The CMO as a Strategic Thought Partner | Chris Milone, A Place For Mom

Speaker A: You have to be a thought partner to the CEO. When you're on the leadership team, you show up as a CEO and operate that way. By the way, it's not just about executives. I tell the same thing to my direct reports and marketing. You're on this team to tell me how to do my job better. If I'm not hearing from you that we did something wrong, you don't agree with how we're doing something, you think we should change something, I probably have the wrong person on the team.

Speaker B: Welcome to Building Better cmos, a podcast about how marketers can get smarter and stronger. I'm Greg Stewart, the CEO of the nonprofit Marketing and Media Alliance. Now, uh, that voice you heard at the top is Chris Malone, the CMO of A Place for mom, which helps families find assisted living, memory care, home care, and other senior care options. Now, before joining A Place for um mom in early 2026, Chris worked at Barclays, Shop Runner, Best Egg, and more. Today on the podcast, Chris and I are going to talk about working with a CEO who used to be a cmo. Why AI makes everyone think they're an expert, and how to focus on what your customer wants and what the business needs. Now, uh, this podcast is all about the challenges marketers face and unlocking the true power that marketing can have. Chris is going to tell us how he did that right after this. Chris Malone, welcome to building better CMOs today.

Speaker A: Thanks, Greg. I'm happy to be here.

Speaker B: I'm really excited to have you because there's only one other CMO I know who has served five times cmo, and this is your fourth CMO gig.

Speaker A: Yeah. I've honestly been very blessed to have four gigs. Uh, I hope this isn't the last one. To be honest. I hope I get to that five or six, and maybe I can come back as the record holder. But it's been a great ride for me and certainly wasn't a ride I expected to go on at the beginning of my career.

Speaker B: No, I saw that. Yeah. You're going to be like, what is on Saturday Night Live? If you have five. If you're. If you're a host five times, they give you a special jacket or something. I don't know, special status. Something like. Something like that. I don't know. That has nothing to do with anything. First off, let's introduce the company because maybe people don't know. So I happen to know because I know your CEO, because she was on the board here when she was head of marketing over at amex. So Tatiana Was there. What is a Place for Mom? Um, tell the listener just so they know the business.

Speaker A: A Place for mom, um, is the leading marketplace where caregivers can find senior care, either senior living or home care. We partner with 15,000 senior care providers on that side of the network, and we interact with millions of consumers who are really looking for support around critical decisions. As typically, our customer is, you know, a child of some parents who aren't doing as well as they once were, and they need to turn somewhere for advice. And we have been in that business for over 20 years now. And so we do, in my mind, a great job helping folks find what they need. It's a category where people don't plan as much as they should. Yeah, right. So I think if you have children, you start planning for college as soon

Speaker B: as they're born, but nobody plans for

Speaker A: this senior care needs. They really kind of come up last second on you or can catch you unprepared.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. No, I just went through it with my, uh, it's been four or five years now, but went through it with my wife and her parents and having to sort of manage that whole process. Yeah, it's a very. It's a very tough time. Uh, it creates a lot of stress in the family, I think, amongst the siblings that are there. Creates a lot of stress in those who have to move into a new place. I mean. Yeah, it's a very. You're right. We don't really talk about it in America that much, do we?

Speaker A: We don't. And I can just tell you we talk to a lot of caregivers. Uh, 75% of them report high stress, anxiety. It's a tough thing to go through. Part of what I really want to do in my role is drive the conversation, the preparedness conversation, a bit more into the ecosystem. The demographics are really strong in this industry. It is. It's growing. There are 63 million caregivers right now. That's up 45% in the last 10 years. Oh, wow. So it's. It's a population of people. You know, obviously the baby boomer generation is aging. I don't feel like a lot of people are ready for it. And it's. It's, um, a fragmented industry. And so I think one of the great things about A Place for mom is we're a market leader and we have enough marketing budget. We can really drive some of these conversations. But other players, they just. They're focused on what they should be focused on, which is taking care of grandparents, mom and dad, you know, the loved ones, we need them to.

Speaker B: No, and by the way, I think the funny thing about the whole thing is that Keith, uh, Richards, I think put it best. He says nobody wants to die young, nobody wants to grow old.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker B: I think those are your two choices, everybody. Especially funny for him to have said that. I think at some level, I was

Speaker A: going to say, I think he tried. I think he tried to die young. I don't know.

Speaker B: He seems to have accomplished one and tried for another. I don't know. That's a whole nother. Well, that's not for this. So, Chris, let's go back. So, uh, listen, there's a couple good conversations here. We said. One is the fact that this is the fourth time you've done it. So I'd love to talk to you about what it did to go. But also too, there's a quirk to yours, which is that you're working for, I mean, the former cmo, Tatiana became CEO. So you have a CMO who's a CEO boss. So I mean, that's kind of unusual. Okay, so let's talk about sort of, um, what's your playbook, Chris? Like if you were to advise a new CMO coming into the job or new senior marketer, like, what's the scars you have? What's the lessons you've learned around that?

Speaker A: Yeah, part of my playbook. When I enter any organization, this is not just for CMOs or marketers, but it's for, for any executive. It is to talk to every single person in your organization. Right. So usually I take over a team. It can be 20 to 40 people. There's a lot of things that people are going to tell you that they know second hand or third hand when you start a job.

Speaker B: Wait, wait, wait. But they're the people entrenched there. Why don't they know? Why don't they know firsthand and. Exactly.

Speaker A: Let me give you an example. When I enter a company, someone's going to tell me we're great at X or we are terrible at Y. Yeah, okay, fair. I will take that information in. Um, usually it's the CEO, another executive, somebody who's helping you onboard. But I think you have to do your own digging and your own evaluation of that because sometimes that's an opinion rather than ground truth from someone with experience. So the first thing I do is go through and talk to everyone. I want to know how they're spending their time, what they're working on, what performance looks like. I also want to get to know them as people and I want them to get to know me. When you lead people the first thing you need is some level of trust and ah, they've got to feel who you are and what you bring to the table.

