Sean Downey is the president of Americas & Global Partners at Google, overseeing the company’s expansive advertising business, including Google Search and YouTube. With a background rooted in the earliest days of digital marketing startups and leadership roles at DoubleClick and Google, Sean draws on leadership lessons learned from his father, particularly the importance of creating a workplace where everyone feels they are contributing to something greater than themselves. He emphasizes authenticity, empathy, and continuous learning as core leadership values.
As part of our Cannes Lions content series, Alan and Sean connect at the International Festival of Creativity to discuss AI’s impact on marketing. Sean explains how Google integrates AI and automation into its advertising platforms to help marketers achieve better results while protecting consumer privacy. He notes that marketers today have to be more efficient than ever and highlights how AI-powered tools help them work smarter and adapt to rapidly changing consumer behaviors. Sean also stresses the importance of first-party data, privacy-safe solutions, strong change management, and a growth mindset for teams navigating technological shifts.
In this episode, you'll learn:
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
and
Are you ready to go beyond the basics of marketing?
I'm Alan Hart and this is Marketing Beyond, where we talk about the questions that sparkchange and share ideas that challenge the status quo.
Join us as we explore the future of marketing and its endless potential.
(00:32):
Today on the show, I've got Sean Downey, President of Americas and Global Partners atGoogle.
Sean leads the advertising business for Google, which makes up roughly somewhere around 70% of the business.
We talk about the evolution of marketing and advertising platforms at Google.
We talk about AI and automation, how that's been integrated into the Google platforms foranybody to use it that can use Google Ad platforms themselves.
(00:56):
We talk about change management and the leadership principles that he puts in place tohelp his teams be more innovative.
and adapt to change in a growing marketplace.
That and much more with Sean Downey.
(01:17):
Well, Sean, welcome to Sh-
It's great to be here, Alan.
I'm so happy to talk to you today.
Yeah, me too.
So before we get talking about business, I have got this interesting stat that you've beento approximately a thousand youth baseball games.
That's the critical word right there.
At least a thousand.
I have three sons.
(01:37):
They all play baseball.
And I have one that's better than the others.
And so he's a fairly accomplished travel player and he travels everywhere on the weekendsto play baseball since he was eight.
So I've been in every state, almost every hotel.
I even left Cannes last year early because he had a tournament in Georgia.
And I think it's important to do those things with your kids because it's a little bitlife balanced.
(01:59):
Also shows your personal range.
And what I love to tell people about it is like one night I was here, I was in theMediterranean, I was sipping Rose, just having a great time.
And then 24 hours later, I was on a fly fishing boat on the Chattahoochee River
So pretty good fun, fun life to have.
love it, I love it.
I love the spectrum there too that you're illustrating.
(02:20):
Everyone loves work-life balance.
Work-life balance comes in, sometimes you have more work, sometimes you have more life,but I think we should all be normal humans.
Baseball teaches life lessons, it teaches failure.
I'm a huge growth mindset person and it's kind fun to see your kid go through it becausehe's going to be a better person.
It keeps the personal life, keeps me grounded when I'm coming to work.
(02:41):
oh What was your path?
Where did you get your start in your career and how did you end up the president ofAmericas and Global Partnerships at uh Google?
Big job.
How did you get started?
It was unintentional to find my way to this job.
When I started in the workforce, there really wasn't a Google, or least a Google anyoneknew about.
think it was still in the garage in Menlo Park.
(03:05):
But I'd like to say there was a grand plan, or that I trained to do this role.
I don't think I'm any smarter than a lot of people walking down the quasset here, but Iwas willing to take some risks in my career.
And I joined the digital marketplace
in our schoolhouse in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, building web design websites.
(03:26):
And I took that job because nobody else wanted it.
And I thought it'd be a place I could differentiate myself and build a career because thisinternet thing was new back in that time.
And then I just found myself in a really fortunate place to learn that industry from theground up.
I did some startups, some that worked, some that didn't.
I worked with some great companies along the way, like DoubleClick, and I was fortunate toget acquired by Google and then.
(03:49):
Now I am in this seat, but I think that's because I took a risk of something that wasill-defined and then worked really hard to master my craft and do well at it.
And sometimes that works out for you.
And even if you're not the smartest person in the room or the most pedigree person, youjust work hard and take risks and you're to find yourself in a fun spot.
I love I'm gonna pull on this thread a minute because I'm also from North Carolina and theconnection to North Carolina and that story was pretty cool.
(04:18):
I grew up in North Carolina went to uh NC State and UNC uh for business schools
Amazing.
uh I was in a schoolhouse in Jordan Lake, which was a really remote part of Chapel Hillwhere UNC is located.
Now it's highly populated.
My first son, my first baseball player son was born in Raleigh-Durham.
(04:39):
And I moved there because I went to school in Buffalo and it was really cold there.
The opposite of Cannes.
And I wanted to go somewhere warm and work and work and find a job.
And that launched my career.
And it's really weird to tell people you launched your advertising career, especially indigitally in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Nobody does that.
You have to be in New York or Silicon Valley.
(05:01):
And I'm a native New Yorker.
I ended up.
I love it.
talking about Google's advertising business today, what is the scope of it?
I believe, if my numbers are right, it's roughly 70 % of the revenue today.
But tell me more about the scope.
Well, it's the biggest business in Google, as you know, and we drive a lot of growth for aof companies.
(05:23):
I think that's our core value proposition.
And as the economy does well, whether you're a small business or a big business, we growwhen you grow.
And that's important for us.
But really, we're in the business of helping people grow their business.
And we have these two amazing platforms.
that we focus the business on.
have this thing called Google search.
Many people have heard of it.
It's where people go to find information, to ask questions, to get the answers that theywant.
(05:48):
It's where small businesses, whether you're in New York City or in Chapel Hill, NorthCarolina, can connect to commerce around the world and grow their businesses.
And it's an amazing place to connect people and grow.
And we think we solve a lot of critical problems and growth for our partners.
So that's a huge portion of our business, obviously.
And then we have this amazing platform called YouTube.
(06:09):
It's up and down the Quasat.
You can't go five feet without meeting a creator.
We are celebrating our 20th anniversary for YouTube and we're celebrating that at beachtoday down the street.
But that's another place that's had its own ecosystem.
It's where people go to be entertained.
really only one YouTube and we do short form, long form, audio, podcasts.
(06:31):
It's a billion hours of podcasts watched a month.
Right?
And that's a place to build a brand, to build resonance.
with a consumer base to get into a community and that has a lot of solutions that helppeople grow their business and also people build careers if you're a creator.
And that's really the scope of the ads business.
We have incredible places where you discover, you can be influenced and then it's a reallycritical path to purchase that drives a lot of value for advertisers, publishers, creators
(06:59):
and ultimately allows consumers and people, consumers are people, to find what they needand get a lot more educated.
Right.
Well, there's a lot of evolution, if you will, in the digital marketing space.
You've got um consumers, you've got privacy.
uh How is Google adapting its ad solutions to meet consumers in a more private world, butalso help marketers drive marketing effectiveness?
