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Time of India
4 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
CMOs at Cannes 2025: Balancing creativity, data, and consumer connection
What does it take to be a Chief Marketing Officer in 2025? The 'CMOs in the Spotlight' series at Cannes Lions 2025 provided some compelling answers. The popular session brought together top brand leaders, Claudine Cheever, VP, Global Brand and Marketing, Amazon, Gülen Bengi, lead chief marketing officer, Mars; and Gail Horwood, chief marketing and customer experience Officer, Novartis, moderated by Jim Stengel, host of The CMO Podcast with Jim Stengel, The Jim Stengel Company. They dissected today's most challenging marketing issues and shared their vision for the future, highlighting the critical interplay of creativity, technology, and genuine connection. Bengi, highlighted the company's transformation journey, focusing on a new approach to brand building. 'We are moving from messaging to two-way engagement,' said Bengi, emphasising co-creation with communities and building ongoing, personalised experiences. Mars has restructured its brand teams by integrating data analytics, digital capabilities, and human insight placing the consumer truly at the heart. Horwood, shared her pride in the company's intentional focus on creativity despite regulatory hurdles. 'We focused on what we can do, not what we can't,' she explained, referencing their award-shortlisted campaign Your Attention, Please, which tackles breast cancer awareness. This initiative includes a unique partnership with the NFL—demonstrating how creativity can thrive even in highly regulated sectors. Cheever, reflected on the company's global-local balance. 'We're making Prime a global brand while staying locally relevant,' she said. She cited a notable holiday campaign that harnessed AI to mine millions of customer reviews for comedic gems, brought to life by actor Adam Driver. Cheever credited the blend of creativity and technology as critical to the campaign's success. Stengel encouraged the panel to consider Cannes not only as a celebration but as a space for reflection. The CMOs agreed on the value of flexibility, collaboration, and intentional pauses. As Bengi advised, 'See something unexpected. Be flexible.' Cheever, with nine years at Amazon, highlighted the company's deeply ingrained corporate culture rooted in creativity, risk-taking, and experimentation. "If you know it's going to succeed, it's not an experiment," she stated, underscoring the importance of providing a "safe space" for teams to make mistakes. Cheever explained Amazon's concept of "two-way doors" versus "one-way doors," encouraging quick decisions for reversible actions. For her, fostering creativity within the culture means delegating decision-making, enabling speed, and getting out of the way. She proudly noted that she no longer reviews content for Amazon's vast out-of-home network , considering her involvement a "defect." Her ideal scenario is when a team confidently takes ownership, reducing the need for her oversight and building courage throughout the organisation. Bengi expressed Mars' fortune in having curiosity as a core cultural tenet, where creativity is deeply cherished. While leveraging the legacy of iconic brands built by past generations, Bengi acknowledged that the world has changed, transforming "creative" from a title for a select few into a "verb for everyone" within their culture. She believes good ideas can emerge from anywhere and must be approached with a mindset of learning, iteration, and scaling. Mars achieves this through what they call "learning journeys," such as immersing teams in new technologies. They've expanded their partner ecosystem beyond traditional collaborators to include tech giants like AWS and visionary entrepreneurs. Bengi champions an "iteration to scale" mindset, where there are no failures or successes, only continuous iterations aimed at solving the right consumer problems, a fundamental part of their brand-building culture. Horwood emphatically stated that at Novartis, their company culture begins with purpose, drawing people to healthcare with the shared mission of "reimagining medicine together" to help others live better lives. She stressed, "the culture is us," highlighting that their culture isn't defined by one person but is a collective strength. Novartis actively enables this by encouraging every associate to contribute to their shared vision for creativity, which is not optional but multifaceted. Participation can range from workshops and trips to agency shadowing. Horwood underlined the significance of allowing associates to reflect on what's important to them within this shared mission, reinforcing that while frameworks exist, the principle of "the culture is us" remains the most important aspect of their organisational ethos.
New York Times
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The End of the Blurb. Thank God.
