Today on Next Gen Builders, Francois welcomes Brent Smart, the CMO at Australian Telco giant, Telstra. Their conversation focuses on the power of brand as Brent has been the leading charge behind Telstra’s new brand platform.
Today on Next Gen Builders, Francois welcomes Brent Smart, the CMO at Australian Telco giant, Telstra. Their conversation focuses on the power of brand as Brent has been the leading charge behind Telstra’s new brand platform.
Throughout the episode, Brent argues for connecting your marketing efforts to the real world. When trying to evaluate how Telstra appeared to consumers, his team ran surveys asking Australians to draw, not write, what they thought of the organization. Similarly, he consistently advocates for running live experiments to validate your approaches in real time.
The episode also explores how Brent aligns teams around a unified brand vision with tools created in house, such as “Telstra’s Creative Dial,” to help measure and guide creative output. He stresses the value of a distinct brand voice and explains why starting with a small, focused team helps nurture new ideas.
Drawing on his transition from agency life to leading Telstra’s marketing, Brent offers a fresh perspective on keeping creativity alive in a corporate setting. His commitment to hands-on idea generation and real-world testing over pre-market research makes this episode essential for anyone seeking meaningful brand transformation.
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Guest Bio
A leading global marketer and a passionate speaker on creativity, brand and culture, Brent Smart is Chief Marketing Officer of Australia's second most valuable brand, Telstra.
Previously, Brent spent five years as CMO of Australian insurance giant IAG, where his work on NRMA Insurance took it from 36th strongest brand in Australia to 5th, winning 3 Gold effectiveness awards and the coveted Grand Effie in 2021. Mark Ritson wrote that “NRMA is not just a fantastic Australian case study, it could be taught at Harvard or Stanford and positions Brent Smart as the most accomplished CMO in Australia and one of the best in the world”.
Before becoming a marketer, Brent spent 20 years in the advertising business, leading New Zealand Agency of the Decade Colenso BBDO and rising to CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi New York, winning many Cannes Lions and other global creative awards.
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Guest Quote
“ Brand is a multiplier for performance marketing. When the brand is strong, the performance marketing actually works better. We've seen our short term ROIs actually go up, not go down. The brand doesn't just help with this quarter's numbers, it helps with next quarter’s and beyond. And once you give it time to start building, you can start showing that not just the brand metrics are healthy, also our short term performance metrics are healthy. But you need time. It's not gonna show in the first quarter. You gotta wait.” – Brent Smart
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Time Stamps
00:00 Episode Start
2:00 The power of brand
05:10 Evaluating your brand
08:35 Finding your brand voice
12:10 Building conviction within your organization
15:05 Start experimenting in the real world
17:40 Leading by doing
19:45 Taxi or Bus Meeting
22:00 What does a good pitch feel like?
27:35 Discipline liberates creativity
30:00 Can you teach taste?
34:20 Brent's journey to CMO
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Links
0:00:00.2 Francois Ajenstat: I think we spend far too much time in many marketing organizations trying to research everything to be really sure right about what's going to happen when you put it to market. You can never be sure right then.
0:00:12.6 Brent Smart: You have analysis paralysis as well.
0:00:14.4 Francois Ajenstat: Analysis paralysis. And you just end up spending all this time in an artificial environment trying to predict what's going to happen in the real world. Just do something in the real world and get that instant feedback.
0:00:31.1 Brent Smart: This is NextGen Builders, the show for the growth and product leaders of tomorrow. What does it take to transform a brand with a long history and shift the way people think and feel about your business? Well, today we're going to dive deep into how to rebuild your brand from the inside out, and why gut instincts and bold storytelling beat all the generic playbooks. And how you can get your ideas from your brain to go through the creative process and get them out into the market to drive impact. Joining us today to talk through brand transformation is Brent Smart, the chief Marketing officer at Australian Telco Telstra. Welcome, Brent.
0:01:19.3 Francois Ajenstat: I feel like I should say G'day.
0:01:22.2 Brent Smart: G'day. Welcome to the podcast.
0:01:26.5 Francois Ajenstat: Thanks, Francois, for having me on. It's, it's great to be talking to you.
0:01:30.3 Brent Smart: It's great for you to be here and we're really excited for you to be on the podcast. I think maybe first, I know you love brand and you talk a lot about brand, but when you joined Telstra, you've gone through this whole brand transformation. What does that look like when you joined? How do you actually transform a brand? How do you quantify the success of that brand transformation? And where are you guys at now in that journey? A lot of questions packed into one.