(07:25):
Well, number one, we always start with the consumer.
So thank you for asking it from that lens.
Consumer privacy is the most critical thing for us.
People are coming here to find something that improves their lives, whether it's personalinformation about something important in their life or to find a product that's going to
improve their family life and protecting their information, protecting who they are, allwhile delivering relevance to them is really important.
(07:52):
So we want to build solutions that serve that purpose.
so that we can have a good ecosystem.
And for markers, we want them to be successful.
So we want them to make sure that we can go into a situation where they can find the rightaudience that's identified and work all the way through an influence curve to get to some
level of purchase or intent.
And that can be done in a really privacy safe way.
(08:13):
Like you put it from a cookie ID perspective, like there are a lot of ways to do targetingand most of them are privacy safe.
So we really focus on those things.
And I think our job as like technologists and platform owners is to make sure that you canbe successful in that privacy safe way.
And, you know, I built a lot of the programmatic businesses at DoubleClick and Google andcookies was one way and IDs was one way to do things, but technology advances and
(08:41):
technology changes.
And I think what's really working and resonate right now is this constructive AI poweredcampaigns that really privacy safe.
your, your understanding intense.
understanding behaviors, and then we're finding people that exhibit those.
And we used to call that machine learning.
We used to call that automation.
That sounded really boring.
(09:02):
The AI revolution allows you to say it's AI powered things and that's helping grow.
And those are very privacy safe.
Like it doesn't require individual IDs.
It doesn't require us to know a lot about an individual specifically, but we can find whata brand needs, who exhibits those types of traits, and we can find people that they didn't
think they wanted.
So when I talk to brands, I ask them to do three things.
(09:25):
I say, invest in first party data because no one knows more about your customer than youdo.
So tell us about them.
We don't need know who they are.
What do they like?
How they behave?
And then we can go find those people on our platforms and we can make sure that resonates.
We're trying to get them to use some of those AI powered campaigns because that's howthey're going to find people that they didn't know that they needed.
(09:48):
A lot of brands can get caught in a trap of
thinking they know exactly who their customer is.
When in reality, they're looking for people that they didn't know existed, that areincremental to their business.
And a lot of those AI-powered campaigns do that.
And then we want them to have really good transparency about how they get that to othersites.
And that's the crust of things that we're trying to accomplish.
(10:10):
And when cookies were being bantered about, I asked my teams, I gave them very simpletask, prove that you don't eat cookies before they go away.
Almost all of our marketers are really well-crypt to leverage their first-party data, toleverage AI-powered campaigns, and they don't even worry about the specific technology.
They just worry about the outcomes that they can drive, and we're getting a reallyprivacy-safe world because of that, and we're getting better outcomes for advertisers
(10:36):
because of that, which is the entire point.
Well, talked to me, you mentioned AI already, but maybe we'll take that a step further.
How is AI and automation influencing the products that you're able to provide to brandsand agencies?
I mean, they're deeply embedded.
Google has been an AI first company for 10 plus years.
(10:57):
And that's really important to remember because we've been developing the research.
We've been putting them in our products for quite a long time.
Everyone loves generative AI, but general machine learning AI has been in the product setfor quite a long time, driving a lot of business results.
And we're investing all of our new things that we develop in DeepMind and the labs intoour advertising tools to benefit
(11:20):
our customers.
So when I have a lot of brands, we love to do AI labs and summits.
And they come to me and they always ask, how can I use AI marketing?
And my first response is you are already doing this, right?
Because if you're using Google search, it's AI powered.
If you're using YouTube, it's AI powered.
So maybe we'll unpack it.
(11:41):
What do I mean?
We have a lot of our advertisers using AI powered search, which means we allow them tolook for search terms that they didn't know people were searching for.
A lot of people are searching for things that you're not thinking they're searching forthat are really relevant to your campaign.
And the whole goal, as we talked about earlier, is to find consumers you didn't know youneeded.
(12:02):
And if I put you in an AI-powered campaign that has a broad search function, it'sidentifying those people in real time for you and extending your audience.
That's an AI-powered format.
It's built in the tool.
You don't need any special skills.
You just need to use the tool.
And that's a really important thing.
As we launch all these new things, if you walk up and down the Quaset this week, you'veseen Vio3, you've seen Amazon 4, you see these amazing creative tools, those get embedded
(12:28):
into the tool.
And that enables a lot of small advertisers who don't have the resources, the large ones,to make creative messaging faster, right?
To have a more resonant call to action that's going to work and improve their results.
Those things all get built into the tool.
Equally, that happens in YouTube.
have AI-powered campaigns that help people.
get through campaign functions because if you are on YouTube, I could be watching a 15second video which requires a certain ad.
(12:54):
I could watch long form, which you might have a 30 second trailer, which people are soused to.
I might have an audio ad.
I might have shorts.
Like all those things have to be identified in real time and AI is powering that for them.
And equally we're giving them some creative tools that help them scale production becausethey have more assets that could be produced.
And so you could become a really good AI driven marketer by adopting good tools.
(13:17):
We did all the work for, you just need to go be trained.
And then you can focus on all the innovation and the efficiency that you can get on allthe tools that make your operation better, make you more intelligent, help you scale
creative outside the system.
But we start by just building everything we have in the technology.
And much like your cell phone, you don't worry about what's in it.
(13:38):
You worry about what it does.
So when you come to Google ads and YouTube, you know, you can do what you want and you getthe outcomes you desire.
And most of it's powered by.
Well, I think that's pretty interesting that you, I mean, it's just embedded, right?
If you use our tools, you're going to be using and getting the benefits of AI.
As you think about helping, you moving from the, products, if you will, to like how dobrands and agencies adopt tools?
(14:04):
How do you empower them to help them understand where advertising and the next generationof advertising is going?
How do you support those two?
Yeah, we do a lot of things.
So maybe we put it in a couple of buckets for you.
First, there's got be some education, number one, because people see themselves better ina world and a vision if you can paint the picture where they can see themselves in it.
(14:27):
I think that's always something as a communicator you have to do really well.
Paint the vision, let me see myself in it, and I will embrace it.
That starts with what is their consumer doing?
So what do you have to do well to market well?
And consumers are
behaving a lot differently than they were two to three years ago.
I always like to tell advertisers they're predictably unpredictable because they don'thave patterns and there's no traditional purchase funnel that you should expect.
(14:53):
They are doing really four things.
Like we want to be simple.
They're doing four things.
They're searching.
We're all really well accustomed to searching for information.
They're streaming.
YouTube's the number one streaming platform in US for two straight years running.
It uploads more content in a day.
than every other place does have combined in a year.
(15:14):
This is always something relevant to watch.
You're scrolling.
We all love to scroll.
Sometimes we're in the doom scroll on our commute, but that's a great place forinspiration to discover new things.
And of course, they're shopping.
Now the difference is they're potentially all of those things at the same time.
Like if you are on YouTube, you might search for something that turns into a string thatyou might be scrolling.
(15:36):
And then of course you saw something you want to buy and you've purchased it.
Are you streaming?
