Scott Mager, Deloitte’s US chief marketing officer, has taken an atypical path to the CMO title. He moved into the CMO role in 2022, after more than 14 years as the US practice leader for Deloitte Digital’s advertising, marketing, and commerce business.
Mager told Business Insider that his experience running P&Ls gives him perspective on how the CMO role is evolving.
“The role is really pivoting from brand to growth,” he said during the video interview with Business Insider. “With everything we do, our focus is on our business partners, making sure that what marketing is doing helps grow the business,” Mager said.
In the video interview, Mager talked about how Deloitte is using artificial intelligence to streamline marketing operations and scale creative work, though he remains cautious about AI-generated video.
He also shared the three factors he believes are critical to the success of Deloitte’s sports partnerships, and how its work on the Olympics has helped demonstrate Deloitte’s technology expertise.
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
The role AI plays in our brand marketing and communications is to drive efficiency in our processes. It gives our practitioners the opportunity to use the time saved to do more creative or more strategic thinking, and to help our organization grow and meet its ambitions. The non-creative side of it has been a great time saver.
On the creative angle, using it specifically for things like brand assets, design, video — we’ve been doing a lot of work there. We’ve built an AI generator that creates circular design elements, which is a core part of the Deloitte brand. We’ve rolled that out globally, and it’s been a great time saver, but it’s also really up-leveled our design capabilities.
We’ve also done a lot of work in the creative space using AI to create internal and external videos. But we’re sort of dancing around a line right now on how much we want to use AI for things like video. We’re an organization that trades on credibility, relationships, and trust. We’re just not sure that using AI-generated video conveys that trust.
To me, it’s much more authentic to use real people, to use our actual practitioners in the video, our actual partners, and our actual clients. There’s an authenticity to that that I don’t think you can replace with AI-generated creative.
Building stories through sports partnerships
Sports sponsorships have become an incredibly important part of our brand marketing playbook. We have lots of sports clients — teams, leagues, organizations that we’re constantly helping through all the services that Deloitte provides to advance those organizations. Only a few of these clients become sports partners, with Deloitte as sponsors.
There are three things that go into a sports sponsorship for us. First, brand: What does a sports property do for us to help our brand reach our target audience?
Second is storytelling: Did the work that we did for that sports organization create a meaningful impact? And can we take that story and use it to explain to non-sports organizations the services that Deloitte does? Storytelling is really important.
And then, hospitality: The bottom of the funnel for me, and for Deloitte as a professional services organization, is to put my partners and directors in rooms with our clients and our future clients.
Olympic-scale work
The Olympics is an incredible story, and it’s one of our largest clients globally. We’ve built over 18 applications for the Olympics that do everything from enabling the ticketing and credentialing of the Olympics, to working around the cybersecurity, and integrating 40 to 50 other applications for the entire Olympics platform.
We run that technical infrastructure during the Olympics, which is the equivalent of running almost eight Super Bowls a day for three weeks. The volume of data, the number of events, and the disparity of location over the Olympics make it incredibly complicated.
Telling that story to any client that wants to understand our technology chops is incredible.
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