can it
do for you? If our hotels can create that kind
of experience for paris Hip when she's djaying all across
the world, what can it do for your next business
meeting and so telling the story of how the physical
space plus the service plus that technology unlacks that things
like for our families that want to book confirm connecting rooms,
this ability to make sure that when your kids are
traveling with you, you know for sure you'll get the
(16:23):
sign room next to you. We're working on AI to
make that possible. We brought that to life, making sure
our Honors members get recognized consistently that they get the
upgrade delivered automatically through AI. We've already built that. That's
already out in the marketplace, so the future is actually here.
It's doubling down on the things that make the stay
possible and then working with partners to make sure we
flood the zone with content so that as AI becomes
(16:44):
the predominant chat and search feature, it's looking at premium
products not just as the cheapest, not just as the quickest,
not just the closest location, but the one that's best
for me. And that's what our job is, is to
flood the zone with great content that tells the story
of our stay and make sure that you know that
any of our twenty four brands is the best fit
for your travelication.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Now, Troy, I'm sure you have very comfortable and cozy
stays at Hilton hotels that can't sleep well at night,
But what are some of the trends or developments or
concerns you have for the future of the advertisement industry
that keeps you awake at night.
Speaker 4 (17:19):
Well, I'm certainly worried about the conventional activity that you
could get from algorithms driving it to you too familiar
places and data that could do that as well. So
I think making sure that we carve out a unique
place for us is probably my number one priority. But
I think it's also the fact that the solution isn't
advertising always right, And I think Hilton is the ultimate
(17:39):
experience brand, you know, without doubt, so our solutions to
be able to drive their business aren't always going to
be an ad like object. It can be an experience
that's happening in the room. It could be something that
has actually said from a person who works at the
hotel that can enhance that experience. So we constantly have
to interrogate, whatever the issue is, think about the total
brand experience and say, how can we do a breakthrough
(18:02):
way of enhancing that experience and making sure that we're
deliving true impact against the promise that Hilton makes. And
we've just got such a great partner, We've got such
great trust that we know that we feel quite confident
in our future, so well, let's fixate it on why
everyone's afraid of We're more about trying to exercise the
opportunities that are in front of us.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
And if you stay focused on what unique role you
bring to the world, the innovations will change, the capbilities
are changed, what you're trying to do will stay exactly
the same. And having a great partner do that's been
the key to our success.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Yeah, three two one, and we finish right on time,
Ladies and gentlemen. That was Troy Ruhannan, CEO of Omnicom
Advertising Group and Mark Weinstein, CMO at Hilton Hotels Showkan Gasila.
Thank you so much, give it us for the chatlemen,
thank you.
Speaker 4 (18:46):
Thanks Match
Yata okay asalama lek, Hello Doha.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Great to be here again for the second edition of
the Web Summit cut our congratulations to the organizers. What
a fantastic event again. Lovely to see you. Troy and Mark.
Let's dive straight into the topic of the dollsness advertisements.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Or the opposite.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
So tell me Troy. First of all, why is distinction
so important? We've heard it global edgevent top the one
trillion US dollars in twenty twenty four. Incredible, So why
does distinction matter and standing out from the crowd?
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, our job is to be able
to create breakthrough and to be able to get not
just attention, but to get conversion. And unfortunately, as algorithms
get further along, we end up in more similar places,
and ultimately, I think algorithms are flattening culture in many ways.
So what we get then is the cost of that
is a bunch of work that feels familiar, that feels invisible,
(01:16):
and then ultimately that becomes quite dull, and that costs money.
