Marketing campaigns come and go, but the fundamentals of building a brand remain the same, says Gene Foca, CMO of Getty Images. Foca’s career spans over 20 years, providing marketing expertise to brands like TIME and Amazon. Although aside from the new array of digital channels, he told AList, not much has changed.

Please explain your job in the context of Getty Images.

I oversee the entire marketing and communications function for Getty Images globally. The goal is to be the senior expert and adviser on developing marketing strategy and tactics in a way that will represent the brand, the people who support the brand and our content creators with integrity. I also drive performance with a real return on investment. We’re very focused on ROI for our marketing dollar.

How has the nature of your work changed in the last five years?

I don’t think it has changed significantly in the last five years and here’s what I mean by that. I grew up in a discipline of performance marketing. If you go back to the 70s and 80s, there were companies in the marketing world like American Express and HBO that did direct marketing and performance better than everyone else. There was always a focus on using marketing to get a customer, retain a customer and measure lifetime value. When branding, it was always done in the context of the entire customer journey as opposed to branding for the sake of branding.

I think what has changed more dramatically over the past five years that more and more of the business world has come to look at marketing with a critical eye. They want more ROI. They want more of the focus in the marketing world to be driving performance, new customers and the retention of current customers. Building a brand is entirely about the consistency of the entire customer journey over a long period of time and making sure the components of marketing fit with that vision of what the customer journey should be without exception.

I think that if there is something that has continued to evolve, it is a clear understanding that building a brand is not about the success of a single marketing campaign. It’s about the consistency of the entire customer journey.

What is the marketing topic that is most important to you as an innovator?

The questions of 30 years ago were actually the same as the questions of today. Understanding the marketing mix and the attribution those dollars to sales and revenue is still the dominant overarching topic for most CMOs.

Also, the business model dictates the marketing plan, not the other way around. Whether a company owns its distribution channels or not really helps define what a typical marketing mix should be. Those questions have always been present.

How important is personalization to your work?

Personalization, depending on how you define it, is very important to our marketing channel on a number of levels. In paid search and paid social, you don’t have endless real estate to be able to target, provoke a reaction and get someone to actually do something. You’re always trying to personalize and appeal to a target audience or segment of your customer base with a message that will resonate with them by virtue of data information.

It always goes back to the same thing—understanding your value proposition as an organization but then looking across your set of benefits and toolkit, then understanding what’s important to different segments of customer base and making sure that you emphasize and appeal to those things so you fill their needs. It always starts from the customer and you work backward from there.

At Advertising Week? Gene Foca will be participating in AList’s panel, THE REBOUND: Recovering From Failure on October 2, at 10:20 am.