You don’t need millions to succeed as a marketer, Clíona Hayes tells Tim Healey. “Just the nerve to think differently and the confidence to ask for what seems impossible.”
You’ve worked on an impressive array of brands at Ryanair, Pernod-Ricard, Irish Distillers, Britvic, Communicorp and now at Indeed you are senior director of global brand and advertising. Please walk us through your career.
It’s been a wonderful twenty-odd years working in different industries. I was only with Ryanair for a brief period before getting into the much-coveted graduate program with Irish Distillers Pernod-Ricard based in Marseille, France, where I worked for Jameson Whiskey as the assistant brand manager and Whiskey Ambassador.
That was a fun thing to do when you’re young and full of energy traveling around France teaching people all about whiskey! I transferred back to Ireland and into a global brand management role at the head office of Jameson on the central team working with our local marketing partners across the globe. I was with Pernod Ricard for seven years, and then I moved into media, mostly radio, which was fantastic, dynamic, ever changing… the original social media we used to say!
I was working across a multitude of different brands, each with different positioning and target audiences. Each brand had separate creative and media agencies, which was such a great learning curve working with so many partners. I rose through the ranks to the senior management team of the holding company Communcorp (now Bauer Media), which ultimately reported to the board, which also was steeped in learnings.
I came to Indeed around seven years ago. I have had a number of different roles here and over that time we’ve grown exponentially. Working at a high-growth company presents employees with a huge amount of opportunity.
What is the offer at Indeed?
Our big mission is: we help all people get jobs. Ultimately, we connect jobseekers with employers. We offer a comprehensive suite of tools and services to assist jobseekers and employers at every stage of their job search and hiring journeys. We want to ensure that people are being seen for the skills that they have to offer and then we use our superior match-making capabilities to connect them with the right jobs.
We have 580m job seeker profiles on our website and advertise 32m jobs across 60 countries. We also have a front-row seat on all of the employment data across the globe, all of which fuels our mission to help jobseekers and employers match the right talent for the right job.
Cliona unpacking the Indeed approach and insights about the jobs market.
And armed with that data you can even advise governments what to do?
Our global team of labor economists at Indeed Hiring Lab combines external job market data with our unique observations into how work is evolving. Therefore, we are a very rich source of intelligence for governments in many markets to help forecast and share rich data insights on the labor economy.
Tell us about Indeed’s new global campaign.
The launch of our latest global campaign is the result of nearly a year of research, ideation and planning with our agencies 72andSunny in both LA and Amsterdam. For us, this central idea of ‘better work’ began in 2023 with the introduction of our brand platform, ‘The World Can Work Better.’ We started with a bold belief: better work is out there for everyone.
Now, in 2025, we’re seeing the evolution of that vision with our new campaign: ‘There’s Got to Be a Better Way.’ This challenges outdated hiring norms and highlights how Indeed helps all people find better work, whatever that means for them. In a rapidly evolving job marketplace, both job seekers and employers need to have the tools to adapt, thrive and match with the right opportunities. Through this campaign over the next 12 months, we’re pushing boundaries and challenging the current status quo in the job market, ensuring job seekers and employers alike are ready to adapt to the changes to come.
We’re calling out the absurdities in hiring, like lack of salary transparency, arbitrary requirements, nepotism and mismatched expectations. This campaign is a rallying cry for a more open and transparent hiring experience.
Using humor and relatability, we’ve brought this message to life across the UK, US and France in unique ways. At its core, our campaign emphasizes substance over superficiality, challenging biases that prioritize pedigree and privilege over real skills and value. In the UK, we’re pushing for more honesty around salaries. In France, we’re tackling presenteeism – the pressure to always appear productive. And in the US, we’re highlighting the role of self-promotion in your career journey.
Indeed’s headquarters in Dublin.
What does the next 12 months look like for Indeed’s brand team?
Building on these insights uncovered by our global Insight team, ‘There’s Got to Be a Better Way’ channels these workplace absurdities into localized, humorous moments we can all relate to. Over the next 12 months, we’ll see these absurdities highlighted further across a range of platforms and moments, telling our brand story in a multi-faceted way.
