CMO Chats with Gilbert Camilleri, CMO at Chiliz

We continue our knowledge-sharing mission through a series of interviews with marketing leaders from all around the world, and are thrilled to have Gilbert with us today.

Hi everyone. Welcome to CMO Chats. My name is Gilbert, and I am the CMO of Chiliz.

Gilbert, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your role at Chiliz?

For starters, I have been with Chiliz for the past six and a half years. It seems like 20 to 30 years, because if you work in the intersection of crypto and sports, it is very, very fast-paced. 

Like any other CMO, there is a lot of thrill in bringing the teams together to organise events, put campaigns together, and bring our mission home. But there are also lots of challenges in the market, which are very much dictated by market conditions, so we have to adapt a little bit to those and, of course, all the ongoing challenges that marketers face these days.

Tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you got into marketing. 

That is going to be a bit of a long one, so I will try to keep it very short. Actually, my background is in IT and technology. I graduated in computing and technology quite a few years ago now. But then, very strangely, I had always been a big sports fan. Here locally, together with a few of my friends, we launched a local soccer team. We took one of the ancient cities on the island, which was not represented by a football team, and we put a team together, which sounds like a fun thing to do, and in fact, it was for a very long time. But it is also quite daunting, because whether you are a small team or a big team, the challenges are more or less the same. Of course, you are working with different budgets and different aspirations, and I guess that was a platform that really got the marketer out of me. I was there with zero budget at hand, with no story behind it, no brand to sell. So I had to basically create everything from the start. And slowly, I started getting close to what marketing really is, which is also, in a nutshell, to wow people. And that is what we have done, everything in the context of the scale we are talking about. It is there where I then furthered my studies. I was involved in SAAS companies for a long time, both in marketing and then eventually running the companies. A few years later, here I am with a dream job, bringing sports and technologies together, and I have been doing that for the past six and a half years.

Can you tell us a bit more about what Chiliz does?

You have to look at Chiliz as an ecosystem. It is a crypto company. It is a Web3 company that has also been powering and creating tokens. It is digital assets and powering sports teams. We now have around 80+ sports teams that are fan token partners with the likes of Manchester City, Juventus, Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain, and many others. While Chiliz has its own chain, we also have Socios.com, which is a wallet and a fan engagement platform under the Chiliz umbrella. It offers fan tokens and allows people to acquire them. They can trade fan tokens, but they can also earn fan tokens on the Socios app to then redeem a number of rewards that we have. With our existing partners, we have deals in place that allow not only fan token holders to redeem rewards. Rewards like VIP ticketing, flying with the team, meet and greets with players, and playing on the pitch. We have quite a few playing opportunities coming up, so fan token holders can actually play at the stadium in the next couple of weeks. They can do the same at Tottenham and with other teams. Besides that, they also have some of the decision-making power that is given to fan token holders to leave their mark on. The first official decision was back in 2019 with Juventus, when fan token holders decided what song to play at the stadium after each goal, which sounds like a small feat today, a couple of years later, now that fan engagement is truly in. But at the time, getting clubs to actually involve fans and get fans deciding stuff touching the sporting element was not easy at all. We have done some great ones. With Galatasaray, I remember we had a crazy afternoon when Dries Mertens had just moved from Napoli to Galatasaray, and we had fans voting on the number that Dries Mertens should put on his shirt. Lots of stuff, bus designs, we have done some cool things. 

What is your main marketing focus at the moment? 

At the moment, the main marketing focus is to really bring the fan token as a product category in front of as many eyes as possible. Even though fan tokens have been around for the past five years, it is still a relatively new digital asset and not something that all crypto traders or mainstream fans are fully aware of. Even though we have done a lot of activities over the past, there is still a lot that has to be done, and that is our main focus today, which is an exciting one. Different from what we have done previously with apps, or what we do with a developer chain, marketing a product category has different tools to the game than classical product offerings. Why? Because you want to sell less, but actually educate more, which is what we are trying to do. We really want to make sure that we are seen and heard as an authority within the space, because we are representing fan tokens in their entirety. Even though that fan token does not sit within the Chiliz fan token ecosystem, it is still a fan token that sits within different token categories. We are being as open-minded as possible, but also as inclusive as possible, covering content not just in relation to different tokens within our ecosystem, but also those that exist all around us.

What would you say is the biggest challenge for marketers today?

