Finding disruption in yourself

Transcript

Mark Singer Transcript

Bennie F. Johnson

Hello, and thank you for joining us for another special episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. In our episodes, we explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations of individuals that flourish at this intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We’ll introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know.

Through our thought-provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, we have a really special guest, none other than Mark Singer. Mark is Deloitte Digital’s US Chief Marketing Officer and agency lead. As a commercial driver, he embeds creativity into the way businesses solve their problems and helps create purpose-driven solutions that’s transformed how they operate. By blending his marketing and technology experience, he helps create opportunities for disruptive growth. 

There’s so much more I can say about Mark’s background, but we’re just going to jump in. Mark, welcome to the podcast, my friend.

Mark Singer

Hey, Bennie, great to meet you. That introduction, I have to have them change all that about me. It’s embarrassing whenever I hear that, but it’s great to meet you.

Bennie 

It’s always so embarrassing. It is always fun to have that. I’m going to embarrass you some more, my friend, because it’s a delight to have you on the podcast and really to think about your role and your journey, which we’ll talk a bit about. I’d love for our audience to learn a little bit about you. Now, one thing that we have in common, you spent some time in Washington, D.C.

Mark

I did.

Bennie

Let’s talk about the early experience of Mark at GW. 

Mark

That’s perfect. I didn’t go from pre-med to today.

All right, well, so crazy, crazy story. So I was, very pretty much a science-minded guy, but I’m also an art-minded guy. I have always, I think, I attribute that to having undiagnosed ADD for a long time. GW, I wanted to go to medical school. I was very excited about it. I worked in the emergency room. I actually did some time at DC General just to see the action. So that gives you a little bit of ground, I wanted to see the action. And so they had the first heart lung transplant in DC at the time. And of course, you know, me being like the guy that wants to be in front of everything, I was like, I got to figure out a way to get in there. The only way that I could get in there was if I went and I filmed it for the medical school, literally like, because then I knew my way around, you know, an OR, I knew my way around. Yeah, so like, I wasn’t in the way or drop anything on anybody. Can you go film this? Because it’s an educational institution and everything. So I went and filmed it. And it was pretty cool. And then I put the package together afterwards and I edited it and did all the color corrections and everything on it. And I was like, God, this was a lot of fun, right?

And, and, you know, I’m where we’re at. And I am a moment in time, like I love doing that. I wasn’t ready to do another six years of school. And so it was like, I’m going to just do this for a little bit. I think it was fun. Basically moved to New York and became a producer at an ad agency. That’s basically how I got to my parents to buy in. I got away from the business of medicine and into the business of marketing. As far as my dad is concerned, still says that when he talks about me to his friends, goes, Mark’s in computers. So I guess somewhere along the line, I’ve gone from medicine to advertising and marketing to computers. And I can’t quite figure out the…advertising.

Bennie

It’s such a common theme and we’ve touched on it a couple of times in our podcast. I get a chance to talk to incredibly successful people like yourself who’ve created new ways of thinking about the business. And we all still come back to our relationship with our parents trying to figure out what we did.

Mark

Because I don’t think you can explain what we do to our parents. I just don’t understand it.

Bennie

No, I’m fond of saying my mother-in-law once reached out to me after a podcast interview and she looked at me and she said, I finally understand who you are and what you do. And that was really wonderful. The fact that I’d been married to her daughter for 20 years. And it was a great moment of like, I finally understand. But this is probably true today. But when we think about kind of our growth, one of the things that we play around with is we never really get a chance to understand the future. And kind of looking back, you can see how that moment opened up and prepared you for today. 

I’d love to talk about kind of these moments of pivot in the work that you’re doing now. In the bio, I hesitate it for a second when it describes you as the US Chief Marketing Officer and US Agency Lead. Because one of the things that’s really provocative and I think really dynamic is the work you’re doing to pivot away from that classic concept of agency. Talk a bit about what that means for you and Deloitte Digital in this day as you adapt.

Mark

Yeah, you know, it’s so I’ve just a little bit about my career before Deloitte. So I spent a lot of time in agencies, doing a lot of, frankly, a lot of different roles within them. And, you know, I came to Deloitte almost 15 years ago to build what is today Deloitte Digital and build our capabilities and our market around that. That was all about a moment in time going back then of this shift. There’s all this white space between consulting firms and agencies and because because you know, had this influx of technology and had this influx of digital and you know, people using apps and websites and sort of connection with e-commerce and all that and that was really sort of like what consulting firms are good at and then know, agencies were good at their thing and so my career sort of started with this disruption in the agency landscape.