Indeed’s vision for the future is that through Indeed, every worker in the world will have their own personal talent agent. We’re using AI to level the playing field and provide everyone with the kind of career champion that today is only available to very few. As a brand team, we’re thinking about what this means for our job seekers and employers and how we help our audiences into the future.
How is your team structured?
We’ve a big marketing team over many disciplines, including brand, growth/ performance, media, country marketing, lifecycle teams, content, martech, job seeker and employer dedicated teams. We have over 450 people across multiple markets. In terms of the brand team, which is the team I’m part of, we focus mostly on a few key markets. Our team covers research, insights and brand strategy, brand management, media, social, events, brand science and operations and we have an internal creative agency too. We work with a huge network of agencies across all the different markets that are our partners and an extension of our teams.
Drawing on your leadership expertise, what has your career taught you that helps you to make a great marketing team?
I think the most important thing for a great marketing team is to be creatively ambitious and culturally curious. It sounds trite, but it really is the key to good work. I truly believe that if you take the creative path, it is going to be better for your brand and your business. The biggest risk is not taking any risk at all.
If you don’t take these calculated risks, you’re going to fall into a place where you have an undistinguished brand that’s undifferentiated, and that means that your work will end up in a sea of ‘meh,’ and lost in an orbit of fragmented media. In terms of team behaviors, we constantly encourage people to voice their opinions in an effort to push and think, how can we do better? Is this the right insight? How can we resonate a little bit more with our audience?
A great marketing team must be curious, constantly be learning and be on a mission to push the boundaries in terms of risk.
Please tell us about your first memory of a marketing success that you were part of where you felt: ‘This is the role for me.’
My first marketing aha moment came at Ryanair, where I learned the art of guerrilla marketing with literally zero budget. Working for the French market, I’d hop on a plane to Paris or anywhere in France weekly with nothing but flight vouchers as my currency. I’d visit prestigious publications like Paris Match or TFI, essentially bartering seats for ad space: “Two tickets to Milan for that quarter page, monsieur.” It was marketing at its most primal: pure hustle, no frills (much like the airline). Watching our brand visibility climb across France with each scrappy trade deal felt like pulling off a heist. It was most shocking to me that this strategy even worked, but nothing beats the thrill of making something from nothing, which is probably why I fell for marketing. It’s the closest you can get to creative resourcefulness in business.
I’ve had many different answers to that question, but I’ve never had one like that: where you had to negotiate and trade to get your ad space.
They’d actually haggle with me: “Half a page? That’ll cost you six round-trips.” We’d be taught to push back, insisting they also include a reader competition and cover the winners’ airport taxes! The cheeky audacity worked; it still shocks me! It taught me the most valuable marketing lesson: creativity trumps budget every time. You don’t need millions – just the nerve to think differently and the confidence to ask for what seems impossible.
AI in marketing: what are the pros and cons?
The pros are widely spoken about: where AI helps save time, brings tremendous efficiency gains, teams are able to focus more on projects which deliver more impact to the brand, on strategy and creative direction and less time on administrative tasks. And financially, we can prioritize budgets for more important value-led propositions. We can generate variations of copy and creative at unprecedented speed, create content at scale and analyze vast datasets for insights that would take humans weeks to uncover.
Perhaps most concerning is our potential over-reliance on AI and the inherent bias that can come from learning from LLMs. Marketing fundamentally requires human understanding of emotion, cultural context and brand positioning that AI simply doesn’t possess. I’ve seen teams become dependent on AI recommendations without questioning the underlying strategy. We’ve had a few slip-ups already and we’ve learned the hard way, but then again I know we’re not alone. We’re all learning!
The key is finding the right balance. Using AI as a powerful assistant while maintaining human oversight on strategy, brand voice, and creative direction. AI should amplify human creativity, not replace it.
In Indeed’s ‘The S Word’ campaign, a notification on the interviewee’s phone helps him navigate salary expectations.
Could you tell us about a customer research discovery you made that you found surprising?
One of our UK commercials is called ‘the S word’. This spot playfully exaggerates the awkward and uncomfortable conversations that can occur in the recruitment process when salary expectations are misaligned. Its aim is to promote the benefits of salary transparency. Talking about money is uncomfortable, especially for the Brits. Yet, with the ongoing cost of living crisis, salary has never been as important, with research showing it is workers’ largest unmet need. Research has also shown that money conversations are an even bigger taboo than mental health. Isn’t this shocking when you think about it?