Are you scrolling or are you shopping?
All of them, right?
So you have to get people to understand that picture.
And that means you must do things differently.
You can't run your campaign structure the way you've done before.
You can't run your targeting the way you've done before.
(15:57):
You can't separate your budgets the way you did before.
So let me start by educating you.
So we do a lot of that.
Like we try and get people to understand what's happening in this world and how you reallyget to discovery through inspiration.
I think that's a really important thing.
Then we try and train them on what we think they should do foundationally.
So we talked about media.
(16:17):
That's an easy AI case.
We show them how to change that, how to adapt to it, how to create a lot of efficiency andgrowth out of it.
The most important thing is it has better results.
You get a lot of bumping of improvement uh using some of these automated campaigns.
On average, we're seeing about 10 % lift from AI-powered campaigns on Search and over 20 %on YouTube.
(16:38):
You get benefits.
Here's what they are, learn how to use them.
Then we want them to understand the creative process.
And there's all these incredible creative tools that are democratizing creation and thepace of creation more importantly.
And we try and get them to understand what's the journey that they can go on.
And a lot of this exists outside my tool set, but it's powered by cloud because they'rereleasing all these new tools.
(17:00):
And we can talk to them about how do you generate really good insights, right?
So can you use AI to make you smarter about your insights?
What do I mean by that?
Like, imagine a world where you could take all the campaigns that were ever successful andlearn from them and then make more of that look like them.
Then think of a world where you could take all those campaigns and then decide which onesyou were most proud of because they were work that represented your brand value.
(17:26):
And you merge the, I'm proud of this and it worked and use AI to tell you what that brieflooks like, how to build more like it and shorten your cycle to creation.
So you have a faster learning curve.
We teach them that.
Then we teach them how to create scaled creative through partners where they can create amultitude of assets in real time because optimization has been limited by the ability to
(17:47):
make things.
Like I can't make a thousand ads because it's too expensive and it takes too long.
But with AI, I can find that thing I love that works that resonates.
And I can make thousands of them in real time because there's all these tools that scalethat development and there's great partners doing this work in the marketplace.
Then I can get into like ideation and creation and shrinking that time.
(18:08):
And that's important because the brief time for a CMO is shrunk.
Lorraine Tuhill likes to talk about this.
She's my CMO at Google.
She used to have six months lead time for a campaign.
release products all the time now and she has 10 days.
So how do you get from brief to execution in 10 days in the old process?
(18:29):
Right.
You fail miserably.
You can't do it.
There's no way.
But you can use tools to get there faster and you can accelerate your development.
You can accelerate your
production and you can accelerate your ideation really fast.
So we teach them that.
Then we get into measurement.
And we talk about how do you model things?
How do you look for the insights that you didn't know existed?
(18:50):
And how do you think about valuing things across a funnel and on for performance?
And we're helping people redeploy measurement strategies with the right data, right?
And that could be AI driven, right?
And those are all great.
And then markers are usually pretty happy and I remind them.
Oh, there's one more thing.
Do know what the one thing is?
(19:11):
This little thing called change management because humans are slow to adapt to things thatfeel different.
Right.
And the number one, you do a survey.
I've been doing surveys all week because I have all these AI labs happening on the beachdown here.
And I love the first question to be, what's your strategy?
What's the most important project?
(19:32):
It's like, talk about your greatest frustration in your journey.
AI transformation in every single table, every single day, morning and afternoon sayschange management for my people.
Yeah.
Right.
How do get them to learn skills?
How do get them to accept that they might have to advance how their job works and thatfear that it might take it away.
(19:54):
Like all these things exist.
So you have to have a really strong change management plan both for your teams and foryour enterprise, because you have to partner differently with your cross-functional
partners.
But that's the journey.
And that's the education and that's a fun one because most people love transformation andthey come here to solve problems and we got plenty of solutions for them.
(20:15):
We've got such a uh massive business already.
You're managing change, new products, launching, know, this like rapid cycle, if you will.
As you think about like leadership principles that you use to help your teams be moreadaptable, more innovative, or think about innovation, and even think about those
(20:36):
partners, agencies, and brands, what principles do you lean on in terms of like fosteringthe right environment?
Well, I learned most of my principles from my father.
So he was a car dealer.
I sat in his office as a kid in New York and I watched how he operated.
(20:56):
And a few things came out that I realized when I was older.
He had an open door policy.
He painted a picture that everyone in that building, whether you were the owner, his ownerwas a trust fund kid and he owned a lot of dealerships, occupied himself.
Or you with a kid that came in and washed the cars.
You were valuable to the operation and your ideas mattered.
(21:18):
Right.
So there was this collective vision of success for the dealership because he wantedcustomers to walk through the door of this little Honda dealership in late in New York and
feel welcome, empowered to get what they wanted and treat it well.
Right.
And it was everyone's job to do it and anyone can improve it.
(21:39):
And I watched that happen day after day after day.
So I entered.
a leadership position and I want to create one vision.
I want our people to be chasing the same thing with purpose.
I want my people to have the same message.
I want my people to understand their role is to solve customer problems and help acustomer reach their vision.
(22:00):
And they'll do whatever it takes together to get there.
And that requires you to do a few things.
you to have a growth mindset.
I don't care if you fail.
I love failure.
I love fabulous failure, but I want you to learn something from it and then teach thatlearning to someone else so it's not repeated.
Right.
I want us to ideate on solutions.
(22:20):
Right.
Listen, that means our number one skill is curiosity.
Ask, what are you trying to solve for?
Why are you trying to solve that?
What are your problems?
And then present a solution and all the things I have to help them do that.
Understand value.
Right.
So be a
uh a data scientist by understanding what makes value realized for a customer and be ableto showcase that to them.
(22:47):
Be a great storyteller.
Right?
So people understand stories better than data or lots of long slides.
Tell a story of how people should get from here to here using your tools and doing thosethings.
And then most importantly, don't be afraid to have a point of view, be a challenger.
And you empower all those things because you want people to be able to go to ourcustomers, explain the value of what we have, solve their business problem, and be
(23:13):
motivated to solve that first and foremost.
And that culture is known, it's celebrated, em and everyone knows when they walk throughthe doors in my building that they contribute to something greater than them.
And that powers innovation, it powers customer orientation, and it most importantlyempowers growth, personally and professionally.
(23:33):
Love it.
So that's it.
I love that.
Well, one of the things I like to do on the show is get to know you a little bit better.
know you've got three boys, play baseball.
But my favorite question to ask everyone that comes on is, has there been an experience ofyour past that defines or makes up who you are today?
(23:53):
Well, maybe a few.
So I think you learn the most when things don't go well.
I think that's the most important part.
And when companies go through tough times, everyone always maybe feels it personally.
So I always like to remember that you haven't always been on top.
When I meet people, like, oh, your life must be amazing.
You're the president of Google in the Americas.
(24:15):
You have this great job, this great family.
And life's been so easy.
And life's been easy to you and your view because
I've learned from all the things that maybe weren't so great.
And I learned that you can't ever take anything for granted because I've been laid off.
