Guest · B2B brand and storytelling
John Rudaizky
Global Chief Brand and Marketing Officer, EY
A career built inside the creative industries, from Saatchi and WPP to global brand at EY, and a belief that inspiring your own people is where brand growth begins.
About
John Rudaizky is Global Chief Brand and Marketing Officer at EY, where he leads brand and marketing for one of the world's largest professional services organizations. He is known for creating the award-winning Better Questions platform and for arguing that brand building at scale begins by inspiring an organization's own people.
Rudaizky traces his start to a university market stall and a school full of creative people, where a love of selling met the pull of the creative industries. He chose advertising over the city and joined Saatchi, which he describes as the rock and roll agency of its time, later running his own agency and working across WPP. In 2014 he moved to EY to transform the brand, a decision he says many questioned before the rise of the consultancy in business.
At EY, Rudaizky built the Better Questions platform with Steve Dunn and Dave Allen at Brand Pie, landing on the line that the better the question, the better the answer, the better the world works, since tweaked to the better the prompt, the better the answer. He has worked through a relaunch under CEO Janet Troncalli around the strapline shape the future with confidence, and he points to the ambition set by former chair and CEO Mark Weinberger, who he says wanted to double the size of the business with distinctive brand at its heart.
Career41 years
- 2024 to now EY Chief Brand and Marketing Officer/ CMO
- 2016 to 2024 EY Partner, Global Brand and Marketing Leader
- 2014 to 2016 EY Partner, Global Brand & External Communications Leader
- 2012 to 2014 WPP CEO Team GSK
Show earlier roles: WPP, J. Walter Thompson Worldwide, RudaizkyRyan Ltd, Saatchi & Saatchi, Market Stall
- 2007 to 2012 WPP CEO, Team Vodafone
- 2005 to 2007 J. Walter Thompson Worldwide Global Business Director
- 2002 to 2005 RudaizkyRyan Ltd Founder
- 1987 to 2001 Saatchi & Saatchi Managing Partner
- 1985 to 1987 Market Stall Trader, Blackbushe Market
How John thinks3 convictions
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An and, not an or
Rudaizky refuses to treat creativity and technology as rivals. He recalls that people declared the end of creativity when digital first arrived, when it was simply a new format. For him the magic is always the marrying of the science and the magic, with AI as another set of tools in human hands.
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Purpose as business strategy
Rudaizky argues purpose only works when it is embedded in how a business operates rather than bolted on for communications. At EY he found a purpose, building a better working world, that had to be meaningful across people, clients and society. He treats it as a driver of talent and trust, not a marketing wrapper.
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Emotion sells in B2B
Rudaizky insists B2B is more emotional than consumer marketing because a client is betting their career, their mortgage and their home on who they choose to work with. He points to EY's film Generations as emotive storytelling that outperforms the traditional rational sell. Bringing consumer instincts into B2B, he says, has worked.
