The Conversations Marketing Leaders Need Right Now

Becca Banyard: Marketing leaders are under more pressure than ever to move faster, prove impact, adapt to AI, and still build brands that people trust. And behind all of this are bigger conversations around leadership, creativity, growth, burnout, and what modern marketing leadership is supposed to look like now. So that’s exactly why we’re launching The CMO Club Podcast.

This show is about honest, smart conversations with marketing leaders navigating all of it in real time. I’m Becca Banyard, producer of the podcast, and today I get to introduce the show’s host, Breanna Lawlor. She has a background in communications, marketing, and video production, and she has a natural curiosity that makes her the perfect person to be the host of the CMO Club Podcast.

Breanna, welcome to your show.

Breanna Lawlor: Thank you so much, Becca, for that lovely introduction.

Becca Banyard: This is so exciting, and there’s one question that I wanna start with What feels uniquely hard about being a marketing leader right now?

Breanna Lawlor: It’s a great question. It’s probably something leaders ask themselves every day, “Why is this so hard?”

And it’s because we’re dealing with times where no one has all the answers. Literally building the plane as you fly it, and there’s no playbook for doing an AI rollout with a team of multiple hundred marketers. There’s no set path that’s been walked for your organization in this time. And so dealing with ambiguity, leading in a time where you don’t have all the answers, that is inherently hard because you have to have a strong sense of your own point of view, your own intuition, and then deal with the visibility that comes with being a marketing leader.

It’s a lot. It’s never been more exposed. You’re accountable for growth, for brand, for navigating an entire workforce transformation, and it’s just a lot. And you don’t have to do everything perfectly, but you do need to make steps in the right direction, and you’re guessing until you get there, and you look back on the other side, and you think, “Maybe that wasn’t so bad.”

I think what it is sort of like being between a rock and a hard place. Like, the pressure doesn’t just come externally. It also comes internally, both for yourself and also for the team that you support. And so it’s like working in that environment of pressure constantly. Some people thrive off of it, and others get bogged down by it, and I think that’s what’s really hard about being a marketing leader is that there’s never been so much visibility and pressure and ambiguity all at the same time.

Becca Banyard: That’s a lot. And even if you’re someone who thrives under pressure, we can only take so much as humans, so…

Breanna Lawlor: Yeah, like, if there’s any sort of sage advice, the thing that’s gonna get people through is connecting with other humans who are in a similar position. You do not have to know all the answers.

Sometimes it just helps to have someone in your circle who has maybe a few more than you do, and then you feel heard and seen and willing to wake up the next day and do it all over again. That’s all it takes to be a leader. You don’t have to have all the answers, but you need to be willing to show up and be consistent and trudge forward even without the playbook in hand.

Becca Banyard: When I have conversations about ambiguity in my own career, it’s always like, yeah, nobody has the answers. We just have to come up with a solution, be, like, consistent about seeking a solution and sticking to it and seeing if it works. If it doesn’t, you fail, you learn, and you try another solution, and I think that’s just kind of the common theme, whether you’re a marketing leader or whether you’re a multimedia producer.

Breanna Lawlor: Totally. I think a lot of it… I mean, there’s, like, a safe space aspect to, you know, life being so digitized, but, like, really, the true safe space is when you connect one-to-one. And we’re all imperfect. We’re all gonna make mistakes, especially when things are moving at the pace that they’re going. Like, it’s just, it’s kind of wild.

It’s like Better keep up or you’re gonna fall flat, and there’s another way. And it really just is being humble and seeking out the answers when you don’t have them yourself.

Becca Banyard: Yes. And just to go back to the pressure cooker example, I feel like having those one-to-one connections, or even just listening in to somebody else’s shared experience, it’s like lifting that lid just slightly and letting some of the pressure out so that you can, like, keep going.

Breanna Lawlor: Yeah, I couldn’t have said it better. Like, yeah, there’s lots of ways to alleviate the pressure, but the peer-to-peer connection, it seems to be a consistent theme among leaders because you’d be amazed by how many parallels there are, regardless of industry, just by the nature of being in the C-suite as a marketer.

You’ve already had quite a few conversations with marketing leaders, so I’m curious, what are you noticing about today’s CMOs that people don’t see? I think historically CMOs have been responsible for campaigns and outcomes, and now really they’re focused on building trust, trust with their audience, trust with their team, trust with their board.

And this was always the case, but it’s a little bit more visible now. So CMOs are also having to be thought leaders. They’re really needing to show up and demonstrate their point of view. There’s a lot of pressure on CMOs. They need to be responsible for handling what the vision looks like and then executing on that.

So it’s just a lot of pressure. Some people handle it better than others, but I think the ones that are doing that well are quite humble. They’re asking the right questions, and they’re not pretending they have all the answers There’s this tension evident in every aspect of a CMO role, and there’s a good reason for it, but sometimes it serves and sometimes it doesn’t.

So it’s nice to figure out when we should aggravate that tension and when we should release it.

Becca Banyard: So there’s quite a lot of change happening in the industry right now, largely due to AI and the disruption that it’s brought. I’m curious from your perspective, what is something that the marketing industry right now is getting wrong?

Breanna Lawlor: Yeah, no, this is a really great question. It’s come up a lot in conversations over the past nearly six months. The number one thing is mistaking motion for progress. They’re not the same thing. Speed does not translate to outcomes or outputs that are valuable, and honestly, a little bit of FOMO doesn’t always serve you well.

