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How Indeed is Breaking Down the Brand-Performance Divide

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How Indeed is Breaking Down the Brand-Performance Divide

Moving Beyond the Brand-Performance Divide

The distinction between brand and performance marketing can create more problems than it solves. When teams operate independently, budgets become contested territory and brand teams can find themselves pressured to justify every decision through short-term performance metrics.

Jennifer argues that this does not reflect how customers actually experience brands. Customers do not separate a paid social interaction from a brand campaign, PR story, product experience, or customer service interaction. They experience the organisation as one brand.

That means marketing needs to operate in a similar way.

At Indeed, the opportunity is to think about brand, performance, PR, and communications as parts of one growth system. Each function can have a different role, but they ultimately contribute to the same business outcome.

For senior marketers, this reframing matters. It moves the conversation away from which discipline deserves credit or budget and toward how the different parts of marketing can work together to create both immediate demand and longer-term brand value.

Making Brand Investment Measurable

One of the biggest challenges for brand leaders is proving the financial value of brand investment.

Jennifer describes a pivotal moment when she was asked what brand consideration points actually meant for the bottom line. The question exposed a familiar problem: marketers can measure awareness and consideration, but those metrics do not always tell the CFO what the investment contributed to the business.

At Indeed, that challenge helped drive the development of a brand science function designed to connect creative impact with commercial outcomes.

The approach combines tools such as media mix modeling and incremental experimentation with different sources of data to understand what marketing activity is actually contributing. The goal is not to replace creative judgment with statistics. It is to give creative decisions a stronger business case.

This changes the internal conversation. Instead of asking whether a campaign feels effective, marketing can start demonstrating what it delivered.

For CMOs, that distinction can be critical when budgets are under pressure. Brand science provides a bridge between the creative ambition of marketing and the financial accountability expected by the wider business.

Brand Does Not Belong to Marketing Alone

Jennifer also challenges the idea that marketing owns the brand.

Marketing can define the promise and shape how that promise is communicated. But the organisation ultimately delivers the experience.

A customer's interaction with a product can strengthen or undermine a campaign. Customer service can reinforce the brand or contradict it. Employees can bring the organisation's values to life, or create an experience that bears little resemblance to the message appearing in advertising.

That makes brand building an enterprise responsibility.

For marketing leaders, this requires a broader definition of the job. The CMO cannot simply oversee campaigns and expect the rest of the organisation to follow. The role increasingly involves connecting marketing with product, sales, customer success, finance, and other functions that influence the customer experience.

The strongest brand strategy therefore cannot exist in isolation. It needs to be reflected in the decisions and behaviours of the entire organisation.

Using Testing to Make Creatives Better

Creative disagreements are inevitable, particularly in large and complex organisations. The problem comes when those disagreements turn into subjective debates that slow decisions and dilute the work.

Jennifer's answer is to test.

At Indeed, qualitative research is combined with quantitative evidence to understand whether an idea is working and, importantly, why. In a data-driven organisation, hearing that 50 people responded positively to an idea can be useful, but it is not enough on its own.

Testing provides another layer of confidence.

Crucially, Jennifer does not frame testing as a way to kill creative ideas. If an idea the team believes in does not perform as expected, the next question should be what can be learned from the result.

Perhaps the concept is strong but the brand's role is unclear. Perhaps the customer problem has not been communicated effectively. Perhaps one part of the idea needs to be strengthened.

This turns testing from a gate at the end of the creative process into a tool for making the work better.

For CMOs, that creates a more productive way to manage stakeholder disagreement. Instead of compromising because everyone has an opinion, teams can establish a clear point of view, test it, and use the evidence to improve the work.

Finding Ideas That Actually Move People

Data can strengthen creative decision-making, but Jennifer is clear that great marketing cannot be reduced to numbers.

Her approach to evaluating ideas starts with understanding the problem. Teams need to know what they are trying to solve, understand the customer, and establish a clear connection to the brand before moving too quickly toward execution.

Then comes emotional resonance.

A strong idea should make people feel something. It might create inspiration, joy, empathy, or another emotional response that gives the work the power to move beyond information and create a connection.

This balance matters. Strategy without emotion can produce work that is technically correct but forgettable. Emotion without strategic clarity can produce work that is entertaining but disconnected from the business.

The opportunity is to bring the two together, then use testing to understand whether the idea is landing as intended.

Using AI to Expand Creative Ambition

Generative AI is another area where Jennifer sees an opportunity to challenge traditional constraints.