It costs in the vicinity of about one hundred and
nine million dollars not to be dull. So for our clients,
we obviously need to go and break through, and distinction,
on the other hand, is really important. So if I
look at a slide that we've got here from our
good partners at Interbrand, this slide which will come up
(01:36):
at some point, we'll make sure it goes again. Here
is a slide that talks about from the world's top
twenty five brands. It looked at the top one hundred
brands of the last twenty five years, and what's quite
amazing about that is when you see the performance of
those brands. We all know what the S and P
looks like, and the S ANDP has been on a
very good run for the last twenty five years. But
(01:57):
whether you then look at the performance of the brands
that have been occurring over twenty five years that are
the top one hundred brands, it far outstrips the performance
of the S and P. Then those brands that are
the most clear, that have the most distinctive assets, that
then move into the most new experiences that could extend
that promise, they again outperform the market share. So there's
(02:19):
a business case for actually being distinct that's measured over
twenty five years that has been confirmed by Nasdaq and
really validates ultimately the mission that we all know that
it's so important to break through and to not be dull.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Mark over to you, why is distinction so important for
you and for Hilton Hotels.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Thanks for the question and for being here with our
partner Troy. I mean, if you think about it, every
single day, we as humans will make I think thirty
five thousand decisions. Five thousand brands will try to get
into us as we're making those decisions. And I'm sorry
to report the human attention span is less than seven seconds,
which means if there was a steering contact with a goldfish,
you would lose.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
And so as a brand, we're trying to make our
narrative come across in that environment. And never, I think
ever in the of course of human history has it
been easier to buy access to customers, and yet you
have to earn your way into attention. It's a true
seay have sameness in our category. I think a lot
about the fact that our competitor is not any one
of the hotel brands. It's indifference. It's not caring which
(03:19):
hotel brand where I stay. And so we had this
interesting moment in twenty twenty we had an extra free
time as we set out the pandemic and we're trying
to figure out how to recover the business. We called
our partners at TBWA and said, we need to disrupt
the marketplace. And what we noticed time and time again
was people were advertising the category. If people were advertising travel,
but not our role in the story. Look, it's very
(03:40):
easy to market travel. Open up your window, look outside,
beautiful sunset. There you go, and every advertising was found.
The troops of people on paddle boards doing goat yoga
with gojiberries. That is not my experience traveling most nights.
And in fact, we're not in the travel business. We're
in the business of the stay. And what we unlocked
was our role starts when you the transom of our
(04:00):
hotels and come through those doors. And that's when the story.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Of this day and you just mentioned thisa Kyruda, it's
about to stay about the experience. And with the hotels
you have this campaign for to Stay it's cold, So
it seems like building distinct brands really works. Can you
share more about that.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Yeah, Look, at the end of the day, we're in
the franchising business. Our job is to create brands. The
customers love the command market premiums that cause other people
to invest in building more hotels. At any given time,
we have about fifty five billion dollars of other people's
capital building great hotels because they out deliver the market. Well,
why do they out deliver the markets? Because we know
our unique role. We know our role and culture. We
(04:43):
know it differentiates our hotels across all twenty four brands.
So in a market like Katar, you've got sixteen of
our hotels in the market too, Walter for Astorias, and
number of other brands. How do we tell the story
of what makes each brand different but also together as
one narrative around Hilton, we thought about it. This stay
is what we were outed upon. Our founder one hundred
and five years ago said it was our job to
(05:03):
fill the earth with the light and warm of the hospitality.
He didn't say we're in the lodging business. He didn't
say we're in the travel business. He said, we're in
the stay business. And for us, that stay comes together.
And again, what we uncovered in doing the research with
our partners at TBWA is the stay is the combination
of great physical design, beautiful spaces that inspire you great
service design, people serving people with human hospitality, all enabled
(05:26):
by great technology. Any one of our competitors can pick
one of those things and migrated it. But the combination
of the three together and then activated by great storytelling,
and that's how you break out and distinctly make yourself
more distinct in an otherwise crowded marketplace.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
And this is so important because here in the gold
of our region, and especially in Doha, I see new
hotels mushrooming every day and I'm feeling like I spent
every night in a different hotel. It's absolutely booming the
hospitality sector and the quality and the service industry of
course as well. Now in practice, Troy, how do you
actually build distinction and how can you use platforms and
(06:04):
ecosystems to support that.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
So you have to have a very clear impression of
what is the convention of the category, and unfortunately there
are more and more conventions as we all go through it.
