CMO Chats with Le Gammeltoft, CMO of Netcompany

What does your company do?

Netcompany is an IT company. We deliver very complex IT solutions to governments and businesses, all over Europe, actually. We were founded in Denmark 23 years ago, and now we work out of 10 different countries in Europe and the UK.

As a CMO in your company, what is currently your main marketing focus?

As a CMO at Netcompany, the marketing focus at the moment and the market focus—I think those two go hand in hand, don’t they? Is to become this international company and raise awareness of NetCompany in new markets.

We don’t have the same maturity in all markets, so we need to get that aligned. Being founded in Denmark, of course everybody knows us here, but what’s it like in the UK, Netherlands, Norway, etc.? So, awareness around the brand and our solutions is the most important thing at the moment.

Can you tell me about a particularly innovative or successful marketing campaign your team has recently executed?

We have had another campaign that’s been really interesting. We’re working with IT, and what is more important than trying to create more diversity in IT at the moment? We’re working a lot on trying to attract more women to the business, and we’ve been doing this with the Danish CSGO Astralis team.

We have a partnership with these five female Counter-Strike players. In Counter-Strike, we see that it’s free to be a man, to be a male player—this is for free, but you have to pay if you want to be a female player. So, if you want a female skin in Counter-Strike, you have to pay for it, and this is just not right.

This is 2024; we need that fairness to go through the gaming industry as well. We made a campaign with the female CSGO players from Astralis called Free the Female Skins, and we got, I think, 5 million hits on that. It went viral throughout the European and worldwide gaming industry that we are fighting for diversity and think this is so important for IT companies. We want more female IT people; we want to get that diversity purpose and get that out of life. I think this campaign really hit the spot on that.

I’m not a gamer myself, I’m assuming Counter-Strike is a game?

Yeah, it’s one of the biggest games out there. Counter-Strike is where you see those very big gaming conferences and tournaments going worldwide, and we have some of the best teams in Denmark, and they’ve just started working with the female teams, and we are sponsoring them, trying to create this very purpose-driven partnership with these young female players. It’s important to show that a 16-year-old professional gamer has this technical ability; she’s purpose-driven about being aligned with IT and tech, and she might be the next computer science IT person we can hire. Of course, she’s a role model for the younger girls as well.

The partnership is very important to me, and I think we need to show that more women are needed. We need more women in the IT industry, and everybody’s yelling for more women. We wanted to do something instead of just saying we need more women; we wanted to drive those role models and put some focus on them.

That’s amazing. What are your biggest marketing challenges at the moment?

I think the challenge, as I’ve already mentioned, is the maturity level in different markets. Most CMOs know this: PR, marketing, and campaigns could be easy in a market where everybody knows your name, what you stand for, and your purpose and the line of business you’re in. But when you’re trying to get that scale through other markets to work with your brand when nobody knows you and we are up against companies like Accenture with 700,000 people worldwide who are a net company.

This is the challenge we are facing at the moment, and of course, it’s getting easier with digital marketing so we can get that name up and running so everybody else notices us. But we are up against very big players, mostly from America.

How do you stay ahead of your competition in terms of marketing?

This has actually been very funny to me to work with marketing and communications with NetCompany because I entered as the CCO and CMO one and a half years ago, and we were just very blue.

In these old-school IT companies, it’s the same in finance. We see this with the consultancy houses: they’re very blue, very stock imagery. They do their marketing in the same way, and it’s very inside-out. It’s very much about the solutions; it’s very much about the consultants and everything. We turned it around. So I think we are getting very much ahead of our competitors at the moment because we are very human-centric and very purpose-driven in our marketing campaigns.

We put the humans out first, and we get the solutions. How is our IT solution going to affect you and me? How is this solution going to make a difference across Europe and in the market? Getting a new tax system in the UK—how is that going to affect you as a citizen? This is what we do now, and not a lot of people are doing that in other IT companies. We are pretty much ahead in the way we attack the marketing campaigns.

In your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like?

The future of marketing is very tied to go-to-market strategies. It’s getting drawn closer to the true business of the businesses. I also think that modern and future marketing are tied closer together with PR, communications, and brand—this is one unity.

With a lot of corporates, you see the marketing is placed in one place, and then you have PR, and then you have communications. We need to see this as one, as unity. You can’t say something in PR if you don’t have that alignment with marketing. A more human-centric and united-group entity is how I see the future of marketing.

I completely agree, that’s actually a very good insight. If you could use one word to describe the role of a CMO, what would be that word and why?

I’ll have to say digital. I think everything that’s happening is so much easier to work on a global scale because we are so digital now in our market campaigns.

With AI, things are getting even more digital in the way we work. We’re going to optimise so much more; we’re going to work smarter; and we’re going to work creatively digitally with AI as well. If we see that we can actually cut a little bit down on our resources and our FTEs and use that digital toolkit that is available to everybody now and work a lot smarter, work cross-markets very smartly as well, and also with our campaigns, the way to get that awareness out and get your purposes and messages out, that is a digital focus we have.

I think everybody has that now. Of course, we can see that conferences, roundtables, and stuff like that are very valuable, but that only comes after you’ve got that digital always going.

What career advice would you give to other marketers out there?

The most important advice I’ve gotten and the most important road I’ve been following, working with marketing, is that you need to be purpose-driven.

You need to get into the core of the business that you’re working for. It’s not all numbers, solutions, Excel sheets, pipelines, and cash flow. It is, of course, as well, but if you want to do a proper job as a marketer now, you need to get that purpose, the core purpose, from the core business out. How are we going to work with that, and how is that going to be present in all the messaging, all the narratives, and all the campaigns? Otherwise, you won’t stand out. It will be the same as everybody else.

Also, think more long-term. This aligns with the purpose as well. You can’t change your purpose every three months, and you shouldn’t change your campaigns every three months. You have to always focus on purpose-driven campaign alignment in your business: who are we, and what difference do we make to people? When you get that into your work, you will succeed more and better as a CMO.