Rather than treating AI as a replacement for human creativity, Indeed is using it as a creativity amplifier. The technology can help teams explore ambitious ideas and overcome production limitations that might previously have made certain concepts too expensive or difficult to execute.

But the human role remains central.

Insight, strategy, creative judgment, and emotional storytelling still require people to make the decisions. AI can expand what teams are capable of producing, but it does not remove the need to understand the customer or know what the brand should stand for.

For marketers, the opportunity is therefore less about asking what AI can replace and more about asking what it makes possible that was previously out of reach.

Build the Conditions for Agility and Speed

Modern marketing is increasingly expected to respond to culture in real time. A trend can emerge on social media and disappear within days, meaning a 24- to 48-hour response window can become the baseline rather than the exception.

Traditional approval structures are not designed for that speed.

Jennifer explains how Indeed has approached the problem by spending more time upfront defining the framework in which teams can operate. Legal, brand, and other safeguards still matter, but teams do not need to restart the approval process every time an opportunity appears.

Instead, clear guardrails establish what is approved and what is not.

Once those boundaries are understood, teams can move with greater confidence.

This is a different model of leadership. Instead of becoming the person who approves every decision, the senior marketer becomes the person who designs the framework that allows others to make good decisions.

That requires trust, clarity, and a willingness to delegate.

The Modern CMO as a Connector

Perhaps the biggest lesson from Jennifer's approach is that the senior marketing role is becoming less about controlling the function and more about connecting the organisation.

Jennifer believes marketers need to be curious about the entire enterprise. They need to understand how different functions work, influence without relying on authority, collaborate effectively, and connect dots that others may not see.

Those soft skills become increasingly valuable as marketing becomes more integrated with the wider business.

The CMO who can connect brand to performance, creativity to data, marketing to product, and experimentation to business growth is in a stronger position to influence the organisation than one who stays within the traditional boundaries of the marketing function.

The reset is not about choosing brand over performance, creativity over data, or speed over control.

It is about building a marketing organisation capable of doing all of these things together.

🎧 Listen to the full episode of Time for a Reset with Jennifer Warren to explore how Indeed is rethinking marketing as a connected growth system.

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[00:00:01] Jennifer Warren:  I would stop treating growth as a department and really thinking of it as the outcome that all of marketing is driving because that is the truth. Right? We are all there no matter if you’re in brand or in growth marketing, PR, comms. We’re all there to drive growth for the company.

[00:00:22] Fiona Davis:  Welcome to Time for Reset, the marketing podcast that gets behind the thinking of the industry’s sharpest leaders shaping the world’s most iconic brands. We ask the big questions. What does it take to drive real change? How do you stay ahead when the rules keep evolving? From shifting consumer expectations to marketing seat in the boardroom, every episode dives into what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next. Expect smart conversations, real world insights, and a bold perspective on modern marketing leadership. Let’s hit reset and turn strategy into action. Now into the conversation.

[00:00:56] Fiona Davis:  Welcome back to Time for a Reset. I’m your host, Fiona, for the day, and please welcome. We are very excited to have on Jennifer Warren from Indeed, one of the largest job sites in the world, I believe. Jennifer, if you can tell us a little bit more about that. She’s a global vice president of brand marketing experience at Indeed. Welcome to the show, Jennifer. It’s great to have you on.

[00:01:14] Jennifer Warren:  Thank you for having me. I was looking forward to the conversation today. 

[00:01:19] Fiona Davis  So, Jennifer, just by way of background, you have quite the broad background, and our listeners will be very interested to hear some of your examples as we go through because you started an agency and then have obviously worked brand side. You are three time CMO. You’ve been through all of the things, I think, in the marketing space.

[00:01:35] Jennifer Warren:  It’s a good way to put it, all the things.

[00:01:37] Fiona Davis:  You’ve been working at that sort of intersection of creativity and business impact for a long time. And I think what I would do is actually get you to talk a little bit about what you’re doing at Indeed to finish the conversation there. But, also, listeners, be aware that, obviously, Jeniff has a quite broad background. She’s been part of CMO’s club, top CMOs for creativity. She’s had some pretty trailblazing campaigns that we’re gonna probably touch on as we go through the interview today. So I’ll start with you. You wanna just give us a bit of background on your job today at Indeed?