I've been in a startup world ah that was shut down for no reason other than it was thewrong market fit.
(24:38):
I've been laid off because the business didn't perform well because we weren't doing theright things.
So I've learned in that environment in those early 2000s that you can't take things forgranted and you must be the best at what you do every day.
And you do that by learning and being open to feedback.
about how to make the business better.
And that's been maybe at the worst times of your life.
The first time I got laid off, I was newly married in Raleigh, North Carolina with aone-year-old.
(25:04):
That's not comfortable.
But then you have to figure out how to rebuild yourself.
And that's a really important thing.
The next time is we talked about my dad and his impact on me was when he passed away fromcancer, I got to recant in my brain, because I had to write the UOG, all the lessons that
he taught me.
So I gave you some of them.
that I learned as a child, but I didn't remember them until I was maybe 43.
(25:28):
And I was reflecting on this man's life and what he meant to me and the lessons that hetaught to me.
And it started to really formulate my leadership principle, my personality about how Iwant to show up and work.
And I realized that you can't have a business Sean and a personal Sean.
There's just Sean.
So he has to show up, has his authentic self.
(25:49):
You have to treat people the way
at work, you treat them at home, you have to be a compromiser at work the way you are athome, you have to build relationships at work the way you do at home.
And I shouldn't be any different in my house at night than I am in the office or with mycustomers, because my job is to make people comfortable and know that they have a great
(26:09):
environment and be welcoming.
And when I learned that, I went from hard charging business executive, cared about thebottom line and growth to
hard charging business executive who cared about people and environment and culture and itproduced growth.
Right.
And that's just going through maybe some hard reflection period when you're watching yourmentor go through the tough time.
(26:33):
Right.
Right.
So this is little bit about me.
That's helpful.
If you were giving yourself that young self advice, advice would you give your youngerself?
Don't be afraid to be honest with yourself.
I think the hardest thing is when you come through with youthful bravado, which we allhave, uh you think you know.
(26:57):
And everyone has another level to reach if they're open to looking at it.
Everyone can be a better public speaker.
Everyone can be a better data analyst.
Everyone can be a better seller.
Everyone can be a better engineer.
But if you don't seek out your weaknesses,
and be open to them and accept them, you don't know what to work on.
(27:17):
No one gets any better by working on what they're great at.
They get better by working on what they're not so great at.
So when you recognize that and you can accept it, then you can embrace true growth andthen that you'll be better.
Is there a topic either you're trying to learn more about or you think marketers ingeneral need to be learning more about right now?
(27:41):
I think change management.
I'm go back to that.
It's the number one thing I think people are trying to learn how to change a culture.
And reflecting on a lot of my conversations, whether it was with CEOs this week or CMOs, alot of it was about how do I create this culture to reduce the fear of risk taking, which
(28:01):
is like a form of change management, right?
Because they see the opportunity.
Like if you walk down the beach here, it's really optimistic.
There's all this amazing technology, all these amazing ideas.
And all these executives here want to embrace it and alter the way their company works andtransform their company.
And the biggest challenge they have is how do I get my team and my company to embracethis?
(28:24):
So you just can't will it.
You have to think about really good change management strategies.
How do you set up different KPI structures?
How do you set up different celebration or recognition structures?
How do you showcase it?
And then how do you psychologically and emotionally move people to a different place?
(28:45):
And that's a lot.
So there's plenty of books on it.
There's plenty of podcasts.
There's plenty of experts.
There's probably a self-help course if you want to find it.
There's probably a YouTube podcast actually.
sure.
You can probably find it.
And I think that's a topic.
I'm a student of that.
I love that stuff.
I think I'm noticing here a lot of people are quickly becoming students of that.
What are you curious about out in the world could be a trend subculture something you'rejust into at the moment.
(29:11):
Yeah curious
I'm like trying to figure out the, how people find resonance with things.
Like what draws somebody like the psychological effects, because as I'm like trying totransform like this, our YouTube story to the marketplace, YouTube's actual power is its
authenticity and not of the platform.
(29:32):
So I'm fiscally authenticity of the creators on it who have drawn all these people, allthese fans to them.
because of their stories, because of how authentic they are.
And I'm really trying to understand like what's behind that, right?
Because that's the secret to like really great marketing.
(29:53):
It's a secret to really great leadership.
It's a secret to really great change management.
But how do you tap into that, the ethos of something or the resonance of something and getpeople to understand it, feel simplified about it and move them.
And it's probably like some deep philosophical thing or that will probably be written, abook written about it.
I'm like,
super interested in it.
I like every time I see a crater, I see a lot of them crawling up to my beach right now.
(30:18):
I have, that's what I asked them, like, what did you do?
And you find it's like trial and error.
Like, and it's just like, I'm just being myself.
I'm telling my story.
I'm, you know, I'm treating these people like my family.
like, you understand that everything becomes really human.
And, know, it's not lost to me.
I work for a company that is powered in AI, but I really think
Humanity is its greatest strength because humans power all these things if you could tapinto that Culture and what makes people resonate.
(30:45):
Yeah, great things happen.
So I'm really trying to suss with it So this is my conversation with everyone.
I'm trying to figure it out.
Yeah, maybe apply some of that myself
I think it's a great question.
It's a great question to be pondering.
uh And I love the notion you talk about, like the humanity is what draws us together.
Couldn't agree more.
My last question for you, what do you think is the largest either opportunity or threatfacing marketers today?
(31:08):
Well, I'm an optimist, so I don't like to work in threats.
I think the pace of ideas is the biggest opportunity.
A lot of people ask me about efficiencies or jobs and what can be taken away withtechnology.
And I'm always a person that believes that technology advances what you can do.
(31:30):
And guess what?
That's happened since the dawn of time.
You just even think about communication.
We didn't communicate.
We wrote on stones, we got some paper, we got a printing press, we got a radio, we got aTV, we got the internet.
Communication has always evolved and it advances what you can do and not do.
And the biggest opportunity is to understand what you can do ah and find yourself in thatvision.
(31:57):
Right.
Cause that's going to build like longstanding businesses and brands that last.
And if you don't do it, someone else does maybe to your threats.
You'll be left behind.
the penalty for complacency is a relevance, right?
And there's always the law of substitution.
If you can't do something, there's a substitution for you.
(32:20):
So it's really critical for brands to embrace the future, understand how to do it andbuild a plan.
And that has way more opportunity than downside because if they get it right, it's goingto be tremendous for them.
And I think a lot of them are walking out of Cannes feeling that and recognizing thatbecause so many of these things are real.
that weren't real a year ago.
And they see that if they get it right, it's huge.
(32:43):
Love it.
Sean, thank you for coming on the show.
My pleasure, it's great spending some time with you.
um
Views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent theviews, thoughts, and opinions of Deloitte.
The material and information presented here is for general information purposes only anddoes not imply endorsement or opposition to any specific company, product, or service.
(33:06):
Hi, it's Alan again.
Marketing Beyond is a Deloitte digital podcast.
It's created and produced by me with post-production support from Sam Robertson.
