CMO Chats with Natalie Truong, CMO of EY Oceania

Hi everyone, my name is Natalie Truong, and I’m the CMO of EY in Oceania.

Lovely to have you here, Natalie, in our CMO chats. Can you share with us what your company does?

Thanks for the opportunity, Sabrina, and thanks for joining, everyone. There are three things that we do from an organisational perspective. We’re a global services firm with 400,000 people, and our purpose is to build a better working world. We do really cool work, like helping clients fight data piracy, guiding governments through cash flow crises, and helping health professionals unlock medical treatments with data analytics.

We try to pursue high-quality audits to help build trust in financial markets and business. Another very cool thing we do is that we’ve recently invested significantly in our AI capabilities. We spent 1.4 billion US dollars on the investment we’ve made in AI, and we’re trying to integrate that into our proprietary technologies to help our clients and our people.

Wow, AI is really the way to go. As the CMO or Chief Marketing Officer, what is your current main marketing focus?

Oh, great question, Sabrina. I probably spend my days thinking about three things, if I’m honest with you. I think about people and talent. I think about whether we have the right capabilities in the team. Do we have the right culture? What skills are we missing to continue to provide value to the business? So, people and culture are incredibly important to me.

I also spend my days thinking about brand and reputation management, especially with the launch of our new global brand refresh, which is all about shaping the future with confidence. How do we think about that for our people? How do we help them build pride? How do we help them understand what that means for our organisation? And how do we deliver that confidence to our clients? Then, I think about go-to-market campaigns. Are we hitting the right audience with the right messages, using the right channels at the right times, or are we just spray-gunning and hoping and praying that our campaigns are hitting the mark?

There’s a lot of analysis that goes into these campaigns. And since we’re on the topic of campaigns, I specifically wanted to ask: can you tell me about a particularly innovative or successful marketing campaign your team has recently executed?

Yeah, wow, that’s going to be like picking my favourite child, Sabrina, so that’s a bit tough. Alright, let me talk to you about the education campaign, which I think has been our most successful campaign in the last 12 months, and it’s one I’m really proud of. We worked together right from the start, instead of how marketers sometimes go off, forget about the social people or the PR people, the comms people, or the data people, and then get to a point in their campaign where they realise, “Oh my goodness, we haven’t engaged our PR team,” or “We haven’t engaged our digital team,” which is really bad. But right from the start, this campaign was all about team, and we had really strong stakeholder engagement, ownership of data, and clear roles and responsibilities, which I’m really proud of. 

And I guess it’s a reflection of the success of the campaign because, so far, the campaign has generated eight leads, four of which converted, with revenue of about 6.1 million dollars, which is a pretty good return on the investment we made.

I like what you said about really making sure everyone’s involved and that everyone plays a big piece of the puzzle to make it a successful initiative. So now, since we’re looking at success, I want to ask: what are your biggest marketing challenges at the moment?

I’ll go back to my first point, which I think I made earlier, about what keeps me awake at night or what I’m constantly thinking about, Sabrina. People and talent—it’s absolutely critical we get the right people in the right roles. Otherwise, you can have all the money in the world, and your campaigns will fail, or the reputation of your company will suffer if you don’t have the right people and the right talent in your team. 

I think another marketing challenge is AI. How do we add it to the marketing toolkit to enhance the client journey? How do we use AI? People are quite fearful of AI, thinking, “Oh my god, it’s going to make me redundant,” but that’s absolutely not the case.

I think you’ll be redundant as a marketer if you’re not using AI. Marketers should learn to use AI—it’s a great ideation tool, and it definitely won’t replace you. We will always need human intervention, but I think it’s critical that marketers, brands, and digital teams, and all our people should be looking to use AI. 

And then, I think the third thing for me in terms of challenges is trying to raise the bar on creativity. How do we break outside the mould of professional services—very conservative, very risk-averse? How do we show that it’s an incredible place to work? That’s why we’ve managed to attract 400,000 people. And then, how do we break out of that mould to create a place where people want to come and work for us and with us?

So, how does your company stay ahead of its competitors in terms of marketing?

It’s a big debate amongst our team, if I’m honest with you, Sabrina. We try not to look sideways, and that’s not out of arrogance or anything. We try not to look sideways because, in all honesty, I think we’re all kind of doing the same things in the professional services industry, which is why we try not to focus too much on that. We really try to look to other industries and sectors to see what’s happening there. What are they doing that’s creative from a marketing or brand perspective? Because professional services are so conservative, we’re always thinking about how we can shake things up a bit in the industry.

With our go-to-market approach, we have the freedom, I think, and one of the reasons I joined EY Oceania is the ability to actually shake things up a bit in this industry. Especially in Australia and New Zealand, the industry is being shaken up, and we can’t stay still. So yeah, we try not to look sideways. We try to look for inspiration from our friends across different sectors and industries.

Yeah, I love that answer. Totally, taking inspiration from other areas and using that as good energy in terms of how we make things different and stand out. I love that answer. And in your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like?

I think I’ll go back to my point on AI, Sabrina. I’ve spoken to too many marketers, and you know, I was at a roundtable—a CMO roundtable—last week where only two or three of us were using AI. So, the biggest opportunity for marketers or CMOs today is to leverage advanced data analytics and AI.

I think it will help us drive highly personalised and targeted campaigns. Unlike in the past, where CMOs had to rely on manual insights, today’s CMOs can harness all this data. I think about our EYQ program, which is our own LLM, and then I think about ChatGPT. You can throw a document into those machines and ask them to summarise it, and they’ll generate insights for you that would have taken days to figure out otherwise. So, CMOs should absolutely be using those tools to gain deep insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and trends. It allows us to be more precise in our segmentation, Sabrina, and also to tailor content to enhance customer engagement and conversion rates.

The integration of AI and machine learning tools enables us to make real-time decisions, in my opinion, and the automation of marketing processes significantly improves efficiency and effectiveness. So, overall, if we can encourage more CMOs and marketers to adopt a data-driven approach, it will create more impactful campaigns and resonate more with our audience, leading to business growth, which is why we’re here—to help grow our business.

You know, I couldn’t have said it better. That was really insightful. Seeing how AI is and will probably be a permanent part of the future and how leaders are now opening their eyes to its use is definitely something to look out for. And now, since we’re talking about the role of a marketing leader, what is the role of the CMO for you, in one word, and why?

Only one word. I think it’s “strategist,” Sabrina if I’m honest. I think the CMO’s role is to craft and execute comprehensive marketing, brand, and digital strategies that align with our business goals. It drives brand growth and adapts to changing market dynamics, so you have to be a good strategist. Obviously, you have to be able to execute well, too, but if you’re executing without a strategy, then you’re kind of just running blind. So, I think a great CMO is a great strategist.

And it’s also about knowing the people you’re working with and the people you’re crafting these strategies for. A lot of it is really about seeing the bigger picture in that sense. So, my last question for you, Natalie, is: what career advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders out there, and maybe even those listening to this podcast right now?

Gosh, you know, I am quite old compared to a lot of you guys. You’re quite young, and I guess I’m straddling traditional marketing advice versus how we should move forward these days. For me, I think modern marketers should no longer stick to what has always worked in the past. I think it’s important to acknowledge what’s happened in the past, Sabrina. Acknowledge the tools and strategies that worked, but in a rapidly evolving landscape of marketing, where consumer behaviours and technology are constantly changing, if you only rely on what’s worked in the past, you’ll miss the opportunity to stay relevant and on-trend. Your brand could become obsolete.

So, I think as a modern CMO, you need to be willing to experiment and be ready to pivot when necessary so that you can stay relevant and effective.