Speaker B: The process is as important as the information gathering is what you've just said.

Speaker A: Yes, the process is at least 75% of it. To me. The information is 25.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's funny.

Speaker A: Yeah. But then you just get smarter about what questions to ask when you get the actual person who's running paid search or brand talking. You learn things and you learn things. You're only going to learn from that person and you learn about that person. And I'll spend 30 days doing this. It's not like I'm not going to make decisions or do whatever the, the day to day of the job requires. But I don't think you can effectively define a strategy until you really understand what's going on.

Speaker B: And Chris, if I can clarify something, if they've called you. So I used to tell people all this time if somebody calls me to come do something and it's because they didn't know how to solve it themselves.

Speaker A: That's right. I think the, one of the worst things you can do in my opinion is come into a business with preconceived notions. I mean you have to have some, but you need to validate all of those notions against what's already been tried, what's been done, what's been tested. And I think if you approach uh, the job as I'm going to come in and tell you all the answers on the first day.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You lose the team from the outset. You don't really earn the ability to opine on strategy because you don't know anything about the business yet. And my current role, it would be catastrophic if I did that. Because if you look at my, you look at my background, I'm um, a uh, Fintech executive. So I've done some retail. Before I got here. The only things I knew about senior care or senior living were what I experienced with my own grandfather. And so for me to come in and tell a marketing team in this industry that I have all the answers would just be, would be a crazy thing. I think that's the beginning of my playbook. And then you start to craft what's the strategy? Do I have the right people to implement it? Are we going to need different functional areas than we have today? For example, at A Place for mom, we, we have only one person focused on customer life. Cycle management at the moment. And it's a big opportunity for us. So those are. Those are kind of the big things I think you do coming in. The other thing is, it's not just your team you want to do this with. It's the leaders you work with. You want to really spend time, pick their brains, generate trust with them. Um, because that is the team that's. That's even bigger than the functional team you're leading. Right. You're leading the marketing team, but you're on the executive team trying to push the company forward.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And that's as important.

Speaker B: Yeah. And you need that support, too. I mean, we often. We've done a lot of work. MMA's done a lot of work in Market. Org. And we say that marketing is no longer leading a function, it's leading a coalition.

Speaker A: Yeah, Yeah, I think you're exactly right with that. You got to bring everybody along. And when you do, it's a lot of fun. By the way, when you get people excited about trying different things, excited to give you money to try things, the job's a lot easier if you don't have credibility, that you're going to spend money wisely. This is the hardest job to have because you have to spend money most of the time. It's hard. It's hard to be a CMO with no budget.

Speaker B: As you look back, having come into so many senior executive roles in the company, you have, like, can you think of something that was said to you that you're like, oh, my goodness, Like, I. I just don't know. Like, do you have an example of something?

Speaker A: There's so many things. Honestly, Greg, I don't know.

Speaker B: But maybe, maybe it's marketing direction that somebody. I mean, I don't want to limit too much. You can come up with any. But is there anything that, uh, that marketing direction people giving, by the time you got in and you go, oh, my God, I'm glad I didn't listen to that. Like, you know, that wasn't the right thing to do.

Speaker A: I think the typical one is we're really great at this channel. Like, insert a channel. And then I get to the first optimization meeting and it's clear we just don't know what we're doing at all. You know, it's just like, oh, I thought we were great at this. But there's no. The economic model doesn't make sense. The way you're optimizing doesn't make sense. I've seen it too many times. Those are the trickiest things to Navigate. Because it's not simply that you fix the problem. You have to explain that you have a problem.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: To the people who thought it was great to begin with. So you have to change their hearts and minds. And typically it's the human element of it is difficult because yeah. Those folks believe this person who's leading, whatever it is, was doing a great job and you have to explain that it's completely the opposite and then navigate that going forward. That's the most common thing I've seen.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's funny, you say I came into it. You're just making me think. I came into a company one time and somebody, I remember that it was a CFO who said like, oh, you know, this person is really great strategy. And I was kind of like, well, I didn't say anything at the time. I thought, well, I'm a little suspicious of that because the business is failing. It's actually the company's insolvent. So I'm not really sure how good a strategic person they are. So it's kind of. Clearly, I don't think they were strategic because they didn't have any background for what they were doing. But they, you know, but they sounded kind of good and the CFO didn't know any better and just believed it. So it was very. I was, it was a funny observation. Yeah.

Speaker A: Well. Well the other one, I get a lot. I think if anyone's ever worked in a VC backed company during the recruiting process for the job, you're sold. It's a three year plan.

Speaker B: Yeah, we're gonna, yeah, we're gonna go public, we're gonna sell.

Speaker A: Yeah. You review this three year plan to. Yeah. Whatever the outcome is, just add two years. Just add. Whenever someone tells you it's three, it's five minimum.

Speaker B: Well, and the other thing that's funny about VC companies too. And I've advised a lot of CEOs in here, I always have to tell myself, be very clear that the venture capitalist sitting on your board who gave you money, she or he is not there to build your business.

Speaker A: Correct.

Speaker B: They are there for you to become a billion dollar unicorn. Anything less than that, you do, they're through with you.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So be careful. Now this might. And I remember I had a couple of CEOs. In particular, there was a co. CEO, co founders and CEO situation. And I said, you know, you guys just need. What they're saying is interesting, but this is your first money.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So you have to decide, are you going to bet it all to go Big for them or are you going to try to take care of your family?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: And this makes some more reasonable decisions that still otherwise is a good business. It has good growth trajectory to it, but it's not. But they, they want a billion or nothing. Yeah, the, it's crazy.

