Bridging the tech/creative divide

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Debbie Forster MBE:
Hello and welcome to XTech Podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Forster, MBE. I’m a tech portfolio consultant and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion and innovation in the tech industry.

I’m delighted to be working with Fox Tech Agency as the host of the XTech Podcast and as a curator for the XTech community. Today I’m delighted to be joined by Sarah Thomas, Group CMO at Capgemini. Welcome, Sarah.

Sarah Thomas:
Thank you so much for having me.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Right. Now, our community love to get to know you as a human being before we actually get into talking about the technology and where it is for you. So Sarah, how did you get into tech? Was it born with a laptop in the hand or did you wake up and find yourself here?

Sarah Thomas:
Actually, I think I probably have a very unusual career path and certainly one that’s unusual for a CMO. So I would say it was a slow meander to technology. My first love and first passion actually was biology. And from a very early age, inspired by my father and his love for animals, through to my teenage years and choosing what I was going to focus on at university, I actually ended up doing a degree in microbiology and virology, of all things. And yeah, I was all set for a career in science. I was going to spend my life in a lab coat and in a laboratory.

And then, I came across a company that was then called Andersen Consulting and actually had a sort of brief period where I dallied with moving into IT consulting at the time, learning to code through my early years. In fact, I just was laughing because earlier today, a group of us who all connected on social media from my original start group way back when, looking at photographs of ourselves when we were very young and fresh face, but starting on our career. And I started off tech consulting, did that for a short period of time. And then, actually, fell back to my first love. And I decided I really wanted to go and pursue my PhD. And I left what was then Andersen Consulting and I went and worked for Novartis. So I went into the pharma industry and I worked in a laboratory, a commercial lab whilst doing my PhD with my specialist focus being on HIV and molecular biology. So as you might imagine, the last years with COVID and the pandemic were very interesting to me all for other reasons than just what was happening and going on in the world. And I saw many of my old professors, actually, on TV giving interviews, which was really fun.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Sarah, that’s fantastic. I mean, this makes you my first microbiologist and I think my first guest with a PhD.

Sarah Thomas:
I mean, it’s not the usual route to then have a career in marketing. And what I would say is much as I loved the intellectual challenge of the science and I love the environment, it’s very much an inclusive environment, and by that, I mean, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, if you are the expert in your field, you are the expert in your field, and I loved that about working in science. What I didn’t like so much was some of the financial uncertainty, the lurching from grant to grant. And if you working in a pharma company, quite rightly, you are working on a commercial enterprise and you’re very focused on drug discovery versus your scientific areas of interest that allow you to go meandering off and exploring a hypothesis that you are just interested in.

So after a while I actually decided to go and go back and explore the world of business. I think what I loved about the business world was actually the pace. I liked the deadline, I liked the energy, the focus, the different projects, the different clients. And when, I actually went to go back, Accenture was born then out of Andersen Consulting.

I’d stayed and kept many relationships. It’s a perfect example of always keeping doors open to yourself in your career. Always leave well because you never know when those contacts will be useful. And I actually managed to talk myself back into a role at Accenture, not in the business, actually, as a consultant at that time, but actually, in marketing. And that was quite a leap, actually and I look back and wonder about the bravado of youth that managed to allow me to convince everybody that I was the right fit with zero marketing experience. But I figured, actually, being a scientist and a technologist, you learn logical thinking, you learn to ask the right questions and you learn to tap the experts that you need to pull in and help you answer specific questions. And marketing isn’t any different, actually.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah. And you talk about that. What I found in interviewing our various guests is there’s very few of my guests who said I had a typical route into tech. It’s almost that’s atypical to do something very linear. I love the way you described it in a post where you talked about the wild card of career choice. So if I’m sitting in our audience and I’m a manager, so I have my managing or recruiting hat on, what can I learn about this for you and others who find themselves in tech?

Sarah Thomas:
I think it’s not to put somebody in a box based on their academic area of interest or even some of their past career experience, and instead, focus on what they’ve learned and taken away from those experiences and the type of individual they are.

So for example, in my world and marketing and the team members I look for, I am less concerned that somebody has a deep knowledge of a particular content area and a particular area of the business or a particular industry even. Very often it can be an advantage, but it’s not essential. You can learn everything you need to know about aerospace and defense and you have got the business experts around you who are the deep industry experts. So you need to know enough to be able to curate them and do the best job of working with them.

