Gen Z audiences respond better to creative that doesn’t overtly feel like an ad, according to the marketing team at DiGiorno pizza. So for its latest campaign on TikTok, it’s paying influencers to create original soundtracks about the product. Because for younger audiences, a brand promoting itself is not nearly as effective as consumers talking about it—or in this case, singing about it. An article in AdExchanger explores how DiGiorno experienced a 3.6 percent increase in brand awareness, 6.8 percent uptick in brand favorability and 3.1 percent boost in sales using this strategy.

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It’s been a newsworthy week for the controversial CEO of Twitter. And that’s not counting his SpaceX Starship rocket exploding mid-launch.

Twitter announced a new content moderation policy on Monday, April 17, dubbed “Freedom of Speech, Not Freedom of Reach,” which aims to restrict the visibility of tweets that violate its rules against “hateful conduct.” The following day, billionaire owner Elon Musk talked up Twitter’s recent efforts to promote transparency to a crowd of advertisers, marketers and media folks—this editor included—at MMA Global’s inaugural POSSIBLE conference in Miami.

Though extremely attentive to the CEO’s remarks, we’re not convinced all in the crowd were receptive—despite outbursts of cheers from some in attendance. Many advertisers fled the platform after Musk took over the company in October and began making moves that prioritize his views on free speech—“the bedrock of democracy,” in his words—over content moderation, from reinstating formerly banned users to a new paid verification service for accounts with blue check marks.

The new enforcement policy, according to Musk, will make tweets that potentially violate its rules less discoverable on the platform. “If somebody has something hateful to say, it doesn’t mean you should give them a megaphone. They should still be able to say it, but it needs to be not then pushed on people,” he said. “So, if somebody wants to say something that’s technically legal, but that is by most definitions hateful, we’re not going to promote that. We’re not going to recommend hateful content to people. We’ll put it behind a warning label.”

But will advertisers consider the platform safe enough to reinvest? Moderator Linda Yaccarino, Chairman, Global Advertising and Partnerships at NBCUniversal, summed up advertisers’ concerns with this: “Have you de-risked the opportunity or chance of their campaigns landing in these awful hateful places?”

Musk responded that Twitter is indeed taking action to allow brands control where their ads show up. “People may not be aware of this already, but we have adjacency controls in place that are really quite effective… Ads will not appear next to anything remotely negative.” He added, though, that campaigns launched without using adjacency controls do not mitigate that risk. “That should never be done,” he said. “You must put controls in place, because we have excess inventory on negativity.”

Trust and Transparency

When it comes to implementing warning labels that accompany tweets that possibly violate Twitter’s Hateful Content policy, Musk said he has open-sourced a list of words associated with such content, as well as the recommendation algorithm and the Community Notes algorithm. The latter function—formerly known as the Birdwatch program—allows Twitter users to add context to “potentially misleading tweets” by leaving notes that are then evaluated and rated by Birdwatch contributors.

“I think in order to really build trust you have to have transparency,” Musk said. “If you want to trust something, you’ve got to know how it works. And so that’s why we open-sourced the algorithm, and we actually fixed I think over a hundred issues with the algorithm. So it’s actually very helpful to open-source it.” When asked whether his own tweets are subject to Community Notes, Musk said that they are—and that he’s been corrected before as well.

The Feedback Loop

Musk also shared his long-term vision for Twitter, which is “to have a platform that is so useful that you find it is essential.” That means providing a “meaningful communication pathway,” with voice and video calls, encrypted and public communications, and payment capabilities.

But in addition to having concerns regarding the protection of their ad campaigns, advertising experts are also looking for more of an open feedback loop of communication with Musk, Yaccarino argued, “to help develop Twitter into a place where they will be excited about investing more money, product development, content moderation.”

If Twitter becomes an open-sourced conversation, in which users can conduct their lives, their business and their commerce, that’s a huge advertising opportunity for Twitter and for brands, Yaccarino said. “But they need to feel that there is an opportunity for them to influence what you’re building—that vision, what we’re doing here,” she added.