0:01:58.3 Francois Ajenstat: No, no, a lot, A lot of questions. So, so when I joined, I think, you know, Telstra is one of the most iconic brands in Australia. We certainly don't have an awareness problem. You know, we've got like 100% awareness and everyone knows us. We're a real sort of part of the fabric of this, of this nation. But I think Telstra had, and quite surprising to me, Telstra was a very aggressive trading company. Right. We call it trading, which is sort of all our retail activity and our performance marketing and our channels. And, and I sort of expected Telstra being the market leader, you know, a company with a lot of legacy. I probably expected coming in that maybe Telstra wouldn't be as aggressive as some of the challenger brands and smaller brands, the market, but it was really aggressive on the trading, weekly trading meetings. Everyone knows the numbers and really good at it like a really well developed trading muscle. But because it was so focused on that, you know, the brand muscle was a little bit lacking development, you know, like it needed to get in the gym and we need to build the brand muscle back up.
0:03:10.0 Francois Ajenstat: And in fact, probably the sort of, the starkest example of that was, was 80% of our marketing budget was getting spent on that short term trading activity and only 20% on the brand. So job number one was, was to get people to understand the the commercial value that brand can bring beyond just the quarter we're in. Right. That's the beautiful thing about a brand is when you build brand, you're not just talking to the, to the smaller group of customers who are in market right now. You're talking to everyone. And you know, we've got some incredible technologies available to today's marketers. You know, it's never been more possible to target someone and to really sort of understand if someone is, you know, in market and ready to buy. Like, we've got amazing tools to do that. But there's only one killer technology that lets you reach someone who has no interest whatsoever in your category. They're not interested in buying a mobile phone. They don't know when they're gonna buy a mobile phone. They might buy it next month, they might buy it next year. They don't know. They're just not engaged in the category.
0:04:11.9 Francois Ajenstat: They're not interested. They're just going about their, their daily lives. And there's only one killer technology that can actually engage that type of customer, implant a memory into their brain and make them feel better about your brand. And that's called brand advertising. I don't know anything else can do it. So, so that's the power of brand. Brand builds, builds future demand with people who aren't in the market yet. They got to be in the market someday. And that future demand isn't going to help you this quarter, but it's going to help you in three quarters or further out. And I think being able to, you know, explain how that works is a big part of the job. Right. And so that was the first thing like really getting people to understand that we need to build the brand in the long term and the commercial benefits that that would deliver. So that was step one.
0:05:01.9 Brent Smart: How do you, how do you assess where the brand is? Like current state, you know it. Do you use market studies for that or is it a feeling?
0:05:12.9 Francois Ajenstat: Well, we've got all the, we've got all the data in the world. Right. We've got so much data on, on, on awareness, consideration, you know, brand image attributes, all these. We've got, we, we're drowning in, in data. But I always think that, that the data doesn't really give you a feeling for the brand, does it? For me? Anyway, so, so we did an ethnographic study where, you know, rather than talking to lots of customers, we spoke to a small group of customers, spent a lot of time with them. We spent about sort of three days with them and we, we hung out with them in their homes, in the pub, at their local sporting clubs and we just spent time in their environment talking to them about the brand. And they're really most powerful thing was we asked them to draw the Telstra brand and they did these drawings and, and I brought those drawings back into our business and it's so much more powerful. You know, the old adage, picture tells a thousand words but you have an emotional reaction to a drawing that you don't get from data sets, you know, and so for me, that was a really powerful way of really sort of understanding how customers really, when you get under the surface, how customers are really feeling about the brand.
0:06:32.0 Francois Ajenstat: And that became, you know, the good old from to shift. That became sort of the. From. Like what we wanted to shift from was the way that people were currently perceiving the brand. And by the way, those drawings were...
0:06:43.0 Brent Smart: Yeah, I need to know. So you go in, they're drawing stick figures of how they imagine Telstra to be like.
0:06:50.2 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, yeah. So what they drew mainly, there were three sort of major themes of what they drew a white guy in a suit. Lots, we got lots and lots of white guys in a suit. Right, so you sort of. Yeah, you're traditional, you're serious, you're boring, you're corporate. We got Monopoly man, you know, from the board game, and we got bags of cash and cash registers and all this sort of imagery to suggest you care more about profit than you do customers. And then the other one, which was probably the most, the one that gave everyone the most visceral kind of reaction was two stick figures, a large stick figure and a smaller stick figure. And the large stick figure is sort of bending over and pointing his finger down at the little stick figure and just said, bully. Right. So you're talking down to us. You're the big, you're the big guy in the market that sort of, you know, he's bullying customers. So, you know, it wasn't, wasn't great. We knew we had some reputational challenges. Our category makes it hard. Telcos don't have the greatest reputations, you know, as a category.
