The Brand Insider: Recent Episodes
Steve Smith
MediaPost Editor Steve Smith's Intimate marketing, advertising and strategy discussions with top brand marketers.
This week, Erin Everhart sits down with Greg Hall, MoneyGram's Chief Marketing Officer.
This week Steve chats with the Founder & CEO at Black Executive CMO Alliance (BECA), Jerri DeVard.
This week, Erin Everhart sits down with Giovanni Zaccariello, Coach's VP of SVP of Global Visual Experience.
This week, Steve Smith interviews Kate Godbout, Chief Marketing Officer at Scholl’s Wellness Company.
This week Steve chats with the NA VP of Media and Consumer Engagement Molson Coors, Brad Feinberg.
This week Steve chats with the Senior Manager of eCommerce at OLLY, Jennifer Peters and Ruthie McCombs, the Overnight Beauty Founder.
For this week's episode, Steve chats with Julie Raheja-Perera, General Manager/VP, Pepsi Lipton Partnership North America.
This week Steve chats with the Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer at ZIPs Cleaners, Mary Ann Donaghy.
For this week's episode, Steve chats with Dustin Humphreys, Senior Vice President of Digital Innovation, Rite Aid.
This week, Steve sits down with Group Black's Bonin Bough, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer.
This week Steve sits down with the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Caravan, Leonard Brody.
For this week's episode, Steve chats with Ep. 105 with J.J. Healan, the VP of US Marketing: Brand Content and Culture at McDonald’s.
This week Steve hosts the Head of Marketing for Nutrition & Ice Cream at Unilever International, Lan Trieu to chat about Knoor.
This week Steve sits down with Doug Zarkin, the Chief Brand Officer of Good Feet Worldwide.
This week Steve chats with the Vice President of Brand Strategy at FanDuel, Jennifer Matthews.
In this episode, Steve sits down with the Co-CEO of Painterland Sisters Yogurt, Stephanie Painter.
This week Steve sits down with the iVice President of Lexus marketing at Toyota Motor North America, Inc., Vinay Shahani.
This week Joe sits down with the Chief Marketing and Merchandising Officer from Zappos, Joe Cano.
Steve chats this week with MoneyGram's Global Head of Brand, Creative Services & CRM, Michael Catanzaro.
This week Steve sits down with the founders and management team from Uncle Waithley's Beverages; Karl Williams, Monica Freeman-Greene and Michael McConnell.
This week MediaPost's Steve Smith chats with Kyle Sanborn, Vice President of Global Brand Strategy and Marketing Activation at Enterprise Holdings.
This week Steve has a conversation with the CEO of SmartyPants Vitamins, Brenda Demers.
This week Steve chats with Matt Carrington. Matt is the CMO at Athletic Greens, the decade old maker of a nutritional supplement, a category now known as green powders. The company works on a DTC model around a deliberately narrow set of products available in a single-sale or subscription model. Any podcast fans will recognize the brands, especially under its more common recent moniker, AG.
This week, Steve sits down with Zelle's Senior Director of Brand Marketing, Joshua Fajardo to talk about the digital payment landscape and banking apps.
This week Steve sits down with Denise Vitola, Bayer's VP Brand Integration PR, Social and Influencer.
Today Steve sits down with Denise Jaeschke, VP of Integrated Customer Marketing at Zulily.
The pioneering 4th Ave. Market e-retailer is powered by a community of Black-owned CPG manufacturers across a wide range of product categories. Its model is deeply grounded in principles of empowering minority businesses at every level, from manufacturing to marketing to personal professional development. Founder Salim Holder discusses what it means when the retail model is truly powered by and for the community it serves.
This week Steve talks with Patricia Corsi, Global Chief Marketing & Digital Officer for Bayer Consumer Health.
Today, MediaPost's Steve Smith chats with Paul Mascali, Head of Esports and Gaming at PepsiCo.
This week Steve chats with LEGOLAND's Kelly Hornick, Director of Marketing and Communications.
Steve welcomes to the Podcast this week Erin Chin the Chief Marketing Officer for Logitech For Creators.
This week Steve chats with Pearl Servat, Head of Brand Marketing and Demand Generation at Visible Wireless
The Amazon ecommerce ecosystem continues to breed fascinating marketing and business offshoots, not the least of which is the so-called "Amazon roll-up." These companies, like Berlin Brands Group (BBG) acquire digital native brands that invented themselves principally to sell in Amazon. As General Manager and President Bob Land tells us, this is a wild world unto itself that challenges many preconceptions about what constitutes brand and valuations.