And you got like, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this, and essentially we’ve been shaping our business this way. I think the construct we’re entering into, this construct of a quote unquote agency, is sort of at its time. And the reason why I say that is this, if you go back in time, and you think about what an agency is, the word agency comes from a company being an agent of another company. So agencies were born out of this, I am a middleman between you, something, and generally, it’s because a client didn’t understand how to access celebrity or how to access production or how to buy media or do any of that stuff.

So the agency came in as a, we’re going to do this work for you and we’re going to execute it for you. And we’re going to be an agent of you in doing that.

And I think…What has happened over the time, if you look, you know, going back to, we started a tech revolution or got into a data revolution. We’re now in an AI revolution. Like all of these things started coming into play that brands, companies, enterprises can use to actually do marketing. They still need partners, partners that will do something different for them, but I think they need partners. And not just be my agent and let me hand you these things and you go do it and then come back to me when you’re done. So I told agents and I mean, look, look no further than what you see happening in the landscape right now of all the holding companies. It’s changing and you know, it’s much more tech driven, it’s much more data driven. Even media and creative and some of the classic foundations of what a quote unquote agency has been doing.

It is all powered by tech and data. It’s got to be the client site. This whole notion of that world is changing, which is going to mean different operating models, different people, different constructs, like all that stuff. So that’s where I had that crystal ball and if we were to look forward, I think we’re entering into a world where that landscape is going to shift so dramatically. It’s going to be more incumbent on brands to sort of own their marketing. So, so I think. And then figure out the partnership models at that standpoint.

Bennie

Accordingly, one of the things that in recent, this recent year, I’ve been obsessed about is this notion of if the future of business is changing and the future of work is changing, therefore the future of the profession and the professional have to change. And I love that prompt because it’s provocative to just what you just talked about. All these things are changing. Then what’s next for the role of the leader of marketing within a brand? You know, how does the role of a CMO change with this new reality?

Mark

Yeah. That’s a good. I mean, I think. That’s a great, great question. You also have to look at this idea of all this change. And this is part of the narrative that I think people have that’s off a little bit. All this change does not mean the jobs are going away. All this change does not mean like all of the robots are going to be your next creative director, analytics leader, tech leader, whatever. No, the jobs are going to change in and of themselves.

And so when I think about the role of the CMO in the future, and I just did this talk at think was advertising that, you know, think we, we, there’s still is the week. I think we take on different jobs. We’re the storytellers in chief, right? We have to tell our brand story, we have to tell our brand narrative, we have to get out in front of our customer, we have to connect our brand to the customer, right? That’s super important. We’re still the growth drivers, I do believe that at the end of the day. And particularly in an industry is where there’s a clear line of sight around transaction and sales, intersection of marketing and sales is so important. We are the growth drivers because we’re helping find new markets. But I also think that we are a little bit of the agent CMO, right? In the sense that the best, some of the best business cases for deploying and using AI in an enterprise are in marketing. Marketing is also the hardest to convince.

Bennie

We are the…to go do that and really do the fundamental change. Stewards of what a future of the business can look like where people and tools are coming together to engage with customers, there’s the CMO role in there. And I also think in a lot of respects, we’re the tech CMO, right? In the sense that we’re understanding how the forms come together and work. it’s not like…

Mark

We’re all hobbyists in tech, gonna, you most of us don’t know how to code and don’t do half of that, half of the engineering stuff that goes on behind it. But like, I think having a clear understanding of the role of tech in your business, because otherwise you become tech led as opposed to tech enabled. And I think it sort of changes, changes it. I, so I think the role shifts, but more interesting, my view on it is what’s gonna happen.

There this intersection of like the silos of your organization. So I’m just going to use the sales and marketing as the example. And Agentic AI, agent type of solutions. Sure. I could use agents in my business to help my graphic designers crop out backgrounds and create, and create new backgrounds. Easy peasy, right? Can I actually use agents to help connect the things that are hard in my organization, like the sales conversation and the marketing conversation and how to orchestrate those two.

Bennie

Yeah.

