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An average consumer is bombarded anywhere between 3,000 and 10,000 ads every single day. The human brain cannot process that amount of data. So the brain has learned to tune out all these ads. So you're throwing ads at the consumers, but they're not even noticing it. This is CMO Insider, where you'll get candid takes from marketing power players. My name is Lara O'Reilly. I'm a senior correspondent at Business Insider and I'm here with a marketing legend today. Raja Rajimana has run marketing at Mastercard for more than 12 years as CMO and now he's switching into the senior fellow role. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you very much for having me. Much appreciated. And I wanted to start with maybe a bit of an existential question for you which is why does Mastercard do so much consumer marketing? often times when you get a new credit card or a bank account, you don't get to choose who your payments provider is. So I' I'd love to know um what that involves. That's such a good question. It's in fact very existential, right? For us as a brand, the key thing is when you are building your brand as Mastercard, you are a connector. So firstly start with the places where consumers use their cards. The merchant should feel confident that when they see that this is a Mastercard transaction that they will get paid for it. So it's basically
trust and dependability and reliability. That's from the merchant side. Now from the bank's side, I have to build my image with the bank that a that this is a very uh secure, safe, efficient and effective network and they need to see value proposition beyond just pure functional elements. But we have to make sure that we get enough into the consumer's mind that when a bank gives them that particular offering, they're very happy. So we don't call ourselves as a direct to consumer uh brand. We are a B2B TTOC brand which is we are marketing as a business to other businesses which market to their consumers and we try to fill this entire uh length of the chain.
Mhm. And as I mentioned earlier you were um the CMCO I should have said at Mastercard for around 12 years and I imagine you've you've kind of left the brand on quite a high but there must have been some challenges along the way and I wondered if you could talk through maybe like one big challenge you had and how you overcame it. Does anything spring to mind? At the beginning, I quickly discovered that consumers associate Mastercard overwhelmingly as a credit card company. They say a credit card may make me spend money on things that I don't need and draw me into debt or that they charge me very high interest rates and that makes automatically Mastercard brand as a negative brand. And you're a payments company.
We are a payments technology company. We don't do payments ourselves. So I said this is amazing because we don't issue a single credit card but you ask a normal consumer on the street they say yeah Mastercard is a credit card company and credit card companies are not good. So my biggest challenge was how do I change that perception. So we started getting into areas where we were trying to earn the consumer's trust. For example, we launched with uh a program with Standup to Cancer where we said that when we run some promotions and you as a consumer spend at a restaurant using Mastercard, we will pay a part of that or we'll give a part of the profit that we make to Standup to Cancer Foundation. Uh started
as a simple promise but then it was profound. We raised almost $75 million so far for standup to cancer. And quite unbelievably that group was able to get uh as many as eight drugs through FDA approval from molecule discovery to all the trials and eventually to FDA approval. We did this about 3 years back or four years back. I can't exactly remember but Mastercard was one of the top four most favorite brands. So from a category which is considered to be negative to coming to be one of the top four brands in the country is a big deal for us. And now a word from our sponsor LinkedIn ads to talk about how to cut the ball spend from your marketing budget.
Marketing leaders today are under more pressure than ever to prove real impact and concrete business outcomes. I'm joined by Keith Browning, director of global brand marketing at LinkedIn to learn more. What makes LinkedIn uniquely suited to deliver measurable business outcomes especially in B2B? LinkedIn is the largest professional network in the world. So we're built for this. We're built for B2B. So that means firstly being able to find the right people. So you know you can target by job title or seniority company etc. But there's also the professional context component as well. So people come to LinkedIn to learn to evaluate potential solutions and certainly to make buying decisions as well. And over your career, you've been quite
successful at kind of challenging some of the norms, some of the kind of the marketing playbooks or the marketing theory that people often lean upon in this industry. I mean, one example is you've kind of famously declared advertising dead and you at one point you cut your advertising budget by 70%. Which is kind of unheard of. Most marketers are crying out for more budget each year, not less. I always think of myself as a consumer first before I consider myself a marketer. As a consumer today, do I like advertisements? I hate them. They are an interruption to my experience. I'm watching a beautiful video of maybe some animals in the wild or I'm looking at some Bollywood songs, whatever it is, right? Suddenly, in less than 5 minutes, my experience is stopped
and I'm shown a stupid ad that I don't care about. And then I'm looking at when is the skip no button. Do you have an ad blocker? I have an ad blocker, but ad blocker does not do the blocking of some of these streaming companies. Right. So, and if I don't, you choice is either I pay money to keep the ads out or I suffer the ads. What does it tell you? Mhm. that advertisements are disliked by consumers. So much so that these platforms are telling you, "Hey, you know what? If you don't want these ads, you pay me money." That's like blackmail. An average consumer is