Are you sitting down? In what the trade publication Publisher's Weekly reported as a 'stunning" or 'tour-de-force' development, the publisher of Simon & Schuster's flagship imprint has announced that it will no longer require authors to provide promotional blurbs for their books. If you're still standing and breathing normally, chances are you're not an author. Be grateful! All these years, you have been spared the indignity of going on bended knee, begging people — generally more eminent than yourself — to sprinkle holy water on your manuscript. If you are an author — a blurbee, as it were — you're probably uttering hosannas of thanks to S&S publisher Sean Manning for this benison. And if you're a blurber, that is, on the receiving end of requests for unction, your hosannas may even be more fervent. Asking for praise is an undignified business. It is inherently awkward, especially if the person you're asking is an acquaintance, friend, or worse yet, someone who sells more books than you do. (In my case, roughly 98 percent of the author-sphere.) I know this from experience. After six books and almost two decades of mendicancy, my knees had to be surgically unbent. They weren't the only damaged part of me. My self-esteem was so low, my self-loathing so high that I avoided mirrors. Dear Mr. Updike, I know you must hate getting letters like this, but I was wondering if you'd drop whatever you're doing and spend the next two days reading my new book. Eminent authors do, indeed, 'hate getting letters like this.' To make Mr. Updike's happiness complete, many such requests end with a sheepish PS: Sorry to ask, but would it be possible to let me have your praise by next Thursday? My publisher — who, by the way, is your No. 2 fan, next to me — says that's the latest he can hold the presses. After six books, I told my editor (who is now publisher, president and C.E.O. of S&S): 'No more blurbs for this camper.' He wasn't thrilled, but good man that he is, he acceded. We have gone on to do 14 more books together, all of them blurbless, leaving Mr. Updike and the other gods of Olympus in unmolested peace. On the higher slopes of Mount Olympus, blurbs are a way by which the gods speak to each other in code, with the whole world watching. One of the delights of the late, great Spy magazine was its feature, 'Logrolling in Our Time,' which mortified many reciprocal blurbers and blurbees. To pick just one … oh dear … 'Cheever continues to do what the best fiction has always done: give us back our humanity, enhanced.' (John Updike on John Cheever's 'Falconer.') 'Superb — the most important American novel I've read in years.' (Cheever on Updike's 'Rabbit Is Rich.") In 2000, Christopher Hitchens brought out a book garlanded with praise from Christopher's beau idéal, Gore Vidal. Its tone of hauteur perfectly matched Mr. Vidal's residence in Ravello, Italy, an aerie perched on a cliff high above the Tyrrhenian Sea: 'I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or Delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.' Their mutual admiration society came to grief following 9/11, which Vidal viewed as just deserts, and Christopher viewed rather differently. By this point, Vidal had become verbally incontinent, referring to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber as a 'noble boy.' Christopher denounced Vidal's 'crackpot strain' in the pages of Vanity Fair. This lèse-majesté resulted in defenestration from Ravello. He surrendered his Delfino coronet with typical panache. The back cover of his 2010 memoir, 'Hitch-22,' carries what might be the first instance of de-blurbing: 'I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or Delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.' This text ran with a giant 'X' across it. My father, William F. Buckley, Jr., was capable of similar sleight-of-hand in blurbmanship. He and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. were lifelong ideological opponents who frequently found themselves clashing on numerous public platforms. At one debate in the early Sixties, Schlesinger said in his opening remarks, 'Mr. Buckley has a facility for rhetoric which I envy, as well as a wit which I seek clumsily and vainly to emulate.' Rather nice, but a low-hanging fruit. Dear old Dad couldn't resist. As he recounted in his book 'Cruising Speed': 'A year or so later, I scooped them [Schlesinger's kind words] up, and stuck them, unadorned, on the jacket of my new book, and waited for all hell to break loose; which it did, telephone calls, telegrams, threats of a lawsuit. I saw Arthur at a party the next year and told him that the deadline for the blurb for my next book was April 15, but that if he didn't have time to compose a fresh one, I'd use the old one, which was after all hard to improve upon.' Both these giants have left the building. If they were still with us, W.F.B. would doubtless be sending Mr. Schlesinger a link to the Publishers Weekly story, with a note saying that the exemption doesn't apply in their case, and that the deadline for a new blurb is next Thursday.
New York Times
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Parthenope' Review: Goddess Worship
'Beauty is like war — it opens doors,' says the middle-aged American writer John Cheever (Gary Oldman) to Parthenope (Celeste Dalla Porta), a statuesque brunette from Naples whom he meets at a resort. It's southern Italy, 1973, and Cheever (Oldman in a small but memorably melancholic part) strikes up a friendship with her early on in the film. 'Parthenope," a characteristically decadent drama by the director Paolo Sorrentino, is about all the doors opened by Parthenope's beauty. At first — when she's seen primarily in a bikini, lounging by crystalline ocean waters — this means capturing the hearts of male suitors, like her namesake siren from Greek mythology. Cheever, who in real life spent years traveling around Italy, is one of the few men in the film who is immune to her charms — maybe it's the booze, or his repressed yearning for men. Or maybe its because a woman like her should be admired from a distance as one does a religious icon or marble statue. If this way of idealizing women sounds painfully retrograde, know that Sorrentino isn't interested in realism — or political correctness, for that matter. His work (including the Oscar winner 'The Great Beauty' and the HBO series 'The Young Pope') is less about people than it is about big ideas: art, desire, religion, and, yes, beauty; the way they shape our lives with an almost mystical power. Now add to this an enduring fixation with Sorrentino's native Italy, its past and present, and its contradictions. The country is home to some of the world's great triumphs — think ancient Rome and the Sistine Chapel — but the director also depicts it as a hotbed of spiritual rot personified by its corrupt leaders. At one point in the film, Parthenope enjoys a dalliance with a monstrous bishop (Peppe Lanzetta), representing a union of the sacred and the profane. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