What I care more about is that you have intellectual curiosity, that you are creative, that you are bold, and you actually are looking to challenge the status quo. I don’t want somebody who settles for average and who sits and is content with just turning the handle and delivering the same old, same old because the world of technology is moving quickly that’s impacting all of us and I want somebody who’s always learning and is always looking for the next new thing to bring innovation and do something different in our marketing because that’s how we engage our audiences.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Absolutely. And I think there’s a double-edged sword there to remember because that open-mindedness to find the talent to bring them in. But I think the other thing, you’ve talked about that intellectual curiosity, that wanting the next new thing as a manager, if I wanted to keep you and get the best of you once I get you in the door, it’s about throwing those opportunities to you to learn, to find, to explore the new, that’s really important.

Sarah Thomas:
I agree. And I think, through my career, I’ve certainly, with more junior team members, encourage them not to pigeonhole themselves too early. And in fact, I’ve pushed them to move and work in different areas of the business from a marketing standpoint every six to nine months. Now the beauty of that is they get to hone what they like and what they’re brilliant at. And if there’s something they don’t like, they know it’s only going to be for a period of time. And instead of complaining about it and thinking, “I hate my job, I’m stuck here,” their mindset shifts to, “What can I learn while I am here knowing this is not an area I want to specialize in?” And that I found really good.

And then, the more senior ones, they’re always looking for stretch. I think back on my career, there have been a number of times when I have maybe not had the most pleasant experience through a particular job or working with a particular stakeholder who had found challenging, but those have been the areas of biggest growth. So you want to give people an opportunity where they have a level of comfort, but also, a level of stretch. And sometimes, that can come within their own role, and sometimes, that comes in working on a project that maybe goes across multiple areas of the business with different individuals that they may not work with day in, day out, and they get a different experience.

People who not only lean into those experiences, but embrace them are the ones that become much better leaders as they go up through the organization.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Agree, completely agree. All right, well, let’s talk about what’s capturing that intellectual curiosity that you have. How did the recent trends in tech, things like AI, data analytics, etcetera, impact the CMO world? Is there anything that you see as a particular opportunity or threat on the horizon?

Sarah Thomas:
I think AI is what’s on everybody’s lips. I recently was at the Cannes Lions Creative Festival. It was a major, major topic because it’s a big disruptor for the creative industry and for marketing. I, like Capgemini, have really taken a view that you need to, should we say, approach with caution and put the appropriate guardrails in place. But there’s a massive, huge upside, huge potential to transform the way we work. And so, I’ve really thought about it as how do I elevate my role? How do I elevate, augment what all of my team can do? So particularly in the creative space, I talked to some creative advertising executives who talked about how easy it is now for them to mock up concepts for clients to pitch to clients. They don’t have to go through a big, expensive shoot or spend hours and hours to conceptualize something, they can do it quickly using generative AI to sell in a concept and an idea to then go and decide what they need to build. They can easily make sure that the creative they show is representative and reflects what the client wants.

In my industry, particularly around content production, writing particularly, being able to easily switch and see a different tone of voice to target a piece of content to a particular organization or a particular title. So writing for the CFO and the CMO is very different. And I would always say, it’s not a one-and-done, it’s not a magic pill and I still need to spend the time editing and making sure that the piece that I produce is representative of what I want to say. But does it allow me to turn on a dime? Does it allow me to get ideas and see how things could work? Absolutely. And I’ve used it myself just playing, just to see. I wrote a short biography of myself, and then, I asked a generative AI tool to actually write that in the style of a Netflix series or a Pixar movie. And just seeing the difference, the use of language, it can be very playful in the creative industry, that I loved. And I love playing with that.

But there is also power in the data that we as marketers have to do our job. So if I’m looking at making sure that, internally in our organization, I can recommend the best content for an executive who’s going to a meeting, who wants to talk to a client about a particular topic, I have the opportunity to use the tools to be able to pull that and make recommendations.

Likewise, if I’m looking at data of how we interact with customers, if I’m advertising, I’ll see who’s engaging with the ads and where I have a potential opportunity. That’s also where there are tools that can help me analyze the large volumes of data that come in. And that’s something that I haven’t always had at my fingertips.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think, yeah, that’s so important in tech, isn’t it, Sarah? Because I think, as managers, or if I’m in tech, so let’s talk if I am a techie, it’s really keeping myself fresh, stop thinking of how is this a threat to my job? And I liked what you talked about, how does this augment, how does this support what I do? And as a manager, how do I help my team? I hear that quite often, interestingly, from the CTOs and the CIOs of how do they help their team overcome that initial fear?

