What Scares Me … Industry Leaders Reveal Their Worst Fears
- Kristi Argyilan – SVP, Marketing, Target
What scares me more than anything is if 2019 is not the year we move forward on the ways we do things in the industry. There’s a lot of hyperbole and we should be kicking into action. Instead of just talking, we should be truly evaluating the quality of the data that we are working with.
- Jill Baskin – CMO, The Hershey Co.
The rise of programmatic media and the level of personalization it takes to deliver the message. What will be the rising value of personalization in the future?
- Jeff Charney – CMO, Progressive
People aren’t taking the risks they should be—they’re frozen. It scares me because for a profession, I feel like we should be more bold. We should look for new opportunities—not a bet-the-farm risk, but increased risk. The profession is becoming more risk-averse and people are paralyzed by the analysis of it.
- Jason Levine – North America CMO, Mondelez International
As I’m trying to keep on top of the latest trends, the latest tools, the latest technologies, I’m constantly worried about chasing the shiny new penny down a rabbit hole and being Alice in Wonderland. There’s so much change happening in the industry, I want to make sure that we take our time to do the right thing.
- Marc Speichert – Global Chief Digital Officer, GSK
The whole area of fragmentation and everybody pitching you some set of solutions because they’re seeing all these challenges and opportunities. How do you curate your external ecosystem in a smart way so that you’re not getting advised the wrong way or with a biased point of view, or getting a duplication of efforts?
- Dan Sanborn – SVP, Culture & Partnerships, Diageo
What scares me is that I think the marketing world could truly be in danger of running out of manufactured jargon to use in boardrooms. After beating the death out of buzz marketing, social influence, purpose marketing, social diffusion, cultural traction, branded entertainment, what’s left for a desperate marketer to turn to sell their ideas? How can our ideas be considered without some fancy nomenclature to help land them? Will we be forced to actually come up with great ideas and rely on their merits as opposed to the words we use to spin them?
Source: What Scares Me Right Now… (2018, October 22). AdAge.
Editor’s Note: Quick takes on a panoply of topics from industry leaders – Part 2, Brands (more in the following issues).