If you're new to Marketing Beyond, please feel free to write us a review and subscribe onyour favorite listening platform.
I also invite you to explore the other Deloitte digital podcast at deloitte digital dotcom slash us slash podcast and share the show with your friends and colleagues.
(33:34):
I love hearing from listeners.
You can contact me at marketing beyond at Deloitte dot com.
You'll also find complete show notes and links to what's discussed in the podcast today.
and you can search our archives.
I'm Ellen Hart and this is Marketing Beyond.
and
Are you ready to go beyond the basics of marketing?
I'm Alan Hart and this is Marketing Beyond, where we talk about the questions that sparkchange and share ideas that challenge the status quo.
Join us as we explore the future of marketing and its endless potential.
(00:32):
Today on the show, I've got Sean Downey, President of Americas and Global Partners atGoogle.
Sean leads the advertising business for Google, which makes up roughly somewhere around 70% of the business.
We talk about the evolution of marketing and advertising platforms at Google.
We talk about AI and automation, how that's been integrated into the Google platforms foranybody to use it that can use Google Ad platforms themselves.
(00:56):
We talk about change management and the leadership principles that he puts in place tohelp his teams be more innovative.
and adapt to change in a growing marketplace.
That and much more with Sean Downey.
(01:17):
Well, Sean, welcome to Sh-
It's great to be here, Alan.
I'm so happy to talk to you today.
Yeah, me too.
So before we get talking about business, I have got this interesting stat that you've beento approximately a thousand youth baseball games.
That's the critical word right there.
At least a thousand.
I have three sons.
(01:37):
They all play baseball.
And I have one that's better than the others.
And so he's a fairly accomplished travel player and he travels everywhere on the weekendsto play baseball since he was eight.
So I've been in every state, almost every hotel.
I even left Cannes last year early because he had a tournament in Georgia.
And I think it's important to do those things with your kids because it's a little bitlife balanced.
(01:59):
Also shows your personal range.
And what I love to tell people about it is like one night I was here, I was in theMediterranean, I was sipping Rose, just having a great time.
And then 24 hours later, I was on a fly fishing boat on the Chattahoochee River
So pretty good fun, fun life to have.
love it, I love it.
I love the spectrum there too that you're illustrating.
(02:20):
Everyone loves work-life balance.
Work-life balance comes in, sometimes you have more work, sometimes you have more life,but I think we should all be normal humans.
Baseball teaches life lessons, it teaches failure.
I'm a huge growth mindset person and it's kind fun to see your kid go through it becausehe's going to be a better person.
It keeps the personal life, keeps me grounded when I'm coming to work.
(02:41):
oh What was your path?
Where did you get your start in your career and how did you end up the president ofAmericas and Global Partnerships at uh Google?
Big job.
How did you get started?
It was unintentional to find my way to this job.
When I started in the workforce, there really wasn't a Google, or least a Google anyoneknew about.
think it was still in the garage in Menlo Park.
(03:05):
But I'd like to say there was a grand plan, or that I trained to do this role.
I don't think I'm any smarter than a lot of people walking down the quasset here, but Iwas willing to take some risks in my career.
And I joined the digital marketplace
in our schoolhouse in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, building web design websites.
(03:26):
And I took that job because nobody else wanted it.
And I thought it'd be a place I could differentiate myself and build a career because thisinternet thing was new back in that time.
And then I just found myself in a really fortunate place to learn that industry from theground up.
I did some startups, some that worked, some that didn't.
I worked with some great companies along the way, like DoubleClick, and I was fortunate toget acquired by Google and then.
(03:49):
Now I am in this seat, but I think that's because I took a risk of something that wasill-defined and then worked really hard to master my craft and do well at it.
And sometimes that works out for you.
And even if you're not the smartest person in the room or the most pedigree person, youjust work hard and take risks and you're to find yourself in a fun spot.
I love I'm gonna pull on this thread a minute because I'm also from North Carolina and theconnection to North Carolina and that story was pretty cool.
(04:18):
I grew up in North Carolina went to uh NC State and UNC uh for business schools
Amazing.
uh I was in a schoolhouse in Jordan Lake, which was a really remote part of Chapel Hillwhere UNC is located.
Now it's highly populated.
My first son, my first baseball player son was born in Raleigh-Durham.
(04:39):
And I moved there because I went to school in Buffalo and it was really cold there.
The opposite of Cannes.
And I wanted to go somewhere warm and work and work and find a job.
And that launched my career.
And it's really weird to tell people you launched your advertising career, especially indigitally in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Nobody does that.
You have to be in New York or Silicon Valley.
(05:01):
And I'm a native New Yorker.
I ended up.
I love it.
talking about Google's advertising business today, what is the scope of it?
I believe, if my numbers are right, it's roughly 70 % of the revenue today.
But tell me more about the scope.
Well, it's the biggest business in Google, as you know, and we drive a lot of growth for aof companies.
(05:23):
I think that's our core value proposition.
And as the economy does well, whether you're a small business or a big business, we growwhen you grow.
And that's important for us.
But really, we're in the business of helping people grow their business.
And we have these two amazing platforms.
that we focus the business on.
have this thing called Google search.
Many people have heard of it.
It's where people go to find information, to ask questions, to get the answers that theywant.
(05:48):
It's where small businesses, whether you're in New York City or in Chapel Hill, NorthCarolina, can connect to commerce around the world and grow their businesses.
And it's an amazing place to connect people and grow.
And we think we solve a lot of critical problems and growth for our partners.
So that's a huge portion of our business, obviously.
And then we have this amazing platform called YouTube.
(06:09):
It's up and down the Quasat.
You can't go five feet without meeting a creator.
We are celebrating our 20th anniversary for YouTube and we're celebrating that at beachtoday down the street.
But that's another place that's had its own ecosystem.
It's where people go to be entertained.
really only one YouTube and we do short form, long form, audio, podcasts.
(06:31):
It's a billion hours of podcasts watched a month.
Right?
And that's a place to build a brand, to build resonance.
with a consumer base to get into a community and that has a lot of solutions that helppeople grow their business and also people build careers if you're a creator.
And that's really the scope of the ads business.
We have incredible places where you discover, you can be influenced and then it's a reallycritical path to purchase that drives a lot of value for advertisers, publishers, creators
(06:59):
and ultimately allows consumers and people, consumers are people, to find what they needand get a lot more educated.
Right.
Well, there's a lot of evolution, if you will, in the digital marketing space.
You've got um consumers, you've got privacy.
uh How is Google adapting its ad solutions to meet consumers in a more private world, butalso help marketers drive marketing effectiveness?
(07:25):
Well, number one, we always start with the consumer.
So thank you for asking it from that lens.
Consumer privacy is the most critical thing for us.
People are coming here to find something that improves their lives, whether it's personalinformation about something important in their life or to find a product that's going to
improve their family life and protecting their information, protecting who they are, allwhile delivering relevance to them is really important.
(07:52):
So we want to build solutions that serve that purpose.
so that we can have a good ecosystem.
And for markers, we want them to be successful.