[00:02:08] Jennifer Warren:  Of course. Thanks for asking. I lead our brand marketing and experience team at Indeed. And as you mentioned, we are the world’s largest job site, and we are global. And so the way I think about my job is really helping us connect as many job seekers as possible to the best job possible on a daily basis. I think it’s every thirty one seconds, we actually help somebody get hired. So it’s a pretty massive opportunity. I love my job and being able to help people understand that we are able to help them get seen for what they have to offer and really connect with the right job. And so, I don’t know, I think it’s a really fun job. When I think about the brands that I like to work for, it’s those that actually are doing something really interesting and important in the world, and so that’s what attracted me to the opportunity.

[00:03:03] Fiona Davis:  Doesn’t get much more personal to people than they were. That’s right. So it’s sort of like you’re right in the sweet spot of people. The human component of that is incredibly important. It’s an interesting space to be as a marketer. Right? So I was gonna start by asking you, as we do all of our guests on the podcast, what would you hit reset on in the marketing industry if you have the big red button to push today?

[00:03:25] Jennifer Warren:  Well, thank you for asking. I would stop treating growth as a department and really thinking of it as the outcome that all of marketing is driving because that is the truth. Right? We are all there no matter if you’re in brand or in growth marketing, PR, comms. We’re all there to drive growth for the company. So I just think it’s done as a disservice as an industry to separate the two and name one growth. So that is what if I could wave a magic wand, I would reverse that decision.

[00:03:58] Fiona Davis:  It’s a really interesting time to be talking about that, actually, isn’t it? We’re starting to hear more and more people in the industry talk about that because there has been a bit of a history of over indexing on performance marketing because it’s easy to measure or easier to measure. So people tend to put money where they can show their CFO it’s working. What do you think the industry’s lost as a result of that swing towards performance marketing and the separation, actually, of their two separate disciplines that shouldn’t be working in tandem?

[00:04:26] Jennifer Warren:  Yeah. I think it leads to less impact overall all because it’s exactly what you said. I think it leads to decision making where you think that the things that are easier to measure must be the most valuable and I don’t think that’s always the case. I think when you think about it from that perspective, demand has a ceiling. And so you have to always be also thinking about your future demand, and that’s why it has to be a system. You have to be thinking about your future customers that you want to bring in. You have to make sure you’re staying top of mind and then the demand should be capturing it. So if we’re not thinking of it as a total system and how we’re driving growth both short term and long term, I think there’s impact loss to the business. And then I think it also just creates unnecessary conflict internally when you’re feeling like you’re having to compete for budgets. Or if you’re not in performance marketing, you feel like you are constantly trying to explain in the terms of performance marketing what you do, and it just makes it, to me, unnecessarily hard to think about it as two separate things.

[00:05:36] Fiona Davis:  Absolutely. And it’s also quite interesting that in that discussion of trying to separate it, everyone loses the concept of you still have to have a relationship with the customer. And so you can’t always be selling the customer twenty four seven if you’re trying to build a long term relationship with them. So there’s a time and a place for performance marketing, and there’s a time and a place for brand engagement type thing.

[00:05:56] Jennifer Warren:  Yeah. And just to build on what you just said, the other thing that we lose as an industry is thinking about it that way in departments is not how the customer’s experiencing it. Right? And so it just loses sight of the customer and the journey and, like, how should you be engaging with them at every step. And I think that’s a really important point is it should always center around the customer and the problem that you’re trying to solve versus the discipline.

[00:06:21] Fiona Davis:  You’ve worked on some pretty iconic brand campaigns in your time, and you’d spent your career proving out that the creativity can drive measurable business outcomes. How do you think marketing leaders should be reframing that conversation so that brand and performance aren’t competing for dollars and it’s more seen as an integrated program?

[00:06:40] Jennifer Warren:  Right. Yeah. That’s a great question and one that I would say has been a really important learning and lesson for me at Indeed. And I was just thinking back as you’re asking that question on one of the probably most pivotal moments for me in my career where I was in a board meeting and I was presenting the results from a great campaign we had done. And I think it was around the Super Bowl, and it was very well received, grew our brand consideration. We, of course, had won awards. We saw traffic to the site, and I’m talking about all of this. And our CFO at the time said, well, Jennifer, what does a few points in brand consideration mean to our bottom line? How did that really drive revenue? And it really changed the way as uncomfortable of a moment as that was for me personally, thinking about it still kinda makes me

[00:07:39] Fiona Davis:  queasy.

