Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar is “shocked” at how slow the marketing industry has been to shift from traditional advertising to experiential marketing.
Rajamannar has been at the forefront of shifting Mastercard’s marketing budget away from advertising, estimating that 70% of its budget has “pivoted” away from traditional methods. He has instead put that into experiential marketing to bring customers into “immersive experiences that money cannot buy” and that you can only get with Mastercard.
“It leaves you with an incredible, positive experience that you associate uniquely with the brand,” he tells Marketing Week.
Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar is “shocked” at how slow the marketing industry has been to shift from traditional advertising to experiential marketing.
Rajamannar has been at the forefront of shifting Mastercard’s marketing budget away from advertising, estimating that 70% of its budget has “pivoted” away from traditional methods. He has instead put that into experiential marketing to bring customers into “immersive experiences that money cannot buy” and that you can only get with Mastercard.
“It leaves you with an incredible, positive experience that you associate uniquely with the brand,” he tells Marketing Week.
Praising this “new” way of marketing, Rajamannar claims it has been “very effective” for the brand, helping it become the 12th most valuable brand in the world, according to Kantar’s BrandZ ranking. The pivot meant that the brand had to “rethink” every element of its marketing value chain and each component that went into its marketing efforts – something that was a “tectonic” change for the brand but one he is confident has set it up for the future.
While Mastercard has been on this journey for the better part of a decade, the rest of the industry is not necessarily in the same place. Rajamannar says it surprises him that so many brands have stuck true to the methods of marketing that have always worked for them, perhaps with the exception of an increase in influencer marketing.
“I’m very shocked because I know for a fact that advertising is not working the way it used to in the past,” he says, adding that the average consumer is being “bombarded” by anywhere between 3,000 and 10,000 ads every single day, something that the human brain “cannot process” and so it tunes out.
“Even if you do stand out and do everything right, it’s still not easy to cut through the clutter, especially as the human span of attention is shrinking to less than eight seconds. I would have expected companies to have reinvented their approach towards advertising. I’m shocked at how slow it is.”
‘Profound implications for the industry’: Mastercard’s CMO on marketing’s agentic AI future
Experiential marketing also keeps marketers in touch with consumers in a way that can be a challenge in an increasingly data-led industry. While data in the past used to be proprietary, companies can now source “credible” data from many different sources.
“Data is not going to be an advantage and everything is going to be very similar,” says Rajamannar. “The differentiation will only happen when you bring in that element of empathy.”
Marketing, then, even in an age of increasing AI technologies, is becoming more and more about the human-to-human connection, he believes. “I need to understand your fears, your aspirations, your apprehensions, your constraints, your capabilities. I need to know you in totality while still respecting your privacy,” he adds.
The future of work
Rajamannar is also focused on the “existential question” of how junior marketers will make their way into the industry when the bottom rung of jobs is taken over by AI.
He acknowledges that marketers “have to learn somewhere” before they reach middle and top level jobs, or “we will not get future talent” coming into the industry. This is a challenge compounded by the “significant” number of job losses the industry will need to deal with. There will be a lot of marketers competing for far fewer jobs.
There is no easy answer to this problem. Rajamannar wants to see businesses commit to keeping people in roles but realises the productivity boon offered by AI might make it an expense that most are not interested in. He does believe there is a solution to ensuring junior marketers can gain experience before entering the workplace – and it comes from upending the curriculum.
“We try to collaborate with universities and encourage our people to go out and talk to professors to help change the curriculum,” he explains. “Because a lot of the things that a young marketer learns in his or her first job, they could actually learn in university, and then they would come in with a certain level of knowledge.”
‘Strategic thinking doesn’t change’: Are marketing degrees fit for purpose?Rajamannar recalls how through working with universities he has seen how courses can be set up in a way that overprepares young talent for aspects of the role they will never need. You’re teaching students a hundred things, he says, but 98 of them they will never revisit in their careers.
Instead, with the smaller attention span of people and the “impatience” of younger generations, he believes that an MBA programme could be for six months rather than multiple years.
“If you want a marketing MBA, give them a quantum marketing MBA, do a programme in six months that is highly, highly pragmatic,” he says. “You get an understanding of the theory, but you are trained to be a marketing practitioner, not a marketing researcher. If you are a marketing researcher, you should be put in a different stream.”
Ultimately, while the challenges of an AI future will have an impact on how younger people come into the industry, he doesn’t see any other choice but for the fundamental training to shift to qualifications while businesses take on more specialist training.
“Companies will still have to do their own training because marketing in one company might be totally different than marketing in my company,” he says. “If I’m taking trainees, then it’s my responsibility they understand the Mastercard way of doing marketing.”