0:07:56.9 Francois Ajenstat: So that makes it hard that you start from a disadvantage being a telco. And we knew we had some reputational challenges. But those images, those drawings were able to sort of funnily enough articulate it better than any words or data could.
0:08:11.3 Brent Smart: It's hard to get feedback like that about whatever you're working on, in this case the brand. But it could be, you know, your product, you get product feedback, you get feedback at a retro. And you know, now you're, you're being told, okay, your baby's ugly or has room for improvement. Yeah. How do you go from that to a desired, desired state?
0:08:33.8 Francois Ajenstat: Well, I mean, like I said earlier, it gives you the from right, like you go, okay, so this is what people really think about us. So here's the vision of what we, you know, could be. And I think, you know, personality is massive for brands and, and I think you often end up with these really sort of wishy washy words. We want to be confident and optimistic and likable. I mean, who doesn't? I mean like, you know, and so trying to get to a much more specific tone of voice and personality for a brand, I think is super, super important. And being really clear on that and then that becoming a filter for everything you do. Right. Like, like is this really consistent with the type of voice we're trying to be? I think it's so important for a brand to have a voice, a clear voice, because we live in a world where there's just too much stuff. There's too much content, there's, there's too many digital experiences, there's too many products, there's just too much stuff. So being distinctive and having a clear voice that's like no one else's has never been more important.
0:09:41.6 Francois Ajenstat: And that's why we see brands like Liquid Death, you know, have such incredible meteoric growth because it's got such a distinct voice. It's like nothing else. Not just nothing else. The water category, it's like nothing else.
0:09:52.7 Brent Smart: It's amazing for water and. Yeah, unreal.
0:09:55.7 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah. And so that's a brand that knows its voice, right? And I think, um, Apple, you know, is the most valuable brand in the world. And, and you know, I don't need to wait for the Apple logo to know it's an Apple ad. You know, Apple has such a clear voice and has for Such a long time. So I think that idea of like, what's our brand voice is really important. And I think the other really important thing is a lot of that stuff can live in a PowerPoint document. You know, it's all these sort of words about the type of brand we want to be. In the end, you've got to make work and put that work out to the market that really personifies that voice and brings that voice to life. That's how you build a brand. You don't build it in PowerPoint decks that sit inside an organization. You've got to make stuff that really starts to shift the personality and really starts to feel different. My favorite sort of soundboard on brands is if you want to change how people feel about a brand, you got to change how the brand feels.
0:10:48.6 Francois Ajenstat: So we worked really hard to change how the Telstra. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. And so we worked really hard to change how the brand feels at Telstra and we want it to feel very different to any other telco. But not just that I wanted to feel different to any other big brand in Australia. I wanted to really have a very sort of distinct, creative, interesting voice. So, so that's what we've sort of set about doing over the last little while. And what's interesting, if you put the brand, what we're doing now, you put that credit work next to what we were doing. Like the, it's completely different and it feels so different to how it felt before. And I really hope that I'm going to get some people to do some drawings soon, like once the brand's had a bit chance to really be established. I just hope we get three very different drawings, you know. When they do.
0:11:32.0 Brent Smart: Absolutely. And so when you think about brand versus like trading or you know, doing Legion, all of that, it is a long term bet. Right. It's not something you measure in days or quarters. It's probably in years.
0:11:48.1 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah.
0:11:48.7 Brent Smart: How do you keep the organization engaged and motivated, because you don't get that instant results, right. That dopamine hit when you see those leads coming through. Is there a technique that you have to like get things going long term?
0:12:07.2 Francois Ajenstat: I always say you need equal parts conviction and patience. Right. So at the start you need a lot of conviction because you don't have the data at the start. Right. You've got no data to show that. If we, if we do this move towards brand, it's going to help the leads and it's gonna help the sales and it's gonna help the retail traffic and all those important metrics that get measured week to week. So at the start you've just got conviction and you need a lot of conviction, right, because you know all those sales people are measured on those weekly metrics and they don't wanna see them drop because their bonus will drop. You know, like they're very motivated for those things not to move. So what we did early on was a test market and I'm a massive believer in get out of research and go and do something, live in the market and see what happens. Right, so we just took Adelaide, one of the smaller capital cities here in Australia, and we changed, we went from 80, 20, which was, as I said earlier was our split between trading brand, we went 50, 50 and we left it for six months to see what would happen.
