Since joining Deloitte Canada as CMO in September 2024, Lauren Bradeen has been leading a shift toward a simpler, more human approach to the firm’s B2B marketing.

The second phase of Deloitte’s “Together Makes Progress” platform builds on new internal research showing Canadian organizations don’t lack ambition, they struggle to act on it. While 97% of business leaders believe their organizations have enough ambition to compete globally, 65% say they’ve seen transformational projects stall before reaching the finish line. The latest creative reframes familiar barriers with Deloitte’s signature green strikethroughs, turning phrases like “Follow the script” into “Flip the script” and “Stay in your lane” into “Change the game.”

Strategy recently spoke with Bradeen to discuss more emotion to B2B, the role AI can play in helping marketers think bigger and why, sometimes, the bravest creative decision is to keep things simple.

At strategy, we’ve been hearing more and more about B2B marketing becoming more emotional and human. How do you balance emotional resonance with the credibility people still expect from a firm like Deloitte?

My perspective is that balancing emotional resonance and credibility, it doesn’t need to be an either or proposition, because the best campaigns speak to the heart and the head. Whether it’s consumer, financial services, professional services, you need to relate to your audience first and then you can ensure that you’re covering the pieces that are deeply expert.

So, for us, we start with this human truth in every campaign that we do now, that is a non-negotiable in our brief, and we do that through conversations with the partners within Deloitte that work with our clients. We’ve had client discussions, we’ve done market research and then we ground that in the data, the expertise, the real-world evidence. So it’s that balance that’s really, really critical, and it comes to life differently in different types of campaigns. I’d argue that one of the clearest signals you’re dealing with someone who is a true expert is their ability to take a complex topic, whether that’s health care or defence or AI, and actually make somebody care about it. That’s what we’re trying to bring to life for Deloitte. That’s the balance we’re looking for.

It’s been more than eight months since the first phase of the “Together Makes Progress” series. What has your team learned  that challenged your assumptions going into Phase 2?

Phase 1 performed exceptionally well. I think it validated a lot of the decisions that we made. It was one of the very first campaigns we had that was really across a diverse set of channels. We used an internal media strategist to think about a really highly visible and bold media approach. We exceeded not only our reach and engagement targets for the campaign but we’ve also done research that shows we’re now seen as twice as likely as our competitors to be the partner consumers would pursue ambition with.

What has changed is after that first phase is a new set of market research challenged our assumption in that it showed that while a majority of Canadian business leaders actually feel like their organization has the right level of ambition to compete on a global stage, that ambition and those ideas and those projects are just not getting to market. So we wanted to dig deeper into what are those barriers, what are those constraints, are they real, are they perceived, and so the second phase of the campaign shifted to really think about having an optimistic view on overcoming the perceived or real constraints that people experience to get those great ideas to market.

Image courtesy of Deloitte Canada

Your research found that 33% of business leaders feel they lack the technology, AI or innovation resources to move ambitious ideas forward. From a marketing perspective, where has AI genuinely helped teams become bolder, and where has the hype outpaced reality?

I can appreciate where business leaders are coming from on that, because one of the challenges in getting ideas to market is capacity. The more efficient you can be the more capacity you can unlock, both for great thinking, but also to move more things forward. So AI can be a huge accelerator in that way.

I think what’s been critical to our strategy is not doing anything for the sake of it just being cool or being innovative.

When I think about it from a marketing perspective, not only does it give you more time back, but you can use it creatively, pending you’re being a real responsible steward of it. It also gives you ability to bring ideas to market that you might not have before due to budget constraints. For us, when we use AI, it is very much human first, AI enabled. But we are absolutely training agents on the best examples that we have in our go to market. So now a marketer, a creative person or a media person, it’s about being really, really intentional about where you use it.