Mark

Can I use agents to connect my campaigns to the supply chain? I know what’s coming down the pipe and I know that I can turn on these campaigns faster and more, more rapidly based upon what’s in the supply chain coming down to me. It’s an interesting role that the CMO takes. It’s that growth driver, but it becomes much more enterprise centered. And then just sort of focused on the marketing lane, so to speak. It’s almost like a.

Bennie 

So I think there’s chief commercial officer of sorts, than a chief marketing officer.

Mark

Right. It’s, you know, let’s, talk about this, the words matter in that, you know, if sometimes we carry these classic definitions, it locks us in. But when we think about the object at hand, right? How do we partner to drive those spaces? 

I think about your role and Deloitte Digital in this space. Often, if you’re dealing with a brand, the brand’s going to have a really high expertise in their brand, maybe in their industry, but you’re able to bring in technology expertise that we on a brand wouldn’t have. We’re going to have one experience with technology in our brand and you’re going to bring to the table, well, here’s what five other brands did. And both. In and out of the industry to kind of going back to this agency contract. There’s that old ad. Two is a conflict. Three is a practice. So, you know, I again. You know, most agencies don’t work.

If I’m servicing a banking client, they’re not going to serve as another banking client because that creates conflict. You know, if you’re a trusted organization, I could serve as five banking clients and then help each one of them be more successful because I, because I’m bringing expertise about that industry. Then I’m also bringing in banking is becoming a lot like retail banking is becoming a lot like, you know, entertainment, like action media in this sense. Like, those expertise into, into the table, then…And then how do you use the capabilities and what capabilities you need to build in-house, what capabilities you wanna partner with. So yeah, it’s a pretty fun time to be, to sort of have this dual-hatted role, I guess.

Bennie

Talk to me a bit about it. You know, it just struck me as you were talking about playing in this space and you know, I’m often fond of quoting the Netflix quote that our goal is to become HBO before HBO becomes us in a space you just talked about banking being more entertainment banking being more consumer focus in there. How is it to work in a space in which once again, the classic definitions don’t apply?

Mark 

We get it. Sometimes it’s hard for our clients to get it. You know, I think that our client, hard, as hard as it is, like I’m completely empathetic, like as hard it is for a marketer to be comfortable changing the way that they’ve been doing things, that they’ve been taught to do things that they know works, right? To be changing that. It’s even harder than I think in this state for a lot of clients to start thinking about even differentiated models of how to approach it. Things like commerce media networks, you’re, you get it right away, because it’s kind of the same, it’s kind of trade promotions at the end of the day. We’re like, what does that mean if I’m not a retail? What does that mean if I’m a cruise line? Like, what does that mean if I’m a credit card company, right? How do I start putting that together? And I think there’s seeing value in the,

You’re a retailer you can, in sort of adopting these other constructs within their business. As much as we as consumers are converging on, not mobile only, I’m not web only, I’m TV only, right? I’m converged. Our businesses are starting to see the same way that like these natural silo-ization just doesn’t exist anymore. And they need to start thinking outside of those constructs. And look, yeah, that’s just weird.

Bennie

Are you ever surprised at the way in which contemporary customers show up? We talked about this convergence and seeing in brands like, know where to find my customers until you don’t. I think the more interesting. Yes, I think sometimes the more interesting question is where’s the customer I don’t even know about yet. And I think that’s

Mark 

That’s, you know, it’s, it’s, I had a… We work with this company, they do a lot of political polling, but they do spend a lot of time in marketing. So like half of their time is not to find the people that are going to buy or the people that are not going to buy, they’re trying to find the people in the middle. Right. And it’s just like, everything else, like there’s, there’s always this big middle piece and I, that’s the people I have to go after. I think a lot of marketing spends their time on their, on what they know. And figuring out how do they line up against the great middle of everything. That, mean, that’s prospecting and stuff, but.

And we do. Right. I think there is still, there’s still a world of like, have this product and how do I put this product in front of what kind of cohorts versus here’s the cohorts of what they need. And do I need to start influencing a change in my product? Do I need to start influencing a change in the channel? Do I need to start thinking differently about it? And that’s where I think as a CMO, become, goes back to the classic, you know, four Ps. We’ve been relegated to promotion and placement as the two P’s at most CMOs. We’re not in control of pricing. We’re not in control of the product. Maybe influence it. We maybe can kind of help with that. But at the end of the day, there are people that do pricing and then there’re people who do product development. Our roles start expanding so that because now we have the time, we’re no longer focused on doing marketing. We’re focused on the marketing outcomes. And that gives us the opportunity to then expand our remit to drive the things that get more customers in. And so I think…versus just trying to optimize the customer and the base where I can go after.