Codecademy's CMO Robin Zucker is marketing the brand at the intersection of performance and storytelling. The company’s new tagline, “live by your own code,” aspires to make the brand more personal than transactional.
Steve chats this week with R. J. Ancona Vice President & General Manager, B2B, Global Merchant & Network Services at American Express.
Steve talks this week with Alex Chahin, Sr. Director, Product Marketing at hims & hers.
This week we welcome Jerry Hsiao, the Director of Business Planning at Canon USA to discuss how Canon’s business solutions is reorganizing its marketing around these new patterns and gives us a chance to dig into some of these changes and to understand what the implications are for marketing going forward. Jerry's been with Canon over eight years, previously worked at Luminous Brands, Nielsen and Clorox.
Steve gets the old Peanuts gang back together to chat with Melissa Menta, SVP of Marketing and Communications for Peanuts Worldwide!
The future of the physical retail experience may be murky, but product innovation, creativity, relevance and meaning will always drive consumer interest. Foot Locker has launched literally hundreds of sneaker models in the last year, many tied to everything from human rights issues to breakfast cereal, sports stars to Gummy Bears. It is part of a customer acquisition and brand building strategy that brings CMO Jed Berger and his team to the center of the product development cycle. What does it take to reorganize thinking, people and budgets around a product-centric marketing model?
Even a crusty, jaded critic of the advertising industry like Steve Smith can be a sucker for a great ad concept like JewBelong out-of-home campaigns on New York streets. Steve chats with JewBelong co-founder Archie Gottesman about a range of things — from the real impact of cause-related advertising, being snarky on bus shelters, and rebranding an entire religion.
Grounded in pandemic and post pandemic behavior research, Rexona/Unilever's Degree deodorant brand's Move Again effort is as you'd expect from the CPG giant, a massive multimedia rollout leveraging every imaginable channel. One of their new buzzwords is "un-missable," says Kath Swallow, Global Brand VP for Rexona at Unilever. But that doesn't mean relentless TV spots and billboard coverage. As she tells Brand Insider this week, it's as much about creating critical partnerships: from a famous drag celeb to video games. It even includes a Degree branded "Pit Mobile" making neighborhood stops with truly un-missable pit-related imagery.
If Millennials have a signature food, then surely avocados would be it. But herein lies the opportunity, says Mission Produce head of marketing and communications, Denise Junqueiro. Mission is a farm-to-grocery avocado brand that is both b2b and increasingly b2c. By focusing on creative product development, especially around Millennial lifestyle needs, Mission is working a different lane of produce branding and trying to de-commoditize this trendy fruit. If like me, avocado minis or even the prospect of avocado baby food sounds even zanier than avocado toast, think again, Boomer.
Post-pandemic ad campaigns are trying to thread the needle - find ways of gently alluding to the past 15 months of lockdowns, grief and social unrest, while pointing towards brighter days. Clif's "Move the World" messaging wraps such a light note of return-to-normal in purposeful branding as well as a an overall theme of adventure. As Senior Director, Clif Brand Portfolio, Liza Darnell explains, it is designed for open interpretation around evolving notions of adventure, movement and social impact. In many ways, "Move the World" recalls the fleeting age of the big idea but executed across a wide range of video, display and marketing partnerships. The big idea meets the fragmented customer journey.
Even locked-down seekers of eating therapy eventually crave variety. Apparently, Bob Evans Farms is on it. The company famous for freezer aisle comfort dishes like mac and cheese sides and countless sausage varieties, recently launched a new line of riffs on classics and breakfasts. CMO Thyme Hill discusses how product development is central now to CPG marketing.
MediaPost's Lisa Singer fills in this week for Steve. El Pollo Loco is in growth mode. With several recent record breaking weeks, the company sees itself entering a growth trajectory that includes new audiences, deepening digitization and enhancing its brand position. Lisa chats with CEO Bernard Acoca about how the brand learned from and even grew during the pandemic year.
This week, Steve Smith welcomes to the Brand Insider Michele Waits, she's the Vice President of Marketing and Commercial Support at illy, the coffee makers. illy caffè is an 80 year old premium coffee brand, many of you will be very familiar with that red logo that you see on the store shelves. The company just launched a major multi channel campaign, it calls, “Welcome on the Road to Happiness.”
Steve welcomes Danielle Parra, Head of Marketing and Culinary for McAlister’s Deli to this week's QSR focused Brand Insider podcast.