[00:07:39] Jennifer Warren:  It really challenged me, and I thought if I’m going to invest money on our behalf like that, I have to really be able to explain what it did to our revenue. And we started, as a result of that question, a brand science function or I started a brand science function that really focused on how do we connect what we’re seeing from a brand metric perspective and the impact from the creative to revenue for the business. And so we implemented media mix modeling, incremental experimentation, and, like, triangulating everything. And I think it’s required. I think we can’t expect people to want to invest if we can’t explain what it’s doing for the business, and that was a kind of a lesson I learned.

[00:08:23] Fiona Davis:  I have a bit of an moment of, oh, yes. That would be important. I was gonna ask you a follow-up there on are there any other points in your career similar to that where you thought, I started out thinking this was the thing and that you’ve changed your mind on dramatically throughout the course of your career?

[00:08:40] Jennifer Warren:  Yeah. I think that would be a big one is that brand isn’t measurable from a business impact perspective. That would be a big one. We’ve all said early in our careers, you know, and kinda gotten upset that people expect us to be able to measure brand in the same way. That’d be a big one. I think another one would be as you grow in your career realizing that half of your job is one educating on why it’s important to go, for example, in my world, build a brand or in marketing because you have to bring everybody along with you. One of the things that I think a lot about and talk a lot about is that brand does not live within my team. It is a discipline, meaning there’s expertise, sure, when it comes to how you’re positioning and talking about your brand, but brand is everything we do. It’s how we show up from a customer service perspective. It’s our product, first and foremost, how are people experiencing it. So I think going from early in your career thinking, oh, I’m responsible for building our brand was something that I thought to really understanding and knowing and championing that in order to build your brand, every single person in the company has to feel it, understand it, and deliver on it because it’s a whole system as well.

[00:10:03] Fiona Davis:  Yeah. And also know where they fit into that brand commerce. So I it was so interesting you say that one of the podcast guests we had on in Cannes was talking about from a QSR perspective. We can do the most iconic campaigns with the biggest stars and all of the things, but what it comes down to is when someone comes into your store and they buy something, like they buy a burger and it’s cold, what’s the thing they’re gonna remember? It isn’t your iconic campaign. It’s the bad service they got when they came into the franchise. So it’s not just one thing. What’s the entire customer experience that you’re thinking about. And, like you said, brand awareness and brand favorability isn’t just on what marketing is doing. It’s on the whole organization.

[00:10:42] Jennifer Warren:  And it’s so important. It’s so important. It’s also taught me as a leader, I have to spend just as much time, if not more, working cross functionally across the enterprise versus early in my career. I just spent the majority of my time with my own team. And so it’s all connected. Right?

[00:11:00] Fiona Davis:  Yeah. Absolutely. We touched on this earlier. Indeed’s mission is incredibly personal for people and incredibly human. It’s basically putting people in jobs, one of the most important functions you can operate in for an individual. But you’re also recognized as one of the Adweek’s AI trailblazers at the moment. Right? So how do you think about that? This is a really hot topic for most marketers at the moment is figuring out what is the right use of AI with human in the loop to stop that feeling very automatronic and make it still feel like you’re talking to a person, but using the technology in a smart way to enable your business. So how are you thinking about the relationship between AI and human creativity? And do you see AI as a genuine competitive advantage for your business today? And where do you think other marketers should be thinking about or, like, careful in their use of AI to keep the human element front of mind?

[00:11:54] Jennifer Warren:  Yeah. Great questions. First of all, the AI trailblazer, I guess, as a marketer and as a leader, I am always focused on the human element and the insights and the instincts and creativity. So I think the fact that I ended up being the person to raise my hand and say, I wanna lead AI transformation across marketing might have been a surprise to people. So I wanted to talk a little bit more about where that came from. You know, we at Indeed have a economist team, the hiring lab, and I’d seen that our research showing that marketing was gonna be one of the disciplines that was gonna be the most impacted by generative AI. And so part of it at first was driven by trying to understand that more as well as just wanting to make sure we all stayed relevant in our careers and we could stay competitive. So I sort of leaned into it from that perspective and it’s true. At first, I remember talking about it and you could just see, like, fear. And I think we’ve really gotten somewhat past that and now people are starting to understand the benefits and seeing it as an opportunity to honestly add to the creativity and I know everybody talks about the efficiency that it creates and it’s true. It does and we are using it in ways to create efficiencies, but I think one of the examples I wanna share where it actually has amplified creativity using it. We recently launched a new campaign in Germany and it was about showing how despite all of your barriers and how hard it is to get a job, you know, Indeed can make it a little bit easier by helping you get seen and connect. And so the concepts came in and it was like there were medieval castles involved and hundreds and hundreds of extras or people in the background fighting and things like that. And so we’re like, we can’t afford that in Germany and the team really looked at, is there a solution to this where we can use AI to create the backgrounds and the animation and then use humans for the acting part, of course, because we didn’t want to use AI for that. And so anyway, we were able to do this amazing campaign in production within our budget using GenAI, but it was our teams and the agency that came up with the big ideas and the concepts, but it truly helped us be able to bring it to life. We would have never been able to do that before. So I guess I look at it as it truly can be a tool that also amplifies your creativity, not just driving efficiency. You just have to really, I think, be open to that. There’s always, in my opinion, going to be a need for the empathy, the insight, the human’s ability to feel what creative looks and feels like and make those calls. And I think those that can see how they can also take that and use AI to produce something that they might not have been able to or use it to challenge their thinking, see something they might not have seen. I mean, for me, that is how I think about and use it.