Speaker A: The timeline, the, the scale. If you've got the right investors and the right leadership team, you're clear on that up front what success is and what failure is. But I've seen it go the other way where it wasn't clear up front. And now all of a sudden you've got two different ideas and it's going sideways.

Speaker B: Yep, yep, yep, yep. No, the guy. I talked to a guy in the Valley when I was out there on Silicon Valley, and, and, uh, he had started 28 businesses of life. It was kind of nuts. I asked him, I asked him the. I says, what's the most important thing? It was a dumb question, kind of. I don't think it was an eloquent question, but he answered. He said, he goes, know the values of your partners, which is really, you need to know where is everybody else heading? Are we, are we really here to build and sell? Are we here to build? What are we, what are we out to do? What's the values that we want? Are we just. Is it a lifestyle business? I mean, that can be the case too. That can be a thing. So.

Speaker A: And I think you have to. And this is one of the sayings, you brought up Tatiana, who I work for now.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: One of the things she's excellent at, and I've only been here six months, but is reestablishing what those are.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And reminding this is what we're here for. This is what everybody's agreed to. This is how we're going about it. So it's not a conversation you have once and forget about for three years. Uh, because life changes a lot in those times.

Speaker B: Well, when people are forgetful and they get off track, they go in different directions, they have new ideas or whatever. You know, if they're a good team, they do. And so you just got to kind of remind everybody all the time that, you know, this is what it's all about. Yeah. I'm a big believer.

Speaker A: That's where her being a marketer, I think helps. As a CEO, you continue to message, repeat the message again and again.

Speaker B: Yeah. At the core of Most marketers and CMOs are ability to do storytelling, you know, to sort of communicate a story. Absolutely. Hey, Chris, this is a really funny one for you. I feel Like, I'm about to interview you for the job. Why did people make you a CMO so many times? I'm sorry, I'm not interviewing you, but it feels like the obvious question, like, you know, to put you in that role that many times, what do you think? That's a hard self, you know, reflection, collective kind of question. So I don't mean to push on

Speaker A: the spot, but I'm just curious. Uh, it's one of my favorite questions I've ever gotten. No one's ever asked me that before. I love it. Okay. I don't know. It's one of those. One of those things you can never really answer explicitly, but I think there's a few. There's a few things I've done in my career that I would point to. One, I came up in performance marketing. That's where I started my marketing career. I started out doing email marketing in the early 2000s. Then I shifted into paid search, display, affiliates. I learned all the channels. Basically. I went around, I learned them all, uh, led teams. And then when I got my first CMO job, I got to rebrand the company.

Speaker B: That could be a daunting task for a performance marketer because, you know, brand and reposition like that is a very unique skill set and orientation to the world.

Speaker A: I think it is. You know, I had. I had been a part of some brand work on the lighter side, but I hadn't been able to lead it. But I was maybe dumb enough to think I could do it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Never having done it before. I was confident and I loved that work. And that's really how I talk about myself. I think it's really hard to find people that can do both of those things. Someone who can go very deep on performance.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And take it all the way down to the kind of the finance level and face off with finance teams around investment decisioning, and then also be good enough on the storytelling side to say, this is how we're going to go to market. This is how we're going to represent ourselves as a company. You usually have one or the other of those. And I think if you get the opportunity to build both skill sets.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: And you can do it, that really sets you apart in the market. The real answer, though, is I've just been able to have some success with my organizations I was a part of.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And like any other job, people refer, you know, folks that they've had success with. And so I had never met my current boss. My prior boss told her she should hire me and that's how I got the job. Right. So I think that's always job one is to make sure you do a good job and, and people feel like you're competent and you deliver. If you do that, you know, the phone keeps ringing.

Speaker B: And listen, Chris, my experience is too, is that there comes a point in your career you do not get a job unless they can triangulate you to you.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker B: It is really important to build relationships. I think just what you said there, it's important to do a good job every place you can. And you know, listen, business are hard sometimes. They don't always work out, sometimes you don't get aligned, sometimes you miss the thread. Uh, you know, a bunch of things can go wrong.

Speaker A: I have, for me, it goes back to what we were saying at the beginning. The human relationships are important and it's a wider circle than most people realize. Certainly people are going to call your former bosses, but a lot of folks are going to call your former coworkers. They're going to call your former board members. They're going to check with anybody they can connect to. Hiring an executive is one of the highest stakes decisions there is for a company because it sets you back if you get it wrong.

Speaker B: But I'm even saying a little bit differently. Like, sure, they're going to check references, but I'm saying there are some jobs, like, I wouldn't have gotten this job if they couldn't have called one of my previous board members and knew him and trusted him and had a relationship with him and he was able to vouch for me. I remember that phone call and who that person was. And so it's having a lot of relationships for, you know, the new opportunities to open, at least in my experience,

Speaker A: I think, I mean, candidly, when I'm recruiting, the back channel conversation, the interview is interesting and it's good to get to know people, but if I text somebody I trust and they tell me not to hire the person, the whole thing falls apart right there.

Speaker B: Hey, Chris, I wanted to jump into the other thing though, about this. That makes your kind of role here, I think, a little bit unique for people in the fact that you actually do work for a CEO that was a cmo.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: So now Tatiana's got a different perspective. As I mentioned, she was on the board here at the mma, so I knew her through her experience at amex. I m remember when she took this job and made the change to be a CMO over there at A Place for Mom. But, um, I don't Know, have you ever worked for somebody who was a marketing expert too? Or is this new?

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, my prior job to this one, when I was at Laurel Road, I worked for Alyssa Schaefer. She was also a former cmo and in fact she's a CMO now again. Both Alyssa and Tatiana are great leaders for a cmo. And I'll tell you why. Both of them are hyper self aware. M about the fact that what they could do is really lean in and tell you a lot about how to do your job. And neither one of them ever did that.

Speaker B: Yeah. Okay.

