Long before Michael Roberts became the chief marketing and communications officer of MetLife, he was an opera singer. But he used to never tell anyone.
“Early on in my marketing career, I was shy about it because I wanted to make sure that I had credibility,” says Roberts. “But what I found was that the more authentic we are as leaders, the better, the more effective we are.”
The music major at Dartmouth found his way to the business world in a very operatic fashion –a break up that meant losing the cats, the piano and the apartment led him to the need for a reliable career. He landed in consulting and has found his way to a successful career and has learned to balance his love for purpose, business and singing into his life.
Roberts brings his understanding of culture to his role at MetLife where he is very focused on communicating the brand’s long standing purpose through a range of activations.
“Our purpose is to always be with you, building a more confident future,” explains Roberts.
“That means that we have to live that purpose with our employees. That means we have to live that purpose with our customers. That means we have to live that purpose with our communities and the results of living that purpose with all three of those stakeholders is that we are able to live that purpose for our shareholders and investors as well.”
The World Cup was a big deal for the brand to show up with its purpose. While some brands spent heavily on traditional World Cup sponsorships and media buys, MetLife took a different approach. The company used the moment as a platform for purpose-driven engagement rather than a conventional sponsorship logo play through a partnership with the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund, which helps expand access to education and support youth resilience globally. Additionally, they created a free, five-language Confidence Magazine with Highlights for Children that promotes soccer as a vehicle to help kids build confidence and resilience.
Brand Innovators caught up with Roberts from his office in New York to these partnerships, the global nature of the brand’s sports marketing approach, as well as how the World Cup activations are living on beyond the games.
Talk to me about your vision for your current role as chief marketing and communications officer.
In this role, half the job is managing the scope of marketing and communications and customer experience and half the job is working with the executive team to help make our employees, our customers, our communities and our shareholders successful by living our purpose, which is always with you building a more confident future. It’s a privileged position to be part of an executive team that has such a noble purpose. The unit of ambition for the job that I have is how do we not just optimize or transform, but really reimagine the entire business system that we are in. That becomes much more of a reality in this age of AI than it ever has been before.
Our brand is really an expression of our purpose. We lead all of our transformation as a business, through the lens of our purpose. When we think about brands specifically in that context, a lot of what we find effective as a brand is ensuring that we have an alignment of purpose and values with our customers. So making sure that that’s known and recognized, but also driving satisfaction with the experiences we provide, whether it’s experiences for prospects or customers. What that looks like is ensuring that we have a uniquely MetLife customer experience that represents our purpose in action.
Can you talk about your approach to sports marketing?
We have some sponsorships with sports outside the U.S. We sponsor the Mexican national soccer team. We sponsored the futsal league in Japan. Japan and Mexico are two of our largest markets outside the U.S. Nearly 40% of our earnings are outside the U.S. We’re not a U.S. company with a few operations outside. We are actually truly a global company. In those two are second and third largest markets – Japan and Mexico – sports creates a mechanism where we can be attached to culture on the ground as a foreign owned insurer with a very long history of, of meeting the needs of our policyholders. That connection to culture gives people confidence that we have a commitment to the market.
The second aspect is that sports can create a catalyst for meaningful impact in communities. We have a great program in Mexico called “Pinta Tu Cancha” –paint your soccer field or play area. We’ve leveraged our national team sponsorship with philanthropic causes around the country to revitalize community spaces all across Mexico. Sports in that case gives us a multiplier effect of the impact that we can have on a community. We have the same activations from a sports perspective in Japan, which connects us to not just the culture in these places, but also the communities.
Then on a global stage you look at how we entered the World Cup moment. We have the stadium as a key sports asset. We’ve had the arrangement with MetLife Stadium for more than a decade as a naming rights sponsor. But the question that we ask in those situations is not just what does sports mean to the commercial side of the business, but really what does sports mean to our purpose? And how can we get a multiplier effect and what sports means to culture and community. We did that very effectively with the World Cup, which created essentially a global platform for us to drive direct impact.
How do you keep the momentum after the World Cup?
We didn’t view the World Cup as an event in and of itself. We viewed it as a tent pole in the continuum of impact that we’re looking to have through sports. We started way before and we will continue way after, but what we wanted to do was to make sure that before, during, and after the World Cup that our community impact was seen and felt, around the globe. That’s what drove us to do a partnership with Global Citizen and to be a seed funder of the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund.
We started giving grants out before the World Cup and we’ll continue to give grants after the World Cup. From a brand perspective, people want to see that we have a continuous commitment to living our purpose, through the community-based organization grants. We believe that the community-based organizations that we have access to through the Global Citizen FIFA Education Fund are something that we wouldn’t have access to in other ways. It has the most reach across the 40+ markets that we have. When we are thinking about sports as an amplifier of purpose, we have to take all of those things into account.
How do you think about connecting and breaking through when the landscape is so fragmented?
The question that we ask is not necessarily how to break through. It’s more how to be relevant, salient and distinctive. People have to find a way to attach it to something and so that becomes hard. We want to be distinctive but attached to things that people know. We want to be salient. So we need a large footprint of associations that people have. The media fragmentation helps us grow that footprint of things that we’re associated with, because then we can actually create more associations, based on how people are consuming. The idea is not one idea repeated over and over again. It’s a network of interconnected positive associations. Fragmentation actually can be beneficial from that perspective.
The relevance piece is important. We want to make sure that it’s more positive than negative. There’s always negative associations with any brand. You want to make sure that the weight of the associations is positive. No brand is perfect. But we want to make sure that the weight of our associations and the relevance that we have is positive for the things that people care about and the things that are important in their lives. We think about it a little less about breakthrough and more about salience, relevance and distinctiveness.
Talk to me about how you mentioned your past experiences have helped shape where you see the marketing landscape today?
Most of my jobs post singing have been relatively broad movements. Early in my career I held strategy-focused jobs. Even in my early time as a CMO, I oversaw more than just marketing. Between seeing how all the pieces fit together from my singing days in different contexts to the breadth of experience that I’ve had beyond marketing. What I see is that marketing can be a catalyst for broader business transformation.
We have this unique ability to provide insights and impact from the customer’s perspective. That can drive real transformation from a business perspective. That’s a lot of how I’ve approached marketing. It’s not like the marketing landscape isn’t constantly changing, but that’s less important than how marketing products, sales, finance, risk, IT, all work together in a business system in order to create impact on customers, communities, employees, investors. We are the orchestrators of transformation. That’s something that we have a unique perspective on as marketers.