0:13:13.7 Francois Ajenstat: And I was sort of crossing my fingers that, oh my God, let's hope that the retail metrics don't drop. And the opposite happened when we compared Adelaide to the national numbers, Adelaide was up 14% up on all the key short term metrics. So suddenly now I've got some data to go with the conviction and I can say, look what happened when we tried in Adelaide, guys. Like, it actually increased sales. So that's the first thing I say to anyone. Just test it somewhere. Just test it and see if you can prove that it has an impact. But you can't test it for two weeks or four. Like, I mean we test it for six months. You like, you got to give it time to work. And that's the patience bit. You got to have patience with brand metrics. They don't move quickly, they move slowly. But what happens, which is brilliant, is over time, as brand starts to work, that future demand starts to build and people start entering the market, right, who are more predisposed to brand. You start getting this amazing cumulative benefit and after two years it looks great and suddenly all your performance metrics go up as well.
0:14:18.9 Francois Ajenstat: And that's been proven. You know, there's a great study just come out by the guys at Walk Around. Brand is a multiplier for performance marketing. When the brand is strong, the performance marketing actually works better. And so we've seen that as we've built brand over time, we've seen our short term ROIs actually go up, not go down. And that's the power of the brand. Because the brand doesn't just help with this quarter's numbers, it helps with next Quarters and beyond. And once you give it time to start building, you can start showing that not just the brand metrics are healthy. Right. Also our short term performance metrics are healthy. You know, like you can start showing the brand impact, but you need time. It's not going to show in the first, the first quarter. It's not gonna show in the first quarter. You gotta wait.
0:15:04.2 Brent Smart: Well, and I like that you're using experimentation as a way of learning, right? Yeah, because it is I think one of the techniques that you don't always know, but you build conviction through testing, learning. And maybe the experiment failed and that's okay as long as you're learning.
0:15:21.0 Francois Ajenstat: And because you learned something, you learned something. And I'm s so I'm equally passionate about not pretesting because I think pre testing is very artificial and it's not how people actually respond to advertising in the real world. So I'm like, don't stop researching stuff. Just put it into market and get a real response, as you say, and get some real learnings. I think we spend far too much time in many marketing organizations trying to research everything to be really sure right. About what's gonna happen when you put into market. You can never be sure right.
0:15:58.1 Brent Smart: Then you have analysis paralysis as well.
0:16:00.6 Francois Ajenstat: Analysis paralysis. And you just end up spending all this time in an artificial environment trying to predict what's gonna happen in the real world. Just do something in the real world and get that instant feedback. And I think it's a really powerful thing. We've tested all sorts of things. And the other thing too is you've got to be prepared to turn things off as well. So that's how you really learn. If things work, you gotta turn it off, see what happens and you know, quickly if it's really driving some incremental, you know, some incremental results. Because that's the thing. When you've got everything turned up to 10, it's really hard to work out what's driving the results. So you've got to be prepared to turn it off in some places, double it in other places, do something here that you're not doing there and compare. It's not perfect, it's not a perfect science if you do it like that. But, but it gives you, I think, some really good reads on, on what happens when real people connect with real work in the real world versus this artificial world called research.
0:17:02.6 Brent Smart: I love it and I like to turn it up to 11. Because it's one better than 10. It's gotta be better.
0:17:09.1 Francois Ajenstat: Why not? Why not?
0:17:13.0 Brent Smart: One of the things I really appreciate about you is that you're not just know an executive leading a large team. You actually like to be in the work and doing the work. Tell me like how do you spend your time between like creating and being like the, not the icy marketer but in the team versus leading the team. And how does that look like every day?
0:17:37.5 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, it's a hard balance, I gotta say. But by the same token, yeah, I do believe that I need to be in the work. And I am in the work. So the way I do it is I spend Tuesdays with the agency. It's a pretty simple thing. Just I block out my calendar for nine to three every Tuesday. And I'm at the agency and I'm looking at the work, I'm helping to develop the work. And it does a couple of things. And it says to everyone this is important, Right. But it also takes out a whole bunch of inefficiency of like, oh, we've got a edit. We need to show Brandon. Is he available Wednesday at 8:00 or Thursday at 11? Like no, I'm available Tuesday 9 to 3. And if you're not ready this Tuesday, be ready next Tuesday, it's fine. And it creates a cadence. So it creates a cadence where everyone is working towards let's be ready on Tuesday. And that's good to have that I think cadence and discipline to sort of how you work. And look, I copied this from, this is what Apple does. Apple meets with the agency every Tuesday and have since Steve Jobs was at Apple.
