Growth doesn’t start with an ad. It starts where your product decisions meet real people. In this episode of the Better Marketing Podcast David Wheldon sits down with Cheryl Goh, newly named 2025 Global Marketer of the Year, to unpack how Grab scaled across Southeast Asia by turning marketing into a true commercial engine where product, pricing, algorithms, and culture work in sync to earn trust and drive results.

In 2026, the best marketing leaders will empower their teams with a healthy mixture of curiosity, humility and optimism.

In this episode we review a year of conversations with Unicef's Frederique Covington Corbett, culture guru Marcus Collins, Cathay Pacific's Ed Bell, Meta's Nicola Mendelsohn, Marcel Marcondes from AB InBev and Global Marketer of the Year, marketing expert Seth Godin, Leyal Eskin Yilmaz from the Magnum Ice Cream Company, and Ogilvy's Rory Sutherland.

Marketers are willing to increase budgets where performance data justifies it. Tom Ashby, Global Lead, Media Services at WFA, argues that the relationship between budget growth and price inflation is breaking down.

The biggest wins in marketing rarely fit into neat dashboards. Marketing guru Rory Sutherland joins us to unpack why creativity is “fat-tailed,” how a few outlier ideas create the lion’s share of value, and why short-term incentives push teams to optimise what’s easy to count rather than what actually compounds.

How do marketers effectively combine people, creativity and technology? The Global Marketer of the Year 2025 jury share their thoughts.

We asked the Global Marketer of the Year 2025 jury which qualities will be most important for marketing leaders in the months and years to come.

AI is transforming the way marketers work. Gabrielle Robitaille, Policy Director at WFA, looks at the latest developments and how they impact marketing and media. 

What happens when one of marketing's most influential thinkers shares his unfiltered wisdom about the state of our industry? Seth Godin joins the WFA Better Marketing Podcast to deliver profound insights that challenge conventional thinking about what makes marketing truly effective.