So we want them to make sure that we can go into a situation where they can find the rightaudience that's identified and work all the way through an influence curve to get to some
level of purchase or intent.
And that can be done in a really privacy safe way.
(08:13):
Like you put it from a cookie ID perspective, like there are a lot of ways to do targetingand most of them are privacy safe.
So we really focus on those things.
And I think our job as like technologists and platform owners is to make sure that you canbe successful in that privacy safe way.
And, you know, I built a lot of the programmatic businesses at DoubleClick and Google andcookies was one way and IDs was one way to do things, but technology advances and
(08:41):
technology changes.
And I think what's really working and resonate right now is this constructive AI poweredcampaigns that really privacy safe.
your, your understanding intense.
understanding behaviors, and then we're finding people that exhibit those.
And we used to call that machine learning.
We used to call that automation.
That sounded really boring.
(09:02):
The AI revolution allows you to say it's AI powered things and that's helping grow.
And those are very privacy safe.
Like it doesn't require individual IDs.
It doesn't require us to know a lot about an individual specifically, but we can find whata brand needs, who exhibits those types of traits, and we can find people that they didn't
think they wanted.
So when I talk to brands, I ask them to do three things.
(09:25):
I say, invest in first party data because no one knows more about your customer than youdo.
So tell us about them.
We don't need know who they are.
What do they like?
How they behave?
And then we can go find those people on our platforms and we can make sure that resonates.
We're trying to get them to use some of those AI powered campaigns because that's howthey're going to find people that they didn't know that they needed.
(09:48):
A lot of brands can get caught in a trap of
thinking they know exactly who their customer is.
When in reality, they're looking for people that they didn't know existed, that areincremental to their business.
And a lot of those AI-powered campaigns do that.
And then we want them to have really good transparency about how they get that to othersites.
And that's the crust of things that we're trying to accomplish.
(10:10):
And when cookies were being bantered about, I asked my teams, I gave them very simpletask, prove that you don't eat cookies before they go away.
Almost all of our marketers are really well-crypt to leverage their first-party data, toleverage AI-powered campaigns, and they don't even worry about the specific technology.
They just worry about the outcomes that they can drive, and we're getting a reallyprivacy-safe world because of that, and we're getting better outcomes for advertisers
(10:36):
because of that, which is the entire point.
Well, talked to me, you mentioned AI already, but maybe we'll take that a step further.
How is AI and automation influencing the products that you're able to provide to brandsand agencies?
I mean, they're deeply embedded.
Google has been an AI first company for 10 plus years.
(10:57):
And that's really important to remember because we've been developing the research.
We've been putting them in our products for quite a long time.
Everyone loves generative AI, but general machine learning AI has been in the product setfor quite a long time, driving a lot of business results.
And we're investing all of our new things that we develop in DeepMind and the labs intoour advertising tools to benefit
(11:20):
our customers.
So when I have a lot of brands, we love to do AI labs and summits.
And they come to me and they always ask, how can I use AI marketing?
And my first response is you are already doing this, right?
Because if you're using Google search, it's AI powered.
If you're using YouTube, it's AI powered.
So maybe we'll unpack it.
(11:41):
What do I mean?
We have a lot of our advertisers using AI powered search, which means we allow them tolook for search terms that they didn't know people were searching for.
A lot of people are searching for things that you're not thinking they're searching forthat are really relevant to your campaign.
And the whole goal, as we talked about earlier, is to find consumers you didn't know youneeded.
(12:02):
And if I put you in an AI-powered campaign that has a broad search function, it'sidentifying those people in real time for you and extending your audience.
That's an AI-powered format.
It's built in the tool.
You don't need any special skills.
You just need to use the tool.
And that's a really important thing.
As we launch all these new things, if you walk up and down the Quaset this week, you'veseen Vio3, you've seen Amazon 4, you see these amazing creative tools, those get embedded
(12:28):
into the tool.
And that enables a lot of small advertisers who don't have the resources, the large ones,to make creative messaging faster, right?
To have a more resonant call to action that's going to work and improve their results.
Those things all get built into the tool.
Equally, that happens in YouTube.
have AI-powered campaigns that help people.
get through campaign functions because if you are on YouTube, I could be watching a 15second video which requires a certain ad.
(12:54):
I could watch long form, which you might have a 30 second trailer, which people are soused to.
I might have an audio ad.
I might have shorts.
Like all those things have to be identified in real time and AI is powering that for them.
And equally we're giving them some creative tools that help them scale production becausethey have more assets that could be produced.
And so you could become a really good AI driven marketer by adopting good tools.
(13:17):
We did all the work for, you just need to go be trained.
And then you can focus on all the innovation and the efficiency that you can get on allthe tools that make your operation better, make you more intelligent, help you scale
creative outside the system.
But we start by just building everything we have in the technology.
And much like your cell phone, you don't worry about what's in it.
(13:38):
You worry about what it does.
So when you come to Google ads and YouTube, you know, you can do what you want and you getthe outcomes you desire.
And most of it's powered by.
Well, I think that's pretty interesting that you, I mean, it's just embedded, right?
If you use our tools, you're going to be using and getting the benefits of AI.
As you think about helping, you moving from the, products, if you will, to like how dobrands and agencies adopt tools?
(14:04):
How do you empower them to help them understand where advertising and the next generationof advertising is going?
How do you support those two?
Yeah, we do a lot of things.
So maybe we put it in a couple of buckets for you.
First, there's got be some education, number one, because people see themselves better ina world and a vision if you can paint the picture where they can see themselves in it.
(14:27):
I think that's always something as a communicator you have to do really well.
Paint the vision, let me see myself in it, and I will embrace it.
That starts with what is their consumer doing?
So what do you have to do well to market well?
And consumers are
behaving a lot differently than they were two to three years ago.
I always like to tell advertisers they're predictably unpredictable because they don'thave patterns and there's no traditional purchase funnel that you should expect.
(14:53):
They are doing really four things.
Like we want to be simple.
They're doing four things.
They're searching.
We're all really well accustomed to searching for information.
They're streaming.
YouTube's the number one streaming platform in US for two straight years running.
It uploads more content in a day.
than every other place does have combined in a year.
(15:14):
This is always something relevant to watch.
You're scrolling.
We all love to scroll.
Sometimes we're in the doom scroll on our commute, but that's a great place forinspiration to discover new things.
And of course, they're shopping.
Now the difference is they're potentially all of those things at the same time.
Like if you are on YouTube, you might search for something that turns into a string thatyou might be scrolling.
(15:36):
And then of course you saw something you want to buy and you've purchased it.
Are you streaming?
Are you scrolling or are you shopping?
All of them, right?
So you have to get people to understand that picture.
And that means you must do things differently.
You can't run your campaign structure the way you've done before.
You can't run your targeting the way you've done before.
(15:57):
You can't separate your budgets the way you did before.
So let me start by educating you.
So we do a lot of that.
Like we try and get people to understand what's happening in this world and how you reallyget to discovery through inspiration.
I think that's a really important thing.
Then we try and train them on what we think they should do foundationally.