Yaccarino pointed to the beloved former Influence Council from Twitter 1.0, which allowed key stakeholders to have recurring access to Musk. However, the CEO seemed unwilling to reinstate the Council. Pointing again to protecting “the true voice of the people,” he responded that he worried such a move could create “a backlash among the public… There’s legitimate concerns that advertisers have that I want to hear. I think these things should be discussed in an open forum.”

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“With everything that’s happening in privacy right now, and how the media landscape is changing, your first-party and your zero-party data become at the center of communicating with your community or your consumers. And that’s why we really nurture this program.”

—Ekta Chopra, Chief Digital Officer, e.l.f. Beauty

Chopra is referring to e.l.f.’s Beauty Squad in the quote above, a loyalty program that boasts an impressive three million members. The brand’s success on social media, which includes creating TikTok’s first viral campaign and becoming the first beauty brand to launch on the app BeReal, can be attributed to community listening followed by swift action, Chopra explains.

“e.l.f. really listens to their community. And once we get a signal, we lean in,” Chopra says. “We tend to take more risks than some of the other brands do. That’s one key differentiator. And we are not afraid to go into channels, partner with people, and be authentic to those channels.” Chief Marketer spoke with the digital chief about the benefits of loyalty programs, managing personalization at scale, keeping up with the speed of digital, and more.

Chief Marketer: How do you account for e.l.f.’s success on TikTok? What’s working for you that other brands can learn from?

Ekta Chopra, Chief Digital Officer, e.l.f.: It’s grounded in who we are. First of all, e.l.f. is a bold disruptor with a kind heart. Disruption is in our DNA. We listen to our community; our boots are on the ground. Back in 2019 when TikTok was just starting to come up, we did a small test, and it gave us the signal that our community is actually there. We leaned into that signal and partnered with an expert in TikTok, and [created] the most viral campaign that TikTok has ever seen, our #eyeslipsface challenge. Now we are a TikTok “billionaire” multiple times.

The key thing there is, e.l.f. really listens to their community. And once we get a signal, we lean in. We tend to take more risks than some of the other brands do. That’s one key differentiator. We are not afraid to go into channels, partner with people, and be authentic to those channels. Sometimes brands just want to dive in, but they don’t lean into this ecosystem of people that actually know how those channels operate. Once our community tells us that you need to be here, we don’t wait. We want be the first ones. The same thing happened with BeReal. We are the first beauty brand on [the platform]. Then everybody else followed.

CM: Talk a little bit about your Beauty Squad and how you nurture that community.

EC: Beauty Squad is our loyalty program, essentially. Currently we have a little bit over three million loyalty members. With everything that’s happening in privacy right now, and how the media landscape is changing, your first-party and your zero-party data become at the center of communicating with your community or your consumers. And that’s why we really nurture this program. Our program rewards our consumers not just for shopping with us, but also for shopping with other retailers. They can choose different types of rewards. On our app, 95 percent of our shoppers are Beauty Squad members, so we know that from a shopping experience perspective, that is our most engaged consumer. And it is also about giving us feedback. We learn a lot from them.

CM: How do you approach creating a personalized customer experience at scale?

EC: We invested in ActionIQ’s CDP way before the privacy landscape was even starting to change. For us, leveraging and harnessing the power of data is very important. When you think about personalization, it is your data, right? When it comes to Beauty Squad, that’s the most engaged consumer that’s giving you information about who your consumer is, what they like, what they don’t like. [It’s about] leveraging the power of a CDP and then surfacing up insights that can then help us create the right content for the right people, the right messaging across all channels. And then ensuring that the consumer is not wasting their time, they get the information that’s going to be relevant and our brand shows up the best that it can. The CDP is what’s helping us power that.

CM: As a digital-focused company with so many different products and launches, how do you keep up with it all?

EC: Digital is always changing. You’re on shaky ground all the time. Number one, it takes the whole organization being digitally-centric and data-driven. Because if it is only one person talking about it, it doesn’t go anywhere. There is an alignment at an organization-level that’s needed. Number two, for me personally, I like to focus on learning from others. You partner with like-minded people, whether it be other companies that are doing amazing things or the insights that you’re learning, and then building an organization that can activate those insights into actions. [It’s] bringing those insights to the organizations externally, leveraging what you’re learning internally through the data that you have, and building an action-oriented team that can actually deliver and focus on speed—because doing it with quality and speed is really important. You have to balance both.

