Something happened at the 2023 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity that has never happened before in the event’s 70-year history: A chief financial officer spoke on stage.
That CFO was Mastercard’s Sachin Mehra, who co-led a session at the Palais with Raja Rajamannar, the company’s chief marketing and communications officer. Mehra, standing before an audience of creators and agency executives, admitted he was out of his comfort zone. Rajamannar, for his part, said he had mixed feelings about Mehra coming to Cannes Lions because it was like “taking the priest to Las Vegas.”
The focus of their talk, which occurred on the festival’s opening day, was to address and alleviate the tension between marketing and finance. Only around half of marketing leaders, for example, believe they can prove the value of marketing, according to research firm Gartner. Unable to demonstrate how advertising, sponsorships and other marketing activities drive business growth, many CMOs see their budgets shrink and credibility diminish.
The topic wasn’t limited to Mehra and Rajamannar’s presentation, either. As signs of a future recession persist and technology provides more ways to measure consumer behavior, others at Cannes expressed concern for marketers who struggle to show a return on investment.
Don McGuire, svp and chief marketing officer at technology company Qualcomm, said he has observed a troubling amount of angst at CMO conferences he’s attended in recent years.
“I don’t want to call it whining, but there was this disconnection that these CMOs felt with their business or the rest of the C-suite,” he told Adweek’s chief experience officer Jenny Rooney during a separate panel discussion in Cannes. “It was almost like they were saying, ‘I don’t have a very good relationship with my CEO, or my CFO doesn’t understand me.’”
Metrics and jargon
The source of friction between CMOs and CFOs often relates to two things: metrics and jargon.
On the former, marketers have a history of caring about numbers that don’t carry much weight outside of their field. An increase in email open rates or likes on Instagram might point to a bump in brand favorability, but these statistics don’t do much good for CFOs having to answer questions from analysts during a quarterly earnings call.
Establishing objective metrics everyone agrees are vital to the business can do wonders.
The same goes for the latter. Marketers who are incapable of speaking the language of the CFO will have problems getting heard and winning arguments. Basic training in financial literacy can help CMOs overcome this hurdle.
“The CMO has to try a little bit harder to show real interest in the metrics that matter to an organization and lean into the CFO language,” said Paul Coxhill, CEO of the marketing intelligence firm WARC, during another event at Cannes Lions. Marketing leaders, he added, can’t “rely on using marketing jargon and expect everybody else to understand it.”
Prior to debuting Shipt’s largest campaign ever, which features actor, comedian and producer Issa Rae, the delivery service’s CMO Alia Kemet said she had to prove to her CFO, Chris Falk, that the marketing effort would benefit the business.
“We have very different jargon, and sometimes that can create obstacles, but I’m someone who wants to constantly absorb and learn from my colleagues,” said Kemet. “I’ve been in this industry for over two decades now, so I’ve learned to stop, listen, ask questions and respect the role finance plays in bettering my work.”
As Ulta Beauty’s CMO Michelle Crossan-Matos put it during a recent interview with Adweek: “When we all speak the same language with a foundation rooted in data, consensus is well within reach.”
It’s all about relationship
Trust, communication, honesty, humility—these qualities form the bedrock of a happy and healthy marriage. It’s no coincidence, then, that they’re also necessary for a creating a robust working relationship between CMOs and CFOs.
“It sounds really basic, because it is, but as human beings we’ve all got our own agendas, we all like to think about what we like to think about, we always think the other person doesn’t understand what we’re saying,” Mehra said during Mastercard’s session. “We’ve just got to spend the time to communicate effectively.”
Sometimes sharing ownership of a problem can spur action and strengthen bonds. This fall, Qualcomm plans to introduce a revamped website that’s better equipped to guide and track the user’s experience. According to McGuire, partnering with his CFO, Akash Palkhiwala, to push for the update was crucial in securing the funds needed to build a new Qualcomm.com.
“Ownership from our CFO in this process was important to get the resources and support,” said McGuire, who noted he has a great relationship with Palkhiwala.
McGuire stressed every CMO should make understanding what their shareholders value and how their company earns money a priority. The biggest compliment he’s ever received from his CFO, he added, was when Palkhiwala said, “Don, I know you’re a marketing guy, but I also look at you as a business guy.”
This, however, isn’t the case for everyone. In a 2021 study on the CMO-CFO alliance from market research firm Forrester, the top marketer at a specialty retailer admitted they don’t have a solid rapport with their CFO.
“Part of it is personality,” the anonymous CMO told the Forrester researchers. “It is not lost on me that it’s a key relationship.”
A strategy Rajamannar has pursued at Mastercard that might aid CMOs in this difficult position is to embed a finance person, who still reports to the CFO, within the marketing department. This gives the finance team a look into what the marketing team is doing and how it’s spending its dollars without the CFO having to grab a coffee with the CMO every few days.
Rajamannar acknowledged many of his marketing colleagues nearly had a heart attack upon first hearing this proposal, but he said the move has fostered trust and transparency within the company.
Another aspect to building mutual respect is admitting when something doesn’t go as planned, especially since marketing often requires a test-and-learn attitude. Hiding projects that fall short of victory only breeds suspicion and doubt among other members of the C-suite.
“As much as it’s about celebrating the successes, it’s also about sharing the learnings when you fail,” Charisse Hughes, svp and chief growth officer at the Kellogg Company, told Adweek earlier this year. “There’s going to be some things that won’t work.”
Throughout their unprecedented presentation at Cannes Lions, Mastercard’s Mehra and Rajamannar repeated that despite the tension that exists between their roles within the company, they’re both on the same team and share the same goals.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about if you can translate what the marketing department is doing to how it’s going to create shareholder value,” said Mehra. “That’s what matters.”
