TOP CMO: Gene Foca, Getty Images

Gene Foca - Getty Images  0:00  

The future of marketing is increasingly moving into the notion that every department of the company touches Marketing.

Ben Kaplan  0:08  

Today on top CMO, we're chatting with Jean fokus, CMO of Getty Images, that's the multibillion dollar visual image company that helps media outlets, creatives. And corporations access more than 400 million pieces of visual content. Creativity is viral, great ideas packaged a certain way want to spread, they want to be told to someone else positioning, branding execution to spread your message, one across our brands to spread, it can be simple, surprising, and significant. This is top cmo with me, Ben Kaplan. This is the podcast where we go around the globe to interview marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, fastest growing companies and most disruptive startups. Today on top CMO, we're chatting with Jean phoca, CMO of Getty Images. Jeanne, great to have you. And I'd love to kind of start out like I think many, you know, CMOs come from different backgrounds, right? Some come from a real like sense of brand, others come up from more of a creative discipline. So talk about maybe your background and the perspective that gives you in your role as CMO.

Gene Foca - Getty Images  1:15  

Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Ben, I really appreciate it. So I have a bit of an unusual background for a CMO, I started my career as a public accountant for Price Waterhouse. And I actually think it's a phenomenal background. For a CMO, particularly in today's world, where marketing as a discipline that crosses a variety of departments, in most medium to large sized companies is more analytically driven probably than ever before. And the discipline of marketing, you know, how you get ROI on your marketing investment, and how you attribute that investment is more analytical than ever before. And so the the accounting background has always served me very, very well. And after business school, I kind of grew through the ranks that time incorporated in Time Warner, which was always with American Express one of the companies where you could really build performance marketing, chops, and really learn the basics of analytical marketing and how that ties to brand marketing and really building a brand from the ground up.

Ben Kaplan  2:28  

Okay, so you came from this analytical background, I guess it doesn't get much more analytical maybe than an accountant. And what brought you over to this alternate track? We came with you were at a media company, you were at Time Warner, what sort of made the shift? Was that business school? Or was that something else that caused you to shift out?

Gene Foca - Getty Images  2:48  

No, I was always interested in general management and marketing, from my point of view, is simply the discipline of improving the customer journey, removing friction from the customer experience and maximizing every touchpoint you have with your customer, so that you're serving them as well as you possibly can. And more so than ever before that discipline crosses not just a marketing department. But usually it involves product that involves obviously, sales in it might involve other departments of an organization as well, depending on how a company is structured. So I was always interested in general management. And I was always interested in viewing the business model through the eyes of the customer. And I just felt that marketing was the best place to do that.

Ben Kaplan  3:34  

What's an example of something where you have an approach to how you look at a marketing problem, how you find insights, or analyze it that's that you think, you know, stems from your different sort of background that you think other people would miss or other people just wouldn't see. Or other people wouldn't speak the language that you can speak to communicate with other departments in the company?

Gene Foca - Getty Images  3:57  

Well, I think often, some people within our company view marketing more as a campaign or, or a slogan. And that's an aspect of what is done in marketing and complements, how we might build our brand and our value proposition. But I always start with the business model, every business has its own unique business model. And I like to say that the business model dictates the marketing plan, not the other way around. And so I look at the customer journey and marketing through the lens of the business model, and how you can maximize your resource and cut across silos within a company to actually serve the customer well, and build that marketing plan upward based on your business model. So I don't start as an example, bandwidth preconceived notions of how to build that brand value proposition. I start really with how does the business model operate and how can I And my team within that business model, really function to maximize marketing on behalf of the customer?

Ben Kaplan  5:07  

Well, that's a good segue to the actual business model, which is, you know, as part of the company, there's Getty Images, there's also I stock, there's different segments of the market. Let me first of all, just explain what is the difference between Getty Images and I stock and then what is the difference in the target customer as you start building the customer lifecycle with each of those brands?

