CMO Chats with Suzana Ristevski, CMO, Google Australia and New Zealand

To start, could you please introduce yourself and tell us about your journey into marketing?

I’m Suzana Ristevski, the Chief Marketing Officer for Australia and New Zealand at Google.

To be completely frank, I actually started by studying commerce and law. It was one marketing subject at the very end of my degree that caught my eye; I thought talking about customers looked fun. Since then, my whole career has been focused on marketing, augmented with product strategy and a little bit of sales. I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to work across a number of industries, from telco, private health insurance, and banking to industrial organisations and now technology. It’s been quite the ride.

What is currently the focus of your marketing team?

I’ve been at Google for a year now, and growth is obviously still a very large focus, as it always is when you’re running a marketing function. It would also be remiss of me not to say that AI, and how it can make us more effective, efficient, and customer-centric, is definitely top of mind as well.

Were there any particularly innovative or successful marketing campaigns that your team has recently executed?

At Google, we are not only using the tools but also creating them, so we have copious amounts of campaigns. We’ve been using AI in our customer communications for many years, but now we can use additional data sources and in-market signals to get the right message to the right customer at the right time through the right channel.

In terms of innovation and creativity, we recently did a campaign using Magda Szubanski, who is an Australian icon, to push content to our B2B customer audiences. It was mildly innovative in that we used consumer channels to promote a B2B proposition.

Are there any big challenges that your team is currently handling?

The big challenge is not only keeping up with competitors but surpassing them, especially as we are right in the midst of this AI transformation. As marketers at Google, we want to be highly effective at using our own tools to create brilliant campaigns. We work very closely with our product teams to ensure they understand what marketers need so we can create the best services.

For example, Search is incredibly interesting for us. We need to keep updating it to be more relevant as people are now searching using audio, video, and text. It really is all about artificial intelligence, not for its own sake, but for how we can maximise these new tools to provide amazing customer experiences, brilliant creative, and better, quicker outcomes than everyone else.

How does Google stay ahead of its competitors in terms of marketing?

We have to stay true to our customers and our purpose of democratising information for the world. And we have to move at pace. As a CMO at Google, I’m using the exact same tools that other CMOs are using to drive effective advertising and business outcomes.

It’s a super interesting time. If you’re not thinking about AI now, if you’re not using it now, you’re already left behind. This isn’t something that’s happening tomorrow; we are literally right in the middle of it, and our competitors are using these tools to drive good outcomes for their businesses and customers.

What do you believe are the biggest opportunities for marketing leaders today?

The first thing I find fascinating is the ability to gain unprecedented customer insights. I remember the days when it would take months of focus groups and quantitative research to find out anything about our customers. Now, you are getting signals everywhere, so much so that you’re arguably in a position where you know what your customers are going to do before they do.

The other incredible opportunity is delivering personalised experiences at scale. There was a time when you had to send one mass message to all your segments. Now, you can literally send millions of personalised experiences and creatives to your customers so that the message is 100% relevant to them. If someone had asked me 30 years ago what I would wish for, being able to truly understand my customers would have been the top priority.

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

The fundamental principles of marketing will stay the same: our job is to be customer advocates, understand the market, and execute flawlessly. What’s changed are the tools we have and the nature of the interaction. It’s no longer one-way information; marketing is now a conversational and experiential way of interacting with customers.

The creation of marketing has also been democratised. You no longer need huge budgets to create wonderful content and liaise with customers. Of course, you still need to have taste to avoid “AI slop,” but these tools have opened up the world for anyone to execute on their brilliant ideas, which is super exciting.

What is the role of the CMO in one word and why?

That is so hard, but I’m going to say Growth. I think growth is the role of the CMO, and obviously, that has a lot of different input levers. There are different ways to grow a business, but I’m going to back in growth.

What is a piece of traditional leadership advice that you believe doesn’t apply to modern CMOs?

This might be mildly controversial, but the idea of “sticking to your lane.” As a CMO and a marketing team, that’s absolutely not what you want to do.

If marketing is a growth engine, you need to work with all the other people in the business who are also interested in growth. Customer experience is a shared responsibility. Data and technology are cross-functional. You simply cannot survive by sticking to your own lane. You really need to get in there, be curious, and work with other parts of the organisation to meet your customer needs and grow the business.

What career advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders?

Lean in and be curious. There is a huge technological transformation going on at the moment, and it’s super exciting to be in it. It blew me away when someone said to me the other day, “We will be the last generation of leaders that just lead humans and the first generation that will be leading humans and AI agents.”

That is so significantly huge, and you have to wrap your head around it now. This isn’t happening tomorrow; it’s happening now. If you’re not getting involved, your competitors will get an edge and beat you. So my advice is to get in there, get your hands dirty, be curious, and lean in.