Bennie

So I’m going to ask this question. I haven’t thought about it in this way. We talk a lot about marketing to multiple generations in the marketplace. I want to bring that back and put that microscope on us as CMOs. What advice do you have for CMOs of different generations? Because there’s a way in which CMOs looked at the world 10 years ago. And then there’s the way, as we smile, my friend, as those who are taking on the new CMOs today have a different remit and a different reality.

Mark 

That did a lot of damage. That’s great. You took a different angle on that question than I’ve heard it before. Let me get to it this way then.

Yeah, I think our edge – education system, marketing education system – does our, you know, those people out of disservice.

Bennie

We were talking earlier, I have kids applying to school right now. They don’t want kids using AI. don’t want kids, they’re not teaching the modern ways of thinking. And so I think there’s a level of, they’re still teaching very well with somebody at an institution and they were talking about how they’re teaching strap planning. That’s kind of still very like waterfall, right? So they’re not teaching. But, And I’m like, what in the agile ways of sort of thinking about. 

Mark

So, so, so interesting. I’m smirking because I don’t know how much of it is a generational thing versus a willingness to take risks thing.

And I think as people are becoming CMOs or leading marketing, their ability to question, to understand, first you got to understand why the status quo works. Start to question the status quo around, what if this does it differently? And this statement, don’t focus on like the doing of marketing, because on the outcomes that marketing will take you to.

And I used it earlier. And I think that’s where you start to shift this perspective. I mean, there are plenty of…multi-generational CMOs that I was just down at ANA a few weeks ago. And like you see it there, there’s a lot of people that have been in the business a long time that are very much at the forefront of driving interesting ways of thinking and working and operating. As much as there are people that are like fresh out of the gate and they’re operating a new business model with startups and the like. I think it’s more around the curiosity of how you as a CMO should work with the right level of skepticism.

Bennie 

How much do I jump into the fray of the future as well?

Now in that context, how do you disrupt yourself? So if you take the generational approach, you’ve got a CMO who’s been a rock star, who’s been delivering for the business, but that equation changes.

Mark

I think so. Recognizing I’m talking with the AMA in this one. Much in the same realm that the term agency has some stain to it or could have some challenges to it. Marketing is kind of in the same category in the sense that, you know, I… Going all the way back to the old Wanamaker quote of, I think it was Wanamaker, of 50 % of my advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which 50%, right?

So it’s always been sort of this. There’s always sort of like a…less than precise view on it. I think as an industry, as a business, we have to rebrand what the value of marketing is. And maybe, maybe it’s the term that we have to move away from for a bit. I don’t know what other term we would use, I’m personally in fond of like being, a commercial growth driver, right? Cause I’m focused on commerce and driving growth. And that is all about customers and bringing them in and converting them and executing on them. A resetting.

And I think powered our vantage point as being growth drivers with commercial orientation and then also with a transformation mindset, being willing to walk away from pride and true approaches and not fall on our sword about certain things. I think that’s where our future is going to come from.

Bennie

Yeah, I had a good friend of mine who was a CMO and he worked for a storied marketing company and we talked about this all the time and they put him on the innovative brand and he was always in the midst of this tension because everyone running the flagship brand had years of success and playbooks on top of playbooks that work. But he was breaking new ground. Yep. And that tension in this space where they had to disrupt, you I know we’ve approved this and pitched it to the board and budget 20 times over.

Mark

And you know, think a lot of that, I mean, I don’t know, if you were to ask me, if we were out having a beer and we were talking about this and you asked me why I think that’s the case, I think there’s a story of like, what’s the average CMO tenure? 72 months, like depending on who you want to talk to, but let’s just say it’s three years. What, like, of course you don’t want to take risks. Like, I want to be in my job longer than three years. You know, I think there’s a little bit of personal management that goes into some of this potentially, I guess. You know, I think, you know, we’ve kind of done the to, know, or that line.

A little bit of that back. Just driving transformation and our clients, see that they’re like a lot of marketing, like a lot of marketing is resistant to the change, even though they want the change, because they have to do they have to work differently, different partners, different structures, etc.