So really I think I would lean into that. Like, the biggest mistake or the narrative that’s maybe gotten too much attention is to move fast regardless of everything else. But motion is great, you just need to make sure you’re moving in the right direction.

Becca Banyard: I love that response. I’ve heard somebody say often people with AI, they’re just accelerating bad processes, and so you actually need to fix the process with AI and make it more efficient.

Breanna Lawlor: This theme has come up so much. I think almost everyone I’ve spoken to have talked about how you’ve probably heard this, AI is an amplifier. Amplifies good, amplifies bad. It’s like putting a microscope on your ways of working, on your processes, on your workflows. So I mean, you better be prepared for fluorescent lights and a microscope if you’re gonna roll this out.

Yes, it can speed things up. Is it gonna speed things up in the right direction? Remains to be seen.

Becca Banyard: Totally, and I think that’s where, going back to what you were saying about trust, that piece is so important because your team needs to be able to trust you so that they can follow you into this wild west of AI.

Breanna Lawlor: Completely, because this is unchartered territory. I’m sure we’re all exhausted by that. But the fact is, you can only go into an area that you’re not familiar with if you have someone who you trust as a guide, and that really is the role that marketing leaders play. You’re a guide. You’re guessing. Maybe you’ve got some intuition, you might have some data, but ultimately trust is bought through experience, and that’s what you need to lead with.

And that actually leads beautifully into my next question. What kind of leaders do marketers need to become in this era of AI and constant change? I love this question because I think it’s really important, and it probably trickles into other areas of life too. It’s important to have a strong point of view, but it’s also important to not be married to it all the time.

If you’re presented with new information, maybe you change your mind, and as the saying goes, like, if you hang onto something too tightly, it may break. Same thing applies here for marketers. A marketing leader has a position that is so visible, it’s important to have this sort of consistency in how they apply themselves.

So having a strong point of view will serve you well. Hanging onto things so tightly that they break, not so much. So I found that there’s a certain element of flexibility, of humility that’s really serving leaders well, and these are traits that basically buy you that trust with your team so that you can move faster together rather than slower alone.

It’s not an option for CMOs. Like, you just, you simply need to know how to persuade people to follow you, and it comes from having a clear point of view that people can get on board with, but not being so rigid that you don’t account for new information and allow it to maybe shape-shift from time to time.

Becca Banyard: In the last few moments, switching gears, let’s chat about the show.

So who are some of the guests or the conversations that listeners can look forward to in the next few weeks?

Breanna Lawlor: My aim is to invite a variety of guests from different disciplines with different levels of expertise on the show. I actually have found in the conversations over the last few months, some of the ones that are the most fascinating interviews haven’t always been a marketer.

They were in a completely different role before they came to marketing, and that then kind of gave them a foundation, a unique point of view. So we’re really gonna dial into what is your point of view and what missteps have you had and what happened as a result? We’re really looking to connect with the doers, the marketers who are doing something.

And yes, you may be a leader, but you’re still in charge of doing something that’s gonna get to a different conclusion than you’re at right now. And the timelines are going to be shortened, they’re gonna be condensed, and there’s gonna be visibility the whole way through. So we really want the folks who are working in public, who are showing their work, and then telling us the story of that experience.

Becca Banyard: I love that. I love tactical insights. I love lessons learned. As much as it’s hard to share your own personal failures, I feel like sometimes those are the conversations where you can learn the most from. There’s a lot to look forward to.

Breanna Lawlor: Yeah, like there’s something to be said for failures, right? Like a success, great, but a failure you learn from.

And sometimes it’s really nice to learn from someone else’s misstep rather than make the same step yourself. And in a lot of the conversations that I have with these leaders, they have peer groups where they lean on each other, and I want this to exemplify that peer-to-peer connection. We’re giving someone a platform to share their expertise with a huge network of people who are just trying to move a few steps forward from where they are now.

Becca Banyard: For the listeners, if somebody is to tune in consistently for the next few months, for the next year, what is one or two things that you hope change for them?

Breanna Lawlor: This is a time right now where there’s so much information, you can totally get bogged down by information overload. And so what I hope people get is from the specifics of these episodes, from the specific stories that are shared by leaders, they come away with one, two, three, maybe a few different ideas of new approaches to old problems, and they arrive at different results.

There is one other thing that I wanted to add because I think marketers right now are under a lot of pressure to deliver in their role, to navigate AI, to figure out that balancing act. But ultimately, like marketing is about connection. And so if you feel like you’re connecting to an idea, to a person, to a new way of working, and that clicks for you, that’s amazing.

And it hopefully won’t take you a year of listening to get to that point. But I really look forward to sort of extracting those experiences from the guests that I connect with and then sharing it here.

Becca Banyard: So much to look forward to. And Breanna, I am just so excited to be on this podcast journey with you.

It has only been a few weeks so far, but it has already been so much fun, and so I’m really thrilled to be doing this together So with that, I’m gonna pass the reins over to you. You are the official host now of the show. It won’t be me in this seat anymore. So why don’t you take the reins, take over the mic, and close us out?

Breanna Lawlor: Sure. Absolutely.

So I really look forward to connecting with you, the listener. I hope that you gain some wonderful insights from the people that we connect with. And be sure to follow along wherever you get your podcasts because there’s gonna be some conversations you will not wanna miss. Thanks for being here with me.