Episode 212 / Thiago Gomes / Meta / Product Marketing Lead - EMEA
Why Embracing Diversity Is Good for Business
Thiago Gomes is the Product Marketing Lead for EMEA at Meta. Having started his career with Facebook/Meta among the first batch of Latin American hires, he’s accumulated experience working within the company’s US and European markets and experienced the benefits of a pro-diversity approach. This is why diversity is his shiny new object - a driver of innovation and opportunity.
Diverse hiring practices don’t just benefit the people getting hired - they broaden a company’s perspective and can be the engine behind better customer understanding, more innovative and creative work, and better marketing. At an uncertain time for diversity and inclusion, Thiago advocates for not cutting budgets when it comes to investing in this aspect of an organisation. It will improve the company’s performance and prove to be a wise long-term investment, rather than a cost.
Thiago sees the impact of the recession and of financial pressures on many companies’ hiring practices. Diversity may be one of the first areas where budgets are cut when money is tight. Combining this with the difficulty of people from diverse backgrounds to get access to the right opportunities makes it more important than ever to keep investing in diversity.
Instead of reducing efforts in this area, companies should keep pushing despite the economic climate. Diverse teams perform better - according to research by the UN, diverse organisations outperform individuals in decision-making by almost 90%. Thiago also shared data showing that diversity boosts productivity. So, the benefits are quite tangible for those who choose to keep investing.
How can companies get started with diversity? Thiago advises to begin with an acknowledgement of the diverse world we live in and the varied backgrounds of people who may join your organisation. Then, stop seeing diversity as a cost and focus on its benefits as an investment. Finally, he thinks leading by example is key for amplifying the effects of diversity - the more you can see yourself represented, the better you will feel as an employee and as an individual.
However, it’s not all smooth sailing. Listen to Thiago’s advice for avoiding the worst diversity-related mistakes, as well as to more of his top marketing tips,, on the latest episode here.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Thiago Gomes 0:00
Start with a why. We are always trying to exercise this muscle, muscle of the action and going for the action going directly for what is the outcome. But contextualizing, having our direction connected to a business reason is something that takes some exercise.
Tom Ollerton 0:43
Hello, and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative and this is a weekly podcast about the future of the advertising and marketing industry. I get to interview someone who's bright senior, clever, influential, and this week is no different. I'm on a call with Thiago Gomes, who's product marketing lead, EMEA at Meta. Thiago, for anyone who doesn't know who you are. And what you do. Could you give the audience a bit of background?
Thiago Gomes 1:46
Alright, Tom, how are you? Very nice to be here. Thank you very much for the invite. So my name is Thiago. As you probably can hear from the accent. I'm not from here. I'm originally from Brazil. And I started my career, my path over there. So started my career always in advertising agencies at the beginning, for the first third of my career, always advertising agencies, especially creative agencies, but working always on the business side. So making the relationship between the agency and clients to happen and for the business to progress. So a few independent agencies in Brazil, but I also had a moment at Ogilvy as well with our international business over there. And when I was at Ogilvy was the exact year was in 2011 was the exact year that Meta or Facebook at the time, was starting its operations in Latin America. So I was lucky enough to be part of that first batch of hires that we have there, we had the region, part of the first group of like five, seven employees that joined the company. And I started at the company on the sales departments are taking care of advertisers, mostly in E commerce and retail, still in Brazil. Then, as that operation progressed, I moved into a product marketing role for Latin America and US Hispanics. So doing the whole Americas product marketing role for ads. And back in 2017, I got the opportunity to do my first international movement with Meta, which was to take pretty much the same role that was having with them. But now for EMEA, and sitting in Paris, France. So I moved there, stayed there for almost five years. And then I got an opportunity to move again. Now here in the UK, based out of London, and taking care of a very experienced, very senior team that covers some areas of our advertising business, but mostly focused on foundational areas for our performance marketing. So things related to signals and growth, to ads integrity, regulations, privacy, targeting, delivery, automation, all different topics around this universe, the app, so a long journey 12 years in this company so far. But yeah, a journey with the opportunity to explore several different roles and also several different regions, which was super nice for me.
Tom Ollerton 4:37
Right. I have a very, very high expectation of this podcast now with that introduction! So in that career what has been the best investment of your own time, energy or money?