Speaker A: Um, both of them are great leaders, led across teams and functions. And I think with both of them, once we got to, hey, this the opinion of, hey, this guy might know what he's doing. They both felt very comfortable stepping back and not leaning in. But what you do get is a real thought partner. When you have a marketing challenge and you don't know what to do and your boss used to be a cmo, that is, it's a great gift because they can really help you navigate the strategic question.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: That you're wrestling with. And so for me, I find that hyper valuable. The other thing is I myself may want to be a CEO someday.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And both of those folks understood that and have coached me around things that are not just CMO things. It's, hey, if you, if you were running this company, you know, how would you think about this? They want that information from me, but they also will proactively share. This seems difficult, but this is why we have to do it. And this is how I'm thinking about it. And so I learn about CEO level decision making. Yeah. From, from both of those two, which is hugely valuable to me.

Speaker B: When you come into a new company, then what's, you know, you know, first step is go talk to everybody. Get to know either those who are working in the marketing department, those who have the broader C suite vision. What's number two? What's number three, by the way?

Speaker A: Yeah. So number two is really getting your arms around performance. I'm a chemical engineer by training in college. Right.

Speaker B: I saw that. Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah.

Speaker A: Until I'm underneath all the numbers and I understand how it's working, I don't feel like I can do my job.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And so, you know, a part of that is what I'm doing in a way when I'm talking to everybody. But I, I have to sort of go into my personal cave and dig through it and be like, all right, what really is working? What's driving this thing and do we have pockets of inefficiency and things I need to clean up?

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: And that allows me to get a plan together when I can get my plan together about what are the levers in the business that I want to be pulling. That's step two. Step three then is all about the team and the people because we'll figure out, you know, if we need a new platform or we need the tagging solutions not set up correctly. All these tactical things. To me those are all outcomes of having a great team. And I don't want to go do those things personally. I want to get the right, I want to get someone smarter than me to go and do it and set it up the right way. And so there's the evaluation of what are the skill sets we need. And let me do a comparison to the people we have.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And then let's try to get the people we have into the right roles for them that support our strategy. And then let's be really honest about if there's some people who don't fit, what are we going to do about that and then who do we need to go and hire? Yeah, I'm sort of at this point now where I'm in month six. I have done that. I have my team. We're starting to fire on all cylinders. But it takes a while to figure out who should be on the boat with you. But as soon as you do that, then you can start to grow.

Speaker B: Hey, Chris, you know what's funny about companies too? And listen, obviously as a, uh, as a head of a trade associate, I work with a lot of marketers and I can get somewhat deep into some of these organizations. Not always, but, you know, some. Yeah, I'm always surprised at what appears to be the incredible major gap in knowledge and experience that exists sometimes.

Speaker A: Yeah. This is one of my favorite things about my new role. In a lot of jobs you take, you have your network to call upon. You know, my network's pretty big. I've been around a while. I've had multiple jobs. So you know, I can call a lot of people when I have questions, but in some companies you're kind of on your own.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And if the team doesn't have a deep network, you can end up missing a wide piece of like something super important to your knowledge base and not know how to fix it. One of the things I appreciate about, we, uh, were talking about venture backed companies earlier. A Place for mom is actually a PE backed company. One of the great things though about private equity that I'm experiencing for the first time is I have these folks who are sponsors from the investors who basically talk to CMOs all day within their portfolio of companies. And so what you benefit from is you're like, oh, you know this company, you know that team. Like I love what they did with their TV strategy.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, can you connect me to them? And that is immensely valuable in a way I, I never appreciated before. Like we just went through and looked at our entire TV strategy from the ground up. We've been in linear TV for a long time. I could quickly get to who are some of the smartest people in the industry on this. Yeah. What are the best tools? What are startups using, what are scaled companies using? Who are their agency partners? What are the platforms? What's a typical uh, CPM on, you know, parts of inventory. It can just fast forward you a lot. That's been hugely valuable for me. When you have a really young team, you're at a disadvantage in some ways because you just haven't built, you just haven't built the network to go find the answers you need. And it's a fast forward button that you're just missing.

Speaker B: Well, and you kind of said it earlier too. You know, just because you're a brand guy doesn't mean you're a performance marketer. M because you're a performance marketer in your brand. By the way, I've done both those. I went from the brand world, uh, to working for wondering, uh, it was wondering Kittle Johnson but you know, world's largest direct marketing agency at the time. And it just really opened up my eyes to a whole new world that I really didn't get or understand. But it takes me to sort of the third. Listen, there really are sort of, you know, dare I say there are only three marketing strategies. Everybody's done this. So there's brand, there's transactional which is what you're talking about, performance marketing and ah, then there's customer experience. I think you have, do you have customer experience under your remit there?

Speaker A: Yes, yes.

Speaker B: That's a little unusual. By the way, they don't always give customer experience to the CMO to marketer. By the way, we happen to know those companies that do have CX under the CMO financially perform better. Just it happens to be a random data point we have for our marketing org work. So yeah. What does it mean for you to do customer experience? Can you talk to me about that?

Speaker A: You broke it down to say, and uh, by the way, I'm guilty Of this too. Brand performance, marketing, customer experience. Three separate buckets.

Speaker B: Well, those are the three go to market strategies. Just to be clear what I'm saying, there's only three go to market strategies. You can be derivatives off of that, but there's only three. Yeah. Which is confusion I think we as marketers have created over the world. But yeah, go ahead.

Speaker A: I'm always going to be. If you say those are three strategies, I'm always going to say, really, you've got to have a hybrid of those things. Like I can't have a brand strategy that is disconnected from my performance marketing. Right. But I know what you mean by different strategies.

Speaker B: You can't do everything. You have to, you know, strategy is making choices. So you have to decide is what's the best example I saw was that you got like Harry's Razors, which is a transactional go to market strategy. And you got Gillette, which is a go to market brand strategy. I'm not saying they don't cross over and have sort of elements, but they're, you know, they're very different go to market strategies. Right.

