Laura Jones: 00:11
Well, we've had so much fun doing the first season of Opinion Party that we are back. I'm really excited to be opening season two here at the IRG Summit in Cannes. It's the weekend before the Cannes Lion International Festival of Creativity, and I'm joined today by the founder of IRG, Marc Deswan Arons. And he's going to tell us all about this amazing program. He is incredible.

Laura Jones: 00:36
You can check him out. His LinkedIn will be in the show notes. But I just want to get into this amazing conversation. So welcome to Opinion Party, Marc.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 00:44
Thank you, Laura. It's an honor to be here.

Laura Jones: 00:46
Well, thank you for hosting us on this beautiful campus. This is an annual tradition. Yes?

Marc de Swaan Arons: 00:52
That's right. We're year five now.

Laura Jones: 00:54
I, in fact, as you remember, we were talking about this last night, was part of the original cohort.
Marc de Swaan Arons: 01:00
Of course, I remember that.

Laura Jones: 01:01
The guinea pig, as it were.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 01:03
Well, I would say pioneer.

Laura Jones: 01:04
Yeah. Ah, I love that. And it's amazing to see how far this movement really has come has come. So, let's start from the beginning. For those that are not indoctrinated, do not know about the Institute for Real Growth, what is it?

Laura Jones: 01:19
What is IRG?

Marc de Swaan Arons: 01:20
Well, the interesting thing is, so it started as the initiative for real growth, and that's when you were one of the pioneers. It's now, I want to say seven years ago, that WPP and actually Martin Sorrell, he was still there, said, look, I need one view on behalf of the group on what's happening in the world, what's happening in terms of business, expectations of businesses and expectations of marketing and brands. And that takes a collective perspective across all the experts that they had in all the different WPP entities. And so, I had the honor of being able to orchestrate that, as you remember. And it was such a fun exercise because we literally took the 25, I think, smartest people of WPP all over the world, and spoke to CMOs, clients and non-clients of WPP, but also trend analysts and business analysts, and formed a picture of not only where's the world going, but what are going to be the expectations of marketing, and specifically chief marketing officers, the most senior clients of WPP.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 02:26
So that was, you were one of those, and I remember fondly that about, what is it, five years ago or six years ago, we had a villa somewhere in the mountains not too far from was

Laura Jones: 02:38
seven, Mark.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 02:39
Oh, my goodness.

Laura Jones: 02:39
2018.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 02:40
Right, right, I'm adjusting your memory. And we distilled all those interviews and research into one picture, which then turned into a leadership program. And so, the IRG switched from an initiative to an institute. We made it independent, so at that point Google and LinkedIn, and that's now Tata and Ipsos, joined the collective. And for the last six years, because this is literally the last session, we've had eight fifty CMOs go through that program.

Laura Jones: 03:15
Wow, eight and fifty. That is so incredible. I mean, I just have to say thank you, Mark. I really want to start by saying that the original program that I was a part of was just, it was so transformative for my own career and getting to know you and this amazing community really just changed the trajectory of my career, and I could not be more grateful to be part of this amazing community. So, thank you so, so much.

Laura Jones: 03:44
And eight fifty CMOs and business professionals, that is incredible. What's changed in the last eight years? How have things evolved since that time?

Marc de Swaan Arons: 03:56
If we have time, we can talk about the next study.

Laura Jones: 03:58
Yeah.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 03:59
Because it's time. It's really time to do that. What's changed? I mean, there's so many things. But on the other hand, I always got very tired of all those programs that said everything in marketing has changed.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 04:09
I don't think that's true. Think the fundamentals have been so true. However, I think with AI, you really can make the case that a lot is changing. Now, again, the fundamentals will be needed. What I think is not changed and will be even more important in the era of AI is that when you walk into a boardroom, when you walk into an expo, if there's a marketer there, they bring a different perspective.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 04:37
They bring the human perspective. And no one else can I give you an example?

Laura Jones: 04:41
Yes, please.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 04:42
So, there's this picture I love of a man who's standing in a long line at the airport. And the line is clearly not moving and there's probably like 20 people ahead of him. And I put the picture up and I say, so, mister CEO, missus CFO, you know, just how's this person feeling? And what they do, because that's what their job is, they look at the data, they look at the account and they say this guy is miserable. It's not moving this line.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 05:09
There's 20 people in front of him. You know, he's not fitting very well. But only the marketer will say, no. No. Can you just pivot the camera?

