Antonio Lucio has taken the marketing job at a company going public, a company splitting in two, and a company under sustained reputational attack. His method on arrival is the same every time, and it is archaeological rather than creative. He asks why the company was ever invented, then works out which parts of that original vision to keep and which to change.
The reason he starts there is political rather than sentimental. A positioning reached through research and an agency arrives as flowery language that people can like or dislike, and they will say so. The founder’s own sentence is not an Antonio concept and did not come out of an agency, so there is nothing to have an opinion about.
Key findings
- At the payments company he was able to go to the source. He spent five hours in Seattle with Dee Hock, the founder, who was still alive, and came away with one sentence that did the work: a universal currency for life and commerce.
- At the technology company the founders were long dead, so the same method ran through the archive instead. Hewlett and Packard had left a wealth of documents and philosophies, all of them about reinvention and fixing problems through technology, and those themes did the same job while the company split in two.
- At his current employer the founder is present and thirty five years old, which changes the task entirely. There is nothing to reconstruct, because any question about the vision can be put to Zuckerberg directly. What is missing is that the company never held a consistent narrative or an ongoing dialogue with its stakeholders, which Lucio calls his own side’s fault.
- His stated goal there is comprehension rather than agreement. When Zuckerberg talks about freedom of speech, about neutrality, or about amplifying voices, Lucio wants people to understand where those principles come from and why the decisions follow from them. Whether anyone agrees is their decision, and he says so twice.
The audiences stopped being separate
Lucio’s argument for integrating the corporate narrative is historical. When he started, the PR team spoke to journalists in one narrative, the policy team to opinion leaders and politicians in another, and HR to employees in a third, while marketing did its own work with consumers. Each held separate research and separate storylines, tied together loosely only at the very top.
What ended that arrangement is that every stakeholder now navigates the same digital world, so an inconsistency in any one narrative is called out within minutes. Lucio is clear that the obligation does not depend on the reporting line. Whether or not communications sits under the CMO, the CMO still has to deal with policy and with HR.
Where the line actually falls
Lucio has held the job both ways, integrated with communications at Visa and at HP, separated at Facebook. He draws the boundary by subject rather than by function. When the corporation speaks there is complete alignment between what he, Nick Clegg and Zuckerberg say, and the two of them meet weekly to hold it.
The individual apps are a different task. Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, along with services like Portal and Oculus, are direct to consumer work led by marketing, with communications amplifying rather than co-authoring. The variable that decides how much collaboration a company needs is whether the company and its main brand carry the same name.
A purpose arrived at late, and why
Lucio was forty four, head of marketing for PepsiCo International and traveling constantly, when he was diagnosed with chronic depression. He told the company he could not travel that much anymore and asked for a job that did not require it, adding that he was ready to move on if no such job existed.
Recovery meant medication, therapy and a change of lifestyle, and it forced a longer question about what he actually wanted. He had been running since leaving university at twenty one. He worked the answer out through repeated conversations with people close to him, on the principle that what matters most is how the people who care about you feel about you.
The sentence he arrived at is that his role in life is to create environments where people working together can achieve extraordinary things while finding meaning and well-being. He runs it as a test rather than an aspiration. If the environment, the extraordinary result or the well-being is missing, he is out of purpose.
That test is also what draws him to companies going public, splitting, or under reputational attack. The mission has stayed constant, but in the past three to four months the place he wants to apply it has changed. The last chapter of his corporate life belongs to transformational change in marketing and advertising, inside his company if he can and elsewhere if he cannot.
Treat it as a transformation, because that is what it is
Lucio’s impatience is not with the goal but with how the industry has handled it. There are no shortcuts, he says, because this is a business transformation like any other. That means a very clear vision of where you are going, then specific objectives, specific programs and specific measurements, repeated year after year.
He is done with the evidence stage. Every year another consulting firm shows that diverse firms perform better, the playbooks have all been shared, and the award ceremonies have all been attended. What he wants instead of another round of pronouncements is a mechanism: everyone publishes their scorecards, everyone calls each other out, his own employer included.
He is also explicit about the scope of the claim, which is narrower than the way the subject is usually framed. He does not expect to have enough time in his life to fix racism in the world. He does think he has enough time to fix it within the context of his own industry.
The nuance in the research that usually gets dropped
Lucio states the research finding with its condition attached, which is the part that usually gets dropped. Diverse teams perform better on complex tasks requiring creative solutions, and on simple tasks homogeneous teams perform better. His point is that the condition is met right now, because the tasks in front of marketers are the complex ones.
The playbook, at the level of who is in the room
The first move is the marketing team itself, diversified particularly in the senior roles. The second is the agencies, invited to set their own targets for women and people of color. Lucio insists this means senior roles rather than junior ones, which are easy, because creative and strategy leaders are where the communication is decided.
At Cannes the previous year he put that requirement to five newly appointed agency partners, asking for the most diverse group of people in the creative and strategy roles. The third element is production, on both sides of the camera, so that the representation holds in the work and not only in the teams.
The fourth is measurement, using the industry GEM and CIIM scores, which ask whether the communication depicts society the way it actually is. At HP, higher scores correlated directly with work that performed better, and Lucio notes he does not yet have enough data at Facebook. The whole value chain is now scored quarterly, up from every two months.
The average of the average of the average
Asked about the content itself, Lucio names the habit he blames. A total market focus averages the average of the average into one message for a hypothetical consumer who has nothing to do with the real ones. The fix starts in the brief, and he says he has measured dramatic results when consumers are depicted the way they want to be depicted.
Pressed on the harder case, where luxury advertising in Asian shopping malls sells aspiration using Western faces, he answers with where the world has moved rather than with a defense. The pendulum has shifted from global to local and from local to community. Brands in that category, he says, have made significant mistakes projecting a globalist view that is no longer relevant.
Four things nobody else controls
Lucio’s closing argument is a list of what marketers can act on without anyone’s permission. The first is brand safety, and he makes it while running marketing at one of the platforms: CMOs are the brand stewards, and platforms like his need to do significantly better. He immediately widens it to every other platform, online and offline, newspapers, radio and television included.
The second is the product portfolio and the supply chain behind it, and he includes himself by speaking as someone who has worked across categories. Some brands tied to the history of slavery have already been retired. Plenty of categories still carry a history of prejudice or stereotype, and food and industrial goods brands still have supply chains that are not clean.
The inconsistency he names inside that one is geographic. Companies stand for values with the Black community in the United States and in Europe, then forget those values when the conversation turns to Africa and emerging markets. The third item is the gap between the cultures brands borrow from and the leadership doing the borrowing, where senior teams sometimes do not have one Black person on them.
The fourth is what actually goes out: communication that represents the people served, without prejudice, without stereotypes, just people the way they want to see themselves. Lucio groups the four because none of them needs anyone’s approval, no law has to change and no one else has to act first. If the industry does not do it, shame on us, shame on me.
Scope and limitations
This is a conversation recorded in mid 2020 while the speaker held a senior role at one of the platforms he is calling on the industry to hold to account, which he acknowledges as he says it. The claims about measured results, including the correlation between representation scores and performance, are his own recollection rather than published research.
Source
This page summarises HGS #18: Antonio Lucio (Global CMO, Meta) about corporate narratives, purpose and diversity, by Marc de Swaan Arons, 2020-10-20.