I was reading a line from Seth Godin last week, in an interview or a speech he gave a couple of weeks ago, where he outlined that anything the market touches is marketing. That is one of the biggest challenges that marketers face today. If you really want to do this job well, you need to step on a lot of toes, because you are going to ask uncomfortable questions. You are going to get on the product’s back to make sure that they are actually providing the best features, the best user experience possible. You are going to sit closely with your partners or with your sales team to make sure that you tailor the offerings to attract the right people. You are sitting with customer support, you are sitting with the finance team, asking for more budget. The biggest challenge is that if, as a marketer, you really want to do things well and shake up the status quo, there are a lot of toes to step on.

Now let us talk a bit about marketing’s relationship with sales. Out of all the marketing initiatives that you are in charge of, which one do you think your sales department has been more grateful for or excited about?

We have a particular setup internally. Yes, there is marketing and sales, but there is also an expectation that marketing runs part of those sales. There are quite a few initiatives as a company. We live a lot out of the buzz that we create around the activities that are happening around the tokens. We are in a very lucky position, or at least I am in a very lucky position as a sports and tech fan myself, to get my hands really dirty on campaigns or initiatives that touch both sides of the spectrum. We have done quite a few things. Very recently, for example, in Brazil, we had a really cool art design mural close to the Americano Stadium, where we started narrating the five-year story, the five-year journey of tokens. There were NFC chips integrated within the mural so people could redeem NFTs through it. Very recently, a couple of weeks ago, in preparation for the semi-final of the Coppa Italia in Italy, we branded the Metro that takes the train from the Milan centre to the San Siro stadium. We split the train into two: One is a Milan fan token branded, and one is an Inter fan token branded. So we try to get people to pick a side and also engage with us on QR codes. 

One of the coolest activations that we have running right now is the game ball that you see in all Serie A games, or in most of the Serie A games. Goals are being scored, and we have managed to influence the protocol of the game, which was a nightmare to do, as you can imagine. Now, anytime a goal is scored, the referee collects that specific ball, hands it out, and someone from our team puts it in a bag, and then that is auctioned for fan token holders or Socios users. We have done quite a few. There are so many that, to be honest, I cannot remember all of them, but I hope we have made them proud more often than not.

Well, that sounds really fascinating. So, in the games, when you see that ball being put into the bag, that is you?

Yes, yes, that’s us. 

Wow. I have so many questions. 

As you can see from the shirts behind me, I am a big football fan. Now, when I watch the games with my kid, with the VAR protocols, at times, there is this 30-second wait. The goal is actually a goal when you see that ball going into the sack. My kid is like, “Oh, it became a moment!” These small things, my dad always tells me this, we will realise what we are doing maybe in 10 years, when you look back and say, “Oh, geez, I think we have done quite a bit.”

I have a couple of questions around events now, Gilbert. I want to ask you, what is the most successful event or engagement piece that you have hosted, and why?

We attend quite a few events ourselves. In terms of the crypto space, there are a number of standard events that take place every year. We try to attend the most important ones because it is very important to be seen, especially when there is a crypto winter like the past year or so. It is very important that you stay relevant at a time when the market conditions are not great. We have done quite a few. A couple of years ago, we attended the Web Summit, and we got Alessandro Del Piero to join our CEO on stage. We worked on only a few gigs as well, but then we had a signing session right after, which got a lot of attention. I remember the queues were insane. Del Piero’s agent was like, “Listen, we are late, we cannot do all of these.” And he was like, “If they are here, I am going to do every single one.” It took us easily one hour, one and a half hours, to get everyone the signed pictures and photographs, which was fantastic. Last year, we attended the Paris Blockchain Week, and we also got Blaise Matuidi, the French World Champion, there. It was crazy; people were all over the place. This year, something completely different, we did not have a star on our booth. But I do not know if you recall that there was this crypto entrepreneur who bought this banana duct-taped for $6.2 million or something, and then a couple of weeks later, we recreated it. The Paris Blockchain Week is organised at the Louvre. The whole theme was the art of integration, and how you can integrate fan tokens, the chain, and everything into the ecosystem, drawing on the art elements. We actually framed a duct-taped baguette, since we were in Paris, which was really fun to see how people reacted to it, how they stopped for pictures. The press and Blockchain referenced us. People uploaded pictures on Facebook, LinkedIn, tagging us. 

What are the most significant challenges you face when hosting or attending events?

