Is it time for a marketing makeover?

In Cannes, together with The Drum, we asked senior marketers whether they felt marketing had a PR problem, how marketing can have greater clout in the boardroom and how, more generally, we can do a better job of marketing marketing.

As we approach a new year and reflect on our resolutions to be better marketers in 2025, the insights we got in Cannes can offer welcome guidance for us all on how to address these perennial challenges.

We at WFA and The Drum hope that the The Great Marketing Makeover will help nudge the industry a little bit closer to finding answers to the marketing industry’s most fundamental challenges.

Does marketing have a PR problem?

For many, the answer is yes as evidenced by the fact that fewer people are trying to get into the profession, opting instead for the likes of Silicon Valley or investment banking.

“I think one of the issues we are facing is that marketing is still seen as the function that drives consumption and that consumption is unsustainable,” said Stephan Loerke, WFA CEO. “What we’re not explaining is that marketing is actually a key driving force for change in our society and we’ve got this incredible ability in combining science and art for driving change.”

For Rupen Desai, CMO and Venture Partner at Una Terra, the recent shift to the short-term has damaged the profession and there is a need to return to being value creators.

Cristina Diezhandino, CMO at Diageo, agrees, arguing that driving long-term value growth at the heart of the role is critical to making the function central.

Others are more optimistic. Alison Payne, Global Marketing Director at The Heineken Company points out that marketing now touches almost all C-suite functions and is becoming much more central.

Rafael Narvaez, Group CMO at Mutti, agrees, saying that “marketing is still in the driving seat where it is enabled to, and the key reason is that we are an accelerator of growth”.

Esi Eggleston Bracey, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Unilever, takes a positive outlook given marketing’s ability to drive growth by understanding how people’s lives have changed and are changing to create opportunity for brands.

“I believe it's the best time ever to be in marketing,” she says.

How can marketers be more influential in the boardroom?

If there’s one ingredient to being more influential it’s being able to show how marketing delivers on business objectives.

“Don’t show up with some colourful charts and cool videos about how we brought that experience to life, but combine that right away with return on investment and that requires quite some effort. Different tools, research correlated with different data sets to really find out what is the impact,” says Rafael Narvaez, Group CMO at Mutti.

For Cristina Diezhandino, CMO at Diageo, it’s about explaining the function in a way that everyone can engage with. “You could be talking about media performance in a way that is extremely specific and perhaps technically challenging for those who are not practitioners in that area and yet you can find ways of having that be translatable to anyone’s understanding,” she says.

Rupen Desai, CMO and Venture Partner Una Terra, argues that a broader conversation is necessary. If you start talking about ‘good growth’ then you can develop a shared agenda and a more collaborative conversation, he says.

Finally, Esi Eggleston Bracey, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Unilever, points out that it’s all about making the business case to colleagues in order to showcase the opportunity in a way that lines up: “I think marketing innovation is business innovation and business innovation is marketing innovation in that it starts with understanding what people need and, importantly, creating the business case and the business value behind that.”

How can we better market marketing as a career?

Anyone can be a marketer because the skills required are so varied. So says Susan O’Brien, Interim CMO at JustEat. “Marketing encompasses a whole heap of talent and a whole heap of skill sets that’s required, you know creative, analytics, project management,” she lists. “Essentially, there’s something in marketing for everyone and that’s what makes it such a fabulous career to follow."

O’Brien was one of many to argue that the profession needed to make a stronger case for marketing. WFA CEO Stephan Loerke, a L’Oréal alumnus, praised his first company’s approach: “Rather than talk about what marketing does, they get young talent into the company. L’Oréal gets young talent to work on marketing case studies and build marketing strategies themselves. I think that’s the best way of just convincing young talent that it is what you are doing in your day-to-day job in marketing.”

For others, including Cristina Diezhandino, CMO at Diageo, and Esi Eggleston Bracey, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Unilever, it’s about celebrating the ability to understand people, the world and how society evolves.

“If you’re interested in people, you’re interested in the world, you’re interested in seeing how society evolves then you would be interested in marketing,” says Cristina.

“My experience is that young people, particularly GenZ and younger, want to make a difference and help people and marketing is a place to do that,” adds Esi.

For Alison Payne, Global Marketing Director at The Heineken Company, the big selling point is the ability to evolve your own career. “You can be like your own entrepreneur, experiment. We’re always dealing with new consumer touchpoints, with new places to go with our communications. There’s really no other function that has that ability to go and experiment like we can,” she says.