I think there’s a fear. A failure there, but in reality isn’t marketing, marketing, what we do innovation is about failure. It’s just how do you react to failure and how do you overcome that? I think is where we’re a success. He gets us. and it becomes a persistent driver for success.

Bennie

In that way we reinforce where we are. You know, when we think about, you know, that role of the CMO and talk about the changes, you know, this is in every conversation that we have in the public, in private, in the texts that you receive, the question is what to do with and about AI, right? And I think, you know, we did a bit of, as the AMA, we did a bit of proprietary research last year and it was really powerful to see about 82 % of marketing leaders are actively using, we use the term playing with AI in some sense. Didn’t speak to having a strategic advantage or idea or insight, but we’re actively playing with it. Some of the play is self-generated. Often it’s our other C-level executives saying, figure this thing out.

Or it’s a board. Yeah, it’s a board board directive saying you’re doing AI and then you go, okay, I gotta go figure out what to do with the guy and got to the board. Yeah. So when we think about that, what are some of the better practices you’re seeing now with CMOs who are trying to figure it out?

Mark 

Sure. So first, know, first and foremost, one of things I think we’ve gotten ourselves stuck into with any kind of new technology, but particularly is a lot of pressure to allow to do something to deal with back-up clarity around what to do, specifically this cycle of endless pilots. We’re always going to create pilot over pilot over pilot over pilot. And the problem with pilots, I think the true value doesn’t come from a structured approach. Like I kind of alluded it to earlier, I think the true power of AI is connecting the hard things and orchestrating across hard things.

And that’s led us into, that I think of AI, was doing some simple tasks. The pilots are always around these simple tasks. It’s really hard to build a business case out of the simple tasks. I use the example of removing backgrounds from images. If I’m a retailer and I sell bedding and bed in different scenarios, to pay somebody a lot of money to go in and cut it out and then slap it on. Now I can kind of do that a little bit quicker. Sure, great business case, but it’s not going to actually help.

So, I to put it right, I used to have fun what needs to get done with AI. Like, number one, if you’re going to the process, start with the way you work, let the tech do what you want it to do. I think we start a lot of pilots without what can the tech do? It can do this. Let me go use that and see how I do that. Right. And so I think it’s shifting that paradigm. Number one, I number two is, is also kind of getting out of the vernacular, this, this idea of like job replacement.

One is like, I do it, start with and then AI is because it is really about creating hybrid working environments. And by the way, it’s not going to happen from the top, it’s going to happen at the bottom or in the middle. You talk about playing with it, which is a very, we have a similar kind of construct we talk to people about. Like go experiment, go do things. But at the end of the day, unleash your teams to go do it because the younger generation, the mid management and below, they’re a lot more digital native than we are at the end of the day. Have a lot less to lose quote unquote than we do at the end of the day. Unleash them, let them experiment, let them learn. And at the same time, you learn from them. And I think that’s hard for us to do sometimes, it’s because we’re expected to be the mentors and the guides and the most knowledgeable person in the room. But the fact is, we are enablers of that for them. Let’s figure out what that works.

One of the most powerful things when you think about professional careers is this often unidentified notion of this multi-dimensional mentorship. Yeah. Right? Where up, down, inside, out, diagonal, kind of learning from teaching and learning all at the same time.

And being comfortable not knowing. I gotta tell you like, recently it was in a conversation with somebody talking about data. This person kept saying, well, and then we’re going to do the data thing. I finally realized that they didn’t really know what they were talking about. They felt obligated, sounded like they knew what they were talking about. It is actually hard for us to kind of, kind of help them.

Bennie

But you know that I think there’s just that kind of challenge that we have like to sort of be vulnerable in a changing dynamic world. And I think that’s what true leadership, you know, ultimately looks like is being comfortable in that vulnerability and building the team around you to help balance all that.

In that sense, I’m going to ask you this question. What’s something that you learned recently? And I’m going to ask it a little differently than just general, what have you learned? This isn’t a big groundbreaking thing. What’s something really small in that quiet moment that you learned and you’re like, that, that’s helping to shape your approach to work in the world around you? 

Mark

Yeah. Okay, so I haven’t really talked about it. I’ll mention it. So what is something every leader in a business needs? Like we need a board of advisors. Ee need inventors ourselves. Because not only do we want to be strong, also want to think about, you know, be challenged in our thinking.

Bennie

Right.