As Mark said, in the travel industry, there are a
lot of cliche, a lot of images that appear, and
we have to have a really good understanding of that.
But you also have to have a very clear, defined
point of view about what you want to be as
a brand, and I think in the case for Mark,
(06:28):
I mean they were very clear about what assets they
wanted to build. Bringing parents back into the franchise was
really important. She was a key figure in helping us
bring back another level of personality, but also helping to
define the things that I think we could then extend
as well. So if you think about it, it's not
just advertising. Some of the experiences that market these team
(06:48):
were able to create we're pretty unique. You know, the
Wicked experience that you can kind of see on the
screen up there, others there that people would pay a
premium to be able to have that experience. It redefined
what actually traveling was and it was truly about staying
in such a unique place. So clarity is really important.
Breaking the convention is necessary, and then I think being
(07:10):
able to make sure that once you have that platform,
that when you stay with it for the journey, but
you try and find new ways in which to express
it and put that into new experiences. And the Holden
team has just been an incredible partner to be able
to do that. They're looking for opportunities all the time.
They embrace innovation, which is hugely important as well. I mean,
one of the great examples of Mark's team is that
(07:31):
they came to us to talk about Hilton Honors and
how to launch that program. They were the first people
ever to crack a ten minute TikTok. Normally it's seven seconds,
of which they will maintain their level of presence. So
imagine going to someone to say we're going to do
a ten minute ticko. No one's going to watch that. Well,
yes they did, and it broke all the records that
you could imagine, and the impact was great. So you
(07:52):
have to have bravery as well. And I think what
we love in our partnership is the honesty, the experimentation,
but also the commitment to when we said that we've
got a strong platform, now let's go find ways to
express that that can break through and not be like
everyone else in that category.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yes, and especially as you mentioned, experiences are so important
and also money can't buy experiences. All about the adventures,
I guess in the travel business as well. Now, Marca,
what about you like how to build distinction and how
to expound platforms like these?
Speaker 3 (08:26):
I think Trey hit it right on the head. I mean,
so many marketers are going from advertising campaign to advertising
campaign it's tempting to do. And the analog I would
give you be like trying to go to the bar
and try to find your future spouse by announcing it,
who wants to marry me? Right, and just having one
shot at having that happen, versus saying who wants to
go on the next date with me? Who wants to
go on the next date? And you go on this
journey one step at a time. That's what a platform
(08:48):
alacks for you.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Right.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
You don't have to win everything in one fell swoop.
You have a chance to tell that story. And so
what we did with TBWA is we first found the convention,
as Troy said, we found how we're going to push
back to it. We decided our unique role in culture
and everything we're doing is just asking for the next date.
It's just asking for the next moment to have a
go at it. It makes you, in some ways braver
as a marketer because you're not going to lose much
(09:10):
the ten minute TikTok. When the team pitched it, I
didn't get it, if I'm being honest, checked all the
boxes right. It fit our purpose for who we are
in a world that's on the go would you stop
and stay it embraced innovation. If it didn't work, okay,
you moved to the next thing. If it did work
like it did, you triple down on it. You invest,
You put more dollars behind it and invest and move
it forward. The tricky part, as Troy said earlier, is
(09:34):
as a marketer, not getting bored with your own work.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Right.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Consumers need to see it over and over and over again.
Deliver through different modality is different creative, different ways of
saying the same story, but the same story over and
over again. That's how you become famous, That's how you
become distinctive. And having a platform has made us braver
as marketers.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Absolutely, now mark you are to CMO off Hilton Hotels.
And obviously we just heard it from Troy. This is
an expensive business advertisements as well. The costs are rising
and so on. How do you sell this beautiful package
to your CEO and through your stakeholders as well?
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Yeah, you know, if it may be so bold, I
think where most cmos go off the rails is when
they don't understand how their company makes money and they
don't understand the business they're in. And so when I'm
at the table having a conversation. Marketing is my tool,
but I'm there to deliver performance on behalf of the company.