[00:15:09] Fiona Davis:  With also predictive analytics, like, the now the predictive analytics capabilities that would have been really tough even a couple of years ago, now is it’s real. You can use synthetic data for testing and innovation to go, well, we think this might be true. Let’s give it a try and see how we go. We touched on something there as well. I agree with you in that. A lot of what we see is people talking about efficiencies rather than what does that efficiency enable you to do? Because the end goal is actually speed because if you can react in real time with all of the data signals that you have and you’ve got an easy way to be able to make a decision and move, that’s the real thing that AI is enabling you to do, that it’s just making it faster. Some of those mundane processes that you’ve been doing manually for years, being able to automate that stuff to allow people to step back and do the creative stuff, that’s really why you want it in marketing.

[00:16:03] Jennifer Warren:  I completely agree, and you just made me think of another good use of it is I think to get to those big creative ideas, you have to spend a lot of time really understanding the problem you’re trying to solve and triangulating data between the problem you’re solving for your customers, what are the pain points, problems that you’re solving, obviously, for the business, and really go deep into understanding that. And we still have people doing research and strategist. And I think that’s important, but using it to help triangulate and, again, keep sharpening the insights and really understanding the problem, I think, actually leads to better creative and better work. So, I mean, we’re all on this journey together trying to really decide what do we think about it, is it gonna take our jobs, but I tend to believe there is a role for it and way of it making actually the work better still having the human in the jobs. In our campaign right now is jobs need people, and I truly believe that. Jobs do need people, and so I think it’s about just using it to amplify within the work that we do where can you use it to actually make things better and then embracing that and building on top of it. That’s the way I think about it.

[00:17:24] Fiona Davis:  How are you involved in the creative process today? Like, you just talked about a little bit there a great example of how you kind of evolved it with the agency. How do you know when the idea is truly a breakthrough?

[00:17:35] Jennifer Warren:  Yeah. That’s a great question. You know, it’s something I’ve also always in my career said, oh, it’s really hard because creative’s subjective. Right? And everybody has an opinion. Everybody has an opinion about whether creative is good or not. So when I think about where I spend my time within the creative process, a lot of time, it truly does start with making sure we all understand and agree on the problem that we’re solving. I think sometimes there’s a rush to get to the creative solution or the campaign without truly, like, spending enough time on it. And so I tend to get really involved in the upfront, the brief or the problem that you’re trying to solve, making sure we’re all aligned on that. And then in terms of the creative idea, how you know, I think if you’re clear on the problem, you know your customer, you know your brand, and you can connect dots. And then it’s like, I look at how does it make me feel? Did it make me feel something? Because I think great creative should make you feel something whether you’re wanting to cry, your heart will ring, or you’re laughing. So I think if all of those things, you can connect the dots between the problem you’re solving, the pain points, you know, your customers feeling, having an understanding and awareness of culture and where it fits in and then you feel something, to me, that is how I personally look at something and usually feel pretty strongly about what something’s gonna work. And then, of course, we do testing and all of that to look at is our instinct and intuition, is there any watch outs that we need to have? But I also like to look at research as something to help add or develop something further.

[00:19:08] Fiona Davis:  You touched on something really important there, I think, especially around the testing because I’m sure you’ve had this in your career. We certainly see it with our clients where that, as you say, everyone’s got an opinion. And sometimes you reach that point in the creative process where you’ve got a bit of a stalemate, where you’ve got a couple of key stakeholders who would just not down for the idea.