0:18:47.0 Francois Ajenstat: There's discipline to it. We do it every Tuesday. So that's one way that helps me sort of manage my diary and be really available. But the other thing, look, it gives me energy. It just gives me energy to be around ideas and having conversations about ideas as opposed to being a risk and compliance meeting or you know, or a financial results meeting. I'm in those meetings and they're really important, but they don't give me the same energy as a creative meeting does, you know, so for me it gives me energy, which is really important I think if you love what you do, you know.
0:19:22.7 Brent Smart: I totally agree. And so that like Tuesday meeting creates predictability. I think it, the way you're describing it, it also reduces bureaucracy because the people that are there to make decisions can make it there.
0:19:37.7 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah.
0:19:38.2 Brent Smart: And it also so shows importance. Right, because you're spending the time, therefore it's important to you?
0:19:44.7 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, totally. And the other thing we do, which I learned from 20 years in agencies, we talk about is this a taxi meeting or a bus meeting?
0:19:55.4 Francois Ajenstat: So a taxi meeting means you're only allowed to have from Telstra, you're only allowed to have the number of people you can fit in a taxi. No more. So you can't turn up with the 15 people and all the cross functional team. So everyone, because when an idea is first presented for the very first time, they're never born ready. They're very fragile things and the last thing you want is a whole room of clients all weighing in with their feedback and dissecting the work and overthinking the way and it just becomes a pile on and it's just, I mean that's the quickest way to kill an idea. You want a small group of people, you want a lot of trust in the room and you want to have a conversation that builds on the idea, not sucks all the energy out of the idea, you know, so that's a taxi meeting. First time things are presented, we have a taxi meeting and then, then we have the bus meeting.
0:20:52.2 Francois Ajenstat: When once we've got an idea and we're sort of decide, right this is the thing that we're going to all get behind, then we bring the bus in and we get everyone across the work early, get everyone upstream on it so that we don't have that horrible thing where we finish the campaign and then, then we work out what the digital guys need for the digital channel. No we get to get everyone in there up front and make sure we're really clear on what everyone needs to execute it with true integration across every channel. So yeah, taxi or bus is how we think about creative meetings and it's a really, I think, important thing because when the army of clients turn up to creative meeting, that is not conducive to creativity.
0:21:32.6 Brent Smart: Now what does that look like when somebody comes in and pitches you an idea? I mean you're a CMO, you're, you know, the person they aspire to be or high level person. What, what does a great pitch meeting look like to you? What do you expect to see? What is a good example where if they do this, you know it's gonna go off the rails and is it gonna be a bad pitch?
0:21:57.3 Francois Ajenstat: I'll start there because it's easier, it's easy to talk about what not to do, I think, I mean, don't walk in with a hundred slides or twenty slides or like I just think like less is more like this. Like don't kill me with a deck. It's so frustrating, right? Because the human, human. I want to see the thing and like all this build up and all this rationale and two things happen when you do that. Right. I get frustrated. But B, you're engaging the rational brain. And what we got to do when we see ideas is we got to actually quieten down the rational brain and we got to approach it in a way that we have more of an emotional and intuitive reaction. And we've got to approach it how a consumer would. The consumer doesn't get the 10 slides beforehand. That tells them what the idea is and the strategy and why it's Right. Right. They just see it. So I think that that's the first thing. Like don't over explain it. It's not about how, how diligent you've been and how thorough you've been. That doesn't matter. Like, so that's the first thing.
0:23:03.3 Francois Ajenstat: Make it short. I think the second thing is don't read a script. It's the worst thing creatives do when they read a script. It's tell me the idea and let me feel the idea and let's talk about the idea and then we'll talk about the execution and where it's shot and how it's shot. We'll get to all that stuff. But tell me the idea, what's the core idea? And tell me why you love it. Let me feel your passion for the idea, not the. We open on her, you know, and we go through the script like that. We will get to that stuff. And I think that's a big thing that I think the great creatives understand the difference between an idea and execution. And the great creatives are prepared to let go of executional things and understand there's many ways to execute things. They don't fall in love with an execution, they fall in love with an idea. And I do too. I fall in love with an idea. And then I think we have a really interesting conversation about, okay, there are many ways we could execute this. Let's explore that a little bit.
0:23:53.6 Francois Ajenstat: I think separating the idea from execution and I think it is something that is a dying art. I think that now we get very caught up with the execution, the platform that's going to live in, the clever bit of technology we're bringing to it. It's all executional stuff, but what's the idea? And I think a lot of people struggle to actually articulate what the core idea is. And we got to get better. I mean, Hollywood's amazing at it. Hollywood can picture a movie in like 30 words, right. And yet marketers, you know, can't. They need to explain all this sort of stuff and get into all the sort of detail of stuff. And I think also as a CMO, when you then are pitching things internally to the C suite, they don't want all the details about the marketing execution. They want to know how does it link to our strategy, how's it going to solve our business problems and tell me the core idea and why it's right and get out, like, whereas I think, you know, again, we want to give them all the detail and show them all the work we've done.