Speaker A: Yeah. I was in personal loans for a long time. I worked at a company called Best Egg. I was the CMO there for about five years. It was highly performance driven. Right. It started as a direct mail strategy. Like that was their first channel. And to succeed in that channel, you've got to be dialed in on creative, but you've also got to be the mast. Yes, you've got to be so on it. And then the channels expanded and I helped expand those channels. Right. When I got there, we were booking something like $2 billion a year in personal loans.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: When I left, we were booking about 8 billion in personal loans. I think our strategy was better than most of the players in the space, but everybody had the same strategy. And There were about nine or 10 players. You had lending club, you had upgrade, you had bunch of folks. And there's one outlier. And it was sofi. And Sofi was sponsoring stadiums and they were just all brand. They were just all brand. Right. They hardly even competed in direct mail where we were winning. But I think what happens over time is, and this was the conversation I would have, I said, hey, you know, we're at 8 billion in, uh, loans. I think we can grow that by 50% maybe with our current strategies. But we top out, we top out at some point and then you have to make a leap to being more hybrid and you have to go have a brand strategy. Otherwise you can't grow and what I watched Sofi do was the opposite. They just, you, uh, know, we were going different directions. We were coming from the performance side and saying we gotta have a brand strategy. They had a huge brand strategy that worked really well for them. And then all of a sudden they invaded the performance marketing space. All of a sudden they were doing direct mail. They were approaching affiliate channels like Credit Karma, uh, completely differently, similar to everybody else in the space. And that was super powerful for them, of course, because their brand recognition was massive. And now everybody else is at a disadvantage. There's multiple ways to get there is kind of my point. I think you want to lean on the strengths of your team, but at some point you've got to learn the other way in a very competitive marketplace. And customer experience in all that also was a differentiator always in my career. That's one of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten. And I don't know how to do it any other way is you better keep coming back to the customer. Who's your customer? Are you meeting their needs? How's it going for them? What's the feedback? What's the feedback like? We have a huge feedback culture. I'll have a meeting with my team for six hours and I'll be like, we have to survey the team and see how we did and then we're gonna make it better the next time. You've gotta do that same thing with your customer.

Speaker B: I have a thesis though. I wonder and I've not had anybody be able to prove this to me, although I've had other people sort of agree that there were all those direct to consumer companies that exist early on and most of those died. And I talked to a lot of those CMOs and they were incredibly transactionally oriented. If they could find two nickels to go get a new customer, that's what they do. We've done a lot of M and A, done a lot of research. I actually think that the reason they failed because they didn't have solid brands.

Speaker A: No, I think you're right. I think the other thing is you can over optimize, which is exactly what you're talking about.

Speaker B: Uh, well, yeah. Then you're getting into what do you optimize against. Absolutely.

Speaker A: Yes, that's right. And probably the wrong thing when you go out of business. There's a lot of direct to consumer brands though that are highly successful and made it much more about the brand.

Speaker B: Yeah, have really strong brands. You took like Warby Parker. I mean they were very brand focused in addition to the transactional dynamics and they built retail, uh, to support that were able to do. I mean, I don't know enough about the insider strategies and my random analysis is not enough. But I just, I knew so many of those because I was talking about getting involved in May, which is, you know, we're supposed to be accretive to what you're trying to do. You know, you work with us because we know more about certain parts of marketing than any individual company or your agencies do. And yet they were just like, no, we, we can't get involved with mma. We got to go buy new customers. I'm like, okay, well, it feels risky. I mean, you know, I know what the research shows that wouldn't support that. So I don't, I don't know.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's even more important now. If you talk to Google about paid search, for example, and AI overviews and how the search landscape is evolving. One of the things they always lead with is brand searches are still super important. They're actually growing. That experience on Google is what it's been for a long time. If you go just if you know, you want to work with a place for mom and you go search for a place for mom, obviously you're going to find us, right? But if you haven't established a brand and someone's asking what's the best long term care facility in San Diego, a place for a mom might come up. But other things where there's no brand presence that might be equally helpful to you, they're not going to. And you can't even buy the traffic effectively at the moment.

Speaker B: Hey Chris, what is it just as a segue here, I always like to ask CMOs because all of us, especially you're like me, got a little more gray hair than not along the way, people have sort of said things that are interesting, valuable. What is the best advice you've been given? By the way, you can make it business or personal. It's fine. I mean, wherever you want to go. What do you think?

Speaker A: I love this question too. I share this probably three times a year with my, either a colleague or my team or um, someone like that. And we got into it a little bit. But the first time I was a cmo, business was good, we were growing. I just signed like a really important partnership for the company. Thought I was doing great. My CEO pulled me aside and said, kind of asked me how I thought it was going. I gave him the speech I just gave and he said, actually, I'm really pretty disappointed in you. I was just shocked. I was like, what are we talking about? And he said, you know, when I hired you, I didn't hire someone to run the marketing department. Like, I. That's table stakes. That's a given. I barely hear from you in our leadership meetings. I don't know if you even care about what's going on in the rest of the company.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: And I was. I mean, of course I cared. What he said is you have to be a thought partner to the CEO.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: When you're on the leadership team, you show up as a CEO and operate that way because that's what is required of the role. No one had ever moderately come close to telling me this, giving me this advice, or being so blunt about what the expectation was. I said, well, by the way, I wish you would have told me that in the hiring process. So I could, I could have come in. I could have come in trying to do that. But it just m. Completely reframed my mind.

Speaker B: Chris, what was he telling you? Was he telling you to speak up more? Was he telling you to engage? Was he telling you to disagree? Where was that going, by the way?