Gene Foca - Getty Images  5:28  

Sure. So we we serve at Getty Images, Inc, the entire creative economy. And actually, most recently, we've added Unsplash, to our stable as well. So if you think about visual content needs, whether they be for marketing, for media, any use at all, no matter the size of the company, we've got three different business models that serve that entire creative community. So starting with Unsplash. Unsplash, is one of the largest free visual content sites in the world, it helps us reach and serve the long tail of the creative economy. I stock is our E commerce business model targeted at global small businesses and small enterprises and freelancers. And the idea behind high stock is that we want to have a depth and breadth of high quality visual content, from videos to vectors to images that can serve businesses that principally want to do their business and get their needs served through ecommerce with as little friction as possible. They have certain rights and protections and things that they require out of the business model. And I stock serves the SMB, and SME marketplace very, very well. And then as you move up the value chain, Getty Images is our premium quality offering that serves the largest global enterprises. And those those visual content packages, often in the form of subscription programs are basically a visual content as service model, then you have personalized registration, you get access to the content, whether it be video vectors, imagery, obviously, you get access to tools, and information all served through the cloud. And basically, that model is designed as our premium model. And we also offer custom content solutions, through Getty Images as well, where we can create in a variety of ways custom visual content for, you know, a multitude of needs.

Ben Kaplan  7:36  

So, so and across those as you start thinking about the customer target, and each of those, you know, what's an example of a marketing in either strategy or channel or activation that like that you would, you know, always do you would never do on high stock, but you would totally do on Getty Images, or or vice versa, or Unsplash. Like, how do you sort of how do you think about marketing differently? And how do you keep them distinct?

Gene Foca - Getty Images  8:03  

A really perfect example of what we do Ben is I stock is really our new business engine. When you think about the growth around the global economy. It centers around small businesses. And so we use you know, a team of digital marketers that are set up into regional teams, Americas, EMEA and APAC to do end to end digital marketing and worked very closely with our SEO team on paid search campaigns paid social campaigns, retargeting, and programmatic, all designed to bring in new customers into our business, on an ROI basis. And then typically, what we do is, as we renew those customers and get them into whether it be credit packs, or small subscription programs, we segment them into nurture campaigns and cohorts where we try to move them up the funnel, and a percentage of those customers will ultimately grow to have different and bigger needs. And we use a data science team on on my team that does predictive modeling, to help us identify who in those different cohorts is capable of moving up into a larger package of visual content and we deliver those leads through Salesforce to our global sales team. Now, when you look at Getty Images, and how we mark it, we're going to do a variety of things. Because we have, you know, frankly, a lot of expertise within Getty Images. We have a fantastic internal creative team, who are experts in in how to help you select visual content for your needs. And we have a really excellent research team who can help identify content for a customer's needs. We have the ability, as I said, to create custom content and as well, and so a lot of What we do at the Getty Images level has to do with global partnerships to help provide information and deep insight for large global customers as to how they can appropriately use visual content. So a perfect example of what we might do at the Getty Images level is our new webinar series called the download, where we pull together our visual experts, our creative experts, our data scientists, and we provide insights into how to select Find and use visual content in a way that will benefit those enterprises. And, you know, we extend that into almost every facet of what we do at Getty Images. So for instance, you know, our partnership with GLAAD where we've created visual guidelines for the LGBTQ plus community and how to represent the chan transgender community appropriately, is an example of the type of thing that we would do under the Getty Images, global umbrella, or our HBCU grants. And so what we try to do is work with organizations that support our value proposition and our goals under getty images on a global basis, to help get our knowledge about our visual expertise out into the world.

Ben Kaplan  11:21  

So here's the Getty way, use digital marketing tactics at your lowest customer tier, and bring them into the fold, then identify those customers with the biggest growth potential and deploy an enterprise sales and marketing strategy to size up the relationship. But I want to know, can data be deployed to make this entire marketing ecosystem work more efficiently?