If you don’t know how much your peers are making, it can be difficult to determine whether or not you’re being compensated fairly. Many workplaces actively discourage employees from sharing salary information, while others foster a culture of secrecy that prevents employees from being comfortable disclosing their compensation to their coworkers. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, adopting transparent pay practices can help to narrow the gender pay gap by up to 30%. At the individual level, employees and managers can improve pay transparency by promoting open, honest discussions about compensation within the workplace.
I’m also the co-chair of ‘Women at Indeed’ for our EMEA chapter, so this quest to advocate for women and all underrepresented minority groups is also personal to me. Closing the pay gap is built into our brand purpose, and I feel very lucky to work for a brand that promotes positive impact and societal change.
Could you tell us about a marketing mistake that you’ve made and what you learned from it?
I’ve got a funny one, which was far from funny at the time. I was not directly responsible for this mistake, but was part of the working team. We were promoting an in-office golf tournament for corporates in France, as part of a branded Scotch whisky experience. We sent flyers and packs to businesses all over France with a phone number to contact to reserve your place. The phone number had a typo, and all calls went to a Chinese takeaway in Paris. Leave it at that, but there was skin and hair flying. That poor man who owned the takeaway was not happy but well compensated for the mistake. I still remember his name. It’s like it’s etched on my brain because in that week, his name was mentioned at least 100 times per day and I spoke to him about 10 times each day, as did each member of our team.
‘The World Can Work Better‘ – Indeed’s global brand platform launched in 2023.
What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?
People often focus on the outputs of marketing – big campaigns, the TV ad, the social media campaign, or the radio advert. Marketing is highly nuanced with a backdrop of massive complexity. If you’re in a global role, you may have to switch focus from India to Japan to the UK.
In each case you must consider the macroeconomic factors that are happening. At Indeed, we have to understand: What do job seekers need? What do employers need? What is the business strategy? What is the brand strategy? What’s the consumer insight? How do I merge all of this together to be highly relevant? And then simplify!
Then, before you attempt to get your message across, you need to test your creative and respond to the research findings. Then you have your media mix modeling: understanding your weighting and your distribution across your different media channels, which informs your media plans and how you distribute your budget. There’s a phenomenal amount of inputs. We must navigate the complexities of bringing a marketing campaign to life in a complex organization, influencing across teams, gathering feedback while ensuring desperately we do not dilute the work.
The myth can be that it is fancy shoots and Hollywood directors. It isn’t. People who work within the industry know this, but those on the outside may not always realize what we have to juggle and balance in order to deliver effective marketing.
What advice might you give your younger self if you could go back in time?
Say ‘yes’ to every single opportunity that comes your way and think how you’ll do it later. Don’t procrastinate. Don’t say I’m not good enough. Say ‘yes’ and you’ll be very surprised at how many people jump in to help you be successful.
Constantly challenge what you are being told and stay curious. If you relax on learning and your professional development in marketing, you’ll become a dinosaur within months, given how fast media, tech and cultures are evolving.
Could you tell us something that maybe not a lot of people know about you?
I’m a certified rescue diver.
What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer that I interview?
Do they think TikTok will be the most prominent social platform in 12 or 18 months?
Your question from a senior marketer is this: can you gaze into your crystal ball and tell us how different the role of a senior marketer of the future will be from today?
I believe we’re in a game of relevancy and attention that will only intensify as media choices continue to diversify. The landscape has shifted dramatically in recent years, requiring us to balance a top-down brand messaging ecosystem with an emerging bottom-up cultural dynamic.
Our partnership with VaynerMedia helps us stay ahead by identifying trending conversations and integrating organically into them. This bottom-up approach to messaging and culture is becoming increasingly dominant. For marketing, this means we must be actively engaged in cultural conversations while maintaining a strategic balance between top-down brand direction and grassroots engagement.
If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…
It’s a powerful mix of culture and human insights, blending both to create communications that truly connect. It’s challenging, but that’s what makes it exciting
You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.
This interview has already appeared in The Drum. Discover the best campaigns, industry insights and interviews from world-leading marketers, creatives and more.
