Morley rides out

Andy Morley has a few days left at Uber. In a fast turn of events, Morley and his boss, global CMO Lucinda Barlow, announced this week to Uber’s marketing teams he was stepping down. Barlow will provide cover as interim APAC CMO while the search begins for Morley’s  replacement, one he hoped would go to an internal candidate. 

For Morley, who ranked sixth in Mi3’s CMO Awards this year, the decision was fast after considering where and what he wants to do with his next ten years as a career marketer. He’ll take the coming few months to be “really cautious” about what his next move is but will likely be a firm in its growth and scale-up phase. A big, established company with a set playbook is not on the wish list. “There’s no way that I’d be interested in going into a big bank type job,” he told Mi3.

Morley credits his time at Diageo until 2015 and earlier at Arnott’s as core to shaping his marketing approach, particularly in brand, strategy and consumer insights – skills he’s worried are being lost today because of the complexity and expectation of younger marketers to be savvy in execution, tactics and channels.

Personally, he wants to join a “scrappy” company like Uber was when he started in 2016 as head of insights, strategy and driver marketing.

“I’ve loved all of the phases of Uber – I think the growth, scale up phase is actually the bit that I love the most,” he said. “So finding a product or brand that’s ready to kind of accelerate at a significant pace over a short period is probably where I enjoy it – the building side.

“There’s still a degree of that at Uber, compared to other companies, but it is much more of a mature company now, and a mature global company. When I joined it was very scrappy. The first year or so was  just putting the real basic foundations in place. The last probably two years we’ve operated in much more of a mature sense.”

Morley said he “loved the innovation that you can drive” during growth and start-up phases – “when you don’t have a set playbook that everyone is well embedded with and you’re just trying to tweak the edges of it”. 

Risk-reward balance sought

Morley likes the “really big swings and big risks” in driving growth.

Diageo during his tenure was like that. “It didn’t feel like an organised FMCG business. It still felt like more of an independent, focused business that had such a big on-premise trade selling to bars and clubs, all the local bottle shops were small, so it operated more like a privately owned business.” Then when Woolworths and Coles started moving on the industry seriously, buying up and consolidating retailers and venues, “it just became a much more, very forward, planned kind of operation”.

More broadly, Morley said at a senior level marketing in the past year had got some more momentum inside organisations. “There’s been a bit of a shift back into having more senior marketers at the executive table again,” he said. “I also think there’s been a bit of a shift from a performance marketing focus into the disciplines of brand marketing. So I feel like the there’s been a positive swing back in the last 12 months.”

Next generation marketers challenged

Still, there were gaps in his observation for the next generation of marketers. 

“Yeah, it’s a tough one because I think the junior marketers coming through are expected to understand how to execute marketing brilliantly across a huge amount of different and complex channels and in really different kinds of modern ways of marketing, which probably need to have different approaches for older audiences and younger audiences,” he said.

“What’s happening is, potentially because there’s this big ask to become highly capable at the added complexity of executing now, there’s not the space given to really embed the traditional disciplines of how to think through customer-led marketing and be really insights driven. That’s something that I’ve been really focused on the last couple of years at Uber – I’ve been leading a Marketing Academy program internally, globally, to work out how do we make sure that we embed those fundamentals into all of the teams so that they don’t just get credit executing campaigns but they actually understand consumers and categories at a deep level.”

Execution over-emphasised

Because execution is more complex than it’s ever been, Morley said “there’s a risk that people have to get really good at that, particularly the entry level marketing jobs” and they look at the world “through a lens of execution, rather than looking at the world through a lens of making a market and understanding categories and consumers”. 

Morley said the Uber team was in a “great place” on that front but the broader market is struggling with building marketer skills beyond tactics.

“It wasn’t like that when I started in marketing 20 years ago – where you had drilled into you by Susan Massasso and the team at Arnott’s at the time around how to understand consumers and categories and have really deep levels of understanding so then you could come up with strategies that were going to help grow the business. I think it’s just about having deep curiosity and empathy for consumers – and the more that they lean into that the more that they understand how their category and their brands show up.”

For now though, Morley is headed north. “We do an annual camper van trip, we’re going to Queensland with four other families, all hiring RVs and doing a whole bunch of stuff.”