Marc de Swaan Arons: 05:17
Because if there's 300 people behind this person snaking, you know, these lines at airports, that person's feeling fantastic. That's in human insight and all marketers get that. And when they bring that to a boardroom because everyone's human, they get it but no one will bring it up. No one is looking for that. And what's the most important thing as we look at bringing technology into every facet of the organization?

Marc de Swaan Arons: 05:44
It's maintaining that human perspective. It's understanding what moves people, what worries them, what, you know, keeps them up at night, and what they consider to be value. Because that's what we do as organizations, we try and create a differentiating proposition. And so, marketing is not going to change in that sense. Marketing is crucial to create value, to help identify opportunities to create value.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 06:10
But how we do it? I don't think anything will be the same a year from now.

Laura Jones: 06:14
Absolutely. And I love that you brought up the human perspective because humanized growth is something that is a foundational bedrock of the IRG. What is humanized growth?

Marc de Swaan Arons: 06:24
Well, so you are part of finding that conclusion. I know this is you were feeding me a friendly question, but thank indeed, when we did that first initiative for real growth study, and we really looked at how do over performing growth organizations, what differentiates them from underperformers? There's a lot of things, but there's a lot of things the same. For example, they all think that top line revenues are important. Of course, are. But bottom-line revenues, it turned out that the underperformers are really obsessed by that.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 06:56
Perhaps crucially because they have to. Overperformers, less so. What overperformers are really focused on is the people, the humans. But they take it broader, and this is crucial, because in the last fifty years, I think, and especially in today's, sort of climate, you see that there's, of all the stakeholders, perhaps the shareholder was the one that was most dominant in the boardroom. Right?

Marc de Swaan Arons: 07:24
We're trying to serve the needs of these shareholders. But there are crucial other stakeholders like colleagues, like the community, like the consumers we serve, the customers. And you see companies always trying to sort of balance those interests, but it's very clear that the stakeholders, I. E. The shareholders, the financial ones, have been predominant.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 07:46
Now, what you see is that when companies do that too long, they trip up. Because the other stakeholders will say, hey, hey, what about us? And whether it's a union renegotiating when car companies or airplanes airlines start making money again, or whether it's a community that doesn't like what's being dumped in their backyard, There's always this correcting mechanism, so what we see is that the best, the winning and financially over performing organizations are the ones that think about value creation for all those stakeholders. And they do that with that marketing mindset, that sort of human perspective, hence humanized growth.

Laura Jones: 08:26
Yes. I love that because it really dimensionalized all the different types of growth and brought to the forefront that we really need a wider set of metrics by which to measure business. And if I recall when we were sparring about it and we were doing the initial research, there was a pyramid of sorts. Right? And we were saying, are the people at the top or the people at the bottom?

Laura Jones: 08:48
I'm just so pleased to

Marc de Swaan Arons: 08:50
Everywhere.

Laura Jones: 08:51
See the people are everywhere, but really in true service of people and humanity, especially in the age of AI, that's going to be so important. One of the other pieces that I love so about the IRG philosophy is the concept, the Japanese philosophy of Ikigai, and how you relate it to marketing. How has that become part of the IRG?

