‘I invite my CFO to creative pitches’: Pet Circle CMO John Wild says hiring analysts, using data bridges destructive divide between finance and marketing, protects budgets

John Wild, the Chief Marketing Officer for Pet Circle, invites his CFO to creative pitches and hires analysts with better data coding skills than the finance team. Why? So they can understand his job and buy into the creative messaging. “It’s incumbent on you to make [CFOs] your friend,” he says. “Make marketing look and smell very much like a financial output. Suddenly, when it comes to cutting costs, you’re not cutting costs, you’re cutting growth, you’re cutting customers, you’re cutting revenue.” Nicole McInnes, Director of Marketing at WW (formerly Weight Watchers), says she used to have “dark weeks” when she worked at eHarmony – when the time came to review media spend. “There is still a lot of misunderstanding in non-marketing executives on the effectiveness of some channels because they don’t have that data,” she says. Too many marketers don’t understand the basics of media and how to demonstrate media’s value, Atomic212’s James Dixon and Claire Fenner say. So much so, they’ve written a book – quite literally – on the topic.

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