bombarded anywhere between 3,000 and 10,000 ads every single day. The human brain cannot process that amount of data. So, the brain has learned to tune out all these ads. So, you're throwing ads at the consumers, but they're not even noticing it. Why would advertising be the right model for us to communicate? The need to communicate with the consumers doesn't go away. But the way we are communicating is not great. And if I'm getting some results, how do I know that these results are happening because of my campaign advertising campaign? It could happen in spite of it. It could happen because the gasoline prices have come down and consumer behav. So the attribution mechanisms are extremely weak. And all the platforms are telling you
that the ads are working and you've that's what they have to tell, right? to sell more. But for us as marketers, we need to understand is this attribution model really reliable. So I cut down my advertising budget by 70%. It is true till now. It's not just done once. We have taken permanently 70% of our advertising dollars out. Nothing happened to the business that is negative. But you reinvested those dollars. I reinvested those dollars into other areas like experience uh experiential marketing for example or new platforms. We started something called priceless.com. We have invested in other areas and that actually has given us disproportionate returns. Now for
example as a result of which if you look at brand Z in the past we used to be at number 87. So brand Z is a kind of measure of how much consumers like brands rate the most valuable brands most valuable brands. Right. Right. Mastercard used to be the 87th most valuable brand. Today it is the 12th most uh valuable brand. So we have been outpacing our competition whose budgets are substantially higher than ours big time and that trend continues to date and do you think that's maybe why marketing has a bit of a trust problem in the seauite? Uh marketing has a trust problem for multiple reasons. Now I managed P&Ls and businesses before I became a CMO. Now in those roles marketing used to report to
me and I would ask them okay your budget this month $20 billion. Tell me what exactly is it getting me for the business? Their answer is my awareness has gone up. My net promoter score has gone up. My brand predisposition has gone up. Uh or my reach has increased, right? None of those are on your balance sheet. I don't care. Yeah. I want business results. I tell me what is it doing? Either the top line or the bottom line in a credible fashion. Don't give me some marketing mumbo jumbo. I would get really impatient. Right. And they're literally like deer caught in headlights. That is a big problem. marketers talking their own jargon, their own language and looking at themselves as marketing specialists as
opposed to business drivers. A number of CEOs were interviewed in terms of their confidence in the CMOs and the marketing departments. Shockingly, more than twothirds of the CEOs have said they have zero confidence in their CMOs and in their marketing departments to drive profitable growth. Now, that is a disaster. The CMO role in many companies has been downgraded to report to somebody who reports to CEO to like the chief growth officer or the CRO or correct chief growth officer, chief revenue officer, chief customer officer. Now if you take away customers revenue and growth out of marketing, what is left behind?
Right. It's it's really fluff. So the issue is that marketers did not market themselves well. They did not learn themselves the new things that are happening. And now with AI coming and it could be even more devastating if these people don't quickly educate themselves come on top. So some technologist will now be running uh through some bunch of agents the entire marketing department which is not how it has to be. So AI threatens those marketers I guess for myriad reasons right one because the thing that used to be hard to spin up you can now make a thousand creatives in two seconds on meta or whatever.
Um, and also with AI, I imagine that means the CFO and the CEO can very quickly kind of unpick these fluffy marketing metrics that they're being thrown at them. So, what's a marketer to do, I guess? So, there are two things. On the one hand, AI is probably the single biggest threat, but it is also the single biggest opportunity for marketing to seize and regain control of the function properly. Now, AI, yes, you're right. You can give a prompt and it'll create 10 creatives, 20 creatives, 100 creatives in a matter of few minutes. You might be a gigantic un liver and I might be a tiny corner shop. Now both of us give the prompts and we get the
output. Your output looks exactly like my output. So what happens is the small companies are able to effectively now compete against the large companies. Before you realize it becomes a sea of sameness. Everyone's output looks exactly the same. And because marketers are also and do you see that now already do you see it when you scroll through your feeds or you wouldn't believe I was doing this exercise just about a week back I was seeing how many campaigns are using iceberg uh as a pneummonic right it was more than 100 suppose AI gave you a particular campaign which shows iceberg you accepted it you ran with it now when I come in and say I want a It'll first refer to its training. It has learned something from you saying
that iceberg works. It gives me iceberg. I don't know that you have run the same thing. I say yeah this looks good. Accept it. Before you know hundreds of people are using the stupid iceberg and then reinforcing it because hundreds of people are using it reinforcing and the system is learning say all right. So if this person asks for something like this that a lot of it is below the surface let me give you iceberg before you know everyone is running with iceberg campaigns which is ridiculous. Right now that is the biggest opportunity for marketers where when there is that sea of sameness original creativity matters. Innovation and creativity are going to be the biggest differentiators in this age of
AI because there at the end of the it is humanto human connection that sells your products and brands. It is not just efficient and effective communication by itself. The communication is effective because it is connecting behind the scenes or below the surface. And now, a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn Ads, to talk about how to cut the bull spend from your marketing budget. LinkedIn's cut the bull spend campaign urges marketers to rethink how they evaluate performance and where their budgets actually drive impact. I'm here with Keith Browning, director of global brand marketing at LinkedIn to learn more. How do you define bull spend in practical terms? So, say bull spend is really wasted