What is our capital allocation strategy? How do we make
money for our fiduciary responsibilities to all of our franchisees.
(10:29):
What is it that moves the needle forward? And so
people fell in love with the idea of creating a
brand platform. That was very easy right away. But we
turned into the team and said, well, show us companies
and the S and P five hundred, how do they
perform those who don't have a platform versus those that do.
At the end of the day, it's not that you
can't measure long term performance. We're really addicted to measuring
(10:49):
short term returns. We're really good at thousand industry. We're
less good about telling the story of companies that take big,
bold risks, that know who they are in culture, that
show up disruptively. That data will show you that it
actually outperforms the S and P five hundred that actually
outperforms other stocks. Our job is not to control the market.
Our job is not to control the macro conditions. It's
to outperform and get alpha on top of it. And
(11:11):
when you can show that empirically that clear brands not
only feel good but actually outperform. It's a no brainer
with our CEO, with the board, with all the other
stakeholders around around the table.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Now we're here at web summa'ge Troy, one of the
largest technology conferences, if not the largest technology conference in
the world. And of course AI is the name of
the game.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
Oh is it interesting now.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Use AI and still be unique and distinct and special
and not just follow the crowd.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Yeah, I mean I think it's difficult. Look, I have
a lot of empathy for clients. I think in the
world that we operate in, we're regularly developing content. We're
quite comfortable with that, and we will spend weeks at
a time or days at a time developing something and
then we put in front of a client and we
look at the and say by it and it's quite
a ridiculous kind of scenario if you think about how
(12:05):
to go through it. So I have a lot of
empathy for that. Also for us to have confidence to
go into a client with the right solution. In the past,
a lot of it is relied on an intuition. It's
relied on our ability to recall from somewhere else, you know,
something that we knewed could be a way in which
to be effective, or that we had some other reference
point in culture that was going to be able to
(12:25):
help us. But a lot of it was in the air, right.
There was a lot of it was conversation, a lot
of it was trust. And so how do you provide
confidence to both clients? How do you provide confidence to
our people because the truth of it is between a
client and an agency relationship. A lot of the time,
there's sometimes people are worried about hurting the other person's
feelings and they don't always give them the candid feedback,
(12:48):
they don't always give them the instruction.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
That they need.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
So what we developed was a tool called the Brave Thing,
which will hopefully come up in a second here, and
it's a bot that's been built in order to be
able to help drive an analysis to go on what
is going to be distinct work, what is the kind
of work that's going to break convention? So in this spot,
basically what we now do is we're able to upload
(13:13):
creative that is going into this evaluator that has five
criteria that it's going to score out of one hundred
and it gives you feedback that gives you real direct criticism.
In this instance, this one's called the bray Thing. It
marries up with a company called TBWA that has a
platform called Disruption. And in that sense, we need kind
of feedback that is a little sharp, a little edgy.
(13:36):
And so in this case the voice giving you feedback
is Gordon Ramsey, the Gordon Ramsey of advertising. So Gordon
Ramsey is evaluating our advertising and basically telling us are
we really breaking convention? Are we really being distinct and
is this worthwhile going to market with? So the category
that you're looking up there is telecommunications. I think I
could you could picture a Telco ad in two seconds
(13:59):
right now, someone holding phone, And unfortunately people do that
a lot. They think if I signal this, you're going
to remember the brand. Well, it doesn't work. It isn't
brave and basically it's a xanax for advertising. So I
think in this case we would do that and then
we would put our work into that system to say, okay,
are we living up to being brave and are we
(14:20):
really going to be able to cut through with that work?
