👋 Hey, it’s Sundar! Welcome to another 🔒 subscriber-only 🔒 article of experiMENTAL: my newsletter helping Marketers navigate the CRAZY world of consumer tech with secrets from 14+ years at Uber & others.

I started as an analyst at Uber for the DC, Maryland, and Virginia team. Back then, I was one of the few analysts that analyzed the demand or rider side of the business. Everyone else was a Driver Operations Manager. I then moved to lead Performance Marketing Analytics for US / Canada and eventually led International Growth Marketing Analytics (now called Data Science) and built Uber’s Brand Data Science team. I’ve been lucky enough to see Uber’s entire Marketing funnel. Throughout my 5 years, there was one consistent theme:

The tech was good. The mission was better. The people were best.

It’s been over 3 years since I left, but I finally decided to reflect and write down the biggest lessons I observed watching alongside 100+ of the world’s best Marketers. I can’t promise everything will work for you, but I hope you can take some of these lessons and apply to yourself, team, and organization.

Surround yourself with genius to create it

The image above has nothing to do with marketing. It talks about the startups that the alum from Uber have created, but, you can extract how the same thing applies to the marketing team at Uber.

Marketers came from legendary companies like Nike, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Facebook. and are now Marketing leaders at Apple, Instacart, Netflix, Booking, Meta, Google, and more.

In order to create genius you have to surround yourself with it.

How did Uber find genius?

• Filter: The interview process was a gauntlet. It involved a series of interviews, case studies, more panels, and on and on. Nowdays that process would show up on LinkedIn with 100 people complaining about how difficult it is. But, it worked.

• Test: Uber threw Marketers into a crucible. Marketers were always competing with Ops and Product teams for resources and had to navigate a complex political environment where most PnL owners thought Marketing was a costly line item. This made the cream rise to the top.

• Reward: I see a lot of job postings now for Marketing roles where the salary is just appalling. “You must be an expert in understanding customers, crafting compelling stories, building beautiful creatives, and analytically savvy. Salary: $20 bucks”. Uber took the opposite approach.

⮑ Winners aren't taught to win

A sublearning here but the most successful Marketers just had an aura to them. They may have been taught how to communicate, analyze, and create briefs but they weren’t taught how to win. They have an innate drive that made them win.

Start with insights and build forward

Focusing and aligning on a customer insight is the single most important step in making a marketing brief. It’s why you see some campaigns that spend millions flop while some campaigns that seem so simple skyrocket. For years, Uber’s best performing Performance Marketing Ad simply said “Push a button, get a ride”

It highlights and addresses the pain point of having to flag down, call, locate, and hail a cab. It also indirectly addresses a Reason To Buy: convenience. But it all started with an insight which is that the customers love the CONVENIENCE Uber provided and so the ad naturally did well.

Garbage in → Garbage out applies to everything

Garbage in → Garbage out is the most famous phrase in the Data world. However, it extends beyond Data and is very true in Marketing.

If the inputs are crappy, the output will be too. Here are a few examples:

1. Garbage brief → Garbage creative

2. Garbage context → Garbage analysis

3. Garbage strategy → Garbage campaign

There are no amount of budgets, people, or channels that could save us when the input was bad.

To change this, we would spend extra time on the input. We would sometimes talk about a brief ad nauseam, but in the end it would pay off.

Failure is acceptable. Mediocrity is not.

This is the most important lesson I learned. We were expected to fail. We were actually encouraged to fail. Because the frontier of failure is also the frontier of the exceptional. It’s a beautiful place to live because every so often you get a breakthrough that makes it all worth it.

Mediocrity is the opposite. You will NEVER find a breakthrough in mediocrity. Ask any athlete if they’d rather:

1. Leave everything on the field and lose

2. Play like meh and lose

Every athlete will choose option 1. Your effort doesn’t always dictate the result but it’s impossible to win without it.

Never accept mediocrity.

Consistency AND Quality not OR

This is one of my favorite Nike commercials of all time and it’s from 1997. It ends with MJ saying “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that’s why I succeed”. Goosebumps. The reason Nike is remembered is quality + consistency. 27 years later, they are still crushing the Marketing game. But, which is more important?

The answer is that it must be both.

Consistency AND Quality.

If you take the extreme example, no one remembers a company that only had 1 great ad. Also, no one remembers a company that has a series of crappy ads.

The goal of marketing is to create quality and consistency. That must be the objective of your Marketing team and the way you measure the success of your marketing team. You have to create an engine that creates quality but in a formulaic way that you can do it consistently.

Proving ROI is the great equalizer

The Marketing version of this is “Everybody thinks their campaign is great until they run an incrementality test”. Yes, It’s definitely not as catchy as Iron Mike’s quote, but the point is that proving ROI is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter how good you think the idea is. It doesn’t even matter if you use insights to create it. All that matters is what happens when your campaign runs and you can prove ROI.

It’s the single greatest equalizing force.

⮑ Measurement is part of strategy

A sub learning here is that measurement needs to be a part of strategy. If you’re running a national TV campaign, you will likely never be able to prove ROI. There’s no opportunity to create a control group. That’s okay. That’s a strategic decision to not measure. What’s not strategic is deciding to run a national TV campaign and then asking data science teams to prove ROI. That never works.

The teams that make conscious decisions and tradeoffs between measurement and impact are who optimize campaigns, unlock budgets, and make more impact.

The process is the beauty

Every marketing team f*cks up. It’s inevitable. It’s impossible to think of all the ways in which you can offend someone. Or maybe the creative just flopped.

The real introspection comes when you ask yourself “How can we get better? “ The beauty of world class marketing teams is the process they use to create great. I’ve been in the room where our VPs of Marketing have instantly shot down ideas because it didn’t have the right insights and heuristics. I’ve also been in the room where the VP of Marketing shuts it down for a totally arbitrary reason.

The former creates the perception of a respected leader who wants to make everyone better. The latter creates the perception of a leader with a ton of ego.

All of it is about the process.

⮑ Breaking silos is a part of the job

Another sub learning here is that breaking silos is part of the job. Our job is to deeply understand customer pain points and then position our business in a way that makes the customer choose us and spend with us.

To do that, you need to understand why your Product is better and why your Operations is better and why your Customer Service is better. Often the customer insights themselves might sit in another team. The best Marketers would break through these silos and somehow be ahead of information before it came out. They’d be proactive and create a network of information that made them better.

Ego is bad, good, and great

Within any company, there are 3 levels that effect your work.

You as an individual.

Your immediate team.

Your broader organization (eg. all of Marketing).

While ego gets a bad rep, it can also be a powerful engine. Depending on the situation, ego can be a good thing.

When things are going well, you don’t want an individual to have an ego. But the Team and Organization should. They need that big of swagger. Team and Org Ego is what attracts more talent and creates a flywheel.

On the flip side, when things are going poorly, you want individual ego. I don’t mean ego in “It’s totally not my fault things aren’t going well”. You want the person that says “Let’s get this. We can do this. We can conquer the world”. You want that individual to have an ego and uplift the rest of the team.

Takeaways

That’s it for this week, friends! Some key takeaways:

• Surround yourself with genius to create it

• Failure is acceptable. Mediocrity is not.

• Winners aren't taught to win

• Ego is bad, good, and great

• You can’t refute proven ROI

• Garbage in → Garbage out

• The process is the beauty

• Consistency AND quality

• 1st insights then build

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Missed the last newsletter?

Check it out: Unpacking MAU and the MAUse trap