Marc de Swaan Arons: 09:14
Fundamental. Yeah. Well, there's a so, the IRG's purpose is to increase CMO personal, business, and societal impact. Now, why we say that so sequentially, if you like, is that there's a fundamental belief there that we, as leaders, we spend most of our time, most of our wake time at least, at work or thinking about work. And of course, we have other things, hopefully, we have full lives.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 09:44
But somebody who says, look, I go to work, but then I do my good stuff through my daughter's hockey team where I'm the coach, look, that's admirable. But our conviction is that if you figured out what your personal purpose is, why you want to make a difference here, what difference it is that you want to make, you're able to bring that to work, and you're able to manifest that at work. And then you're able to, leverage the power of the organization. Everyone in this in this program is at a company of multiple billions. Most of them affect above a billion consumers worldwide.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 10:21
So, is an amplification effect. So, once you line up that personal, what you do at work, and what work does in the world, that's when you've got maximum impact. So that's what we're about, but it starts with that ikagai. So, the ikagai is a Japanese concept, I'm sure most of your listeners and viewers will know that. And it's about really aligning, you know, what I'm great at, what people are willing to pay me for, what the world needs, and looks really holistically at those dimensions.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 10:53
When people come into our program, I think probably 20% would be able to write in two lines what their purpose is. We're busy. Life changes, you know, there's some fundamental tenants to people's priorities and values. But, if you literally force them to write them down, mean, I'll speak on my own behalf, it's, you know, I often struggle. So, that's not a huge part of the program.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 11:19
It's probably about half a day where we ask people to step back, to look back, to reconnect with what's important to them, and to state as a working draft what their personal purpose is. We then use that IGI guide, this is a profile we developed with Spencer Stuart, to, then work into a profile called the da Vinci growth leader. And that starts with their purpose and then looks at their mindsets and their behaviors. So, how do they show up? Literally, how do they think about the struggles at work, but just as important at home, of course.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 11:56
And then literally, how do they behave towards their colleagues, towards other stakeholders? And that is probably throughout the program about 20 to 30% of the total focus. At every stage, we ask people to reconnect to that and say, now what you're doing in developing your humanized growth plan, how does that reconnect to what you said you want it to be from a purpose perspective and from a business behaviors perspective?

Laura Jones: 12:24
Wow. Yes. I can hear in the stories for all the people that I've met that go through the program just how transformational that piece of the program is. And it really serves as that connection that is so important, especially now. Where did that spark kind of illuminate that that was so important to marketers?

Laura Jones: 12:50
Did you notice that there was a barrier to a lot of people getting started with that? Is it I mean, time, of course, is always the barrier. But is there anything more deeply psychological that's holding people back?

Marc de Swaan Arons: 13:03
Look, I think, again, this is cultural. Before we started the Institute for Real Growth, we had a marketing consultancy. It was called Effective Brands. And we had that for almost fifteen years. And any meeting we started there, and every week we started and every global meeting we started, the first hour was about a personal connection.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 13:27
It's fundamental to who we are and how we believe we need to show up in the world. It's fundamental to believe that if people believe that they can be themselves, that they feel safe, that they feel seen, and that they feel listened to, that the organization is going to benefit tremendously. From an organizational commercial interest, when we finally sold our business after fifteen years and we had a huge party with all the team, and they'd very kindly made a book, I would say 80% of the book was about events that we had done together as a team, as humans. And of course, that showed up in the work. So, it's fundamental to who we are and what we believe works.

Laura Jones: 14:18
Yeah. That experiential piece of it is just really groundbreaking and something that a lot of people overlook. Do you have any personal practices that you take as part of your routine to keep it's a lot of emotional energy. I just you pour your entire self in. That's got to be kind of draining.

Laura Jones: 14:36
What builds you back up?

Marc de Swaan Arons: 14:38
Well, it's funny. You know, I'm an extrovert, but I sometimes doubt that because I really also use my personal time. I mean, take where we are now. Last night, there were almost a 100 people that I, you know, know a little bit, know through the screen, know from the kickoff meetings, care about, but of course I don't know them well. And then suddenly they're all there, and I want to be with all of them, so I spent the whole evening socializing.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 15:04
It's really the definition of but then I go to bed, and this morning I spent an hour and a half, I'd like to say I meditated, I didn't. I wanted to, but kind of did, because I sat in the sun, I looked out over the mountains, and I wasn't doing many other things, I was just centering. I mean, I manage my internal energy, and I observe it, and I respect when I feel drained, I don't judge that, I respect it and I give myself time to re-energize.

Laura Jones: 15:38
I love that. Just being present and being aware is, again, such great advice. So, let's look to the future. I know you have your latest study coming out, Humanized Growth in the Age of AI being unveiled here at Cannes. Exactly.

Laura Jones: 15:52
What are the top lines?

