Westpac chief marketing officer Sarah Williams. Photo / Dean Purcell
One of New Zealand’s most respected marketing executives on moving from our biggest telco to a major bank, tapping into younger customers through their love of horror, and how the principles of a classic children’s book have helped her overcome hurdles.
She’s worked for some of the biggest names in adland, our biggest telco, and - now - one of our major banks. But Westpac chief marketing officer Sarah Williams heard salient advice last year from the fast-food industry, and specifically those in charge of the Golden Arches.
McDonald’s - a brand built on advertising - did a rather weird thing in its not-too-distant past. The burger giant axed the role of global chief marketing officer in 2019 - they were clearly not “lovin’ it” - and introduced two slightly lower-tier roles. Within a year, the position was reinstated at the executive table as McDonald’s scrambled to recover from the early impact of Covid.
Marketers are very skilled at selling their company’s purpose or product; one of their biggest challenges is often selling their own role - and explaining why marketing investment is so crucial.
There are many examples of chief marketing officers butting heads with chief financial officers - the simplistic cliche is that one is generally focused on building and retaining customers; the other on reducing costs.
Often, marketing can be viewed as a variable cost line.
Williams says marketers have a responsibility to ensure they’re on the same spreadsheet as the accountants.
“Different organisations are at different maturity levels, I think,” says Williams, when asked about the relationship, generally, between CFOs and CMOs.
“Marketers need to be better at making sure that conversation is being held in a more data-driven kind of way. It’s not enough to say we feel like we need to be spending more on our brand. We need to have that conversation in a much more commercial way.”
Williams was at the Cannes Lions advertising conference in 2024 to hear how McDonald’s CMO - the role that was eventually reinstated in 2020 - worked closely with the CFO. The McDonald’s execs were side-by-side on stage.
“They were talking about the language they’ve had to create in order to unlock marketing,” says Williams.
“If you think about it, it’s like we talk different languages. We need, as marketers, to start talking a little bit in the commercial way that the CFO does. If we can, then I think that bodes well for how we invest in these things in the future.”
She says that means marketers interpreting and understanding customer data and disseminating the results of marketing campaigns.
“They’ve got to understand what they’re seeing and be able to actually articulate and interpret it back to the business as well. It’s not enough to have just the vanity metrics going up by 1000%. What does that mean for the business?”
But she also talks about the critical role that marketers play.
“We definitely need to be seen as a growth engine and not a cost line.”
Williams’ CV reads like a marketer’s hall of fame - before Westpac, she spent nine years at Spark, including as brand and experience boss, and before that, inside some of the advertising industry’s biggest agencies, including DDB, TBWA, Saatchi & Saatchi and Colenso.
So moving from the creative advertising sector to a telco and now to a bank definitely qualifies as a big career switch, especially considering the highly regulated conditions that the financial institution lives under.
That might not always be easy when you’re the marketer.
“It’s certainly got a lot of scrutiny on it,” says Williams.
But, she says, regulation and red tape are there “to keep us safe and to do the right thing by customers”.
“If you approach it with that kind of philosophy, I don’t see any of those things being an issue. You work within the system - it’s an attitude thing.”
Williams says she loves the role. She’s inherited a “fantastic team” and is working alongside executives who are ambitious and “open to doing things differently”.
“That’s the one thing that I would say has been just such an unlock for us. They’re saying, ‘Well in order to look different to the way that we have in previous years, we’ve got to do things differently. We’ve got to show up differently’.
“Open that door, and I will step through it.”
According to recent Reserve Bank data, Westpac’s share of the mortgage market is now at 18.4% - compared with ANZ (29.7%), ASB (20.9%), BNZ (16.7%) and Kiwibank (7.8%).
So Westpac remains in third slot but has been slipping back in recent years.
“It isn’t a real surprise that Westpac has recently tended to be the most rate-competitive,” reported interest.co.nz’s David Chaston in August. “They have work to do to turn the trend around, and they seem to be taking the challenge seriously. But just like the losses, gains will only come slowly.”
Generally speaking, New Zealanders seem rusted on to their bank after a certain age, and certainly once they secure a mortgage.