Speaker A: All of the above. But it was really about my mindset. It was, you're not here to run a marketing department. Of course you're going to do that just by being here and leading your team. Right. But it's more about. And this is a VC backed company.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: It's. We need to level this thing up. And it's a business that kind of like a place for mom was a one of a kind type of business. Right. So there's no, there's no playbook for it. We're all figuring it out together, trying to really drive the valuation of the company up. And he just felt like I wasn't participating in that. I was participating in the comfortable ways I was not participating in it, in the uncomfortable ways of challenging other people. Taking my mind share and saying, hey, there's a problem in sales. We've got to go fix that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, and it's just changed the way I operate.

Speaker B: I'm trying to think about that. Yeah. I mean, I do a lot with people, which I tell them, you know, listen, it is really important you speak up.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: And that, uh, you look like you're interested because frankly, if you're not interested in what m me and the kind as a CEO, if you're not interested in my company, then you need to move on.

Speaker A: By the way, it's not just about executives. I tell the same thing to My direct reports and marketing. You're on this team to tell me how to do my job better?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: If I'm not hearing from you that we did something wrong, you don't agree with how we're doing something, you think we should change something, I probably have the wrong person on the team. That's what I, that's, that's what I need. I need people to challenge us to get better. And usually you, you want to hire people who are smarter than you. I think it's Steve Jobs who, who explained this so well. But you want to hire someone with a different perspective who's going to push you and make you better. That's always my, my number one piece of advice. The other thing I always, uh, tell people is, well, what does your customer want? That's like the question I ask all the time. Right. They're like, like someone will call me for advice about their strategy or something and I'll just be like, well, what does the customer want? You know? And it just reframes the entire conversation right off the bat. Yeah, Usually that wasn't what they were thinking about.

Speaker B: We sometimes forget that, don't we?

Speaker A: All the time, people. I mean, even if you're very focused on it, you can still get bogged down in a math problem and forget that's really. What you're doing is trying to service your customer. In, uh, my current company, there's, there's two sets of customers. There's the caregivers who are looking for care, and then there's all of our provider partners who ultimately are going to provide the care. When you're a marketplace business, you have to think about both of those. And that's what's so fun about those businesses, because you want to align everybody together in the same direction, including your company.

Speaker B: Hey, Chris. It's been so interesting. I want to make sure though, I really, I just looked at the clock. Oh, my God. We've had so many great conversations here. But I have to get to the big question of building better CMOs. Right. It's time for a favorite question. What do CMOs get wrong? We'll find out what Chris Malone thinks in a minute, but first, let's take a quick break. This is building better CMOs. Let's get back to my conversation with Chris Malone, the CMO of A Place for Mom. The MMA M is here to fix stuff. I'm a non profit industry body. In order to try to make an industry better for in particular CMOs and markers. That's who MMA works for. Okay? Because, you know, I'm fishing for research here. I'm doing my own listening tour of CMOs. Like, what do we as a marketers do you think don't get right? What don't we maybe fully understand? What don't we appreciate? Where are we just patently wrong? If you want to go there, where do we make mistakes? Like what do you think the industry? And I'm not asking you for the solutions. I want to focus on the problem first. Then we'll get into kind of what this is. What do you think the industry really just kind of doesn't really fully conceptualize?

Speaker A: Well, I've worked with a lot of marketers over the course of time. The big thing I always want to see and I think can go astray a little bit is if you're not focused on the economic value you're delivering and understanding really what the ROI is of the money you're spending down to the finance level, where you can face off with your finance partners and really talk about, hey, if you gave me 4 million more dollars, this is what I can bring back for you, right? If you don't have that credibility and understanding the job is extremely difficult and oftentimes that's where you know, the average tenure is.2 years. I think for a CMO 1.8, you know better than me.

Speaker B: It's not very long.

Speaker A: Usually when someone's gone from a job they just took in nine months, I think it's typically because they did not establish credibility around spending their budget wisely to drive real dollar value outcomes. Uh, what can the industry do around that? It's a really big question, but I think it's kind of an educational one about how to make sure you are getting that credibility established up front.

Speaker B: Chris, I think MMA does have the answer to that. We'll talk about it here in a little bit. I actually do know what it is and it's nothing. It's actually like dollars and cents. You need to have the formula that understands what connects market. But let's come back here a little bit. Let's make sure we're sort of, uh, and sort of develop the. The problem would be clear. So what you're saying is that marketers don't think in terms of actual contribution to the business. I mean, you even made it as simple as like, oh my God, they don't do. Some do, yeah, but they don't do enough, you know, return on, uh, investment dynamics. They don't understand that. They don't know. I'm assuming you're getting to like they don't even understand how it connects to enterprise value at some level. I mean, those can be two different things. I was going to give this example earlier. I'll give it to you now though, so. And I'll name names on this one. She'll appreciate this. Susie Deering told me she came in to CMO of the company and she met with everybody on the team. She did her. Listen, turn the direct mail people said they were up 17%. The search people said they were up 12%. And you know, I don't know, they, uh, you know, the performance people said they were up, you know, 11% and stuff. She called them all in the conference room. She goes, this is great. She goes, I'm glad to hear you're all doing so well. Why is a goddamn business down 5%?

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Because they were, they were optimizing probably to the wrong. Whatever they were doing, event, whatever it was, clicks to the website or whatever, and they forgot everything that happens downstream.

Speaker B: How do you address that, Chris? Because listen, you also have the complexity of. So the backgrounds we talked about earlier, you have performance marketing, which can have a, uh, cost per allowable. That's what I worked with in direct marketing. But how do you measure brand, which is so amorphous sometimes? The number one thing I hear from people who do a lot of brand is my CEO believes. Honestly, that's really what I hear. I don't hear any other analysis of it other than my CEO agrees and we believe in brand.

Speaker A: More power to the person who can get by on belief. Um, because it's not generally my experience, anything you are doing in marketing has to have a measurement component to it. Right?

Speaker B: Okay, great.

