Six weeks into the biggest marketing job at ANZ when she spoke to NZ Marketing, Astrud Burgess has hit the ground running in her new expanded role of Group Chief Marketing Officer in addition to her responsibilities leading Data, Marketing & Customer Experience in New Zealand. We caught up with her to find out what she’s looking forward to getting stuck into.
Video calling in from her high rise office looking out to a brilliantly sunny Auckland viaduct, Astrud Burgess looks quite at home. It’s a far cry from Kaikohe where she was born, or in fact Kiribati where she spent a lot of her childhood.
Starting out as a graduate working at ANZ, Astrud spent her early years working six weeks in a branch and six weeks processing loans and doing general banking work, and credits this time as giving her valuable insight into the workings of a bank – something she’s been able to draw from throughout her career in marketing.
Her new expanded role as Group CMO means she is responsible for overseeing a programme within
ANZ which involves growing the capability of marketers, through assessment, growth conversations
with their managers, identifying areas of growth, providing training, and monitoring progress.
Ultimately, Astrud’s job is to ensure that marketers across the bank have the necessary skills to perform their roles effectively, which she says is very important because “within the bank, marketers are responsible for growth in sales as well as the brand. So, you need your marketers to be extremely good at what they do in order that your marketing is effective”.
Despite having over 20 years’ experience with ANZ and a deep understanding of the workings of the organisation, Astrud says she sometimes still feels like the new kid on the block. However, she thrives on
a challenge.“I often counsel people that if a job doesn’t make you feel slightly terrified, then you haven’t pushed yourself enough.”
Her experience and role looking after ANZ’s data function in New Zealand has been very useful for understanding how data flows into marketing, and how that flows through the web and into digital advertising, she says. “I also now understand why it’s really hard to manufacture data widgets and why it takes time and why you need to be careful. So, I understand both sides of that the process of creating data driven marketing, which I think is useful.”
She adds that there’s not one right or wrong way to do marketing, which means there’s a real need for marketers to be very well trained, because they’re constantly required to make judgement calls. “The better our marketers are, the better our marketing will be, and the more effective we will be,” she says.
Over the course of her career, Astrud has learnt many valuable lessons, the most important one being how to talk to what the business values. “It’s very easy, as marketers, to be interested in the diagnostics. Did people remember the ad? Did they ascribe the right message to it? That’s great, and you need to be good at that. But when you are talking to the CFO or the CEO, they want to know how is marketing driving growth? How are you solving a problem that I have? The key thing I’ve learned is not to talk about the craft, but to talk about the outcomes.”
Something she wishes more marketers had is a deeper understanding of their business and the economics of their business, as well as the overall economy.
This understanding of wider economic trends was a key factor when creating ANZ’s recent ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’ campaign via TBWA\NZ, that included The Clash’s iconic song by the same name.
“That directly acknowledged that people are concerned. They’re wondering what to do and they were looking for good information. So, we spoke to how the consumer was feeling.”
And this didn’t stop at the campaign. “We did a lot of work with the frontline so that they would have really good conversations. And overwhelmingly the feedback was that people who spoke to the frontline had greater financial wellbeing.”
Her personal goal for her new role is to be in service to the other marketing heads in the group, and she measures her success by whether she makes her colleagues’ jobs easier.
“If I help you to have really well-trained marketers, and if I help you to have really coherent measurement frameworks that are well accepted by senior leadership, if I provide the clear brand strategy and guidelines that are easy to work with, then I have done my job well.”
Clearly whatever she is doing is working, as she was recently named Effective Marketer of the Year at the 2023 Aotearoa Effie Awards in October which she says is recognition that “the work our teams (ANZ, TBWA, PHD) do is effective in driving growth”.
“It is really rewarding when we see successful marketing driving great customer outcomes, such as when we championed the Good Energy Home Loan which helped our customers take action for ‘The planet and the pocket’ and Mr Humfreez who shone a light on New Zealand’s need to make our homes warmer and dryer.”
Another of her goals is to be a sounding board for the work or any marketing problem. “I just love marketing. I love marketing problems. The gnarlier the better,” she says with a smile. “When somebody brings me a really interesting marketing problem, I might not have the answer, but I might know three good questions, and there’s nothing I would rather do than talk about it. I just really want to help ANZ to be better at marketing.”
This article was first published in our December/January 2023/2024 issue.