So we talked about media.
(16:17):
That's an easy AI case.
We show them how to change that, how to adapt to it, how to create a lot of efficiency andgrowth out of it.
The most important thing is it has better results.
You get a lot of bumping of improvement uh using some of these automated campaigns.
On average, we're seeing about 10 % lift from AI-powered campaigns on Search and over 20 %on YouTube.
(16:38):
You get benefits.
Here's what they are, learn how to use them.
Then we want them to understand the creative process.
And there's all these incredible creative tools that are democratizing creation and thepace of creation more importantly.
And we try and get them to understand what's the journey that they can go on.
And a lot of this exists outside my tool set, but it's powered by cloud because they'rereleasing all these new tools.
(17:00):
And we can talk to them about how do you generate really good insights, right?
So can you use AI to make you smarter about your insights?
What do I mean by that?
Like, imagine a world where you could take all the campaigns that were ever successful andlearn from them and then make more of that look like them.
Then think of a world where you could take all those campaigns and then decide which onesyou were most proud of because they were work that represented your brand value.
(17:26):
And you merge the, I'm proud of this and it worked and use AI to tell you what that brieflooks like, how to build more like it and shorten your cycle to creation.
So you have a faster learning curve.
We teach them that.
Then we teach them how to create scaled creative through partners where they can create amultitude of assets in real time because optimization has been limited by the ability to
(17:47):
make things.
Like I can't make a thousand ads because it's too expensive and it takes too long.
But with AI, I can find that thing I love that works that resonates.
And I can make thousands of them in real time because there's all these tools that scalethat development and there's great partners doing this work in the marketplace.
Then I can get into like ideation and creation and shrinking that time.
(18:08):
And that's important because the brief time for a CMO is shrunk.
Lorraine Tuhill likes to talk about this.
She's my CMO at Google.
She used to have six months lead time for a campaign.
release products all the time now and she has 10 days.
So how do you get from brief to execution in 10 days in the old process?
(18:29):
Right.
You fail miserably.
You can't do it.
There's no way.
But you can use tools to get there faster and you can accelerate your development.
You can accelerate your
production and you can accelerate your ideation really fast.
So we teach them that.
Then we get into measurement.
And we talk about how do you model things?
How do you look for the insights that you didn't know existed?
(18:50):
And how do you think about valuing things across a funnel and on for performance?
And we're helping people redeploy measurement strategies with the right data, right?
And that could be AI driven, right?
And those are all great.
And then markers are usually pretty happy and I remind them.
Oh, there's one more thing.
Do know what the one thing is?
(19:11):
This little thing called change management because humans are slow to adapt to things thatfeel different.
Right.
And the number one, you do a survey.
I've been doing surveys all week because I have all these AI labs happening on the beachdown here.
And I love the first question to be, what's your strategy?
What's the most important project?
(19:32):
It's like, talk about your greatest frustration in your journey.
AI transformation in every single table, every single day, morning and afternoon sayschange management for my people.
Yeah.
Right.
How do get them to learn skills?
How do get them to accept that they might have to advance how their job works and thatfear that it might take it away.
(19:54):
Like all these things exist.
So you have to have a really strong change management plan both for your teams and foryour enterprise, because you have to partner differently with your cross-functional
partners.
But that's the journey.
And that's the education and that's a fun one because most people love transformation andthey come here to solve problems and we got plenty of solutions for them.
(20:15):
We've got such a uh massive business already.
You're managing change, new products, launching, know, this like rapid cycle, if you will.
As you think about like leadership principles that you use to help your teams be moreadaptable, more innovative, or think about innovation, and even think about those
(20:36):
partners, agencies, and brands, what principles do you lean on in terms of like fosteringthe right environment?
Well, I learned most of my principles from my father.
So he was a car dealer.
I sat in his office as a kid in New York and I watched how he operated.
(20:56):
And a few things came out that I realized when I was older.
He had an open door policy.
He painted a picture that everyone in that building, whether you were the owner, his ownerwas a trust fund kid and he owned a lot of dealerships, occupied himself.
Or you with a kid that came in and washed the cars.
You were valuable to the operation and your ideas mattered.
(21:18):
Right.
So there was this collective vision of success for the dealership because he wantedcustomers to walk through the door of this little Honda dealership in late in New York and
feel welcome, empowered to get what they wanted and treat it well.
Right.
And it was everyone's job to do it and anyone can improve it.
(21:39):
And I watched that happen day after day after day.
So I entered.
a leadership position and I want to create one vision.
I want our people to be chasing the same thing with purpose.
I want my people to have the same message.
I want my people to understand their role is to solve customer problems and help acustomer reach their vision.
(22:00):
And they'll do whatever it takes together to get there.
And that requires you to do a few things.
you to have a growth mindset.
I don't care if you fail.
I love failure.
I love fabulous failure, but I want you to learn something from it and then teach thatlearning to someone else so it's not repeated.
Right.
I want us to ideate on solutions.
(22:20):
Right.
Listen, that means our number one skill is curiosity.
Ask, what are you trying to solve for?
Why are you trying to solve that?
What are your problems?
And then present a solution and all the things I have to help them do that.
Understand value.
Right.
So be a
uh a data scientist by understanding what makes value realized for a customer and be ableto showcase that to them.
(22:47):
Be a great storyteller.
Right?
So people understand stories better than data or lots of long slides.
Tell a story of how people should get from here to here using your tools and doing thosethings.
And then most importantly, don't be afraid to have a point of view, be a challenger.
And you empower all those things because you want people to be able to go to ourcustomers, explain the value of what we have, solve their business problem, and be
(23:13):
motivated to solve that first and foremost.
And that culture is known, it's celebrated, em and everyone knows when they walk throughthe doors in my building that they contribute to something greater than them.
And that powers innovation, it powers customer orientation, and it most importantlyempowers growth, personally and professionally.
(23:33):
Love it.
So that's it.
I love that.
Well, one of the things I like to do on the show is get to know you a little bit better.
know you've got three boys, play baseball.
But my favorite question to ask everyone that comes on is, has there been an experience ofyour past that defines or makes up who you are today?
(23:53):
Well, maybe a few.
So I think you learn the most when things don't go well.
I think that's the most important part.
And when companies go through tough times, everyone always maybe feels it personally.
So I always like to remember that you haven't always been on top.
When I meet people, like, oh, your life must be amazing.
You're the president of Google in the Americas.
(24:15):
You have this great job, this great family.
And life's been so easy.
And life's been easy to you and your view because
I've learned from all the things that maybe weren't so great.
And I learned that you can't ever take anything for granted because I've been laid off.
I've been in a startup world ah that was shut down for no reason other than it was thewrong market fit.
(24:38):
I've been laid off because the business didn't perform well because we weren't doing theright things.
So I've learned in that environment in those early 2000s that you can't take things forgranted and you must be the best at what you do every day.
And you do that by learning and being open to feedback.
about how to make the business better.
And that's been maybe at the worst times of your life.
The first time I got laid off, I was newly married in Raleigh, North Carolina with aone-year-old.