Speaker A: So brand tactics, for example, we do a lot of tv, right? We just moved into connected tv. So we're moving into connected tv. We do a incrementality test to determine what is that driving. It's not as simple as paid search, but you can still measure it. You still know what the lift is on your business. You have a notion of, if I turn this off, what would it do? Yeah, uh, you've got to repeat that all the time. You know, you kind of have to. Not weekly, but you've got to, you got to check in on it and make sure it's still working. Rerun tests like that. And candidly, I think it's a little bit of the tools are getting so much better. And so it's a little bit to say I can't measure it is one, a little lazy. But two, just, just not True. And I think the thing to really worry about if you're one of those marketers is challenges that are new for CMOs and uh, others in marketing organizations now, where the questions are more nuanced and interesting from others in the organization that you work in. I know for me we have a data provider that has, and we're moving into AI like everyone else and LLMs and all of that as the back end backbone of our business. And so there are tools now where my CFO can just run a plain search, you know, a plain query, plain language query and say, are we optimizing our marketing channels? Well, he'll get an answer back that is, could be part right, could be wrong, but certainly might not be completely invalid. And then just come and ask me, hey, I dove into it and this is what AI told us, told me we should be doing. And so if you, if you can't explain what you're doing well and explain whether that's right or wrong, I think you're going to have a credibility problem going forward. And the barrier of entry to people being able to do their own investigation, ask really smart questions. That, uh, barrier is coming down and I Hope my fellow CMOs realize that, you know, it's something I've thought about a lot and experienced a little bit. You've got to be on your game and if you're not, it's very hard to be credible.

Speaker B: Chris, you know, you kind of said the magic words earlier, which is the ability to do an incrementality. And that's pretty interesting. You guys could pull off, uh, incrementality for television. You were doing that kind of measurement.

Speaker A: We have a partner that we use that helps us design incrementality tests, okay. Based on geographic area. So it's not something we just do by ourselves and you know, hatch in a meeting room. But that's what I mean around the tools are really expanding and allow you to measure pretty much anything.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Um, and if you don't know how to measure it, you know, again, make sure you're asking. I think this is where things like the MMA can really help is like who are the best vendors to use for incrementality testing? What's the best way to measure linear TV or connected tv, things like that? It's out there. So if you're not doing it, please ask around about how to do it.

Speaker B: Well, well, I've said that I've told this story a lot. The best question, one of the best questions I got in here in the, in the over 10 years I've been at the MMA. Was the CMO called me one day and said, greg, is there a quality standard for marketing measurement? And I'm a super measurement expert. I mean, I founded Multi Touch Attribution. I developed the industry's currency measurements for digital many years ago. I really feel like I kind of know my stuff. And the question really is going back because it didn't exist now. The MMA has now written that. And the answer is incrementality, by the way, that is the quality standard.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think, look, we do incrementality testing. We have a medium mix, we have a bunch of tools that we use ain't. And we have our own data scientists.

Speaker B: And you guys are not hundreds of millions of dollars of budgets. Right? I mean, just a. Yeah. So you're still, you're taking the time. That's what's interesting. I know brands that are spending big money like that and they don't seem to do what you just said. To have multiple layers of measurement to try to answer the hard questions.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's, uh, somewhat maddening because it's not easy to do. I wouldn't say that. It's simple.

Speaker B: It's a super pain in the ass. Yeah.

Speaker A: And in fact, a lot of it is art, but there's plenty of science and the tools. I mean, just think about if you Would you spend a million dollars to understand the best way to deploy $50 million of capital if you were going to spend it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Just as a notion. Yeah, you should. The answer is yes, I'm going to spend $50 million. Should I spend 1 million to understand whether it works or not? Yeah, I think so. But a lot of people don't. They spend well over $50 million and don't set the measurement up correctly. And again, this goes back to what else could we do? Well, as an industry, you made kind

Speaker B: of a throwaway comment there earlier. I wanted to just double down on around AI and sort of the LLM. So you kind of made a point. I forget exactly what you said, but there was some variation of people are going to look stuff up, I think in the LLMs and become experts or something. Can you talk more about what that meant and could you go further on that point?

Speaker A: I used to get a question from an executive, but let's say my CEO. Right. CEO would say, Chris, I don't know about our channel mix. It seems like we're spending too much money on TV to me. But he's the CEO and hasn't ever done marketing and I say, well, you know, here's the test we ran. And I. It's a little bit faith. Right. But it's like, here's the test we ran. I really believe we're spending the right amount of money. Let me show you2 PowerPoint slides on why now we're aligned. He trusts me. We've got it. Okay. That's a very simple question. Right now you can turn to whoever you're using, Snowflake databricks, you know, whoever your data backend is, and you can just ask that is Chris spending the money correctly? Right. It's not a yes or no answer. It's. Well, it looks like here's where we're spending our money. Here are three opportunities that I would explore if I was the cmo. It gets very detailed.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And maybe all your data is not in there. There's a lot of things that could be inaccurate that you now have to go and explain.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: But the question, the quality of the question could be much higher. That is good and bad. That is good and bad sometimes because the good is maybe somebody comes up with a good idea and you go implement it and it actually works. The downside, though, is maybe they're sending you on a wild goose chase. And now, uh, you have to explain yourself more frequently and in greater depth and detail. And now you're distracted from doing what is the core of the job.

Speaker B: Now, listen, Chris, I talked about this. This is what I opened up. You know, MMA's possible event with here just a couple months ago. It basically said you need to be very. Listen, I'm a huge believer in AI. Have another podcast, focus on AI. I love this. I think it's the most revolutionary thing I'm going to experience my entire life. Not more excited. Two out of my three children, uh, are getting, uh, one's getting an advanced degree in AI, the other one's getting an undergraduate degree. And I like m, you know, like everybody, you know, I'm buying in, literally.

Speaker A: If they're getting degrees, you are literally buying.

Speaker B: Literally.

Speaker A: Literally.