Few D2C brands have experienced the rapid success and cultural profile of Peloton. But how does the company that introduced many of us to HIIT cardio training handle its own high intensity growth. Company veteran Ryan Dillion-Curran discusses with Steve how the brand has evolved in response to data, product usage and market needs and is creating forward looking teams that bake “slack and flexibility” into the Peloton marketing infrastructure. Find out why one of D2C’s biggest success stories recommends emerging brands think more like a CPG.
One of the largest drug store chains in the US puts email at the center of customer experience. Digital Director Joe Tertel explores how email helps him build his workflows and scenarios that extend out to the full customer journey, whether on site, on social, and even in display advertising. This is next generation messaging, where email is made central to a holistic view of the customer journey that touches all media.
Building a CPG brand within the Grocery Industrial Complex can be daunting and costly. Jimmy Bars co-founder explores with Steve the innovative distribution and marketing channels that has helped build the brand without breaking the bank.
Email is 50 years old this year. Its resilience is so familiar that we don't even bother joking about the many "Email is Dead" eulogies. In advance of EIS, this week's Brand Insider calls on two of the EIS veterans (Chester Bullock at RentPath and Scott Cohen at Purple) to reflect on how the pandemic and looming changes in digital tracking will bring email back to the center of marketers' planning.
Steve chats with David Prokupek, who is the CEO of Ideal Image Med Spa, a medical aesthetics company with well over 150 locations in the US. Their services include laser hair removal, cool sculpting and botox, all administered by medical professionals. It also uses a virtual consultation system to leverage the digital channel in preparation for the engagements. The company has seen growth this year as it quickly pivoted to a telehealth consultation platform that now serves over 25,000 people a month. Prior to Ideal Image, David himself helped build both the Smashburger QSR brand and Jackson Hewitt tax service brands.
As the oral care upstart SmileDirect grows its brand into new product lines and customers, the company is bringing its performance-oriented media to every screen. CMO John Sheldon explores how a CPM-centric approach continues to perform across linear, CTV and social. Likewise, highly modular creative and leveraging shorter formats are giving SmileDirect the flexibility to grow despite the opaque outlook for 2021 media.
Kayla Rochkin is the VP of Marketing at TREC Brands, a purveyor of cannabis based products in the Canadian market. TREC is only a few years old, but has already established several cannabis brands and we'll discuss how the company targets distinct consumer segments, with different branding and packaging.
Steve chats with Stephanie Synclair, most recently, founder of the luxury tea and accessories brand LaRue 1680. But this is just the latest project for the serial entrepreneur, author, and business coach. Her book ‘Shut Up and Do the Work: The entrepreneur's guide to creating massive success’ was published in 2016. This discussion with Stephanie will focus on the topic of building a new brand.
Helix Sleep has refocused a lot of its data-driven strategy to LTV and launched several new brands, among them the AllForm sofas. Director of CRM at Helix, Laur Fiatoa, tells us how emphasizing an LTV strategy for growth involves changes to messaging, the channels you use, and even the internal “data culture” that drives it all.
Alex Reed, co-founder and CMO of D2C cleaning product brand Truman's, is one of the only marketers to give an honest and nuanced answer to my cynicism about "brand love." He gets it. There really is no love lost between most of us and the spray we use to clean our counter top. Nevertheless, Truman's is trying to build a different kind of CPG relationship with consumers without ad-bombing Instagram.
McGowan is a longtime evangelist of digital marketing in Democratic campaigning, as she also ran digital advertising for the massive Priorities USA PAC during the 2016 cycle. Political wonks will want to lean back for this full podcast version, where McGowan reflects on how the consultancy/agency structure in political campaigning skews media allocation and stifles innovation. It echoes eerily sentiments we hear increasingly in the general consumer brand world.
Matthias Paisdzior is the Head of North America for GOT BAG, a Germany-based company that makes backpacks and bags out of recycled ocean plastic. It was a passion project that started in 2016, and has become a business and the mission. Matthias’s job is to bring that brand over the plastic-choked Atlantic to the US shores and launch here.
Pier 1 closed all of its retail stores by the third quarter of this year, Retail Ecommerce Ventures or REV bought the IP and the data in July. That company has been collecting a number of struggling retailers like Modell’s, Dress Barn and most recently Radio Shack, with the aim of relaunching them first as DTC ventures. AJ was the CMO of DressBarn, now he’s the CMO of the Pier 1 brand as it turned very quickly from a model almost wholly dependent on bricks and mortar to DTC. This kind of transition we're obviously going to see a lot more of and the kinds of processes that he's put in place to turn legacy brands into DTC friendly venues is really, I think, going to be relevant to almost everybody.