[00:19:27] Jennifer Warren:  Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

[00:19:30] Fiona Davis:  Having a good testing framework, you gotta go, okay. We’ll do a couple of variations, and then we’ll test, and we’ll see which one outputs. Is that how you’re handling that type of situation where there’s not a clear path and you can’t quite get to the final idea, do you use a testing framework to get to the right approach?

[00:19:48] Jennifer Warren:  We actually test everything. Another lesson for me early on is not to make it a reactive thing because there’s always gonna be someone in the room who questions it, especially when you work at a large company like I do that’s very matrixed and when we invest a lot of money in building our brand and in marketing. And so a lot of these big campaigns, I mean, they could go to their board level. So I learned pretty early on to come to the table with my recommendation, my point of view based on first insight and a clear articulation of the problem, and then also having both quantitative and qualitative testing. At first, I relied a lot on qualitative and I realized, especially at a data driven company like Indeed, it was like, that’s great that 50 people said this, but we need numbers. We do both. And then I think it’s about, again, looking at if it’s an idea you really believe in and your team and everybody really is filling it, it’s how do we then take this and maybe improve upon it if we saw the numbers weren’t as great as we thought they were gonna be, and what can we take and learn from this? And sometimes it might be you just haven’t convinced me. It’s a great idea, but you haven’t convinced me as a consumer that Indeed can solve the problem, and so you might just need to add in a little bit more around that.

[00:21:07] Fiona Davis  In that same vein, the appetite for innovation is different in different organizations, but everyone wants to innovate up until the point when a marketing campaign fails. And we have a lot of our senior CMOs who’ll say, failure is essential in marketing in the sense that if you don’t know what doesn’t work, how do you know what does work? And not every campaign you run is gonna be a raging success. It might be an okay campaign, but you learned something from it, then it’s it was a valuable exercise to go through. Now, obviously, you don’t wanna spend $2,000,000 on the learning bit, but you might wanna run, like, a smaller scale innovation to test out new ideas. How do you think about that in your role at the moment, and how much of a challenge has that been for you in your career to get the organizations you’ve worked for to invest in some level of innovation where you’re kinda out over your skis, you’re gonna give it a try, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

[00:21:58] Jennifer Warren:  I would say at Indeed, it’s expected. We are expected that we’re always trained to innovate and find new ways of doing things and encouraged to share failures, and that is important and it’s hard. Right? Because who likes to stand in front of room and say, I believed in this thing

[00:22:14] Fiona Davis:  and it’s so big. Yes.

[00:22:16] Jennifer Warren:  Yes. And sharing it broadly, like, that’s something that we all talk about is we need to tell everybody we failed this thing so that they don’t go and try it and or they build on what we already learned. And so I would say, one, it is about just how you build a culture where that is okay and you’re out there talking about it and it’s hard to do, especially at first. And then what I find though to be even harder than that is because I feel we weigh out the culture and it’s an expectation, making sure you’re structured for it and you’re protecting budget. It’s really easy when you have something that’s working. You wanna put more money behind the thing that’s working because you see the impact from it. And so I find it hard sometimes to protect, like, a budget because, also, if you don’t know what it’s gonna be allocated to, it’s easy to go. We’ll just take a little bit from that budget. And so I think the more important thing might be just to, like, make sure you have a structure and you’re protecting a budget to do it.

[00:23:15] Fiona Davis:  Marketing’s obviously moving at breakneck speed now faster than it ever has with the way consumers are buying and the way they’re interacting, the consumer behavior generally, how they’re expecting you to react to them in real time. You’ve got new tech, new channels, increasing pressure to demonstrate ROI at every level. How do you, as a leader, create a culture where the teams do feel confident with the experimentation while still delivering a pretty ambitious business goal set a business goal and agenda?

[00:23:43] Jennifer Warren:  Again, I think for us, it’s both. I don’t see one getting in the way of the other, but that’s why I go back to having the structure set up for it, especially these days as you were saying. If we just rest on our laurels and we’re like, oh, we know this works, we’re just gonna keep doing it, we will get behind. And so to me, I don’t think there’s an issue with people, like, worrying about experimenting for that reason, but we also have a structure in place, like, when we share our plans, they’re always a part of it and here’s what we’re experimenting with. Here’s a test that we’re running. Here’s something that we’re trying. Here’s the budget we’re spending. And so, I don’t know, I guess for me, it really has to be part of your process so that it is clear to everybody that there’s no issue with us spending a little money and it might not go the way you think because there’s an expectation of that, and it’s been set aside for learning.