And so we did this in the case for Telstra
in Australia and that work. I think that work there
scored a twenty eight out of one hundred. That's the
convention of the category. The work that we proposed put
in front was an outdoor campaign. It's called eighty seven
out of one hundred. But even with eighty seven, it
still tells you what are other areas which you could
improve upon that they would ask us to be a
(14:40):
little bit more inclusive though maybe we could be able
to have a little bit more empathy. So even at
that stage it's there to do that. But what it
mostly does is give us confidence. And what it's built
off is thirty five forty years of Omnicom's great creative
case studies. So our lifetime of taste will give you
a different answer than anybody else's. So we could come
to Mark with solutions and share the evaluation and kind
(15:04):
of say, look, this is what the critique is versus
everyone else in this category, this convention, and that is
me being a petted partner to Mark. That is us
together taking a step rather than saying be brave.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
That's not a great partner, amazing partnership. We need more
collaborations like yours in the last two minutes of our
panel here on stage, let's talk about the future trends
as well. We were talking about the costs of being dull.
I'm sure you have a lot in the pipeline not
being dull but exciting and innovative and disruptive. What is
(15:38):
cooking in your kitchen at Hilton Hotels now?
Speaker 3 (15:41):
What is not cooking at the moment? The key is
back where we started, is being focused on what role
culture needs you to play, and we're all about to stay.
We're all about that no matter what you're trying to do,
whether you're a McLaren not one who's been our partner
for the twenty years. Did every weekend are effectively playing
a home away match right they're away from home, it's
still having to be their best single race weekend. If
(16:01):
our hotels can do that for them, what can it
do for you? If our hotels can create that kind
of experience for paris Hip when she's djaying all across
the world, what can it do for your next business
meeting and so telling the story of how the physical
space plus the service plus that technology unlacks that things
like for our families that want to book confirm connecting rooms,
this ability to make sure that when your kids are
traveling with you, you know for sure you'll get the
(16:23):
sign room next to you. We're working on AI to
make that possible. We brought that to life, making sure
our Honors members get recognized consistently that they get the
upgrade delivered automatically through AI. We've already built that. That's
already out in the marketplace, so the future is actually here.
It's doubling down on the things that make the stay
possible and then working with partners to make sure we
flood the zone with content so that as AI becomes
(16:44):
the predominant chat and search feature, it's looking at premium
products not just as the cheapest, not just as the quickest,
not just the closest location, but the one that's best
for me. And that's what our job is, is to
flood the zone with great content that tells the story
of our stay and make sure that you know that
any of our twenty four brands is the best fit
for your travelication.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Now, Troy, I'm sure you have very comfortable and cozy
stays at Hilton hotels that can't sleep well at night,
But what are some of the trends or developments or
concerns you have for the future of the advertisement industry
that keeps you awake at night.
Speaker 4 (17:19):
Well, I'm certainly worried about the conventional activity that you
could get from algorithms driving it to you too familiar
places and data that could do that as well. So
I think making sure that we carve out a unique
place for us is probably my number one priority. But
I think it's also the fact that the solution isn't
advertising always right, And I think Hilton is the ultimate
(17:39):
experience brand, you know, without doubt, so our solutions to
be able to drive their business aren't always going to
be an ad like object. It can be an experience
that's happening in the room. It could be something that
has actually said from a person who works at the
hotel that can enhance that experience. So we constantly have
to interrogate, whatever the issue is, think about the total
brand experience and say, how can we do a breakthrough
(18:02):
way of enhancing that experience and making sure that we're
deliving true impact against the promise that Hilton makes. And
we've just got such a great partner, We've got such
great trust that we know that we feel quite confident
in our future, so well, let's fixate it on why
everyone's afraid of We're more about trying to exercise the
opportunities that are in front of us.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
And if you stay focused on what unique role you
bring to the world, the innovations will change, the capbilities
are changed, what you're trying to do will stay exactly
the same. And having a great partner do that's been
the key to our success.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Yeah, three two one, and we finish right on time,
Ladies and gentlemen. That was Troy Ruhannan, CEO of Omnicom
Advertising Group and Mark Weinstein, CMO at Hilton Hotels Showkan Gasila.
Thank you so much, give it us for the chatlemen,
thank you.
Speaker 4 (18:46):
Thanks Match
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