Two CMOs reflect on their roles

It’s hard out here for a CMO. They’re often in the line of fire when their brands misstep, and in today’s cutthroat social media landscape, the Twitter masses can be friends one day and foes the next.

“CMOs are blamed if things don’t work, and they often don’t get credit when things do work,” OkCupid’s global CMO Melissa Hobley told Marketing Brew’s Katie Hicks last week during our latest CTA event, which tackled the ever-changing role of the marketer.

For those who couldn’t be there, below are some of the highlights.

Embracing rejection

Edgy campaigns aren’t right for every brand. But Hobley said that some of OkCupid’s bold (and at times controversial) campaigns have paid off over the years.

• For its “DTF” campaign that debuted in 2018, designed to flip the script on the phrase, OkCupid wanted to address the fact that some people are…less than enthusiastic about dating apps. “People hate them, and I get it,” Hobley said.
• OkCupid worked with a social anthropologist to analyze the word “queer,” which was considered derogatory before the LGBTQ+ community reclaimed it, Hobley explained. Similarly, “DTF” is known to have negative connotations associated with shaming women, so OkCupid set out to change that.
• The resulting campaign included phrases like “down to fall head over heels,” copy that was accompanied by an image of a lesbian couple, which was not common for an ad campaign at the time, according to Hobley. That doesn’t mean it didn’t work.

“The campaign brought us back to life in every metric that you look at,” she said. “People were talking about us…that image of the two women, people recreated on the subway.”

OkCupid also prepped a version of the campaign with the line “down to filter out the far right” alongside an image of a woman dropping a gun in a toilet, since OkCupid lets people match based on social and political issues, Hobley said. That one, among others, wasn’t allowed to run in several prominent locations, including the New York City subway.

“Whenever we were rejected, we leaned into that, and we got press,” she said.

Pivot

Wherever they end up, CMOs often take winding roads to reach the C-suite. Some start in social, and some, like Mayur Gupta, start as software engineers. Gupta spoke with Marketing Brew reporter Ryan Barwick about the numerous career pivots that led him to his current role as CMO of Kraken Digital Asset Exchange.

Gupta said he got into the marketing and advertising space when a mentor asked him to serve as product lead for a recently acquired ad-tech platform. During that time, he turned to everyone’s most trusted source of info to learn the ins and outs of the industry: Wikipedia.

“I was traveling for that gig, so I would go back to my hotel and read Wikipedia because that was the only place that would have marketing for dummies,” Gupta said. “Everything else they were saying didn’t make any sense to me.”

Since then, he’s held marketing roles at companies like Kimberly-Clark and Spotify.

Now, just three months into his role at Kraken, part of his job is to explain the very technical topic of crypto to consumers who aren’t all yet familiar with it. While this is a chore to some, Gupta sees it as a fun marketing challenge.

“We have to bring a lot of creativity and storytelling to simplify that concept,” he said, adding that Kraken plans to implement that strategy within the next six to 12 months, as it further introduces itself “to the masses.”