Marc de Swaan Arons: 15:53
Well, you know, it's so exciting because Google came to us last summer. It's exactly a year ago, and they said this humanized growth concept, we've heard you talk about it for a while now. We think it might be interesting to look at AI, which they're very interested in, of course, and they're talking to marketers about every day of the week, from that perspective. And I didn't need to think about it for a second. I thought, why didn't I think of that?

Marc de Swaan Arons: 16:18
So, we really enthusiastically agreed to collaborate. So, for the last year, we've interviewed probably, I don't know, about 30 CMOs, literally an hour, just talking about this. But then about 160 who are in the programs, because we have multiple programs, we also have a next level CMO program that we run for the ANA. It's called the marketing leadership program. And in all of those programs, we really ask people about, you know, there's so much buzz and there's so much fake news around AI.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 16:52
And so, we really said, what are you really doing? You know, what's the sort of show words that you need to tell people about? And what are you really doing? What's really working? And what are you excited about, what do you think really has legs.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 17:04
And finally, that's all within marketing and AI, but into the rest of the organization, are you playing a role and what role do you think you could play in helping the rest of the organization understand and adopt AI? So it was that, you know, we always try with IRG to be in that sort of facet of both within marketing, I draw the vertical of a T, and then with the rest of the organization, all the other disciplines. And it really was very special. Fundamentally, what you see in the bigger world is that AI has made such a progress from discovery at was it October 2023 that we all first started playing with it on our phone? I remember where I was sitting.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 17:45
And then '24 has really been a year of experimentation for everyone, including all marketers. But now in 2025, what we're seeing is that people have identified it as an opportunity. The picture we use to sort of to show the mindset and the approach of CMOs in 2024 was a hedgehog rolled up. There was a defensiveness, there was a fear. The fear not so much of AI taking my job, and so that's now actually beginning to permeate more deeply, but much more the fear of I'm going to be called out by my CFO, by my board, by my CEO, who's going to say, hey, so and so is doing this and this, why aren't we?

Marc de Swaan Arons: 18:28
Just like the early days of the internet. Why don't we have a website? Why don't we have a chatbot? And all of those things. And so CMOs were just worried that they weren't on top of things.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 18:38
Now, we see a sense of comfort and a sense of opportunity. So, that's the first. That's really where we are now. Secondly, it's about building capability. I mean, really, the people that have invested early in making their teams do a three-week program or a nine-week program, we correlate their answers to how fast the organization is growing.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 19:04
Two and a half times index, so two fifty to 49 to be precise, in terms of my team already have AI capability. That said, 93% say that their teams need more support, more training, and 81% say that about themselves. But the big, big reveal is around that humanized facet. What we see, one, is that the CMOs that approach this not as a marketing opportunity but as a business growth opportunity, they understand the business strategy impact, those are the ones that are over performing, but they're making it for themselves. They're humanizing it within the company and themselves.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 19:47
So, what we see is that over performing CMOs don't just use AI tools, for example, to increase their own professional effectiveness, they're actually using it for personal well-being. And very much more so than the CMOs that are underperforming. That correlates perfectly with what's happened in the real world with all people. And when it's in your own life, when you start to experience where it's useful and where it's worrying, and we can talk about that too, then you start to understand what is possible. And so, those CMOs, they're leading by example, by just bringing it into their own life.

Laura Jones: 20:30
Absolutely. And I think a great example of this was last night when were looking up something I forget, and you went and said, hey, Siri. Right? That's right. And it asked you, would you like to look this up?

Laura Jones: 20:42
Chat GPT. I mean, that integration right there just shows how present AI is in in all of our lives. And I'm really most excited about not what AI is going to help us do faster, better things we already know how to do, but what do we not even know is possible yet were it not for AI. So I know there's a lot of fear out there, but there's also just so much inspiration. And the marketers, the CMOs have always been the centers of innovation within their organization.

Laura Jones: 21:15
And in a way, how you described going across, that's really intersectional transformation. Any transformation, right, as we all well know, it's not about the technology, it's about the people.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 21:26
Which then brings back that humanized perspective. Now, bring a really good point. What we see is that they're doing all the things they have to do, but they also know that that's not going to win. It's just the new table stakes. I sometimes relate it to running from a bear.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 21:43
It doesn't matter that you're faster than the bear, it just matters that you're faster than all the other people running from the bear. That was kind of the mood last year. But now, indeed, people are beginning to see new opportunities, and we have a professor John Iwata from Yale here, former CMO of IBM Global, and he takes the stakeholder innovation perspective. So, he's combining two ideas that we think you and I think are important. Innovation on the one hand, and then two, having those stakeholder relationships as inspiration for that innovation, to create value for the organization and therefore for the stakeholders, including the financial ones.