In its 67 year history, I don't think anyone ever accused Publishers Clearing House of elegant stylings. But those garish paint-factory explosions of entry forms, stamps to apply, subscription offers and giveaways actually worked - both as promotions and as data gathering vehicles. At a recent Email Insider Summit, PCH VP of Digital Operations and Compliance, Sal Tripi, explained how ugly can be good when it is also relevant, entertaining and fresh.
It is hard to think of a brand name less appropriate to the conditions of a deadly pandemic, both in spirit and business model, than "Party City." But the largest retailer of celebration supplies is weathering the crisis by rethinking its role in customer's lives both during and after COVID. That means teaching us how to party safely and often virtually. And there lies the lasting lessons of the crisis. As CMO Julie Roehm suggests, that involves a deeper, more imaginative rethinking of corporate culture, product mix, and especially content.
In this week's Brand Insider, Chester Bullock, Director of Technology at RentPath and a longtime email marketing maven, explains how the next normal will be about a long-ball brand building. RentPath operates Rent.com and ApartmentGuide.com and generates leads for property owners and marketing partners targeting renters. In our podcast Bullock shows one of the ways RentPath is trying to build brand by reducing customer friction in the lead-gen process.
White Castle was “craveable” long before the term became a QSR cliché. In fact, since its founding in 1921, the brand quietly pioneered many conventions of the industry. It tried QSR delivery in the 1930s, had drive-thrus and app-based advance ordering years before most competitors, and its product went into grocery stores over 35 years ago. Not surprisingly, this QSR/CPG hybrid was very well positioned to weather, even prosper from the pandemic year. CMO Lynn Blashford explains how a highly centralized structure of nearly 400 company-owned outlets helped White Castle make the necessary pivots. At the same time, the company structure also allowed it to fully embrace the social protests and calls for justice that from which many other brands demurred.
How much of the digital business surge this year is the result of temporary lockdown culture and how much is attributable to your native marketing genius? The path back to real life interaction is unpredictable in most categories, but is especially acute for the telemedicine sector where the hands-on doctor/patient experience is as old as Hippocrates and the days when Shamans made cave calls. Nurx CMO Katelyn Watson has been thinking ahead and is already calibrating her media buys and content with the expectation the wave of telehealth activity will ebb and diffuse eventually. Nurx is a vertical telehealth provider, offering patients online connections with their own doctors as well as prescriptions, ordering, delivery and follow-up. She is a veteran of startup marketing, with previous marketing roles at IfOnly and Kabbage.
"We don't sell avocados, and we aren't from Mexico" is the inside joke at the Avocados from Mexico brand. Since its founding in 2013, the Texas-based nonprofit marketing group has been dedicated to increasing demand for hundreds of importers and distributors and thousands of growers and packers of avocados grown in Mexico. Yet, since 2015 the group has leveraged expensive Super Bowl ad space into exceptionally successful digital activations that have driven exponential growth in Avocado consumption. But Avocados from Mexico is passing on the big game of 2021. Instead, it is focusing on the three months of football season before the finale by tying an aggressive shopper marketing program at point-of-sale with digital extensions. A veteran of MediaPost's Insider Summit, Head of Digital Marketing and ecommerce for the brand Ivonne Kinser explains this strategic redirection, not to mention what "ecommerce" even means to a company that has nothing for sale.
In the early days of the COVID lockdowns some restaurants and QSRs became makeshift grocery stores. They filled a gap for their customers when standard groceries ran low or just felt too dangerous to shoppers. But the self-descriptive brand Just Salad turned the idea into a new business to go alongside its 30+ store footprint in cities worldwide. This is but the first in a line of new business ideas CMO Andy Rooks and the management will be exploring in the next year. The impetus for all such innovation, Rooks says, is having genuine conversations with customers, not just harvesting data points.
It has been a wild ride this year for skincare maker Urban Skin Rx and its founder/CEO Rachel Roff. The company was launched around 2010 as an extension of her successful spa and laser treatment center in Charlotte, NC. It was driven by Rachel's own passion for making skincare products more relevant to a wider range of melanin-rich skin. A decade into Urban Skin Rx, about half of sales are still D2C but its products are available at Target, Walmart, Ultra, CVS, and a number of other outlets. A surprise TikTok hit and the Covid-driven self-care impulse have helped sustain the company's meteoric growth. But as a white founder of a company with a 90% African-American clientele, the social protest movement this year presented Rachel and the brand with a special challenge. Roff and the company came under pressure and criticism from which it continues to learn.
