Five Takeaways from the Forbes CMO Summit

Last week I had a great experience at the Forbes CMO Summit in California. It was like a “who’s who” of marketing leaders from companies like Budweiser, Facebook, Adobe, Dunkin, SAP, Marriott and many more. Pretty good company to keep. Even Ja Rule made a guest appearance to talk about lessons learned from Fyre Fest and the possibility of a Fyre Fest 2 in the future (I'm not sure that's the best idea but he didn't ask my opinion).

Here are my key takeaways from the event.

1) For CMOs, it’s just as important to focus inside your organization as it is to focus outside. Things like building the company culture, defining the purpose and harnessing the soul of the company can be just as important as an external marketing campaign.

2) All the current noise about the future of the “CMO” position/ title doesn’t really matter. As a marketing leader, as long as you’re focused on being an “Officer of Growth” for the company, you will be just fine.

3) It seems that the trend for CMOs is to move many of the traditional agency services in-house. Yet, there’s still space for agencies to support companies with bigger creative ideas and specialized services.

4) Marketing is a function in the company that intersects with virtually every other part of the organization. It’s critical that marketing leaders are effective collaborators and build strong relationships with the other departments in their companies.

5) Brands need to create more “human connections” with consumers. Being generic no longer works. Marketers have to try to be as relevant as possible. If not, consumers will ignore you or worse, trash you on social media. But, if you get it right, your marketing programs will outperform the averages. Check out Braze’s Brand Humanity research on this subject.

In addition to the points above, famous YouTuber Collins Key spoke about the impact influencer marketing can have on a brand. When I told my kids that Collins was at the conference, they freaked out. Apparently, they're huge fans of his YouTube channel. So, I was able to get Collins to record a custom video for them. I won some major "Dad points" for that one.

Thanks to Jennifer Rooney and the Forbes team for putting on such a great event. See you next year!