Laura Jones: 22:23
Yeah, so if last year's image was a hedgehog all curled up, what do you think this year's image is?

Marc de Swaan Arons: 22:29
Well, I know because I had to choose one for my PowerPoint slide. It's really like a road with a sun at the back and a huge arrow forward. There is really a mood of now, let's figure out what we can make work and specific to us. So people are beginning to see that, you know, they can amplify those are the winners. They're the ones that find AI application that amplifies what makes them different as a brand.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 22:58
Think Audible, you know, you get book recommendations based on what you've read in the past, but also literally how much time you spend, whether you're pausing somewhere, whether you go back, they know all these things, and their recommendations are better and better. So, the winners are the ones that take the new technology, develop innovation that amplifies not cost efficiencies, but they have to do that, but the thing that makes them different, and that's the exciting part.

Laura Jones: 23:27
Absolutely. I love that image of the horizon going forward, which leads us to my last question, really, which is what's next on the docket for IRG?

Marc de Swaan Arons: 23:39
Well, we are actually going to announce a big study. I hope you're going to be part of it, which is marketing 02/1930. We actually did marketing 2020. Now I'm showing my age. And but that was a seminal study.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 23:55
I don't want to say for the market, I meant for me because it got chosen to be an HBR cover story and that really changed my life. Not only because our company suddenly got exposure, yeah, that was un-comparable to what we had done in the past. It led to the sale of our company, which that led to the, if you like, financial independence that allowed us to make the choice to create IRG because we are not for profit. We are totally independent. This is a passion project.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 24:28
I mean, we're not trying to make money here, we will get an income, but everybody is here because they really believe in the purpose of humanized growth. And so, now that AI is permeating every facet of marketing, we think it's a healthy moment to step back and say, what really are the megatrends and therefore the changed expectations of all stakeholders of business and of brands. And given that, what is the marketing strategy, structure and capability that's required to win? And what's the CMO leadership style required to actually help shepherd and build those capabilities into an organization? And, some of the questions are the same as ten years ago, because they're good, profound questions around what we do at work.
Marc de Swaan Arons: 25:22
The answers will all be different. And so we're kicking that off, we're doing that with a really broad coalition, we're calling it the Marketing two thousand thirty collective, And, we're really, we want to set the, if you like, the rules for marketing in the future, but we're not going to do it black box. We're not going to ask people questions and then come back one day and go, ta da, big reveal. We're going to literally, from day one, starting in September, the team is now being assembled. We're going to we're going to actually generate learning and then expose that, discuss it, iterate it, improve it, so everyone that's involved, whether you're an individual CMO or you're one of the challenger board members or one of the collective companies, you're going to be learning from day one.

Marc de Swaan Arons: 26:09
And that's very new, we haven't done that before. I find that really exciting. I'm going to learn a lot. But marketing 02/1930, what it's all about, and the humanized growth in the era of AI, was the opening salvo, if you like, of that study.

Laura Jones: 26:23
Amazing, amazing. That is just so exciting. I'm really looking forward to being part of that. And the collaborative way in which you're approaching that, that real time information sharing and the cooperation between all the stakeholders just really feels like the core of IRG. Yeah.

Laura Jones: 26:40
So well, we're time is about up. The lights are going up. I hear the music going on, so we're going to wrap up. But yeah. Absolutely.

Laura Jones: 26:48
I know you've got a big long weekend ahead of you, but, Mark, it's been such an honor to have you opinion party. You're such a visionary. You've made such a difference in my career and the careers of so many in the marketing community. So much gratitude for you and everything that the IRG is doing. So, No.

Laura Jones: 27:05
Thank you so much for coming. And if you liked what you heard in today's episode, you want to hear more, you can check out all about the IRG, some of the studies that Mark mentioned in the show notes, and thanks for joining the party.