Explore every episode of the podcast Marketers & Money

Two weeks ago Tariq Hassan landed at Wendy’s fired up with a newly minted remit from the CEO as the chief marketing and customer growth officer. Two months earlier Hassan was on stage at the Cannes Lions with an ambitious manifesto of sorts for marketing, marketers and as it turns out, a wobbly $12bn business called Wendy’s. Joined by WARC's Chief Content Officer David Tiltman, they outline a roadmap through the contentious marketing efficiency versus effectiveness debate, avoiding the efficiency trap and Hassan's plans at Wendy's.

One platform mapped to customer - and some quick promotional wins.

WARC's David Tiltman on the 'efficiency trap' marketers are walking into.

Brand vs performance crimps growth; Fortune 500's platform disconnect

JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon told Fox Business in May that Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was “full of shit” - rare public praise from a banker. But to survive an earlier crypto market meltdown, which slashed 90% off Coinbase’s stock price, Armstrong gave his marketing team carte blanche to go after the legacy financial system and banks as lucrative instruments of the elite. They did. It worked. M&M spoke to CMO Cat Ferdon and VP of Brand, Gareth Kay on survival fighting out of a crypto winter, only to discover another.

After the collapse of FTX, everything crypto turned “toxic”, per Coinbase CMO Cat Ferdon.  “We could not explain our way out of this …. The loudest voices were saying ‘crypto is dead’.” So Coinbase ditched defense for offense and took aim at “the bigger enemy," says Ferdon. "Not another brand, not a competitor, but a system that people were trapped inside, even though thay hated it – and that shift really changed everything for us.”

JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon told Fox Business that Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong was “full of shit” over the crypto CLARITY Act. Why is such a senior banker so cranky? Coinbase’s VP of Brand Gareth Kay reads it as “no more than a sign of traction of crypto as a true alternative to a [financial] system that they have benefitted from for a very long time … My sense is we’re on to something, and I take it as a sign that he’s feeling that maybe his toes are being stepped on slightly.” But the future of the financial system – whether it stays the same or potentially becomes very different – now appears to hang on the CLARITY Act. Per Kay “It’s a huge point of inflection”. 

Big banks are testing tokenised securities and payments settlement via private block chains. If they keep settlement inside their walls, does Coinbase get walled out? CMO Cat Ferdon thinks otherwise. “In the history of software, open always beats closed and we think having public open infrastructure will always be the thing that wins in the marketplace versus private and closed,” she says. “Coinbase as a service is actually powering a lot of programs of the traditional banks, governments and fintechs, we are partnering with them on a lot of this stuff …. The more people working together to get everyone on-chain, we are super stoked about that.”

The go-to private eye for US CMOs Michael Kassan says those in the global “top 25” are pushing ahead with plans to in-house bigger swathes of their media planning, buying and production – agentics are serving as the new catalyst.

3CV chief Michael Kassan sees a slew of top marketing organisations across categories harnessing AI to take media planning and “agentic buying” in-house – and ultimately production. Media, he suggests, will happen “within a year … I know there are marketers that would sit in the top 25 globally, that are making moves of that sort”. 

The explosion of retail and commerce media means circa 30 per cent of CMOs are now also salespeople. As a result, they must “ask for the order” and “sell mano a mano”, per Kassan. “They are both buyers and sellers.” But he reckons that should always have been the case. “The job of a chief marketing officer is always to be selling.”

3CV pulled few punches when warning marketers to tread extremely carefully before signing up to holdco AI platform models in a recent report, describing them as wrapped in language so similarly vague to be virtually indistinguishable. “Be wary. Make sure you force it to be proven,” per Kassan. He urges marketers to make use of malus clauses and to “be careful of price promises … because I think at the beginning there's not going to be savings the way people think.”