(25:04):
That's not comfortable.
But then you have to figure out how to rebuild yourself.
And that's a really important thing.
The next time is we talked about my dad and his impact on me was when he passed away fromcancer, I got to recant in my brain, because I had to write the UOG, all the lessons that
he taught me.
So I gave you some of them.
that I learned as a child, but I didn't remember them until I was maybe 43.
(25:28):
And I was reflecting on this man's life and what he meant to me and the lessons that hetaught to me.
And it started to really formulate my leadership principle, my personality about how Iwant to show up and work.
And I realized that you can't have a business Sean and a personal Sean.
There's just Sean.
So he has to show up, has his authentic self.
(25:49):
You have to treat people the way
at work, you treat them at home, you have to be a compromiser at work the way you are athome, you have to build relationships at work the way you do at home.
And I shouldn't be any different in my house at night than I am in the office or with mycustomers, because my job is to make people comfortable and know that they have a great
(26:09):
environment and be welcoming.
And when I learned that, I went from hard charging business executive, cared about thebottom line and growth to
hard charging business executive who cared about people and environment and culture and itproduced growth.
Right.
And that's just going through maybe some hard reflection period when you're watching yourmentor go through the tough time.
(26:33):
Right.
Right.
So this is little bit about me.
That's helpful.
If you were giving yourself that young self advice, advice would you give your youngerself?
Don't be afraid to be honest with yourself.
I think the hardest thing is when you come through with youthful bravado, which we allhave, uh you think you know.
(26:57):
And everyone has another level to reach if they're open to looking at it.
Everyone can be a better public speaker.
Everyone can be a better data analyst.
Everyone can be a better seller.
Everyone can be a better engineer.
But if you don't seek out your weaknesses,
and be open to them and accept them, you don't know what to work on.
(27:17):
No one gets any better by working on what they're great at.
They get better by working on what they're not so great at.
So when you recognize that and you can accept it, then you can embrace true growth andthen that you'll be better.
Is there a topic either you're trying to learn more about or you think marketers ingeneral need to be learning more about right now?
(27:41):
I think change management.
I'm go back to that.
It's the number one thing I think people are trying to learn how to change a culture.
And reflecting on a lot of my conversations, whether it was with CEOs this week or CMOs, alot of it was about how do I create this culture to reduce the fear of risk taking, which
(28:01):
is like a form of change management, right?
Because they see the opportunity.
Like if you walk down the beach here, it's really optimistic.
There's all this amazing technology, all these amazing ideas.
And all these executives here want to embrace it and alter the way their company works andtransform their company.
And the biggest challenge they have is how do I get my team and my company to embracethis?
(28:24):
So you just can't will it.
You have to think about really good change management strategies.
How do you set up different KPI structures?
How do you set up different celebration or recognition structures?
How do you showcase it?
And then how do you psychologically and emotionally move people to a different place?
(28:45):
And that's a lot.
So there's plenty of books on it.
There's plenty of podcasts.
There's plenty of experts.
There's probably a self-help course if you want to find it.
There's probably a YouTube podcast actually.
sure.
You can probably find it.
And I think that's a topic.
I'm a student of that.
I love that stuff.
I think I'm noticing here a lot of people are quickly becoming students of that.
What are you curious about out in the world could be a trend subculture something you'rejust into at the moment.
(29:11):
Yeah curious
I'm like trying to figure out the, how people find resonance with things.
Like what draws somebody like the psychological effects, because as I'm like trying totransform like this, our YouTube story to the marketplace, YouTube's actual power is its
authenticity and not of the platform.
(29:32):
So I'm fiscally authenticity of the creators on it who have drawn all these people, allthese fans to them.
because of their stories, because of how authentic they are.
And I'm really trying to understand like what's behind that, right?
Because that's the secret to like really great marketing.
(29:53):
It's a secret to really great leadership.
It's a secret to really great change management.
But how do you tap into that, the ethos of something or the resonance of something and getpeople to understand it, feel simplified about it and move them.
And it's probably like some deep philosophical thing or that will probably be written, abook written about it.
I'm like,
super interested in it.
I like every time I see a crater, I see a lot of them crawling up to my beach right now.
(30:18):
I have, that's what I asked them, like, what did you do?
And you find it's like trial and error.
Like, and it's just like, I'm just being myself.
I'm telling my story.
I'm, you know, I'm treating these people like my family.
like, you understand that everything becomes really human.
And, know, it's not lost to me.
I work for a company that is powered in AI, but I really think
Humanity is its greatest strength because humans power all these things if you could tapinto that Culture and what makes people resonate.
(30:45):
Yeah, great things happen.
So I'm really trying to suss with it So this is my conversation with everyone.
I'm trying to figure it out.
Yeah, maybe apply some of that myself
I think it's a great question.
It's a great question to be pondering.
uh And I love the notion you talk about, like the humanity is what draws us together.
Couldn't agree more.
My last question for you, what do you think is the largest either opportunity or threatfacing marketers today?
(31:08):
Well, I'm an optimist, so I don't like to work in threats.
I think the pace of ideas is the biggest opportunity.
A lot of people ask me about efficiencies or jobs and what can be taken away withtechnology.
And I'm always a person that believes that technology advances what you can do.
(31:30):
And guess what?
That's happened since the dawn of time.
You just even think about communication.
We didn't communicate.
We wrote on stones, we got some paper, we got a printing press, we got a radio, we got aTV, we got the internet.
Communication has always evolved and it advances what you can do and not do.
And the biggest opportunity is to understand what you can do ah and find yourself in thatvision.
(31:57):
Right.
Cause that's going to build like longstanding businesses and brands that last.
And if you don't do it, someone else does maybe to your threats.
You'll be left behind.
the penalty for complacency is a relevance, right?
And there's always the law of substitution.
If you can't do something, there's a substitution for you.
(32:20):
So it's really critical for brands to embrace the future, understand how to do it andbuild a plan.
And that has way more opportunity than downside because if they get it right, it's goingto be tremendous for them.
And I think a lot of them are walking out of Cannes feeling that and recognizing thatbecause so many of these things are real.
that weren't real a year ago.
And they see that if they get it right, it's huge.
(32:43):
Love it.
Sean, thank you for coming on the show.
My pleasure, it's great spending some time with you.
um
Views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent theviews, thoughts, and opinions of Deloitte.
The material and information presented here is for general information purposes only anddoes not imply endorsement or opposition to any specific company, product, or service.
(33:06):
Hi, it's Alan again.
Marketing Beyond is a Deloitte digital podcast.
It's created and produced by me with post-production support from Sam Robertson.
If you're new to Marketing Beyond, please feel free to write us a review and subscribe onyour favorite listening platform.
I also invite you to explore the other Deloitte digital podcast at deloitte digital dotcom slash us slash podcast and share the show with your friends and colleagues.
(33:34):
I love hearing from listeners.
You can contact me at marketing beyond at Deloitte dot com.
You'll also find complete show notes and links to what's discussed in the podcast today.
and you can search our archives.
I'm Ellen Hart and this is Marketing Beyond.
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