0:24:48.3 Francois Ajenstat: I think marketers, we get too caught up in all the marketing lingo and jargon and nonsense. And I think we just got instead be really sort of clear on this is the idea and this is why we think it's right. And again bring the conviction that it's right. That's the main thing when you're pitching anything is conviction. Like, I want to see that you believe in it. That's really infectious. Whereas you can sniff straight away if someone doesn't really believe in it straight away. And so I think conviction's everything when you're trying to pitch whatever you're pitching. Right.
0:25:19.7 Brent Smart: But in order to have conviction in the idea, you probably have done your homework, AKA you probably looked at some data, you've done some market research, you have built your hypothesis grounded on something.
0:25:32.4 Francois Ajenstat: Of course.
0:25:33.1 Brent Smart: How do you balance out that? Like, well, you want to show the, the work.
0:25:39.1 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah.
0:25:39.9 Brent Smart: Or do you just trust that the work happened and that's how you build conviction? Like. I've seen different, different perspectives from folks.
0:25:47.0 Francois Ajenstat: I think for me, the time to do all that is at the brief. Okay, Right. So like, like when we're doing the brief, that's the time to make sure that we've got all the data, we're really clear on who we targeting and why we're targeting them. And we're really clear on what are we trying to achieve with this, what business problem we're trying to solve or what opportunity we're trying to unlock. So I would say the brief is when you do all that, not the idea. And by the time you've got the idea, why would you go in and try and sell that idea based on all the brief and pre stuff and like you should have people on that journey with you. Anyway, this is what we're working on and why. And like, you know, but I just think make it simple, tell a story, like, use some storytelling and have the confidence to be able to, you know, here's my point of view on this idea as opposed to hear a bunch of slides that someone else has written for me that tells me why this is a very rational, logical thing to do.
0:26:49.5 Francois Ajenstat: Like, you should have a point of view on why you think it's right, why is it great, why are you dying to make this thing? And I think when you've got that kind of conviction, I think it's really hard to say no to people with that kind of conviction. It's really easy to say no to someone who's got lots and lots of data because then you can use data to fight the data, you know, like, you know what I mean?
0:27:12.0 Brent Smart: Well, and it's something that applies to everything. Every time you're pitching an idea, whether it's a strategy, a new project, whatever, you know, at what point do you spend weeks putting everything together? The brief, the PRD, whatever this, the narrative, but there's the process before that that I think helps develop and build the idea.
0:27:35.0 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, totally. And you know, it's that old agency expression, shit in shit out, right? Like, you gotta make sure that the strategy and the brief and the plan and like, like we gotta, you know, another sound bite I love is that the discipline liberates creativity. So by doing all that work, really disciplined work, it actually lets us have much more confidence that the idea's right because we really know the opportunity we're going after. We really know the space in the market, whatever it is. And so I think the pre work is super important and you know, creativity. I think a tight brief leads to better ideas and some sort of open. Do whatever you want. You know, like an open brief, I think is not going to lead to as, as good an idea as a really tight brief that's really clear on what we're trying to do. So I do think that pre work's super important and I think that's where I would focus on, on the research and the data and all that sort of stuff upfront. Not once you've got an idea. Then I think you just need real conviction and belief that it's the right thing to do.
0:28:40.0 Brent Smart: So how do you distinguish between the good ideas and the bad ones?
0:28:44.0 Francois Ajenstat: Wow. I mean, a lot of it comes down to taste, intuition, trusting the partners you work with. A lot of it is very intangible stuff. There's no checklist of what makes a good idea versus a bad idea. Obviously it's a bad idea if it's off brand. So you should have a really good idea of your brand. And you know that brand voice I talked about earlier, it should be really clear that this feels like our brand or it doesn't. And that's where the biggest problem is. If you're not clear what your brand stands for, then, Jesus, how would you. How would you know if it's good or bad or. You have no idea. So I think being really clear on your brand is a really important filter for anything that you do. But, you know, I don't sit there with a checklist, you know, like it's very intangible things, mainly intuition, but also a lot of trust. I think trust is something. If you trust your creative partners, that goes a long way. For me that if a trusted creative partner really believes in it, then, then. Then I'm likely to really believe in it too.
0:29:51.0 Brent Smart: You talk about these intangibles, but is there a way of training or training on those or increasing the likelihood that they will get taste?