Let's welcome to the Brand Insider James Brohamer, who's the Omni-Channel Marketing Director at Purple. The D2C mattress and comfy products brand. We've all seen Purple in every imaginable media channel.
Every marketer wants to crack the code on younger demos and the ways that digital entitlement has shaped Millennials and Gens Y/Z. But not many CMOs with whom I have spoken plot it as out as specifically as Saladworks' Mark Mears. He has pored over the research, and folded in his experience leading the marketing for Cheesecake Factory, Noodles & Co. and Schlotzkey's to create a concise profile of digital natives that informs all of the fast casual restaurant brand's efforts. Mears is tweaking every touchpoint with these cohorts, even the terminology he deploys across the franchise.
In July, A&W Restaurants announced that it had it had seen same store sales increase an average of 12%, making it the third straight month of double-digit year-over-year growth. As A&W's Director of Digital, Liz Bazner tells Brand Insider this week, a lot of that growth took place when A&W's media spend went dark. There may be ominous signs here of how brand reevaluate the value of traditional media in the next normal.
MediaPost's Editorial Director Steve Smith interviews Assistant Manager of Audience Buying Strategy for General Motors, David Spencer.
As Brand Director Adam Weinberg tells us this week, Haven Life aspires to change the conversation around life insurance. Think confetti and hero moments rather than the end-of life euphemisms insurance ads have used for generations.
MediaPost's Steve Smith welcomes to the Brand Insider Jodie Conrad, who is the CMO for Fazoli's, the fast casual Italian American themed restaurant based in Lexington, Kentucky, and has over 200 outlets.
NI is a B2B company in the engineering world formerly known as National Instruments, it makes automated test and measurement systems for a range of industries, from auto to wireless, energy to manufacturing equipment. In June NI launched its rebranding campaign. NI's CMO Carla Piñeyro Sublett tells MediaPost's Brand Insider this week how the company handled that rebranding.
The Empathy Metric: PepsiCo Foodservice Checks In On How We're Feeling
Using everything from relentless Zoom meetings to market research, Scott Finlow and his team worked on the best ways one of the world's largest CPGs could offer genuine help, not just lip service.
MediaPost's Steve Smith interviews Purple's Burke Morley, VP of Brand and Executive Creative Director.
One of the most popular organic peanut butter brands on Amazon started as guest favors that Val and Zach Fishbain whipped up in a Vitamix for their DIY wedding. It is a classic “you-oughta-market-this” story. Seven years later, a full line of nut and fruit spreads is a hit both as an ingredient in the wholesale channel and on Amazon. As Zach tells Brand Insider, the founding couple believes in business models that are as sustainable as their ingredients. It turns out that eschewing VC funding and focusing on B2B as well as that single Amazon consumer channel paid off big when the COVID-19 crisis strained their competitors’ omnichannel distribution networks. Spread the Love had the nutrient-dense nut butters consumers needed. And the Amazon ecosystem had the engine that helped the brand surface.
Showing the ROI of elaborate content marketing programs remains one of the biggest challenges for brands and their budgets. And one would expect these to be the first allocations to go in a downturn like the current crisis. But for headphone maker Skullcandy, its long-planned “Mood Boost” campaign and product releases were eerily well-tuned to the COVID-19 lockdowns. And it was easy to double down on a content-first strategy, company CMO Jessica Klodnicki tells Brand Insider this week. The brand already had in place what she calls a “content-to-commerce” model that connected the dots between brand building and performance. It turns out that getting behind a timely cause while providing customers with positive messages and music has measurable ROI.
The largest job search engine comes at the COVID-19 crisis from several unique perspectives. Foremost, it is a barometer placed at the center of the record unemployment storm. As Indeed CMO Paul D’Arcy told us hours after the release of the historically tragic jobs report last week, his site is more than an activity meter around job searches during these challenging months.
Emotional learning brand Slumberkins was built for precisely this kind of current crisis. MediaPost's Editorial Director, Events, Steve Smith chats with Co-founder Callie Christensen and VP of Marketing Vanessa Holfert as they explain how the company’s roots as a homemade Etsy project and its devoted social media community are helping it thrive in a shelter-in-place economy.
While many brands are responding to the COVID-19 crisis by putting their media plans on pause, Potbelly CMO Brandon Rhoten believes in investing in moments of disruption. Listen as MediaPost's Editorial Director, Events Steve Smith chats with Brandon about these moments of disruption.