The Candid CMO: Toby Horry, SVP Global Marketing, Merlin Entertainments

For marketers racing to adapt to a new AI-led world, Toby has positive news: brand will matter more than ever. “In the world of AI overviews and LLMs, brand becomes even more important than it’s ever been. Fundamentally, the brands that are the strongest will be the ones that win,” he says.

Working across more than 100 attractions, 15 brands and 20 markets at Merlin Entertainments, he sees the pendulum swinging back from short-term performance towards long-term brand building.

“In the 2010s, a lot of money flowed into search and a lot of the measurement was quite short term. I think AI overviews are making brand fashionable again because brand is authority and the LLMs are looking for authority,” he says. “If we start moving to a world where we go beyond zero-click search to zero-click buy, then brand strength is going to be absolutely crucial.”

Tactically, that means marketing to machines as well as humans. “If you can successfully have a strong brand and you’re able to understand your mix of marketing to humans and marketing to machines, you’ll probably do quite well.”

Merlin’s additional challenge is knowing who it’s competing against. In leisure, “your competitive set is kind of infinite,” he says, stretching from other theme parks to the pub and a night in with Netflix.

The upside is that, in a world dominated by screens, Merlin offers the antidote. “Going back through your camera roll, it’s almost always the case that the things in your camera roll are the times when you’re doing something in real life with the people you love.”

From Mr Bean to Merlin

Horry grew up with advertising. His father was a creative at CDP in the 70s and 80s, when the agency was producing classic work for Hamlet and Heineken. At 15, Horry wrote to one of his father’s former colleagues who ran a film production company and landed his first job as a runner on Mr Bean, fetching Rowan Atkinson’s lunch.

Working as a production manager after university, he realised “the more interesting stuff was happening before you got to the production”. He joined AMV BBDO’s graduate scheme and later spent nine years at digital agency Dare, rising to MD.

There, he found himself too far from the actual work. “You’re working 5% on client A, 5% on client B, but also doing a hell of a lot of stuff on internal. So I thought, well, the only way of really fixing that is to go and work client side.”

He successfully worked on Tesco’s turnaround in 2015 as digital marketing director, but a later restructure moved him into a new customer propositions director role, which proved frustrating. “I think the learning was that the role was quite ill-defined. And I think in your career, you need to have clarity in what success looks like and what people expect of you,” he reflects.

Intentional leadership and enabling

Horry recognises that his role has been transformed from the agency days when you could walk the floors, particularly now he’s working multi-market.

“In a post-COVID world where people are travelling less and we're sort of more Teams based and I think you probably have to work much harder on communication and sharing of knowledge,” he says. “You have to be much more active and intentional in how you go about doing that.”

The challenge isn’t just geographical or cultural, it’s also about the change from doing to managing. “As a leader, your job is to find and enable great people to do great work. Early in your career, you basically get rewarded and promoted for being a good doer,” he says. “That pivot point can be quite difficult because you've sort of done your entire career as the person that's actually delivering stuff.”

Elves on holiday

The work he’s proudest of is TUI’s first Christmas campaign, created with Leo Burnett. The insight: people who work hard all year deserve a holiday, and nobody works harder than Santa’s elves. So, the ad sent them off on a fortnight’s break.

TUI had traditionally gone quiet in December. “But of course, the second Boxing Day comes around, everyone’s like, blimey, I need a holiday,” says Horry. Building brand salience in December meant that when January offers hit a crowded market, TUI would be “more top of mind, more likely to convert, more likely to command high pricing.”

Looking for learnings

Having worked both agency and client side, Horry has an open attitude on the value of great work, whenever and wherever it comes form. His first campaign at AMV was for Whiskas Cat Milk and subsequent work has covered a huge range of categories.

He says that’s a lesson many marketers forget because they are too focused on their immediate competitive set. “When I worked on BMW, they only really cared about what Mercedes and Audi were doing,” he says. “I think often the answers are out there, and somebody is doing some great stuff, and you sometimes just need to take a bit of a look up and look around.”

That perspective extends not just to current work but also to the campaigns of his father’s generation. “There was fantastic advertising and marketing in the 70s and 80s and 90s. And I think we can still learn a lot from that,” he says.

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 Charles Chaplin.