Thiago Gomes 4:49
May be transparent when you go through the CV and it's something that I tried to do not intentionally, but it is to kind of combine professional and personal experiences together. I think for me, this was always something that was super important. And for me something that I, I tried to be always very intentional about. So almost in, don't get me wrong, but I was being a little a little bit selfish, in a sense, on thinking about, Okay, I am going for the role, I'm going to support the company on this direction. But I also want to take, I also want to use this opportunity to have something that the company will never take away from me. So it's something that I looked after on this path. And for me, a big, big investment of time, and energy was always on trying to find this job opportunity that would also pay out with, with personal experiences. So all these international movements, the opportunity to work with very different people from from all over the world. They, they, they were always a big focus, they kind of brought to me the possibility to match the career aspirations that I have, with some of the life aspirations that I have, as well. So yeah, helped me to be the person that I wanted to be. It's not easy, right? It's been lots over eight years that like, I don't have a place on earth anymore, because it's always moving from one region to the other one country to the other. It has a lot in my family as well, obviously, but overall, the when when we do the math, it's been super positive.
Tom Ollerton 6:49
So that's great life and work advice. But do you have a marketing tip that you can share with the audience, something that you find yourself quoting most often?
Thiago Gomes 6:58
If you don't mind, I have two and they should be... They can be very obvious when you hear but for me, they have important effect, I had two leaders in the business in the last few years. And the two, the two of them, they said things that were they had the sense of being logical at first, but very powerful at the back end. The first one is, is always start with the why. And for marketing, this was something that for me always, always resonated so much because we are always trying to exercise this muscle of the action and going for the action, going directly for what is the outcome, but contextualizing, having our direction data backed, having our direction connected to a business reason is something that takes some exercise. So starting with a why for me, something that but this I heard that I took for myself and I try not to do, I tried not to go to any pitch or any conversation without starting with a why first. And the other one is very recent advice from one of the leaders that we have in the business, but something that is resonating a lot to me, which is marketing organizations, which essentially focus on two things, either grow and protect the revenue, or save time from our cross functional teams. And, again, very obvious very direct to the point, but sometimes when I read through the details of it, I always think about a marketing organization that is that is first data driven. We have the business outcomes being more important than any proxies. Especially when you think about advertising, proxies can be very strong. So when you think about the business outcomes that it's gonna have, it's something that resonates a lot to me, a market organization that is focused on revenue generating marketing, especially moments like now that we have like business piling up, marketing can be seen as an expense. Well when you are focused on growing and protecting revenue, you are a revenue generating area. So this is this is something that is crucial. So data driven revenue, generating focused on prioritization and essentially an area that connects the technical side of the company with the business side of the company. So for me, yeah, two very strong tips that I take with myself.
Thiago Gomes 7:11
Well done for getting two tips into this podcast. Thank you. So...
Thiago Gomes 9:43
Bonus points.
Tom Ollerton 9:49
This episode of the shiny new object podcast is brought to you in partnership with MADfest whether it's live in London or streamed online to the global marketing community you can always expect a distinctive and daring blend of fast paced content startup innovation pitches and unconventional entertainment from MADfest events, you'll find me causing trouble on stage recording live versions of this podcast and sharing a beer with the nicest and most influential people in marketing, check it out at www.madfestlondon.com.
Tom Ollerton 10:19
We're now going to talk about your shiny new object, which is diversity. So big, big topic, still very much a shiny new object in terms of conversation in terms of the press and different brands, different businesses adopting it in different ways at different times with different amounts of success. But why is diversity your shiny new object?
Thiago Gomes 10:46
So quite a few aspects and I know it's a broad subject. So I'll try to condense a little bit more into the specifics. But I think overall aspect is ... We have data backing up, we have UN data that says that the diverse organizations, they outperform individuals in decision making by almost 90%. We have data that says that diversity boosts productivity overall in over 35%. So it is proven that it works. But more than that. This brings key aspects right, by exchanging between teams, better understanding of our customers in general, different work ethics across the board. And we bring also different decision making and different approach to problem solving. So in short, it's a core mechanism for driving innovation and for driving resolution. And I think that's a topic that is quite hard to argue against, right. But for me, why it is important at this moment to speak about it is because we're going through a moment that is very challenging and quite problematic for our diversity and inclusion efforts. Sorry about that. And why it's very problematic. I think, first of all, we have an overall aspect of crisis, right? We have the inflation recession, companies tidy up. So they are all factors that are making business needs, take more overall measures for efficiency. So this is the first red alert, you know, that we have there. Next to that, we also have a largely offseason going on across many industries, the tech industry, which is the one that I work at, during the last 12 years, but also in the finance industry, in the VC community, most recently in the consulting environment as well. A bunch of situations of mass layoffs that are also a moment that is critical for a lot of business. And the attention point that I have there is that these moments are they can be specifically harmful for diverse communities. And I see three aspects if you allow me to go through three aspects on that, first of all, it's the structural challenge itself, right? Moments like those that we are living in, they make harder for this community to wait for key opportunity. If someone within a diverse community, not having a backup, or a family backup, not having the conditions to wait more for the right opportunity, having historically getting their opportunities challenged by this ecosystem. This already puts a structural challenge that makes things harder. So I think that's the first aspect. There's a second aspect which is the practical aspect itself. This process that are happening, they naturally exclude diverse communities from the market, giving for examples, be one visa holders in the US. We have skilled worker visas here in the UK, once companies let those people go they will naturally not be a part of this market anymore. And finally, I would say situations like this one that we are living in, they reduce the impacts of core measures that we have to reduce the issue. So, DNI programs, they might be seen as a cost. So they might be reduced or removed. Conscious hire is a massive effort or a massive, massive mechanism for mitigating this issue. With less hiring, we are having less entry points for people in the diversity community as well. So to try to summarize, I would say, I think this moment that we are going through puts a lot of extra challenges to the situation.
