__CMOs prepare for a Trump presidency in 2025 — which will be a different kind of CMO from his first term__

There was a time, not too long ago, when CMOs started to sound a lot more political. They made statements about brand purpose. They pulled funding from fake news. They held advertiser boycotts — more than once. They were operating, it seemed during Donald Trump’s first presidency, from a position of power in which what they said and how they spent their ad dollars could help shape the cultural climate.

This may not be the case Trump’s second time around. The cultural landscape has shifted. Marketers have watched major brands — not just Bud Light, but McDonald’s, Planet Fitness and others — grapple with boycotts of their own. They’ve seen the likes of Harley Davidson and John Deere about-face on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives amid pressure from activist investor Robby Starbuck. They’ve dealt with legal action questioning brand safety and pushing back against their ability to boycott a platform. They’ve seen GARM shuttered. And they’re currently in wait-and-see mode with Meta to understand how its position on censorship will affect them.

The CMO during a Trump presidency in 2025 won’t be the same as in 2017. It’s unlikely that CMOs will be seen making statements about marketing as a force for good or announcing they’re pulling funding from a platform or making any moves that could be seen as overtly political. (Though, arguably, not doing so could also be considered its own political move.) This time around, while of course it will vary from one CMO to another, it seems that CMOs in general will focus on getting back to the basics of marketing and focus intently on their own customers rather than making any big statements.

“The CMO’s main job is to protect the company’s brand assets,” said Allen Adamson, brand consultant and co-founder of brand consultancy Metaforce. “The job has gotten trickier and trickier because connecting with consumers is harder, more complicated and more complex. It gets even trickier because the country is also incredibly polarized and fragmented so the one-size-fits-all approach no longer fits.”

“CMOs will be in service of the consumer,” said Stephanie Hanley, chief brand officer at ad agency EP+Co. “They’ll return to consumer-obsession. Talking with them. Innovating for them. Inviting them to co-create for the brand’s community, not just for the platform or the brand. CMOs will use their scrappy mentality to find new channels to build consumer relationship, looking more closely at the full journey to find pockets for impact that may have been overlooked over the last five years.”

With that being the case, marketers are spending time once again on their brand purpose — not to figure out a way to take a stand as they had in the past — but to understand how they should talk to their customers now.

“CMOs, especially at the enterprise level, have really new challenges,” like the changing media and political landscapes, among other “disruptive factors in business” that have made it so CMOs are not in “a very empowered position” at the moment, said Dory Ellis Garfinkle, chief marketing officer of brand consultancy Siegel+Gale. The firm is working with brands on brand purpose and brand building initiatives to help them navigate those challenges.

Marketers will continue to get back to basics, in a sense, going into this new Trump administration to find ways to connect with customers again and avoid polarization. While that could be seen as a move of fear — due to the worry that brands could get caught in something damaging and acting accordingly — some see it as a move that could ultimately help marketers find their way back to making meaningful work.

Recently, marketers have taken an always-on approach required for brands to market successfully on major platforms. That has led to a “sea of sameness as all our lives become influenced by tech controlled algorithms,” said Leila Fataar, founder of creative marketing and communications company Platform13.

“Leaning so heavily on the scale and efficiency of online platforms to create always-on content has sacrificed the creativity and cultural nuance needed to build enduring brands,” said Fataar. “It’s time for CMOs to stop playing by Big Tech’s rules and start creating new ones based on the principles of cultural relevance, creativity and authenticity. While the tools have changed, the CMOs role hasn’t. Those who do, can regain their power beyond brokers of media to become builders of meaningful audience relationships.”

Fataar isn’t alone in her assessment that zeroing in on cultural relevance as a top metric over mastering the latest trend on a social platform will help brands in the long run.

“We all know old adland is dead but the art of brand building is definitely alive and will be for some time to come,” said James Kirkham, CEO of brand consultancy Iconic.

Rather than zeroing in on the minutiae of the latest changes on tech platforms and how to best respond to them, Kirkham said he sees the potential for marketers to get back to the big ideas that help them truly resonate with their customers.

“For a long time we needed to stop thinking about advertising as this thing we push out on some latest tech platform and start thinking about it as moments we pull people into,” said Kirkham. “So the best CMOs stopped interrupting what people were already interested in, and created brand work which became what they were interested in.”

“Just like filmmakers, artists, authors, writers of a Netflix series — this is an experience you want to find, discover, consume and share like any of the best entertainment” he continued. “Irrespective of Meta, X or any other Big Tech shift and a new president influence. Most of the best are realizing culturally relevant work is a mandatory not a nice-to-have, and in this seismic AI shift, the one remaining advantage humans have is emotive storytelling.”

“As brand people, we need to drive cultural relevance,” said Fataar.

DIGIDAY

DIGIDAY 2, JANUARY 2025 

By this time next week, we’ll likely know (though, anything could happen) whether TikTok has gone dark in the U.S. or if the app will continue to exist. So far, it’s not looking good. The likelihood of a ban has creators uneasy, preparing their audiences to follow them on other platforms and hoping to take brand deals elsewhere. Meanwhile marketers are questioning refunds, readying contingency plans and sorting out where they’ll move ad dollars.

