- James Whitemore, the chief marketing officer at Indeed, was interviewed for Business Insider’s CMO Insider series.
- Since our conversation, Indeed has launched a new brand campaign called “Jobs Need People.”
- Whitemore spoke about AI in marketing, the importance of fandom, and his own career move from sales to marketing.
Produced with creative agency 72andSunny, the campaign features warm images of workers in a wide range of job functions engaging with customers and colleagues. Indeed’s message is focused on its AI-powered matching tools that it says help people and companies find each other.
“Jobs Need People” is a reminder that while AI can streamline the process, hiring must always remain fundamentally human,” wrote the company’s chief marketing officer, James Whitemore, in a blog post announcing the new creative.
Whitemore recorded a video interview with Business Insider when the campaign was still under wraps. He spoke then about the balance between the tech and the human — about how his marketing team is unlocking the benefits of AI for refining and tailoring content for its audiences, and arming the sales teams with AI tools to help strategize deals.
“I want my team to be able to be fluent in AI, to have the right skills they need for AI, and help them build their career as a digital AI-savvy marketer,” he said.
Whitemore also talked about the power of fandom across the brand’s sports partnerships. Soon, as part of the company’s broader initiative, Indeed and FOX Sports will announce the winner of its job search for the FIFA Men’s World Cup Watcher, a real employee who will earn a $50,000 salary to watch every game from a cube in New York’s Times Square.
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
There are really three areas I’m focused on right now in artificial intelligence for marketing. First, it’s about helping us refine our audiences, tailor our content for those audiences, and use our media and campaign dollars as effectively as possible.
We serve hundreds of millions of people across multiple countries and multiple industry segments. The more targeted I can get, the better: using AI to take our first-party data, along with the first-party data from our partners and our media companies, and really building hyper-targeted audiences is the first objective.
The second is to strengthen the relationship between sales and marketing. We’re giving our selling teams AI tools that allow them to understand what types of engagements their customers are having with marketing, content, and programs — and suggest next actions for them, and follow-ups for them in response to that. It really changes the whole concept of what a lead is, to become real-time signals and alerts.
The third area I feel very strongly about is helping the marketing teams develop their own AI skills. Marketing is one of the professions that is being impacted most significantly by AI, and I want my team to be able to be fluent in AI, to have the right skills they need, and help them build their career as a digital AI-savvy marketer.
Fandoms as the FIFA World Cup approaches
The concept of a fandom is something I’m very passionate about. Fandoms exist across sports, across entertainment, and in many other areas. Basically, it’s a community of like-minded people who are very passionate about a specific topic. And those audiences have a very high propensity to engage with content and share content and generate content themselves. The ability to tap into those fandoms is core to the way I think as a CMO.
The partnerships that we have with F1 are really interesting. F1 taps into billions of people in the fandom. In Premier League soccer, the partnerships that we have with teams like Brentford FC and FC Utrecht and Eintracht Frankfurt will become a lot bigger this summer with the World Cup in the U.S.
We also announced some very interesting partnerships with FOX Sports, where we will be hiring their official FIFA World Cup viewer for the entire duration of the tournament.
Pivoting a career in sales to marketing
I started my career in sales. I got into marketing because I was always the mouthy, pushy salesperson who was telling the marketing teams that I didn’t like their content, that it wasn’t working, that it wasn’t resonating with customers.
Eventually, when I was working with IBM, somebody said, “Well, if you’re so good at marketing, you should come work in marketing.” So I went and joined the product marketing team at IBM.
When I look back at that, I think I should have been more confident in my ability to tell a story and translate complex technologies into something that resonates with the people that you are actually talking to — especially customers who may not be technologists. It took me quite some time to believe in myself and my ability to tell those stories.