I always see events as being very multifaceted. This also ties in to the classic question that we get internally, “How are we going to measure ROI around these events?” It is because different teams want to get different things out of events. From a marketing perspective, we want to make sure that we are getting brand affinity. We want to make sure that our message is popping, that people can really relate, stop by, and interact. Referring to the same event I was referring to earlier, we also had a fun poll on the stand where people had to answer by putting a ball into one of the slots. We also get a feel of how people are interacting, whether they are enjoying their time on the stand, and how they react to the merchandise. It is also very qualitative, because you tend to spend a lot of time listening to feedback, if people like your brand, if people talk about you, if people want to take pictures at your booth, and so forth. But then there are also other needs and other more important business needs. In terms of the chain, it is how many developers, how many projects we speak to that are interested in developing projects on the chain. There are also a lot of third-party suppliers and partners, both marketing and non, that we can speak to, investors, even KOLs. So there are a lot of things that we try and get out of events. We typically attend events in big teams to have a good representation of all the different areas of the business, and then bring everything together to try and make it as successful as possible. But trying to satisfy all the needs is the most challenging thing. Also, and I know it sounds super operational, actually picking who is going to these events is also a challenge.

I agree. You need to have the right people at the events, depending on the target audience, depending on what the theme of the event is, and depending on who is in front of them. What career advice would you give to anyone starting in the marketing industry?

Let me tell you how I have always worked it out in my career, in my life. For me, my mantra has always been making things happen. For me, marketing is making things happen, but also making them matter, which is what people are after today. We have to keep in mind that people are bombarded by thousands of ads and brands every single day. As you walk through the grocery store, you are bombarded by so many brands at a single point in time, or if you scroll on Instagram and so on. Marketers need to bring not just creativity, inspiration, storytelling, emotional connectedness, and everything that you will read these days. 

Most importantly, it is making sure that the ideas you bring to the table, or that the team brings to the table, actually happen. We are the ones always here having these conversations, but in reality, we owe it all to the fantastic teams that we lead. But the most important thing is that whatever the team proposes, you actually make it happen. There have been and are so many bright people around who have lots of fantastic ideas. They are really good at articulating them, at pitching them, but then they fail in execution. For me, all the strategic planning, all the talking, all the decks, all the briefs, they are all great, but I am really stressed with myself first and my team as a result, on actually making it go live, even if it is not perfect. It is always recommended to go with a “shitty first draft,” or at times, even we refer to it as the SFD. If you do not have a fully refined concept or a fully refined final product, at times, it is good to go with a phase one of it, test the waters. At least you have numbers, you have a stronger narrative to build on, as opposed to just decks, briefs, ideas, and concept documents that never see the light of day.

What do you believe is the biggest opportunity for CMOs today that might not have been available in the past?

The most obvious one is definitely the fast introduction of AI. There is a lot that we can do with AI these days. This week, we announced a partnership with a very cool eSports partner called Ninjas in Pyjamas, and my team was taking me through the creative concept and how we brought the announcement video to life, and how they are integrating AI to really support in creating these quicker, better, crisper, sharper, and so on. We are still at a point where people are a little bit afraid of AI. They see the opportunities of AI. Most of us use AI on a daily basis, but do not yet know how to balance all of it together. 

What is funny as well is that now we are getting the wrong end of the stick of that as well. When you put a brief together, or an article together, or a campaign together, maybe the first feedback is great. But in reality, there is no shame in using these AI tools and making sure. One thing that we have been doing with our team very recently is also using AI to critique our own ideas. Getting these briefs and concepts into AI, and asking AI to critically look at that to see how we can improve it. We can do things way faster, we can come up with way more ideas, and we can be way more always-on than we have ever been before. 

There is less excuse on us as well, on the teams as well. Operationally, it will still be a nightmare, because then you need to manage expectations. Yes, you will be able to cover maybe way more ground way quicker, but you need to understand where AI starts and stops, and where the human being starts and stops, because at the end of the day, we are not telling the story to AI, we are telling stories to people. We are trying to sell an idea to people. At the end of the day, if we start losing the authenticity in our offerings, then there is not much left.

Gilbert, for my last question, if you were to describe the role of the CMO in one word, what would that word be and why?

If I had to tie that into making things happen, which I was referring to earlier, I would say resilience. Because there is no other way for you to be able to make things happen if you are not resilient. Because then again, tying to the phrase I stole from Seth Godin, which is that marketing is basically anything that touches the market, that means that you need to go and have those uncomfortable conversations, whether it is with your CEO, whether it is your CFO, with the Chief Product Officer, with the teams, with sales, with business development, with ops, to try and be involved as much as possible in decision making. Why would we remove a feature that is going to enrage customers? Why is marketing not part of the conversation? We know what is going to come next. 

CMOs have to be resilient. They have to be patient, but they should never give in. Because the minute that we start letting the surrounding environment take over, the harder it is. Because let us face it, at times, it is easier to sit back and say, “Listen, I do not agree with this, but so be it, it has been decided. So be it.” Of course, there is a fine line between accepting decisions and having sound arguments that always get you to a certain point. Maybe you are never going to get it your way every single time. But making sure that marketing is truly represented in most of the decision-making. Thank you.