EY’s CMO Wants Brands To “Be Confident” Because “Bravery Is Just Taking A Punt”

“When it comes to ideas, I've always heard the term ‘be brave’ – I would say be confident. Because if you're confident it means you are calculating based on your best intentions that I'm going to bring the right ideas and it's going to work,” says John Rudaizky, global brand and marketing leader at professional services network EY. “Bravery is just taking a punt.”

Confidence is also what John expects from EY’s agencies.

“Confidence is making sure people feel and believe in the work, from the agency side to the client side. There's a degree to which you have to trust the people around you, because it's not pure science.”

Speaking to LBB AUNZ managing editor Brittney Rigby in an interview during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, he praised the state of both B2B creativity as well as B2C creativity at the festival, saying “I don't think [they] should be separated.”

Whilst “the tactics are slightly different, you're using different tactics to get to the audience,” John says whether you’re working in B2B or B2C, one of the core principals of EY’s brand strategy is the belief “EY is human to human.”

For B2B marketing in particular, John is pushing EY to lean into the emotion of an interaction – “If you're making a decision about who to bring in to help you deliver something of substance, it's an emotive decision,” he says.

“You need to pack it with the rational like anything else, and you need to understand rationally what you're buying. But you've got to buy confidence, and confidence is emotive, hence our positioning ‘Shape Your Future With Confidence’. It's a wrapping which is ripe for this moment in history, where none of us quite know where the world will go. We say ‘shape the future, don't be shaped by it.’

“It all stems from an emotion, and then you have to back it up rationally.”

Earlier this month, the brand launched EY Studio+, combining 37 specialist acquisitions with organically grown EY businesses. Made up of design, sales, marketing, and customer experience technology expertise from EY-acquired agencies, and powered by AI, EY Studio+ aims to help organisations drive growth by reimagining customer experience.

Already, the tool is being used to help businesses build empathy with their customers, support B2B growth, and make front office operations more efficient and effective.

“Most organisations are transforming in some capacity. AI is going to accelerate that, no doubt,” John says.

As the ways that people communicate changes, John says “the two things that excite me are social content and influencer marketing, and then at the other end, what can we imagine through the potential of AI.”

“The rise of influences has been a big conversation, the way many of us have grown up creating content has changed. Authentic conversations can be just as valuable as high end glossy film. I still believe in organising ideas, I still believe that has a role, but so do powerful authentic one to one conversations through social marketing.

“There are some things around AI that will concern all of us as human beings. Equally, if you look at the upside of it, we're sitting on the verge of infinite new creativity. How you lean in and harness that is the question.”

EY held an event with photographer Rankin during Cannes, with one of the discussion points  being Rankin’s creation of a magazine, ‘Prompt’, using AI. 

Reflecting on that discussion, John says, “as everyone gets more of the tools, everyone's got the ability to be average. Therefore, actually, you start to get into the business of saying, how do you create distinctive work? That's where someone like Rankin or other leaders are going to embed new ways of creating creative work with AI.”

EY introduced the ‘Shape Your Future With Confidence’ brand positioning in January alongside the release of the ‘Generations’ film. In the months since, John says the positioning has “inspired our people” and “all the data points are working in the right direction.”

“Engagement in the films, we tested with Ipsos, they’re testing really well. All indicators are early days, measuring brand metrics take time, but all of the leading metrics, you'd say, are working well.

“From all of the brand research, distinctiveness drives consideration, so it's simple in that way.”

Distinctiveness is what the global EY team strives for, with John describing the marketing cohort as “very collaborative and thinking for the future.”

“Within that, I would say we have a guiding principle – we're purpose driven, so that sets a certain framework. We want to be the most distinctive professional service in the world, and therefore we have a framework for making sure all our teams think, ‘how do I show up in a distinctive way?’”

Reflecting on what it means to be a brand, John recalls a definition from the CEO of a client: “A brand is what a brand does, not what it says it does.”

With this in mind, he adds the reason distinctiveness and the ‘Shape Your Future With Confidence’ brand positioning is resonating with EY employees and clients is simply because “it’s what we do”. 

“It's not adding some layer, it's basically saying, we bring in a full spectrum of teams depending on the issue, and we'll shape the future. We ask the big question they’re trying to solve, and then we solve it together with them.”