Gene Foca - Getty Images  11:43  

All of the marketing that we do when we bring in new customers is done on an ROI basis. So we're always measuring our cost per acquisition or our customer acquisition cost. And we're looking at customer lifetime value over a one year, two year and three year period, typically, to make sure that the marketing and the channels that we're executing on a country level are meeting our ROI requirements. And, you know, we're constantly looking for return, because a lot of the marketing that we do is a combination of performance, marketing, and brand marketing, we're obviously always trying to build our brand, and support our value proposition. But we also want to make sure when we're putting investment behind new customers, that it's ROI driven. And that use of data actually extends into a lot of other areas of the company. So for instance, my data science team has built the jester, the Getty Images search trends tool, and it's a tool that allows us to cut and slice search trend data across the globe, on a country level, by industry segments, to identify trends and how content is being used, and what content might be used downstream. And we're combining that internal use of data with external research through our visual GPS program. So that throughout the year, we can provide customers with data driven insights. And we can provide industry segments on a regional basis around the globe with data driven insights into how visual content is being used, and what the trends are, and where visual content is going.

Ben Kaplan  13:28  

I see and use that data science, is it in, you know, to fuel your webinar series, and you're going to have insights. And you're going to talk about, you know, the latest and trends in sort of the dissemination of for instance, content during the pandemic and how it's being used? Or are you also using that data to other parts of the country? Like inform the product? What are people searching for? What do they need? What What should we market to for people searching for images of? I don't know, the latest billionaire to go in space or whatever? Oh, absolutely.

Gene Foca - Getty Images  13:58  

I mean, we're doing both really, I mean, a good example, Ben of, of how we're using data and information on the product side is the use of video. In marketing campaigns on websites, through mobile, all the different channels has obviously accelerated during the pandemic. And so making sure that our customers are aware of our video offering, for instance, we have a video editor product feature that we launched on ice dock, so that our small business customers can do video editing on site is a perfect example of using data and information to support customer needs through new product features.

Ben Kaplan  14:40  

Okay, sure. And we talked about the pandemic we touched upon a little bit, but how did you approach as an organization, the pandemic, I mean, on one hand, it sounds like you have a lot of digital content, digital assets, pandemic, really sort of amplifying the use of digital and reaching people. On the other hand, you know your plot Weighing in a lot of markets around the world, maybe budgets for spending on things like creative assets or photos, if people are tightening belts and cutting marketing departments that might be one, they might consider cutting. So how did you view that overall, both through the lens of it sounds like performing smarketing lens for eye stock, and then more of the sort of enterprise brand, you know, approach for Getty Images.

Gene Foca - Getty Images  15:25  

Sure, well, the interesting thing then, and and if you think about our business and the scale of it, it probably makes sense to you. The main part of our business that's been impacted during the pandemic, is the editorial business and principally through the form of entertainment imagery, where we tend to have a lot of, you know, exclusive and valuable content and sporting events globally. So when you think about the world of sport, we have relationships, whether it be with the Olympics, or with wava, for soccer in Europe, that are highly valuable relationships. And to the extent that during the pandemic, obviously, the world was shut down for a while, there were pieces of our business, where we've just weren't able to provide the current content for events that were not happening. However, the rest of our business, we found that visual content was in high demand. And we saw, in some respects, an acceleration, particularly in growth markets for us, whether that be in Latin America, Eastern Europe, or Southeast Asia. And we found the ability to accelerate our marketing push in many of those markets to grow. And one of the ways that we've tried to do that over the past several years, and reach different target audiences is through relationships. So a perfect example of that is our relationship with Canva. Based in in Australia, Canva, you know, reaches the creative community globally as well. And they and they target a lot of small businesses and small enterprises. And, and we offer our content through Canva. And there's the ability when you're on their free visual content sites to also get access to high stock content as well. And so through a relationship such as that we've been able to accelerate our growth with small businesses and small enterprises globally. And we found that that accelerated throughout the pandemic year so

Ben Kaplan  17:31  

I see you and and have you noticed other since you're on the front lines of like trends and content and what people were doing, how have you seen that change over time? Well, across the pandemic, what do you mean, you mentioned video content, the importance of video? What is the trend sort of beginning to like, you know, now where we are emerging from the pandemic, hopefully? What are those content trends would have was changed?

