C Space at CES is a series of panel discussions featuring marketing, advertising and media executives who tackle topics like AI, data, personalization, content creation and creator-led marketing. Following are insights and strategies shared by six brand-side CMOs during the first official day of CES.
Molly Battin
SVP & CMO
The Home Depot
On brand building through evolving with consumers:
“The key is really evolving your brand to meet the needs of the consumer… as they’re changing. One of our biggest brand challenges is that everybody who walks into a Home Depot has a problem that they are trying to solve. We need to think about, how does our brand show up in a different way based on all of the tools that we now have? Whether it’s personalized content to help them with a project that they’re working on, or whether it is the app and every [other] experience that we have, [it’s about] how we think about content at scale to really connect and help them get unstuck.
“It’s a conversation now with our consumers, as opposed to us telling them what to do. We’re now in a two-way dialogue… that co-creation, listening and responding. So I think that it really is grounding yourself and not the products that you solve, but the core problems that you’re trying to help your customers solve. And then understanding the media landscape and the tools at your disposal to help solve that problem in a way that’s really meaningful for them today.”
Gulen Bengi
Lead Global Chief Marketing Officer, Mars Inc
Global Chief Growth Officer Mars Snacking, Mars
On brand building through co-creation with consumers:
“Consumers want more and more personalization—engagements that have no dead end. They want co-creation opportunities. In fact, two thirds of consumers want meaningful customized relationships, and more than 80% of Gen Zers want brands to allow co-creation.
“So when we talk about brand building today, we talk about [how] brands do not just define themselves with their products or experiences, but what they stand for. And with that, they provide two-way engagements and experiences that have no dead ends. Each experience is leading to another experience or buy button. And we are inviting our fans and communities, our consumers, to co-create our brand worlds with us.
“We’re doing this because we want to be able to provide the right engagement at the right time and right offer for every relevant touchpoint for everyone in the world, but also personalized for everyone. That’s how we define our evolving way of building brands in this new era.”
Randi Stipes
CMO
The Weather Company
On upskilling teams to be more AI-ready:
“I think we have to give our teams the time and the space and the encouragement to experiment at The Weather Company. We’ve created our own AI sandbox where we encourage people to experiment both with our internal AI that we’re using as well as external AI. We’re also encouraging people to work cross-functionally, because what might inspire someone in marketing—you never know—that could be useful to someone in another function or vice versa.
“And talking about successes and failures… that’s a big part of the culture: how are we sharing the wins and… our [missteps] along the way? But if we don’t carve out the time, it’s just going to feel like a plus-one to our teams versus a necessity.”
Drew Panayiotou
Chief Marketing Officer
Keurig Dr Pepper
On what’s most exciting about the creator space:
“An ad unit inherently isn’t a great thing. I mean, I’ll say it as a CMO: where magic happens is when a piece of content that you call “advertising” intersects with the creative platform or a piece of content that it’s associated with.
“What’s exciting for us is when we look at content creators and how they are producing content that’s tied to the product and the thing that you’re watching, it becomes really powerful… The farther we move away from this notion that as these big brands, emerging brands, we have to buy an ad unit, the better it is for brand magic.”
Emily Ketchen
Chief Marketing Officer & VP
Intelligent Devices Group & International Markets
Lenovo
On creating a cross-functional AI team:
“One of the things that we did early on is we developed an internal committee council, if you will, on AI and the responsible use of AI in the marketing organization. We had brought in our security team, we brought in the comms team, we brought in our legal team, and we formed an organization that is fully based on understanding AI, the appropriate use of AI. And then what we did is we went out and surveyed our marketing organization to understand what is it that they wanted to learn more about in the context of AI.”
“We took it a step further and went out and bought licenses. We hired a phenomenal trainer, and we are on course number seven of 11 courses that we’re taking our marketers through. So the point being, you want to democratize the information around AI, responsible ways to market within AI, teaching your marketers how to do it the right way, get in there, have the license. Experiment.
“We’re moving on to things like prompt engineering and curation and ultimately a library, right? Because if somebody else has figured out the prompt, why do I need to go figure out the prompt? We’re not in the single source area of personalization, but experiences here will lead to this.”
Mark Weinstein
Chief Marketing Officer
Hilton
On the need for brands to focus on creative:
“The distraction is, you saw this flurry of brands trying to create the next AI whatever, and actually most of us can’t create that thing. We’ll use the tools to be effective. We’ll tell our stories. And so my biggest focus at the moment is… What is the corpus of creative I need to put into the world?
“Last year [the industry was] debating: is AI a good idea or a bad idea? That’s kind of a waste of time. That’s happened. The next waste of time is debating what thing we’re going to create next, or what tool’s going to win that. That’s not important at this second. What’s important is this wave is coming, the capabilities are coming… We need to be ready for it by telling our stories in relevant ways that put the right information by the customer.”
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