From selling Tea to the British to Latin America's largest e-commerce business - Sean Summers, Mercado Libre

In a career that's spanned selling Tea to the British as Marketing Director at Twinings, to now CMO at the largest e-commerce business in Latin America, Sean Summers knows a thing or two about marketing (at all levels). I catch up with him at Cannes to discuss his career, what it's like scaling a business from $300m to $10b in revenue and what he thinks of the latest trends like AI.

Timestamps

00:00 - Intro
01:04 - Why is Sean in Cannes?
02:25 - What creates an award winning campaign?
03:21 - How to make the most out of your agency
06:41 - What is being a CMO actually like?
10:01 - Marketing language / business jargon
11:35 - The awful 360 campaign
14:10 - Sean’s biggest failure
20:16 - A tough time: running marketing teams in the UK
23:25 - What is Mercardo Libre?
26:08 - From $300m to $10b
28:49 - Marketing for Mercado Libre
31:36 - Working with very constrained budgets
34:46 - Managing a multi-faceted company
39:57 - Becoming a media owner
42:08 - Learnings from running a media business
44:19 - The importance of building an online brand offline
46:16 - How the pandemic helped them
48:06 - Sean’s thoughts on AI