0:30:02.2 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, It's an excellent question. And it's something that I probably didn't believe in before I worked at Telstra. So I've got 300 markers at Telstra. It's a massive team. And, you know, how do you get a common creative understanding when you got 300 marketers, right? So. So the really important thing is you got to help everyone understand what great looks like. Because I think great is something that is very hard to achieve. There's only one coral reef in the world that we call the Great Barrier Reef. And there's only one wall that we can apparently see from space, although I think that's not true, called the Great Wall of China. Like, great, right? There's lots of good walls and lots of good reefs, but there's only one great one. And so I think we throw that word around a lot. Corporations, you know, look at this great experience we've designed. Look at this great ad. Is it great or is it, you know, so just kind of good? So getting everyone to understand what great looks like is really important. So we've developed a thing, we call it the Telstra Creative dial.
0:31:08.5 Francois Ajenstat: It's a 1 to 10 scoring framework that lets us define every single piece of work we create. So once we create it, we get the whole quarter's output and we create a lot of stuff. We're a big telco we create over 100 things every quarter. And we sit down and we score them, we give them a score and then we give the team the feedback on like, here's how this piece went. And so what we start to do is we start to train this sort of understanding of what great looks like. We also spend time with teams if they, if they get a bad score. It's not like a, you know, it's not like a performance review thing. It's Okay, let's unpack this. Why did this one not turn out as good as it could have? And it might be the brief. It might be a decision we've made in the creative process. It might be the way we crafted it, whatever it is, and we re execute it with the team so they learn from doing. The really important thing though, with a dial like this is, I don't, we don't sit there with the dial in front of us when we're, when we're seeing creative work because it engages the rational brain and it's not, hey, we only use it post we never use it pre.
0:32:16.1 Brent Smart: Oh, interesting. So it's only postmortem only post retro.
0:32:18.6 Francois Ajenstat: Yep. And what it's doing, it's creating a... We talk about it. It's creating creative confidence in the team because they start to understand what great looks like. It creates a common language. But the other thing it does, it's a feedback loop which is providing coaching around how this looks. And the other great things I've got data on our creative output by quarter, by channel, by team, by product. And we can start diagnosing the creative output in a much more. In a quantifiable way. Right. But in a way that doesn't strangle the creativity out of it because we're not trying to do it pre and we're not trying to use research to give us the score. I'm not sure it's a much more intuitive tool, but it's been.
0:33:04.6 Brent Smart: Have you seen the creative output improve, like the quality of it improve?
0:33:08.1 Francois Ajenstat: We have, yeah. So we've gone from, I think the first quarter we did. So we did it way back in September 23rd was the first time we did it. We've done it. That's our thing. If you're going to do something like this, you're going to do it every quarter without fail. You can't just sort of skip a quarter because, you know, annual results were due or something like you got to do it every quarter. And yeah, we went for 3.8 in September 23rd and we got our first quarter over five. Last quarter we got a 5.2 or something. And that sounds, you're probably going, wow, 5 out of 10, that's not very good. But for us, 10 out of 10 is a titanium at can. 10 out of 10 is like the best work in the world. So to get a five is really good. And we're happy with that. And so, but we're very clear on the standard that we're trying to get to. We want to be the most creative brand from this part of the world. That's our sort of purpose. And so we're very clear on what that needs to look like.
0:34:00.1 Brent Smart: That's fantastic. And I love how practical you are, how grounded you are in the work. How did you end up becoming a CMO? I mean you've gone through agencies. It was not the typical path of working up in an organization.
0:34:16.0 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah.
0:34:17.0 Brent Smart: How, how did that career develop? And was this always an aspiration to do this and.
0:34:21.8 Francois Ajenstat: No, not at all. Not at all. Like many people, I fell into advertising. I don't know a lot of people who, when they're 12 years old say I want to be in advertising like you just sort of. I fell into, I did a marketing degree and fell into it. But I loved it. Loved it. And I had a great 20 year career in agencies. It took me to New Zealand, it took me to America, took me to New York. It was unreal. And I loved every minute of it until I didn't. And the reason I didn't was I just, honestly, I just couldn't keep handing ideas over to marketers. Ideas I really believed in and I knew were right for their business and what they really needed. And then for whatever, for a multitude of reasons, those ideas would die. And you just get to a point where, well, I certainly got to a point where I was like, well, what if I could be on the other end of that and what if I could get my hands on those ideas and what if I could protect those ideas inside the organization and use all the skills I've learned in 20 years of advertising on how to influence and, you know, how to get people to believe in ideas and like that's what you learn in agencies.