Gene Foca - Getty Images  17:56  

Well, look, I mean, obviously, we've lived through a year and a half, almost two years now of global turmoil, as you and I have never seen before, right. And it's not just the pandemic, but it's other issues in the world. And certainly Black Lives Matter and the awareness that we have around inclusivity, representation, wellness, technology, sustainability, realness. These are all forces that we've identified through our visual GPS research. And there's no doubt that over the past two years, a trend that has accelerated is the idea of represent representation through visual content that's appropriate and reflects the world as it really is. And being more sensitive to appropriate representation and accompanies marketing with their visual content isn't, without a doubt, an accelerating trend, and one where we're trying to help get information to our customers or our clients so that they can really select their imagery appropriately. And I would say another trend that's accelerated over the past two years is just how sustainability gets represented, you know, as, as a really basic example, 10 and 15 years ago, it was very common to see sort of, you know, the stereotypical imagery of the polar bear on the melting glacier. And now, the trend is obviously to depict sustainability, in more of its real form as part of everyday life. Whether it's through business interactions, or your own personal interactions, and so, those four forces, you know, realness, sustainability, technology and wellness reflect a lot of where we see visual trends currently.

Ben Kaplan  19:49  

And in how many countries are you either available in or are you target in terms of your marketing, like how global is Getty Images?

Gene Foca - Getty Images  20:00  

Our content is available in over 65 countries around the world, Ben. And we, we have a presence in over 20 countries around the world physically. And so, you know, an interesting thing for our company is that we were very accustomed to working as a distributed workforce on zoom with each other and with our customers, prior to the pandemic. And so we are a highly global company. And I have obviously worked for large global companies previously, but at Getty, we are constantly, literally on a daily basis talking about issues in Australia, Japan, South America, just as likely as we are to be talking about issues that relate to North America. And so we're really a highly global organization that that reach customers throughout the world,

Ben Kaplan  20:51  

and how I'm interested about your kind of sense of how the power of photos and in shaping sounds like context or understanding around an issue. I mean, to kind of paraphrase what you said, you know, If a picture is worth 1000 words, there's great responsibility in the picture that you choose. And you talk about in the context of, you know, maybe ethnic or cultural or socio cultural events, like Black Lives Matter, you're talking about in terms of sustainability. How does that How do you see that perception change differing between countries? How is it you you're working in 65? Countries? Plus, you just got team members and 20 countries that all have different perspectives to has that lens? Is it different in different countries in which you you work?

Gene Foca - Getty Images  21:36  

Well, there's no doubt look, you know, our, our, our mission as a company is to move the world and you can't possibly move the world with video imagery and illustrations, if you're treating every single country and, and your target audience in those countries as all the same, there's obviously over overlapping issues that apply globally, the you know, the broad issue of sustainability obviously applies, but But Black Lives Matter as an example is an issue that resonates in in many countries in the globe. But perhaps, as a as an issue of inclusivity. And diversity resonates in different ways. In Asia, and Southeast Asia, where, you know, other populations within those countries might be the pop populations, which need more focus and better representation, etc. So these movements, and these issues apply globally, but they can apply in different ways, depending on the country, and the region of the globe. And we have to be sensitive to those issues and make sure that were helping to represent appropriately. And, frankly, that we're able to discuss the issues appropriately.

Ben Kaplan  22:51  

Sure. And, and how you, you know, coming from performance marketing background, and just let me a couple other points. I mean, you know, you had a number of positions at Amazon, also, you know, kind of a fast growing startup like Fresh Direct, you have this performance marketing background, how do you tackle issues like diversity inclusion, where it's maybe important work, but harder to measure the ROI for the company, if you're like, you know, I'm a performance marketer. And I've got to measure, I got to make sure this is revenue positive. So how do you balance sort of marketing in more of a traditional like branding kind of way and brand alignment way? With? You know, you're a trained accountant, you got hard numbers, you got to make sure this pencils out, how do you how do you make those two match?