Mark

When I look across peers, I obviously have people that I’m close with and friends with, I’m close with that I talk about things, whatever. But I wanted to challenge myself and see, like, can I do that synthetically? Can I actually create for me a board of advisors that I can tap into for anything from like I talked about kids going to school. Can ask them about careers and majors. Should I post this thing on LinkedIn? You know, all the way to like and, know, all my board of advisors. I, there’s seven, seven sort of virtual people that are modeled after real people because I train them with their TED Talks, their speeches or so. Their white papers, right? And it’s just a social media posts. A constant learning thing. They develop personas around who they are. Supreme court, I don’t ask it for an answer. Here’s my problem, go debate. And then they debate, literally, I’ll share it with you. Debate with each other. They’re debating each other. They go through three rounds. Comes to the majority and a dissenting opinion. For me, like, I guess, you what I’ve and sort of like…There’s a lot you can do. It accelerated my ability to be more innovative and thinking and also gave me more confidence and sort of wacky ideas. I think we all have wacky ideas every now and then.

Bennie

So, it started my tool, a real virtue board of advice based upon a renowned economist a real renowned marketer a real and you and you know, all the down to that. Renowned hedge fund person, political pollster. Like, wow, this is pretty cool. I’m smiling because my friend going back to restart it in DC, you just created Lincoln’s virtual team.

Mark 

So in some way, to model it off of more of, you know, teamwork, right? So, and I modeled it. I tried off of just what makes our democracy but after that in summer, I really look for the contrarians in the mix.

Bennie

This is awesome. So I’m going to ask you this. I can’t believe we’re coming up on our time. So I’ve got two requests. One is personal and one is for our listeners. So the first one is since I’ve got you here, I’m going to ask you to be on my in-person team of advisor.

Mark

I would love to do that. I might add you, would love the same. But I also want to try you out on the virtual because you got a lot of podcasts I could use.

Mark

Hey, there we go. Let’s train the model, right? So that’s the blood. Number two is for all of us to say, you know, how do when we think about the future, how should we think about human talent and AI talent coexisting as we move forward? What’s the benefit and beauty of that moment?

As humans, are incredibly resilient. There will not be a day, I debate with people about this, but there’s not gonna be a day where like all of us are gonna be sitting on the beach and just enjoying our lives and letting the robots work because at end of the day, we are still a society based on commerce and we like to work. We like to feel productive at the end of the day.

Mark

Immune. We will always be. And so I think. You have to get over first the notion that like, it’s an It’s an either work and but the end is the rules will change 1000% the roles will change. So what are the specific roles, but I still need people to man that and I still need people to own it and work with it. Using my board of advisors, you know, people that write a good story telling me what to do, I specifically asked it for perspectives. I’m still making the decision around those perspectives.

Bennie

And I think as our role too, so I think, you number one, it’s will continue to evolve in that.

Mark

It’s not a replacement of people. It’s a. refocusing of what work matters, this future of work and what that future work looks like and what work really matters. Like, so what we’re doing, our business is we essentially created these hybrid talent models, right, which is I still have a structure that’s to a lot of us. Kind of have somewhat of a look for a lot of people that are used to working with agents, I’m teaming them differently. Like, you know, it’s not just a pairing of our director and a copywriter, for example, it’s bringing other people into the equation, allowing people to scale themselves and strategists, analytics folks at the same time. So we’re really allowing people to expand into the middle of their job. I think that hybrid talent map, hybrid talent model, and it allows our people to get into skills that they have, but their structure has never been in place for them to tap into. So that’s where we are.

Bennie

I love when I think about your work and your story, this notion of unleashing potential and finding the moment and skills that go in from you recording the surgery, my friend, to designing and thinking of a new look agency at the heart is all about the future. It’s about adaptation, innovation, and human creativity. Mark, I can’t believe our time is up. My friend, thank you for this conversation and thank you for pushing us and probing us to talk about this future in which marketing has to be different because we’re different and our opportunities are different.

Mark

Thanks, appreciate it, Ben. It was great, great meeting you and thanks for the time. And I definitely look forward to having more conversations with you on this.

Bennie

This sounds great. We’ll see each other soon, my friend. Awesome. Thank you all for joining us for this special episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. If you want to find out more about creativity and building dynamic teams and agencies that are more than partners, check out the work that’s happening with Deloitte Digital. Check out the work that’s happening with the AMA.org as we continue to work and build a more dynamic future of marketing. Thank you.