It seems, all things considered, that marketers are prepared for the short-order effects of a TikTok ban should that come to fruition. What remains up in the air, however, are the long-term effects for brands should TikTok be rendered unusable in the U.S. Sure, there are other short-form video alternatives that stand to benefit (YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels) but short-form video wasn’t the only appeal of the platform. TikTok has been a cultural spigot of sorts for marketers in recent years — they’ve looked to the app not only for what’s trending and to tap into those trends but to understand potential audiences and various cultural niches. So what happens when that spigot is shutoff?

The common answer from agency executives is that, at least in the short term, marketers will have to work harder to understand what’s trending, where their brands can fi t into the conversation and the audience insight work that TikTok has added some ease to. “It is a cheat code in a way,” Douglas Brundage, founder and CEO of brand studio Kingsland, said of marketers’ use of TikTok to understand culture in recent years. “My recommendation is that brands should always have a platform agnostic culture strategy.”

__“Unfortunately, brands and agencies who have depended on TikTok astheir source of ‘cultural insight’ will struggle,” Leila Fataar, founder of brand consultancy Platform13, wrote in an email. “Being culturally relevant is not easy — it takes care and consideration.”__

While marketers will certainly look to the platforms that people migrate to and spend their time on, there’s no clear indication yet that audiences will migrate to one app and with that move give one platform the kind of cultural power that TikTok has amassed. Instead,marketers and agency execs expect that, should TikTok be shuttered,social media will only fragment further, with some spending moretime on Instagram Reels, others on YouTube Shorts, others on Twitch or Discord or Reddit. Culture is “amplified” on the short-form video alternatives but it isn’t created in the same way it is on TikTok, explained Laura Brand, executive director of social at VML, adding that “2025 is going to be much more about the decentralization of social.”

Without that “cheat code,” marketers will have to use many platforms for research, and will also likely resume or increase their efforts in more traditional audience research methods like customer surveys and in-person research trips at physical stores.

“TikTok is a cultural force and amplifier that has become a mainstay, but most sophisticated marketers look at multiple cultural indicators to understand trends and decide how to incorporate them into a campaign strategy,” Gabe Gordon, CEO of Reach Agency, wrote in an email. “Not only do I believe that the trend forecasters and trendsetters will continue to do just that, but I anticipate that they’ll be inclined to lean into that ability more heavily without TikTok.”

While that will help, losing access to TikTok for creative inspiration and research is something strategists and creatives aren’t thrilled about.

“Obviously we do our own research but TikTok delivers this beautiful nuance because it’s a platform where people just spew their honest, original thoughts all the time,” said Evan Carpenter, group strategy director at Mother New York. “The ability to get really insightful aboutan audience, understand them and understand their motivations via content that’s constantly being posted to that platform, if that’s gone… I’ll miss it.”

While other platforms certainly provide inspiration in similar ways — a Reddit insight led to one of last year’s best Super Bowl campaign’s (CeraVe’s Michael Cera campaign) — TikTok has been a “centralnervous system” of culture, explained Mani Schlisser, director of strategy at Oberland. “The jokes, the memes, the trends, the movements, the creators, they don’t all just migrate to one platform. That’s not how culture works,” Oberland said.

Should the ban happen, it will take time to understand how people migrate and what that will mean for brands in culture. Until then, the industry waits.

DIGIDAY - JANUARY 25 - ARTICLE - COVER

DIGIDAY 1, JANUARY 2025 

BRANDS & CULTURE

Culture is Not a Marketing Channel
Cultural relevance isn’t just a nice-to-have marketing strategy or an output—it’s a contemporary business growth driver.

Leila Fataar unpacked this concept at the debut Brands & Culture event in November 2024, exploring how brands can embrace cultural impact as a core business imperative.


DE&I

Future

Industry

New ways of working 

Cultural

Opinions

Talks

Profile

Brand & Culture 2024

Brands & Culture, November 2024

__Future of Strategy 2024: Welcome to the era of culture-led brands__

It’s time for big brands to embrace "cultural relevance", says Leila Fataar, founder of Platform13. This means culture-led strategy coming to the forefront, upstream with brand and business strategy. It’s time to evolve the traditional brand playbook to update that funnel and make it fit for purpose in the 21st century.

Culture is the stuff of life, living and breathing, always changing and evolving. Culture is a reflection of reality and a global connector of intersectional communities. It's how we communicate, what we wear, eat, see and listen to. It’s how we behave and what/who influences us, permeating every part of our lives. For brands and businesses, cultural shifts impact us all – you, your stakeholders, your employees, and especially your fans and consumers (core, target, latent and potential) – evolving their behaviours and mindsets. For me, a culturally relevant brand refers to a brand state when people engage positively with that brand, work for that brand, advocate for it and buy it, at any time (not only during the paid campaign cycle). They will do this because it deeply connects with them within the context of what is happening in their own, and the wider world, meeting them how and where they are, credibly. Done well, a brand can transcend its category and become part of or even shape culture. These are modern brands, culture-led brands.

