Gen Digital CFO drives a data-driven approach to marketing spend

Sponsored by

Don’t go chasin’ AI trends. Applying AI to the business challenges that matter most to your organization is where the real potential lies. From productivity and workforce transformation to growth and operational efficiency, learn more with PwC.

Gen Digital may be an unfamiliar name to you, but you’ve more than likely heard about at least one of its products—computer security solutions Norton and Avast, for example, and a more recent addition, mobile financial and banking platform MoneyLion. The company has gone through some “big milestone changes” in recent years, and has what CFO Natalie Derse told CFO Brew is “a very strong reputation of operational execution.”

For Gen Digital’s fiscal quarter ending July 3, it recorded an 11% YoY increase in revenue, to $1.3 billion, which was its “fastest growth rate” since its rebrand in 2022, Derse said. It also reported 19% YoY growth in diluted EPS. Both measures beat Gen’s guidance from the previous quarter. The quarter was also another when Gen achieved its goal of “continuously grow[ing] EPS faster than we do the rate of revenue,” Derse said.

Gen Digital prioritizes profitable growth—and one way it does that is by not holding growth and cost discipline as mutually exclusive, according to Derse. “We’re going to do both of them, and we find a way to do both of them.”

She added: “I come from General Electric. You operate lean, and even in the best business days, you are still finding a way to optimize and to really cut back, cut costs, operate in the most efficient way possible.”

Stretching that dollar. To drive that efficiency, Derse said, “what we’ve been really building out at Gen is the data-driven approach to all of the investment areas.”

During a presentation at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference in March, Derse gave an example: The company was challenging employees to find “double-digit efficiencies in our over $1 billion marketing spend” by leveraging “tools and technology.” Expanding on those comments, Derse told us the company wants to both “drive investment in marketing” but also “self-fund” it by boosting efficiency.

The company has automated the data-analysis work by introducing new technology, including AI tools that more quickly measure marketing data. Before, when Gen was manually feeding information into its models and generating reports, Derse said she’d have updates on a weekly or monthly basis. Now she has new reports daily.

“So for every million bucks, it really modernizes and automates the stack ranking of where you should put that next series of dollars,” Derse said. “That data, that visibility, and that speed…allow the marketing team, in conjunction with [the] analytics team, to redeploy funding faster.”

Embracing change. Quickened decision-making ability will be key in a changing world influenced by AI. For instance, in marketing, the “channel mix is changing,” Derse said.

A few years ago, when trying to “drive traffic to a specific vertical of [the] business,” the company probably focused on traditional marketing channels like search-engine optimization. But now, “we’re all relearning what that looks like with AI,” and Gen needs to figure out how to “win in those shopping and decisioning experiences,” Derse said.

“That’s where that speed really needs to come into play,” she continued, “where we’ve got to be able to test, we’ve got to be nimble [and] be able to have a data-driven approach and be able to trust that data and that tooling, [because] you’re actually making decisions that are different than you used to based on more of your historical practices.”