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In this episode of Marketing Factories, a podcast by Effie Europe and REBORRN, Dafni Prosalika (Partner at REBORRN) welcomes Ulrich “Uli” Klenke, Chief Brand Officer of Deutsche Telekom, recorded at the company’s headquarters in Bonn. Klenke stewards the world’s most valuable telecoms brand, worth $96.2 billion by Brand Finance and around $126 billion by Kantar BrandZ, and he starts from a problem every marketer will recognise: when connectivity is a commodity and “everything is accessible, and it’s all the same,” how do you make anyone feel anything about the brand? His answer is brand affinity, measured by asking people, in plain terms, whether they love the brand or hate it.
That question is why the company is, in his words, “not Deutsche anymore, and not Telekom anymore.” It has grown beyond old-school telco into building AI data centres, working with satellite players and moving into the digitisation of society, with a 6G network he describes as an intelligent supercomputer you can reach anywhere. And because connectivity itself no longer differentiates, Klenke argues that affinity and creativity are the only real moats left. So he runs a deliberately decentralised model: one global media contract, but best-of-breed creative chosen market by market. It is “a group of lions hunting, not a group of sheep feeding grass,” held together by shared “toolboxes” rather than orders from headquarters, and by the rule he broke the old ones to introduce: “touch the brand.”
The conversation ranges across the questions every marketer is wrestling with. Klenke walks through going fully AI-first, the Einstein film built on a licensed ElevenLabs voice avatar, and why sound, not visuals, is what makes an AI campaign feel real. He makes the case that purpose campaigns are “not over, they’re different now,” from the “against hate on the web” work to a Habermas-inspired pivot towards restoring dialogue. And he is candid on why he wants to be famous for the use of AI, why his CEO’s one mantra is “bring me awards,” and what keeps him in a seat he has held for double the average CMO tenure. As ever, the episode closes with the 58-hour challenge: the problem Klenke would hand the most brilliant minds in the world.