The past few years have proven what we, who have worked in ‘culture’ for a while, have known for the longest time – that the nuance, context and interconnectedness of geopolitics, the climate emergency and social justice, the narrative around it driven and spread by both the mainstream news outlets and social media truth-tellers has and is shifting global dynamics never before seen in history. 2024 is shaping up to be a pivotal moment in history, setting the scene for supercharged unpredictability. Set against this background, the pace of technological advances in AI, Web3, mixed reality media and spatial computing is accelerating marketing, product and commerce innovation, upending traditional brand management like never before. Successful brands need to be able to credibly tap into cultural nuances to become and stay relevant and adapt for growth and/or even survival.

Having worked on the brand side at adidas and Diageo, 7 years ago, I created Platform13 to answer challenges faced by big brands in the ever-changing world of consumer behaviour, technology advancements, creative innovation and the swiftly moving cultural landscape. Since inception, our project teams have been curated, assembling world-class experts and cultural voices matched to our clients' territories, categories and target audiences to answer their specific challenges, needs and objectives. This helps us read and analyse cultural shifts specific to both our clients and their audiences through real-world insights, then create and/or flex our clients' plans accordingly. To do that all our work starts (and continues) with our pioneering methodology, a "cultural positioning" for the brand. This unique cultural positioning involves aligning the brand (and/or its products and services) with all its audiences and communities by understanding the global issues impacting them, and unlocking the brand's special role and place to those audiences in their lives and in the world – importantly, this is a role that only that brand can fulfil. We then execute this cultural positioning hand in hand with these cultural voices, grabbing the right attention with the right creative for the audiences and building relevance through resonance (and therefore shareability) with all audiences.

__Guinness x Notting Hill Carnival__

A good example is the work I and Platform13 did for Guinness. The brand has been exported to the West Indies since the 1800s, and is as much part of Caribbean culture as Irish culture. I knew this from my time as the first Head of Culture & Entertainment at Diageo…and a visit to the wonderful archive as well as through friends and cultural institutions like Notting Hill Carnival, which I have been attending since I arrived in London almost 30 years ago. For Carnival’s 50th birthday in 2016, we (myself and Boiler Room – a pioneering global online music streaming service) wanted to show the positive side to an event that has stood for diversity and love for 50 years. With Guinness and their then tagline, ‘made of more’, legend was born. A content series of Interviews and broadcasting from 8 original sound systems at Carnival that weekend, merch that went viral and our own sound system hand in hand with Deviation, we told the stories of the people who made and make 50-year-old Carnival what it is, those people who are ‘made of more’ and those standing up for one of London's most loved, culturally important and events today. The results: 36m reached globally, across 2 days, and 100m+ earned PR impressions. A personal and career highlight.

After leaving Diageo to set up Platform13, I continued working with the brand on a number of projects. With increased interest in heritage after the global BLM movement, in 2021, Platform13 created a new cultural platform for the brand with real people and real stories at the heart. Part of this was partnering with people from communities where Guinness is deeply embedded as part of their culture, to tell their story, their way. So, for the Jamaican community, around the year that Carnival did not happen (2021), we wanted to celebrate with cultural voices, Caribbean food sensations, Original Flava (the wonderful Craig & Shaun) and their amazing Nanny (RIP), who used Guinness in her cooking for years. Key for us was Nanny front and centre in the campaign as the inspiration for her grandsons, proudly standing under her statement “My husband love him Guinness Punch”. A city-wide poster campaign, (including in their home town of Croydon) on Carnival weekend and a social first three-part mini-series featuring Nanny’s annual BBQ and recipes for Guinness Jerk Chicken and Guinness Punch drove social organic impact as the community felt seen (and commented and shared accordingly). The paid social campaign also performed exceedingly well, achieving 59% over planned reach. This is because we achieved a lower CPM than planned. The Diageo media agency believed that was because the audience targeting we used for the campaign was more likely to resonate with the ads.

Obviously, this type of work can build positive impact for the brand, drive meaning and loyalty, and if leveraged respectfully, can ultimately drive sustainable, meaningful, impactful, equitable, and lasting business growth. This is how we mitigate risk internally and drive reach and relevance, hype and depth, numbers and nuance externally. But this also means that your brand playbook and how your organisation is set up needs to evolve, involving utilising ongoing cultural intelligence as a tool for innovation in marketing, moving beyond traditional insights for mere validation. It requires reevaluating procurement processes in order to work with new types of external partners, like Platform13, in order to embrace new approaches rooted in culture, credibly. Only then can a brand remain culturally relevant and avoid fading into the background.

__Practical steps to take__

- Invest in your Cultural Positioning to identify the unique role your brand and/or your product/service plays in the lives of your audiences and the world. This enables you to tap into your audience's RELEVANT passion areas, credibly and RELEVANT for the brand, and helps to mitigate risk and drive resonance with your audiences and create a culture-led strategy for your brand and your business.
- Ensure ongoing cultural intelligence using real-world insights through the lens of your cultural positioning can support decision-making on short-term trends as well as how to address cultural shifts.
- Reassess procurement processes to open the gates to new types of partners and new perspectives.

WARC cover image

WARC,  SEPTEMBER 2024

0 (2)

ADE, OCTOBER 2017