Speaker B: I'm buying. Yes, I'm buying. And yes, literally, it's true. But here's what's funny about that. The LLMs are just a collection of opinions. They are not expert, independent, insider knowledge.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: They can just aggregate. And the problem of marketing is that it's full of opinions. And many of those opinions are not right. So I'll give you an example, and this is great. So I have probably done more public multitouch attribution studies to understand marketing mix. I did it once in 2001-2004, five, and then I did it again in probably 2017, give or take a little bit.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: So I know I've seen more marketing mix than anybody across more sectors, more brands. You know what the last series of studies were most interesting? Now, prior, this is prior to ctv, you know what the study showed us? This is cutting the cord behavior going on pretty extensively in the mid teens. Right. Okay. So we're leaning into that pretty heavily now. Uh, TV's changing. We now have a thousand channels. Okay. Linear television was by and far the most valuable part of the mix.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And this is when everybody was out saying how terrible linear television was. It was the single greatest driver performance, in fact, so much so that it should be, uh, in those studies, between 45 and 65% of the mix. That was the optimized level. And listen, at the time I was running the Mobile Marketing Association, I had no reason to say that. I had no. There was no self interest. I had no commercial basis for that point of view. But that's what the data showed. And so you're right. There was just so much. And what people were sort of getting confused by, and it really annoyed me is that you got Ad Age and Adweek, they're coming out saying, oh, TV pricing's going up too much. It's so bad. It's like, no, what that study showed, it was the deal of the century. And that was just the buyers manipulating the press to try to negotiate lower TV rates. I mean, it's just so insane. But yes, if you don't have independent measurement, you don't have any idea what's going on.

Speaker A: By the way, if it's going up so much, but it's not valuable, why. Why is the inventory being purchased? Right.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's a little like the Yogi Berra, right? This. Yeah, this place is so. This place is too popular. Nobody's going there anymore. Right. It's too crowded. Nobody's going in there anymore. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah, but I mean, if, if the value of the inventory is increasing, you know, if they set the price too high, nobody's going to buy it because the smart marketers are going to say, it's not worth it. I'm going to go put it somewhere else.

Speaker B: I'm a little too concerned, though, that we don't have good enough measurement to have followed the crowd. The wisdom of the crowd on that. Which is what your point of view is, prefer better measurement. Which is why back to kind of your earlier question, we'll Sort of wrap up here in a minute. But you know, listen, uh, Chris, we actually think we have figured out the magic formula. I have an actual financial formula that you can run in order to determine what is the value of market in a way as cfo. It's diminishing cash flow and it's using an element of that with some other elements to it. And we're sort of aggregating now test to understand. We're going to show it for the first time at the, at my CMO co summit here coming up at the end of July. But we think we have the magic form and M m our sense of it and it's still early, so I want to be a little careful about this because there was still more work to do. One is that a CFO would never cut a marketing budget again when they see this results. Never, never, never, never. Because the problem is we as marketers have done a terrible job telling what the long term value is marketing, which is what brand in particular is about. And then the other thing of this is that we've not found a single marketer and we've worked now with about 10 of them to try to figure this out. Not one of them yet has their data organized to do this analysis. Not one. We've had to go in and completely redo data stacks of companies just to be able to do, just to be able to set them up, then run the formula for the CFO to understand. Kind of crazy where we are.

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I am super interested and curious about what this is, this unveiling of yours.

Speaker B: So yeah, could be a big deal. I mean there's two brands that are working on it right now that are going through the process and you know, we'll have the results in the next three to four weeks and know, I mean, uh, if not, we'll stand on stage and say, wow, that was harder than we thought. We don't have the actual results, but here's where we are.

Speaker A: If you can standardize that and educate people on how to do it, well, that will be transformational.

Speaker B: It could be. I think it could be. It might be. It's one of those, you know, listen, I've had a couple days in my career. Business could be the most important thing we've ever done. You, uh, know, I want to see it before I sort of make that kind of commitment. But you know.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Speaker B: Chris. Listen, this has been a lot of fun. I mean it really was interesting to have a guy who's done this. I mean like I said, John Costello is the only one I've known who's done a CMO job five different times. So you're up to four. So. I mean, you look young enough. I think you could break his record.

Speaker A: I'm gonna try. I'm gonna try. And as long as you promise. As long as you promise to have me back if I get there, I'll

Speaker B: try exactly what I have to do. Yeah, I have to. Oh, here's Chris again at his new CMO gig. I guess maybe that's what it's gonna be.

Speaker A: Yeah. By the way, that is not an organizational announcement for a Place for Mom. I plan to continue to work there for quite some time. Just to be Chris.

Speaker B: No, I was just. I was talking way off in the future, Chris. Way off in the future. So there we go. You know what? After you've been so successful here, you sold this three times to PE guys. I don't know the new PE firms.

Speaker A: Yeah, There you go.

Speaker B: Okay. Chris is a lot of fun. I really appreciate you doing it. Thanks, my friend.

Speaker A: Thank you so much.

Speaker B: Thanks again to Chris Malone for coming on Building Better cmos Now. Uh, check the description of this episode for links to connect with Chris. If you like this episode, you might also enjoy my conversation with Bob Sherwood, the Chief Marketing Commercial Officer at Zoe. We talked about the power of new channels like podcasting, whether the CMO should own customer experience, and the three marketing strategies that actually really matter. Uh, you'll find that episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to now. At the Marketing Media alliance, we are working to make marketing matter more through conferences, research, and education. If you want to know more, visit mmaglobal.com or you can email me directly, greg@mmaglobal.com now, don't forget, Building Better CMOS is now on YouTube. Just go to bettercmos.com YouTube to start watching. Our producer and podcast consultant is Eric Johnson from LightningPod FM. Artwork is by Jason Chase. And a very special thanks to Angela Gray and Dan Whiting. This is Greg Stewart. I'll see you in two weeks.