The Candid CMO: Lex Bradshaw-Zanger, Chief Marketing & Digital Officer for L’Oréal SAPMENA

“Understanding consumer through PowerPoint is not quite the same as talking to them. You can see the numbers, but nothing beats human interaction.”

By any standards Lex Bradshaw-Zanger is a peripatetic marketer. English by birth, educated to MBA level in Spain, he’s worked in the US, France, the UK, the Middle East and, since May 2023, in Singapore leading L’Oréal’s new SAPMENA region. His career has seen him work for agencies, a media owner and finally brands, experiences connected by a passion for digital and retail.

While his contemporaries were all attracted to corporate finance (a subject he studied at university), he went for advertising’s richer combination. “I wasn't too excited by the idea of moving other people's money. The thing about advertising that I thought was quite fun was this combination of creativity, business, but also a little bit of human psychology and understanding people,” he says.

Looking at his CV, that geographical movement has been matched by job changes, particularly at the early stages of his career but each experience has added to his knowledge.

His first job at the Richards Group, for example, introduced him to the principles of media neutrality, using every touchpoint for Home Depot, including signage, employee training and even uniforms.

When he returned to Europe to work for WPP, he worked on HSBC and particularly IBM, which at the time was one of the most advanced clients doing “demand generation and email way before anybody else was doing it”.

“People expect you to show solidity and not jump around organizations. I got accused of the latter. But then you need to differentiate yourself as well, and those things are a little bit of a contradiction, so I don't know what the right answer is,” he reflects.

The big acceleration in his career was a move to the Middle East in 2010, a chance to work multimarket in one of the fastest-growing regions of the world, working on pitches in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and Qatar.

That experience, combined with his later work for Facebook in France, helped transform his profile. “I went from being a regular account person or a planner in an agency to suddenly seeing multicultural pitching agency models and acquisitions. You step up a level in terms of what you're doing,” he says.

Human first

His love of retail comes from his enjoyment of human interaction. “I always say to my teams here, you know, understanding consumer through PowerPoint is not quite the same as talking to them. You can see the numbers, but nothing beats human interaction,” he says.

As if to prove the point, his journey to arrival at L’Oréal started with an introduction at a WFA digital transformation session where he was speaking on behalf of McDonald’s, which he had joined in 2014 to manage its digital programmes in Europe.

With more than eight years at L’Oréal now under his belt, he admits that being in one company has advantages. “I see that now, having done three or four jobs in this group in three countries, the value of finding people again, and the human network is incredible,” he says.

Now based in Asia, where his responsibility covers Morocco to New Zealand, 35 countries, 37 brands and 40% of the world's population, he’s taking the content and entertainment to a new level. That means live commerce but also more recently conversational commerce as well as live shopping with digital avatars, just to try and see what that's like during the off hours.

The role of today’s marketer

Lex may be a rarity among marketers in that his challenges are not about securing investment. “It's about saying, you know, are we doing this right? Then how do we build scale? And how do we use technology to do it the right way? I can't say that I'm ever fighting for money to drive initiatives,” he says.

The company is constantly looking at new things in pilot markets and making sure that any learnings are cross fertilised. It recently ran a start-up competition called Big Bang, scouting a thousand start-ups, whittling them down to 10 and then picking three winners. The next stage in the process is to pick a combination of brands and markets to go and pilot these startups. “That's how we'll learn. Maybe it'll be amazing, and we'll deploy that across multiple countries. Maybe we'll just learn and it's a new exposure. It’s about constantly placing bets on new ideas and testing and learning. And we’re going even bigger for this year’s competition which started in February,” he says.

The role of today’s marketer is to deliver on both art and science, the industrialization of content creation and data-driven media but also better human connection with consumers with the same level of resources.

“You know, the job of CMO is not one brand and lots of creativity. I sat through two pitch presentations for a project today. They were each two-and-a-half-hours long. There weren't many pictures in them. There were lots of numbers and lots of technology.”

Selling marketing to a new generation

Before he worked in marketing, Lex taught English and the lure of mentoring is still strong, helping sell the profession and giving career advice.

Despite initially always looking outside for his next job, he now takes a different view. “You need to look inside first. I say to people, if you've got more than one job in a single organization on your CV, it's a massive tell that you're somebody good, because the organization has decided that you're good enough to do something else.”

He also works with the School of Marketing in the UK on its mentoring programme with underprivileged groups. “We try to go and see business students, engineering students, these sort of things as well as marketing, to talk to them about what we do and reframe it to explain what marketing is to almost reset it.”

Covid, he thinks, has distorted what marketing is all about, allowing digital and big tech appear to be everything. “There are lots of people who jumped on the bright, shiny object digital thing. But they are just digital people and they're not really marketers. They're not really brand people,” he says. “I think the fundamental job of marketing is what's exciting; understanding growth strategies and consumers and how channels work together. What is it that connects people to brands? Brands are emotions, perceptions and memory structures.”

About WFA’s Candid CMO series

WFA wants to celebrate the world’s best marketers and explore the journeys they are on to deliver better marketing. This series helps distil some of the biggest learnings of our CMO members. As we are great believers in the power to learn from successes as well as missteps, we hope this will give our readers the opportunity to learn more about the things they are most proud of, but also about where they may have done things differently. More at https://wfanet.org/CandidCMO.

If you'd like to nominate someone with an interesting story to be interviewed for the Candid CMO series, get in touch with Camelia Cristache.