[00:24:40] Fiona Davis:  What do you look for when you’re hiring marketers today? Like, obviously, the core foundations of marketing, in my opinion, haven’t changed. What’s changed is the capabilities and skills around that with every new development, every new tech channel, etcetera. Some of you’ve gotta learn something new. What do you look for in the market and how do you think is the most important thing when you’re hiring into a team that is pushing on innovation?

[00:25:04] Jennifer Warren:  This has been true my entire career, and it’s amplified now, and that is curiosity and then fire in your belly. You’ve got to always be looking for what is next, and you can’t wait for somebody to, like, tell you. Right? And problem solving. And so I would say that’s been true my whole career. I’ve always, like, felt that way, but I think now it’s even that much more important because a lot of times leaders are still figuring it out too. Things are coming at us so quickly, and so you need a team of people who are also leaning forward and bringing I mean, I people on my team that I can’t wait to talk to because they’re gonna teach me something new that they have just learned because they went off on their own. I’m like, wow. I didn’t know you could do that.

[00:25:49] Fiona Davis:  Yeah. I think marketing’s never been more of a team sport than now because it’s not possible for you to be across absolutely everything that’s coming at you all the time. So almost having a plan to have people focus in specific areas and bring that knowledge back to the team is like that’s where we see the most success for a lot of marketing teams is where it’s like full court press. Okay. I’m gonna be over here doing this. I’ll be over here doing this, and we’re all gonna get together and try and share knowledge because, honestly, the pace now is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

[00:26:18] Jennifer Warren:  It’s a great point. We have at Indeed AI Innovation Awards. We’ve started across the whole company and then also in marketing and AI showcases, and it’s for that reason. We have structure around, like, learning AI, but where we found we were learning the most is people would just come and say, hey. I was messing around with the quad code, and I learned I could go and do this. I could produce some videos. So, yes, having a structure in place where people can come and share is probably one of the quicker ways to learn. It is a team support.

[00:26:49] Fiona Davis:  Yeah. Also, I was gonna say we have the same thing ourselves of trying to get adoption both for ourselves internally, but also for our clients is stop talking about it, get your hands on it, because you’re not gonna actually get anywhere until you start experimenting in music in a real world scenario because that’s when you get people really engaged with it. Right? That’s when you get the true adoption.

[00:27:08] Jennifer Warren:  That’s right.

[00:27:09] Fiona Davis:  So I was gonna ask you a more generalist question about if we’re having this conversation three years from now, what do you hope will have changed in the industry, not just for Indeed, but just generally the marketing industry as a whole? And what gives you the most optimism about where marketing’s headed next?

[00:27:25] Jennifer Warren:  I hope, and I guess from my perspective, I mentioned the hiring lab data that did show and continues to show that our industry will change in terms of how we use our skills. And so in a few years’ time, what I hope to see is that we have moved past any fear that AI is gonna take our jobs. We have learned how to use it in the right ways that only amplifies what we do well and, of course, creates efficiencies, helping do things that maybe we don’t wanna do to really free us up and that it truly just makes what we do in marketing that much more impactful, that much more enjoyable. I believe it can happen. You know, you ask why I’m optimistic about it. I do think people who tend to gravitate towards marketing as a field is they are curious. They’re problem solvers. They’re creative. They’re tenacious. And I spend a lot of time with marketing leaders talking about this topic and I feel like everybody is looking at how do I use it for good to make things better. So I want to believe that as an industry, we will get there, and we’ll be in a better place in a few years.

[00:28:39] Fiona Davis:  You’re in such an interesting spot, Jennifer, knowing what you know. You’ve got access to all kinds of analytics on job data right now. So this question is particularly poignant for you as around the like, in your opinion, what are the most important attribution skills of a senior marketer for tomorrow? Because you’re seeing it in real time how the job specs are changing, how the different skill sets are getting ranked and rated, and which candidates are popping in that scenario. What’s your take on that?

[00:29:09] Jennifer Warren:  It’s just some recent data that I’ve seen that is really interesting is how marketing is now also seen as a skill set across other departments like product. Not just product marketing, but marketing skills within different departments in sales and client success. And so to me, I think that’s kind of interesting, and it also shows that AI, I think, is leading to more of a blending of roles. And so I think, one, from a senior marketer perspective, you really do have to be able to influence across the enterprise, collaborate, understand how things connect. And so I think you just have to be someone who’s curious and willing to go and understand the entire enterprise, how it all works together, and be able to connect dots in that way. I’m going back to kinda soft skills because I really believe that is what’s important. You have to be able to connect the dots and collaborate.

