Priceless
I first reached out to Alfrédo Gangotena shortly after he took over as Global CMO of  MasterCard in 2010 when I read his Ad Age interview with Beth Snyder Bulik. At the time, he told me he would love to do the podcast at a later date. To be honest, I largely forgot about it until recently. We all know the MasterCard Priceless campaign, but I read recently that it is now 16 years old, spans 112 countries, and 53 languages. Think about that for a moment, can you think of another marketing campaign that is used and resonates globally in this way? Needless to say, I realized we had to get Alfrédo on the show! I reached back out and am so delighted he was able to join us.
Marketing and Mathematics
So how does one become a Global CMO of a company as large as MasterCard? Alfrédo shares that he started his career in finance at P&G. He says that his move to the creative came because he kept pushing his marketing counterparts to show ROI. What struck me as I was listening was just how many of our past Brand Fast-Trackers guests either came from finance (Esurance's John Swigart comes to mind) or are extremely numbers focused (like when Gini Dietrich shared "ROI, ROI, ROI" in her second podcast with us). Alfrédo refers to this as his M&M, not the candy, but marketing and mathematics. He says:
"At the end of the day, any decision you make at the end of the day has to have a return. It has to create business and you cannot just be satisfying yourself with a very creative campaign that doesn't really push the needle." Tweet This 
Alfrédo's Marketing Absolutes
Given his expansive career, I was really interested in hearing what Alfrédo considers to be his marketing absolutes. He offered up two, both of which seem simple and yet so profound.

Have a complete open mind and open eyes. As he puts it, try to understand before being understood. "If you are in a marketing function and you pretend you know it all, you know you're going to fail." Tweet This
Make a picture out of what you see. In other words connect the dots after you have listened. "Very few people are able to understand data or understand consumer reactions and make any sense out of it." Tweet This

Media Fragmentation
We've spoken about media fragmentation on this blog and podcast quite a bit in the last year. THe ability for brands to reach their key audience is one fell swoop has changed. When veteran marketer and Haas Business School professor Bill Pearce was on the show, he shared "you could reach 85% of the U.S. by running one commercial on Sunday night on the then three major networks." Obviously this is no longer the case. So we asked Alfrédo his thoughts on how marketers should handle it. His advice resonated with me so strongly:

Ignore fragmentation. "If people are locked into the details of how  you communicate channel by channel, you're missing the point. The real point is what's your message and how big is your message."
If you have the right message, it will translate across mediums. "So if they have a very strong message and it resonates superbly well with the consumer, it will work well in television. It's going to work wonderfully in radio. It's going to be able to express it in print, in outdoor and how about in digital and how about the reaction of people through social media."

The continuous theme for the show was how MasterCard has continued to evolve their priceless campaign from an original insight to something new such as their Priceless Cities initiative. I can see this particular initiative unfolding in exciting directions.

Alfrédo shared much more than I could possibly cover in this blog post, so I encourage you to take a listen to the full interview below. I think you will enjoy it.



 

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