Gene Foca - Getty Images  23:41  

Well, I believe those two have a very natural match. And that's, and that's the beauty of attempting to support the idea of moving the world, because the reality will meet your financial goals. Think about it this way, Ben. We do things certainly at Getty. And by the way, this was true at Amazon, certainly, and at fresh, direct and other places I've been, because they're the right things to do. But we also do them because they're smart business. Our partnership with GLAAD and our desire to represent appropriately, the LGBTQ plus community, the transgender community is not just because it's the right thing to do. But doing the right thing is actually also good for business. These are large, important communities in our world. And we have to learn to speak to these communities appropriately and represent appropriately and to make sure that our product offering is serving different communities as well as they possibly can. And when we do those things, we will have great return on investment. If we start with a customer and work backwards from their needs, we will always have good ROI over the long term and I think that we do that very, very well at getting him in is an Amazon is is certainly very well known for doing that. And fresh directed that very well in its own way along the I 95 Corridor serving serving families through their digital grocery operation.

Ben Kaplan  25:13  

Simply put, if your principal business is to visually represent people and places and things, you better be sensitive to how those representations affect your key stakeholders and the broader cultural conversation. But what about the culture within the walls of Getty Images? How do you build a high performing global team during a pandemic,

Gene Foca - Getty Images  25:34  

I hire very carefully, I tried to instill in my team, that it's their responsibility to fill important roles in their in their team, it's not the people organization's role, it's their responsibility to fill important roles. And when you hire talent well and carefully and you develop talent well and carefully, you have the ability to lean on a team of people to fill in knowledge gaps that perhaps you don't have. And so if I have strengths, I would say that there in the area of hiring and developing the best. And I would say that I ask good, specific and probing questions to get at the heart of what an issue is. And I hold my team to high standards. And as a result, they hold me to highest standards as well. So we keep each other in check, because I'm not perfect. None of us are. And we have to be surrounded by really good and capable and thoughtful people in order to execute the way that we need to. But I believe that executing great business plans and great marketing plans, starts fundamentally, with having the right organizational construct in place, and hiring talent that has the behaviors and the functional expertise that you need, and is willing to be a part of your culture, and work within the guidelines of your leadership principles. And when all of that is working together. That's when your marketing plans really sing. And that's when you're really supporting your business model, because you're serving your customer. So I would say that my superpowers are in the areas of hiring and developing the best, you know, and, and really asking probing questions and requiring a certain amount of rigor and data to support our decisions so that we're not making a motion based decisions, but we're making decisions based on quality information as much information and data that we have. Well, and

Ben Kaplan  27:33  

do you have other ways that if part of your your strengths are, you know, I like to call them superpowers, you're a little bit more modest, but I think it's a superpower is like getting a team, you know, getting the right team in place and getting them moving in the right direction. What are some of the decisions you made that helped align the team better getting the marching in the right direction, just as much as there's high performing companies that do very well. There's also companies that are comprised of really good and talented people that can't ever marched in the same direction that never get aligned? Is there anything that you can point to that helped you achieve better alignment from the team, because when you're a big enough organization, you're not going to accomplish this on your own, you're only successful Jean, the CMO, you can get a whole lot of other people to be successful, too.