[00:30:09] Fiona Davis:  I think being a good storyteller because most marketers are good storytellers, and that’s a skill that everybody needs in their job. Right?

[00:30:16] Jennifer Warren:  You are absolutely right, and that should be probably towards the top is the storytelling and ability to communicate. Because to your point, to get everybody on board, you’ve gotta be able to communicate and influence and help people understand their role within a bigger marketing and brand building system.

[00:30:35] Fiona Davis:  I always find it fascinating that people talk about comms like it’s its own separate department in my but, no. That’s the job. Okay?

[00:30:45] Jennifer Warren:  I know. Yes. Everybody has to do it.

[00:30:48] Fiona Davis:  Now being as experienced in marketing as you are, what would be the one piece of advice you would give to marketers who wanna build brands that both create cultural impact but also are measurable? What’s your advice to the marketers out there listening today?

[00:31:03] Jennifer Warren:  You know, I probably have a thing going here, but I think we create a lot of false choices like brand and performance and the culture versus business impact, and I don’t think about it that way. It really is to me, you have to understand what’s going on in culture. You have to understand what problem your business solves in the world, and for that, it creates impact. So I look at it as you just have to connect the dots between all of those things. Awesome.

[00:31:30] Fiona Davis:  And then we always ask this at the end of a podcast recording to all of our guests, which is being vulnerable for a minute. What are the things you’re still working on yourself to be a better marketer? What are the areas you wanna improve in?

[00:31:42] Jennifer Warren:  I am working on what I’d mentioned earlier that I think is increasing in importance, and that is working across the company and freeing time up. It’s really hard. I lead six teams over a 100 people, a global team, and it’s so easy to spend all of your time with your team and even just within marketing. Right? And so I am working on how to make sure my team feels completely empowered to make a lot of the decisions without involving me and freeing up at least 50% of my time to connect more with people outside of marketing, you know, product and sales and client success and finance because I think that’s where I can create better impact for Indeed and even help my team by doing that. It’s a balance every single week. I’m like, okay. Where am I spending my time? But that is what I’m working on.

[00:32:39] Fiona Davis:  I was gonna say you just touched on one of the biggest challenges, I think, of the modern marketing age is that’s critical, like, getting the decisioning point to the person who’s doing the actual work. Because if you wanna move at speed, if you haven’t delegated the decision making to the person who’s doing the work, then you can lose weeks in internal debate about whether or not you wanna do something. I find that a fascinating space to be in now because what used to be, like, a sixteen week planning cycle for media and the sign off process, etcetera, now people are like, the moan is gone. If I’m waiting for sixteen weeks, I can’t wait that long. Someone has to make a decision now. Like, it’s a really fascinating spot to be in. Right?

[00:33:19] Jennifer Warren:  It is true. It is necessary now. It is necessary.

[00:33:23] Fiona Davis:  To basically get the delegation right so that people can move quickly. Because, I mean, the expectation now to respond to cultural moments literally within twenty four to forty eight hours, it’s like it’s there. So it’s a challenge for all marketers, right, being able to get to that right level of framework and operating model where people have got safety within a framework to make a call and make it quickly.

[00:33:44] Jennifer Warren:  And I think that’s what it comes down to is having that framework because you’re right. Socially, big companies. Right? Culturally, being able to act in the moment, you see a trend on social. There’s legal. There’s all these different steps that we used to have to take. And now you still do that we spent more time figuring out the framework so that everybody knows. Like, it’s approved as long as we don’t violate any of  these things.

[00:34:06] Fiona Davis:  Is it true? You can do it. Yes.

[00:34:08] Jennifer Warren:  And then you can run with it. Yeah. That’s right.

[00:34:11] Fiona Davis:  Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Jess. It’s been a great chat, and we loved having you on. And thanks for giving us your time.

[00:34:18] Jennifer Warren:  Thank you so much. I enjoyed it as well. Thank you.

[00:34:22] Fiona Davis:  Thanks for listening to Time for a Reset. If you got something out of today’s episode, share it with a colleague or drop us a review. For more sharp thinking and practical tools to help you lead modern marketing, follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time. Hit the reset button and get change over the line.

 

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