And I think you used the magical word, it’s about play. It’s not how you drop it into your first major client. How do you drop it into a high risk project? How do we create these opportunities to play with the new tools, the new approaches? And it’s also what you say, reminding ourselves, any new thing is a new tool that we can use, that you say, to elevate yourself, to lift yourself up, so you’re doing what only you can do and letting the tech do, whether it’s Gen AI or anything else that’s coming down, how does it do the heavy lifting so we can do what we do best?

Sarah Thomas:
Absolutely. And I’ve seen many of the creative industry and marketers embrace it because it has a massive impact of helping us think through bigger, bolder, creative ideas. Just being able to quickly see the way just changing the angle of something can have an impact. So it is playful for us, and I’ve really encouraged my team to – much as when social media came on the rise, if you are going to advise other people in how to use it, you need to know yourself. So you need to have accounts on these different technology tools and platforms to understand and honestly, it was only when I started playing a little bit myself using generative AI that I was like, “Oh, okay, now I get it. I get the potential.”

Then I went to a number of meetings interacting with other, particularly, advertising and design agencies. So they are specialism and they’re really using generative AI in a different way than I use, but seeing the way they were using it to manipulate and create imagery and asking them, “Well, why? Do you not feel threatened?” They say, “Actually, no, because for me, as I said, this helps me serve my clients better, faster. I’m still calling up with the concept.”

And the one thing I say about marketers when it comes to generative AI, we write creative briefs. So we write a brief for an agency to articulate an idea and allow them to do their best thinking and their best work. Well, it’s kind of the same as a prompt, right? You’ve got to be able to ask the right questions in the right way to generate the insight and analyze the data in the way that you want to help you on that journey. So for me, it’s a stepping stone and it’s a hand up on doing the job that I’m doing.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Another thing I note as we’ve been talking is one of the things I love about you, your career, your approach, even the way you were talking about being in Cannes is you are spanning that stereotypical tech versus creative divide that is too often, I think, holding the industry back, both industries back in that respect. What can I learn? What can you tell us that will help us span that divide between the technical and the creative?

Sarah Thomas:
I think we often do feel like we’re talking very different languages, and honestly, I was talking to a colleague and we were saying, how fun would it be to take a group of CIOs to Cannes and have them experience the creative industry. Because you really would see the use of technology at its best. And I think it’s like anything, lean in and understand the other point of view, learn a bit about the pressures of the other role, what’s driving them, what’s core to the work they do, and meet in the middle somewhere.

I find that when I’m talking to our own internal IT organization and the technologists, as well as the business, because we’re in the business of business and technology. I’m immediately always translating it back to how can I use this in my day to day or challenging them to understand the problem and the issues that I face in the organization whilst trying to be creative and trying to get insights. The larger the organizations are, the harder that is to get in a very joined up way.

Debbie Forster MBE:
The taller than the ivory towers can be if we’re not careful.

Sarah Thomas:
Absolutely. So always looking how things connected together, always trying to solve for the organization versus the individual. I’m a big believer in that as well because that’s where I get my greater insights and my greater power. So I think it’s an ongoing conversation. Understand that maybe you might start off feeling like you’re speaking different languages, but ask questions. Don’t be frightened to understand what the life of a creative or life of a marketer is, because that will help you be a better technology advisor.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And I think that’s the challenge I would leave for the audience to think about in your organization, whatever the size. How are you breaching those divides? How are you connecting? Because tech is becoming ubiquitous, but to be effective, it’s creating that shared language and understanding, it’s cutting past those stereotypical divides and looking at it from that other perspective. And that’s where great tech, that’s where great companies come from when they’re welded together, because ultimately, it’s about the organization, not about any part of that organization. Super. We’ve got some homework for everyone in the audience to think about.

So Sarah, we often then try to say, let’s step back out of our specific jobs, although you span those things very, very well, but is there anything else that’s at the horizon for tech that is grabbing your interest and either exciting you or worrying you?

Sarah Thomas:
I thought about this question a little bit and I keep coming back to what excites me is probably all my worlds coming together. And I think about my past life and I think if I was doing my PhD now, I’d probably be done in about three weeks, not three years because technology has moved on so much and everything that I used to have to do manually is now automated, and the analysis and the insight that I could derive is huge.

So what excites me is the power of using technology now for the greater good, actually. And I know that sounds a little bit woke, but because my passion is around science and medicine, using the technology that we have as a force for good, as an aid to really analyzing huge amounts of data that allow us to anticipate and signal trends that are happening, whether that’s on an individual disease basis or on an epidemiological basis, is actually super exciting.