Tom Ollerton 15:43
So in your experience, what, what are the best things that people can do to really get their diversity efforts up to a level that they can be proud of? Because we see a lot of talk in the industry? Yeah, people like virtue signaling. But what I loved about what you said was the stats, I can't remember them all that you gave it the start, and this works, right, you know, and that that that kind of stat wasn't in, in the press, they have like four or five years ago, when diversity really came to the forefront, maybe not as far back as that. But now that you've been in and around it, and running a diverse team and seeing the benefits and seeing the science, you know the stats, like to give some advice to someone who is struggling with this, where's a good place to start? What are those things that they can get going?
Thiago Gomes 16:33
Okay, so a few things that I think they they can help solving the issue and the situation. First of all, it's acknowledgement, right, we spoke, you spoke a little bit about that. It is not only nice for the world, but it's also good for business. I personally, to share a personal anecdote on that, like, I come from a very different work ethic culture. And the amount of learning, the amount of adaptation that I had to have both when I started to work with the US and now working with the different cultures that we have within EMEA for me was a big, big change on my day to day and allowed me to take different directions on problem solving. So if companies acknowledge that this thing that happened to me can happen on a larger scale, and help the structure, help the business to progress, I think it's a great first step acknowledgement. The second step I kind of mentioned very quickly, but this idea of investment versus cost, it is not efficient to get on diversity efforts. In these... efficiency in this case, can translate in many situations, but like for me, extension of remote work, this allows diverse communities to better be placed in the market. Efforts around internal education, internal training, they also help to reduce bias, they help to raise the awareness that I mentioned about acknowledgement, they help with integration. So all those things that can be seen as a cost, they need to be seen as investments. There is the fairness aspect as well. Fairness on promotions, fairness on raises, fairness on opportunities. If this is included in the company mindset. This is yeah, this is a core direction to go. And finally, lead by example, I'd say the reference is super important. To give another personal example, whenever I see a Latin leader across a motional, multi multinational national company, even if I don't know that person, I feel proud. And I can see myself on that. So see diversity leadership is also key. So I'd say if we have a little bit of this four ish elements included as a core mindset for companies, I think we have a good basis, a good foundation.
Tom Ollerton 19:32
And to finish off, what are the biggest mistakes that you've seen?
Thiago Gomes 19:36
Very nice question. I think the biggest of all, is to use this exercise, to use this topic, not as a not not as a legitimate direction for the company, but as an exercise, use it as a marketing exercise. And this doesn't flow too far, this doesn't go too far. I think this is the worst example because you do the activities not from the core, you do the activities just to show externally. And yeah, it's easily seen, doesn't help people that are involved in it. And it doesn't bring the benefits that we spoke a little bit about at the beginning of the conversation. So if companies are up for it, it's very, it's for a core reason, not because they want to collect rent, or marketing benefits out of that.
Tom Ollerton 20:47
That's a very important lesson to share at the end of the podcast, unfortunately, we need to leave it there. Thank you for sharing your views in what I felt was a really passionate way, and very clear and easy to understand. And it was an education to me. So thanks for that. But I imagine I imagine there's a bunch of people who want to talk more to you about this. So how can someone get in touch with you? What platform? What what makes it the perfect message to you?
Thiago Gomes 21:13
Yeah, so first of all, thank you very much. I really appreciate the time and attention. I think the best way is through LinkedIn. So Thiago Gomes. Gomes with an S at the end. And yeah, I'll be more than happy to chat and answer any questions.
Tom Ollerton 21:31
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Thiago.
Thiago Gomes 21:33
Cool, thank you very much. Bye.
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