“There is definitely an element of that,” says Williams.
“That younger audience is easier to shift and are more open to shifting than potentially what an older audience is. Think about yourself and your life - once you get a few more complicated factors in there, it becomes a bigger thing to do. The ones that are more open to potentially being persuaded are the younger audience.”
She says there’s been a lot of introspection at Westpac, “a lot of work going on internally to really make sure that we’re foundationally in a great place. And I think I’ve just joined at the right time, if I’m honest”.
“We’re ready to put our head up again and lean into the market, which is exciting... really exciting.”
Westpac’s marketing has been noticeable in recent weeks and over the past 12 months generally - Williams talks of the challenge of talking to an 18-year-old about finance as opposed to even a 40-year-old.
“They’re quite different things. And the way in which you approach them, the way in which you engage them, the places that you’ll find them are radically different.
“So this idea of mass segmentation, that has these wild differences from the start to the end, is something that we really need to face into if we want to make a meaningful shift.”
Ten days ago, Westpac hosted the “House of Credit Card Fears” in central Auckland - a haunted house activation that played upon 18-29-year-olds’ love of horror (think how much Gen-Zers love shows such as Stranger Things and Wednesday) while trying to explain and ease credit fears.
It was a fun, literal horror show, masterminded with the help of the Spookers theme park team.
Late last year, just as Williams arrived, Westpac targeted a similar age group with its Black Friday Hangover campaign - raising awareness of the dangers of overspending during the big sales weekend, and a range of tools to help them.
“That was very much what you’d describe as more of a ‘consideration’ piece of work, not necessarily a ‘conversion’ piece of work,” says Williams.
“But we got good conversion off the back of it, which just goes to show that if you actually talk to people in an emotionally resonant way and in a culturally relevant way... then it does translate. But you’ve got to be able to turn around and show that.”
Williams talks about the discipline needed in any business for a marketing focus.
“[You need to be] very clear about the audiences that you want, because you can’t just say we want everyone, in every region and every demographic and expect to do that successfully.
“It does require real discipline in the business, and for marketers to be quite confident about being able to ask the business, what is the priority?
“This is applicable to any business that I think I’ve ever worked in, but you need to learn to count past one. If everything’s a one in priority, we’re not prioritising effectively.
“We got a few different segments [at Westpac] - we’re doing a lot of validation into what segments are the important ones to go after. For me, coming into the business quite fresh, I think that 18 to 29 segment is critical.
“Westpac has got a really strong audience but the 18- to 29-year-olds, if we don’t nurture those guys on the way through and introduce ourselves to them in a way that makes sense, then that’s your future. That is literally your future business.”
Williams, a mother of two teenagers, cites a popular children’s book when she contemplates her role and the challenges she sometimes faces.
We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, first published in 1989, talks all about overcoming hurdles - long, wavy grass; a deep, cold river; thick, oozy mud - to find the beast.
“That’s kind of been my approach, I think, to marketing in general and certainly coming into Westpac. It talks to problem-solving - there will always be things that come up in front of you.
“If you approach that as, ‘how do we turn that problem around?’, generally speaking, you can find your way through most things.”
Perhaps Westpac is best known - in a marketing sense - for its long-running partnership with rescue helicopter services. In Auckland, the Westpac rescue helicopter has been flying for 43 years.
Williams says the partnership will continue well into the future. “When you’re out there on the street and you’re fundraising, you’d be amazed at how many people have had personal experience with it. It’s a really meaningful thing.”
The creativity skills of Saatchi & Saatchi and Williams and her team were on full display in May as the sound of the rescue chopper interrupted Toyota, Lotto NZ, Spark, Chorus, Z Energy, and Turners’ video ads, in a coordinated marketing campaign that involved a lot of collaboration.
The chopper blades also interrupted the live Lotto draw on TV.
“There was complexity in it, but I’ve always believed that if something’s not easy, it’s probably worth doing,” says Williams.
“That’s been a philosophy of mine from when I first started, and it’s always put me in good stead. But yes, that piece of work was phenomenal.”
Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand’s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME including Managing Editor, NZ Herald Editor and Herald on Sunday Editor and has a small shareholding in NZME.