Gene Foca - Getty Images  28:22  

Yeah, there's no doubt. Look, I find the recipe for these things, there's there's a lot of overlap. As I indicated across quality organizations, it starts with having alignment, quite frankly, been at the management level. And so, you know, at the C suite level, and across that team, you have to be aligned each year. And also as a culture as to what the core drivers are and what's important to you as an organization. And what the goals are that you're going to focus on and what you're going to exclude because what you're going to exclude, it's just as important as what you're going to, you're going to focus on as an organization, if you don't have that alignment. At the C suite and management level, it's very, very difficult to drive alignment, even within your teams, because then you're working within silos, you're not using resource across department to the best end of the company's goals. And so it absolutely starts with alignment at the suite C suite management level. And then within your team, um, just as you have to do across departments within an organization, you have to do things to break down the walls and be more inclusive, not just within your team, but of other teams. So in your go to market strategy sessions. You have to make sure that right from the beginning, you're including representation from technology from product sales, legal, right, because when you include that representation, you think about a greater canvas of ideas and issues that you should address right from the beginning so that your team is not back to rocking, right? And so that kind of alignment across departments makes it very easy within your team to align on what the key measures are for success, your key KPIs, what you're going to do and what you're not going to do, right. So that alignment, and that focus on goals and core drivers ladders, right down from the leadership level, right into each one of the departments. And so that's kind of structurally, the approach that we certainly tried to take at the organization I tried to take and then within within our department, we try to do things to break down or break down walls, right, we we have a process that we call PPCC. Er, I mean, without going into all of the details of it, I'll simply say that the way we run meetings together, we try to be respectful of each other, give each other opportunity to speak as leaders, we try to wait and let our staff share their opinions. First, we have a culture within our organization where people are free to share what's on their mind without retaliation or fear of repercussion. And we believe that and we live that we raise our hands when we want to speak, we try very hard not to interrupt each other and let each other really express themselves. We're not perfect people. We don't do it well, all the time. But we we really live these ideas and these principles. And when you do those things as leaders, and you show your team that you mean what you say, you earn trust, and you earn respect, and the collaboration comes more easily. And so those are some of the things we try to do culturally. And then when it comes to business plans, I like to say that you need proof of life. And you need to show your team. Sometimes when you create a vision for them of where you want them to go, you have to show them what's possible by digging in with them, and giving them real examples of success, so that they can follow those examples of success.

Ben Kaplan  32:02  

If getting alignment throughout the organization is critical to success. I want to know about how jeans time and Amazon, one of those Bellwether tech companies that is famous for its unique culture, influence his approach to managing teams.

Gene Foca - Getty Images  32:17  

Well, my Amazon experience was was phenomenal. I was there for just short of five years. And I worked with super high quality people in every department at every level with some of the best leaders that I've ever worked for. And when you work at Amazon, you develop or reinforce, because you likely already came to the organization with many of the attributes. Real, it's a real data driven culture, certainly, but it's a it's a highly collaborative culture. And it's a culture that lives by its leadership principles. And Getty Images. And Amazon actually share that Getty Images is the other organization that I've worked at where we live, our daily work lives together through the lens of a series of leadership principles that aren't just words on the page, we evaluate each other on those leadership principles, and we hold each other accountable for those leadership principles, just as the professionals at Amazon do theirs. Amazon obviously has a very rigorous culture around document writing to support decision making. And I really learned the value of that at Amazon. And it reinforced actually how much time you save. When as a team, you put a lot of rigor into writing a well constructed, well supported document to support an idea, because the more time you spend on that document, the more you've refined that argument, so much so cleanly so succinctly that when you get to the meeting with all of the decision makers, you find that you tend to have all of the information that you need there. And so that was really a process that became ingrained in me as a result of the good leaders I worked for and the great teammates that I had. And I brought it with me to Getty Images. And so I immediately in my marketing and communications department instituted a document writing process for our decision making Ben right from the beginning of my tenure at Getty Images. And I did that for a couple of reasons. One, I wanted to see and evaluate the quality of the professionals on my team and felt pretty strongly that if they could articulate their arguments through a well written document, and they could support those arguments, I could I could get insight into how much they knew how functionally expert they were and what their behaviors were like. And so it helped me evaluate the team and very quickly evaluate the structure of the team. But I also believe strongly from my prior experience at Amazon that it would lead us to make better decisions and I You know, I shared those, those documents with with our then CFO who's now our CEO at the time. And we now for for that reason, as well as other reasons that the CEO had have a corporate document writing process. That's part of our culture, and part of how we make decisions across our company at Getty Images. So, you know, a lot of what I learned at Amazon has certainly been reinforced and the value of those things I brought with me. But frankly, Ben, I find that well functioning high quality organizations with people who care about each other, and people who want to do great work, all have some similarities. And I think I wouldn't describe it so much as having a type A culture. As much as I would say that Amazon and Getty Images and other high quality companies that we both are aware of have cultures where people really care about their work. They own their work, they do really deep dives, and try to make sure that the work they do on behalf of customers, is the absolute highest quality that it can be in a Getty Images, we certainly feel and live all of those things.