0:35:35.4 Francois Ajenstat: And what if I could do that inside corporation? I think that could be pretty powerful. And so that led me to leaving New York, coming back to Australia because a fantastic CMO opportunity opened up in an insurance company. I mean, and I gotta tell you, I wasn't dying to work in insurance, but it was just quite the change from Saatchi Saatchi New York to an insurance company in Sydney. But it gave me the opportunity to jump straight into a CMO role and sort of practice what I preach a bit, you know, like walk the talk and see if I could do it. And what transpired was, look, working an insurance company or a telco, it's not as much fun as working in an agency. I mean, agencies are fun. But being able to say yes to an idea and having way more control over the destiny of that idea than I ever had in agencies, that is liberating and why I do the job. So, yeah, that's kind of how it happened. It wasn't what I set out to do. Like, ironically, my frustration with CMOs made me want to be a CMO.
0:36:47.2 Brent Smart: It's interesting. I mean it's a classic thing. If you find a problem and then you fall in love with that problem to go solve it. And did that.
0:36:56.0 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, totally. And it was always about the work for me. It wasn't about, you know, I'm burnt out from agencies and so I want a different life that you have from, in a corporate or. It wasn't any of that. It was like, no, no, no, I'm all about the work and I believe that I can make more good work happen if great work, even if I'm inside. So, and that's sort of how it's played out.
0:37:22.6 Brent Smart: What's been your biggest observation? Being on the other side. Now you're on the receiving end of the pitches, but you also now have a different level of empathy for your clients that you were working with before. So what you expected or is it different?
0:37:36.7 Francois Ajenstat: That's totally different. But I think the biggest thing I've realized, the aha moment was all the conversations that really matter about whether an idea is going to live or die. As an agency person, you're not in, you're just not there. For me, it's so thrilling to actually be in the room and those things are happening. And I just didn't realize I was in agency, just how far away I was from the real conversations that matter. And now I'm in those conversations. And that's what I love. I think the other thing too, the big thing I had to learn I had a fantastic boss when I first became a CMO at the insurance company at IAG. Julie Batch, she's awesome. And she said to me I hadn't been there very long, I'd maybe been there, I don't know, three or four months. And she pulled me aside after a meeting while I was presenting to the leadership there. She said, you know, you don't have to sell anymore, right? I said, what do you mean? She goes, you don't have to sell. Like you're not, you're not the agency.
0:38:41.8 Francois Ajenstat: You're one of us. Like we're going to believe your opinion. You don't have to stop selling, just stop selling. And it was a real sort of mode switch from being an agencies where you're trying to sell and persuade and to actually being confident in the decision we're going to make together. It's a very different sort of, it's almost like a setting you have to change in, in how you approach things. And so that was great advice and really I completely changed my approach. And I mean, God, the way I do it now is so different how I did in agencies. And I would say that as a piece of advice to agencies actually. Like, like by selling less, you sell more. Like when you get all hard sell and you're trying to really close the deal and you're trying to put the pressure, it doesn't, it's not helpful. And it actually, I think makes marketers less confident in the idea. Like, why are you selling this so hard? Like you know what I mean. Whereas when you just stand behind a great idea with confidence and belief, that's how you sell an idea.
0:39:43.8 Brent Smart: I absolutely love that. And I've loved this whole conversation because whether we're talking about unleashing potential, getting great ideas out to market, whether it's through marketing, through product, through finance, however way you build, there are some great ideas out there. And the more that we can help make them flourish can truly transform work. And I also truly believe in the power of the brand, not just to ignite growth, but also to ignite employees and connect employees to drive success. And that's just amazing.
0:40:21.1 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, it's super powerful. And I often find that the answer to most big problems that the companies I've worked for face is brand. Like, when you get the brand right, it sort of solves a lot of the challenges that. That the company's going through. So, yeah, I believe it's the most powerful weapon that any company can have.
0:40:41.9 Brent Smart: There you go. We've gone full circle, right? Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. It was a truly amazing discussion. I've learned a ton. I'm inspired. I want to go pitch some ideas right now and improve how we can go from good to great.
0:41:02.6 Francois Ajenstat: Thank you, Francois. It's been awesome, man. It's been really fun. I hope this was a great podcast, not just a good one.
0:41:09.8 Brent Smart: Well, we'll see what the listeners say.
0:41:12.5 Francois Ajenstat: We'll find out. But thanks for having me, man. Thanks.
0:41:15.1 Brent Smart: Well, thank you so much, and thank you all for listening to Next Gen Builders. Look out for our next episode wherever you get your podcasts, and please don't forget to subscribe.