advertising spend. It's any investment that leads to a greatl looking dashboard. So the numbers look good, the arrows are going in the right direction, but really it's not actually doing anything to drive the business forward. So it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. How does LinkedIn help marketers reduce waste and increase efficiency in real terms? Uh LinkedIn, you don't have to pay for attention from people who, you know, are never going to buy from you. But mass reach works great if you're selling breakfast cereal, not so much if you're selling, you know, CRM. That's really where LinkedIn is different. And do you think that's kind of why we're seeing more of a rise of kind of two trends in marketing? One being influencer marketing and kind of
co-creation with creators and the other being kind of live events and experiential in this kind of sea of sameness we all want to be uh doing different things. That's so true. So the rise of influencer marketing is basically influencer is working as a filter to me as to what I should even bother or care to watch. So you're utilizing that mechanisms party. So influencer marketing I think it'll continue for some good time till such time probably that everyone becomes an influencer and everyone starts creating using AI which is not too far down the line. The other part of it is experiences. Experiential marketing gives you the opportunity to immerse the consumers and tap into all
their senses. I call it multi-ensory marketing. Tap into all their senses. Once you give that experience to that consumer, the consumer will talk about it and becomes automatically an ambassador of your brand. And if you invest your money in amplifying the message of that particular ambassador to reach more and more people of that individual only, you will get a tremendous reach. And this was a big hypothesis we started with, but then it got pro proven extremely well. So much so that now a massive amount of our budget is behind experiences. So you even have like restaurants, you have restaurants, you know, you do live There are 10 passion areas. For example, you have got sports. So sports is one huge ocean. Likewise, we went into music. We went into
culinary, tourism, shopping. Each one of these areas, we curate experiences. And uh that has done a lot more for our brand than any campaign has ever done for us. What's what's an example of a new skill that maybe you've only had to learn relatively recently that now is kind of table stakes for marketers in this era? I wrote this book called Quantum Marketing 5 years back and in that I outlined that there are 24 technologies which are coming at us. AI is a huge one but augmented reality is coming. Multiveres are coming. Even though they're going through their winter right now, they will come right back. blockchains and cryptocurrencies are going to play a significant role. 3D printing and so on. So each one of these
you need to really understand them not as a technologist but they should understand it enough to see the possibilities. The rate of uh change which is happening is unbelievable. So for example AI every week there is something new and something big that's happening. There's a lot of overwhelm right? If you're going to an event like can this year and you're being pitched a genic this and AI powered this, how do you figure out what's real? So I take the help of AI. Okay. So I go to AI and say look I'm being overwhelmed. It will do the filtering. So you don't have to be overwhelmed because your point is so valid Laura.
Every single day there are so many emails which are coming. Everyone is sending the vendors are sending and then there are news articles and even if you subscribe to the so-called experts in this space they have got tons of material and under which there are links that you keep going it's a rabbit hole after rabbit hole when do you do your real work I use notebook LM uh I like reading a lot but I just don't have the bandwidth to read everything so I give tonight whatever the material I want to be renew reviewed and tomorrow morning I switch on the podcast by notebook LM. So there are two people who are talking very naturally and they tell me everything I need to know. It's stuff
like that or if there is a book new book which has come. I'll say hey is there anything interesting in this book that I need to understand. I hope our listeners don't get any ideas and they listen to this from start to finish. No summaries allowed. I hope so. Um, just while we still have you, um, I wanted to leave our listeners with, um, a little bit of advice, particularly people who are just starting out in their marketing careers, or also people who might be thinking maybe marketing isn't for me. I know that there are some stats out there that marketing isn't the most popular degree course out there right now.
Sadly, that's true. Why is there a good reason to go into marketing in 2026? So I think if you are scared of AI you should be very scared if you're in other functions than marketing because they functions like finance, IT, uh even human resources lot of functions like payroll and all these things they are totally automatable and AI can do a fantastic job when AI creates the sea of sameness for all companies. How do companies differentiate themselves and succeed in the marketplace? Marketing is going to help them. So this is the golden era that we are about to enter as far as marketing is concerned. Number one and if you want to see the world marketing is by far the best.
Mhm. And lastly, I would say that there's always a joy when you see your thoughts taking shape in front of you. Marketers do it day in and day out. They're thinking up of a campaign. They release the campaign and they're looking at the impact and how consumers are actually reacting to it. It is absolute adrenaline. If you're into video games and you are competitively you know playing against other marketing is a live video game literally you're playing with uh brutally aggressive competitors and with constraints with all kinds of hurdles thrown in your way. It's such a fun space and it's a real one. Now basically it's not just some abstract things that you're putting together. Uh, I think marketing is as human as it can get.
Mhm. You don't get that in payroll. No. Thank you so much for joining us on the CMO Insider podcast. Thank you again for having me. Much appreciated. Thank you. And thank you for joining us. If you enjoyed this conversation, please do like and subscribe. And if you want to read more marketing content, news, scoops, analysis, you can go to businessinsider.com.