Ben Kaplan  36:15  

Where do you see this all heading both like your industry, like, you know, a major Content Creator and Provider, and also the field of marketing as a whole?

Gene Foca - Getty Images  36:23  

Sure. So first of all, we have, you know, work life flexibility guidelines that we've put in place, we are decidedly moving forward as a hybrid work culture, Ben. And so we made the decision with great detail that's been rolled out to our staff, that going forward, we are not going to force our professional staff to be back in the offices full time, we're a highly distributed culture, and we've had great success under very difficult circumstances, working from home. And so all of our professional staff, with the exception of a small few job functions where there are very specific needs, obviously, as all businesses have, but the vast majority of our precious professional staff will have the opportunity to work up to 100% from home, should they choose with their manager and come to and from the office with their teams, as they see fit. We trust our, our teams, and we trust our professionals to do the work because they have and they've done it expertly and excellently. And that will not change, we will maintain a flexible attitude and approach going forward. We believe it's best for our business, we believe it's best for our customers, and we believe it's best for our professional staff. Without a doubt. In our industry, I see I am very optimistic and bullish about the opportunities for Getty Images, we're applying more innovation, and we're serving more customers in better ways than we ever have before. And that will only continue and accelerate with our acquisition of Unsplash. And I see us as being the largest, most innovative and most important visual content company in the world in five years, I think there's little doubt that we are that to a very large extent today. And I think there's little doubt that we're going to be that in even bigger ways within five years. And I would say from a marketing standpoint, then from my point of view, the now and future of marketing is not as a department, marketing is not a department, it's it's the function of serving your customer, well, removing friction from the purchase experience for that customer in any way that you possibly can that serves the customer well. And it's the discipline of building your value proposition and supporting and building your brand through every function of the company. And so what I would say is the future of marketing is increasingly moving into the notion that every department of the company touches marketing, and it's the marketing leaders role, along with the other C suite leaders to give those departments guidelines on how to build that value proposition for customers within the context of their function, and to tie those elements together so that you're supporting the value proposition well, so it's marketing as a corporate mission across multiple departments. And I think increasingly CMOS VPs of marketing and big companies, as VPs of marketing are going to have to have multidisciplinary skills. They're going to have to have product skills, product management, certainly product marketing skills as a requirement, and more so than ever before. They're going to have to be comfortable owning through collaboration, owning through matrix environments, and working well and collaboratively with To others, if you cannot do that now, and in the future, you cannot possibly be a CMO. If you view marketing through the lens of I'm the CMO, I get to make the marketing decisions for our company with my department, you are not a CMO who will function well or last long.

Ben Kaplan  40:20  

Well said, final question for you. Are there other CMOS that that you admire? And absolutely, yeah. And what do you think are the the core qualities that makes a truly great cmo from just a good one?

Gene Foca - Getty Images  40:43  

Well, there's, there's a lot of CMOS I admire. And by the way, they don't have to be CMOs and title. There are a lot of directors of marketing marketing managers and leaders within marketing, that I admire very much for how they handle their business and how they work with others and treat their teams and their staffs. I think as an absolute necessity, key qualities for any marketing leader, start foundationally with integrity, and being direct and honest with your team and your staff. And, and really being consistent with your with your decision making and how you apply those decisions. So that your team and your colleagues are not shocked by how you might address or handle an issue. But that they are fundamentally can see where you're coming from and almost know where you're going before an issue arises. Because you've been consistent but without honesty and integrity, as a marketing leader, any leader for that matter, but certainly as a marketing leader, you're nowhere those things are foundational for being a good cmo and being a good marketing leader, you know, at any level.

Ben Kaplan  42:06  

There you have it. For Getty Images, a photo isn't just a photo. And for CMO, Jean phoca is the connection between getting business models, team alignment, and global relationships, plus the inherent power of a visual image, provide context and shape perspective. That makes all the difference. Until the next time, this is taught cmo

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