CMO Chats with Alexander de Leon, VP of Marketing, Property Guru Group

Could you tell us about yourself and your role at Property Guru Group?

I’m Alex De Leon, VP of Marketing at Property Guru Group. I’ve spent most of my career in big tech, with about five years at Google and then at Meta, where I led product marketing for Instagram across Asia Pacific. I also spent some time at HBO, helping to launch HBO Max in Southeast Asia.

I’ve been at Property Guru for almost two years now. I originally joined to lead consumer marketing and now I lead both the consumer and the customer marketing teams.

What’s your main marketing focus at the moment?

Our marketing focus doesn’t really change; our role is to grow the business and grow the brand. That is our North Star. We are laser-focused on improving the bottom line and being seen as a growth driver for the company. What changes on a regular basis are the tactics we use to achieve those objectives.

How do you define success in marketing?

It’s easy to get caught up in the thousands of different marketing metrics. The way I look at it is that marketing must be locked in step with whatever the business directives and goals are.

If the business is trying to enter a new market or grow revenue, the marketing team’s job is to translate that objective into the right marketing tactics and KPIs. A member of my team coined the phrase the “levers of levers”—you have to understand the ultimate business goal and then identify the marketing levers you can pull to achieve it.

What are the biggest challenges that marketers are facing today?

Having worked with brands across all verticals at Google and Meta, I’ve found that many of them overcomplicate marketing. I’ve come to believe that creativity really wins, but the biggest challenge is often a lack of courage and conviction, which stems from bureaucracy.

By the time a creative concept goes through hundreds of stakeholders commenting on the logo, the copy, and the colours, you end up with a diluted campaign that has lost its soul and authenticity. It becomes a Wikipedia-style campaign—the consensus of 100 people’s creative judgment.

My solution has been to empower a small, lean, in-house team. At Property Guru, we brought everything in-house, hired a small group of super-smart, high-agency people, and let them run with it. A lot of my job is just empowering them and getting out of their way.

What’s the most successful event or engagement piece that you’ve hosted and why?

Our challenge as a brand was that while our awareness was very high, we didn’t have the brand equity and brand love that timeless, leading brands do. My hypothesis was that we could deepen our engagement through culture and branded content.

So, we made an aggressive push into the culture space. Last year, we released our own reality TV show called “Home Run,” inspired by shows like Selling Sunset. It was a huge success, getting about 10 million views and winning several awards.

Continuing on that theme, we just collaborated with a famous local streetwear designer, Mr. Sabotage, to create a tribute jacket for property agents. It was featured in Vogue and Grazia and was another successful piece of work. This focus on brand and culture has not only galvanised the company but has also helped our bottom line. Our bottom-funnel metrics, like sessions and leads, are at an all-time high, and because our brand is now so strong, we have been able to suspend all performance marketing spend in Singapore since last December. All our growth is now happening organically.

What career advice would you give to anyone starting in the marketing industry?

While there is a science to marketing that is important to learn, it is a function that really requires you to be hands-on and a practitioner yourself. It’s like cooking; you can learn the theory, but there is no substitute for actually getting your hands dirty, making things, seeing how people respond, and then iterating over time. That is the best process I know to learn the craft and make a real impact on the business.

What do you believe is the biggest opportunity for marketing leaders today?

My answer is AI. I think it is both overhyped in the short term and underhyped in the long term. While many marketers are still in “theory mode,” philosophising about doomsday scenarios, the real opportunity is to jump into it head-on.

Instead of being afraid, embrace the new technologies and see what happens. My team has live pilots running for everything from AI-augmented brand refreshes to content creation and SEO. Not every use case will work, but by actually doing things, you get real-time information that informs where you should focus next.

What’s a piece of traditional leadership advice that you believe doesn’t apply to marketing leaders today?

The idea that you have to measure everything. With the rise of performance marketing, there has been an over-indexing on immediate, measurable ROI. But the reality is that some things simply cannot be measured in the same way.

Brand is like love; it’s an abstract thing. People either feel a way about your brand or they don’t. Marketers need to have the courage to invest in things that will pay off in six months or a year, not just in the next 30 days.

What does the future of marketing look like?

Instead of worrying so much about what’s happening tomorrow, I think many brands are still neglecting what is happening today. I still see brands putting a generic 30-second TV ad on TikTok, which nobody watches. I see brands sticking to outdated tactics like banner ads because they spit out a specific metric. There are so many things happening with consumers right now that brands could take advantage of to dramatically improve their business if they just embraced today and moved a little bit faster.

How would you describe the role of a marketing leader in one word?

Growth.

There is no other way around it. If you’re not growing the business and the brand, you don’t have a good reason to exist. Marketers love winning awards and doing fun, creative stuff, but at the end of the day, you have to be seen as a growth driver, not a cost centre.