And I think even as a scientist, my life in the laboratory, if it was now, would be extremely different. I’d be able to test hypothesis and come up with ideas by brainstorming with Gen AI, essentially, in a way that I was never able to. And I’d have to find somebody who was willing to listen, my mentor, who was probably paid to listen and brainstorm with them. But now, I can evolve ideas, I can find sources of data and insight that I wouldn’t have had access to. That’s hugely exciting for the development of therapies, for finding cures for diseases that have long evaded us or potential solutions that have worked in some part of the world, but now making them accessible for others. For me, that’s exciting. That’s technology for good, and I’m a big believer in that.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And it is that convergence that becomes so exciting as tech moves into other areas if it’s done well in all the ways that you said, finding common knowledge, bringing people with you, seeing it as a way of augmenting. We are seeing and we felt the benefits of that under COVID, moving from completely unknown plague to having vaccines and moving forward. That’s the kind of thing that could have been decades, not a matter of years.

Sarah Thomas:
Absolutely. And I mean, I was lucky enough, I spent my whole career working in technology companies. So the virtual working, the use of technology to connect with colleagues around the world was something I was very used to doing. But we saw, during that period, particularly in the marketing industry – events, us having to put on massive events where we’re trying to deliver a intimate client experience and having to do it virtually. And that’s where the immersive technologies really came in. And people who may have previously, I could imagine trying to pitch that to some of my executives pre-COVID would’ve said no too high risk. Then they embraced it and they took a chance.

And was the experience perfect? No, but we learned every single time we did it so that even now we do consider always when we’re doing a big event, what’s the offline experience? What’s the offline? What’s the online? What’s the immersive experience we give to people who can’t travel? How do we make them feel that they’re present and that they can actually explore in the same way and explore both the demos and the things we want to show them, but also, how do we help them have those connections, those human connections?

And it’s not the same as physically travelling, but you know what? When we have people who have constraints now, for whatever reason, it’s nice that we can actually offer an alternative. And so, there’s good things like that that have come out. People’s desire and willingness to try new things I think has increased hugely.

Debbie Forster MBE:
I couldn’t agree more. And it is Winston Churchill’s, “Never waste a good crisis.”

Sarah Thomas:
Absolutely.

Debbie Forster MBE:
So through that, there are so many things that people before had said that’s not possible or that’s too hard, when there was no choice, they soldiered through, and we’ll reap the benefits of a lot of that for some time to come.

Sarah Thomas:
Yeah, I hope so.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay, so the last question is thinking what are we doing with our free time? When we have the audience, one of the things they’ve loved on the programme is something to add to their list to read, to watch, to listen to. What’s been in your mind lately that you could recommend to the audience?

Sarah Thomas:
Well, I mean, my own personal hobby is ballroom dancing, so I’m not going to offer that up to everyone because I’m feeling like you may not get that many takers. I would say there are two podcasts that I love, quite different, but actually, have a lot of the similar traits. So the first one is Diary of A CEO, which is the podcast of the entrepreneur, Steven Bartlett. I love it because he’s a very good interviewer. He has amount of passion for every guest that he has on, and he talks through a variety of business, technology, health, sleep, relationships. It’s a CEO podcast, but it’s not stuffy boardroom.

And then, my other one I love just because you get exposed to people that you would never normally come across, and that’s Desert Island Discs.

Debbie Forster MBE:
An oldie, but a goodie, isn’t it? And it really opens people up.

Sarah Thomas:
It really is. And the format, the beauty of the podcast version, actually, is you only get snippets of each disc that people have chosen to take to their desert island with them, but you hear the narrative of their story. And whether it’s Olympians, it’s actors, I listen to forensic scientists, brain surgeons, poets, war journalists, every single one, I’ve taken something from their story and have found them fascinating.

They’re short, they were just about my commute length. I like to be surprised with those kind of podcasts. I have a low attention span and if it feels too routine, I will just mentally switch off, but those I’ve always engaged with. You can pick who you feel interested in or you can just let it roll and be surprised by people. And often, the ones that I wouldn’t have necessarily selected to listen to have been the most compelling.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Fantastic. Sarah, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today in this episode of XTech. It’s been such a joy to talk to you.

Sarah Thomas:
Thank you so much. It was my absolute pleasure.

Debbie Forster MBE:
We’d love to receive your comments and thoughts on what you’ve heard, and you can share them with us at fox.agency/XTech.

If you’d like to appear as a guest on the show, don’t waste a moment. Email us now at [email protected].

I’d like to thank our whole team of tech experts at Fox Agency for making this podcast possible. I’m Debbie Forster and you’ve been listening to XTech.

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