Digital is a constant muscle of testing and learning, and then quickly leaning in when you see that something is working. TikTok was a great example of that. We didn’t wait a year before we got any approvals or anything. It’s about leaning in once you see a signal—and leaning in hard and quickly.

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For social media marketers in industries like retail, travel and food, the holiday season can be the busiest time of the year—and also a critical one, if you’re serving on the front lines of communication for your brand. Preparation for this onslaught of traffic can help mitigate crises and convert a challenge into an opportunity. PRNEWS looks at ways brands can capitalize on this time of the year, from proactive coverage strategies to crafting customer-care plans to preparing pinned posts.

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Ocean Spray is crafting cross-channel campaigns this holiday season on TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube using social content creators and promotions tailored to each platform. And then there are the shoppable recipe videos it’s producing to run on various publisher sites. The result? A whole lot of fragmentation. Read how Ocean Spray views this complexity as both a challenge and an opportunity, according to a piece in AdExchanger.

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Consumers may not initially equate live music, gaming and the metaverse with an insurance brand—but with its recent launch on Roblox, State Farm is looking to change all that.

“We’re in a category that not many folks wake up thinking about every day,” said Alyson Griffin, Vice President of Marketing at State Farm. “It felt like the right next steps… showing up where our potential and future customers will be in new, interesting ways—but that are authentic to how they think about us in the real world.”

That’s the idea behind its new metaverse activation iHeartLand, a music-themed interactive experience on Roblox created in partnership with iHeartMedia and Intel, featuring live, virtual concerts, gamified music composition, branded worlds from State Farm and Intel, and much more. We spoke with Griffin and iHeartMedia CMO Gayle Troberman about the value the experience is creating for the companies involved, the advantages of cross-brand promotion, the importance of collecting data and insights through testing and advice for brands who are looking to build a presence in the metaverse.

Chief Marketer: There’s a lot of talk about the metaverse at the moment, but not every brand is participating quite yet. Why is that important for your brands to get involved?

Gayle Troberman, CMO of iHeartMedia: At iHeart, we believe in democratizing access between fans and artists and brands and podcasters at scale. We’re always about testing and learning in new spaces, to go wherever the fans are, and to try to create those once-in-a-lifetime experiences and moments. As we saw how big the numbers were, particularly the metaverse gaming platforms that already have high usage and hundreds of millions of consumers engaging on a regular basis, we thought what a perfect place to create new experiences that bring music and gaming together, which is a new space for us. We believe in going everywhere fans are and figuring out what the right experiences are between the fans, the brand and the artists. And that’s exactly what we’re in the middle of with our friends at State Farm.

Alyson Griffin, Vice President of Marketing at State Farm: For State Farm, I’ll just lay it out there: We’re in a category that not many folks wake up thinking about every day. And I’m saying it with a huge smile on my face. Not only that, but we are not a global brand. We operate only in the United States. And just like for every business around the globe, the buying power of the under 40 crowd is immensely important to all brands globally. So we are trying to think of interesting, exciting, unexpected ways to show up to generate future demand. When Gayle started talking to us about this opportunity with iHeartLand in the metaverse, I jumped in really fast because we can replicate what we do naturally in the real world. We show up with stadium sponsorships, for example, naming rights and gaming. We’ve been in gaming for over a decade and we are a big sponsor of audio, with iHeart as an example. It felt like the right next steps… showing up where our potential and future customers will be in new interesting ways—but that are authentic to how they think about us in the real world.

CM: Using your mascot, Jake from State Farm, as a way to engage with players seemed like a smart choice.

AG: We were fortunate to have a little bit of learning here. Jake was the first non-playable-character in NBA2K, maybe a year and a half ago now. We did a lot of learning and testing. Will people approach him? If they do, how long will they interact with him? If they interact with him, will they spend their money on a skin, which is khakis and a red shirt? All that kind of stuff. So when we were talking to Gayle and the iHeart team about the metaverse, it was a no-brainer that we would want to put Jake in it.

And then the final act that we have is literally the words “like a good neighbor, State Farm is there,” but also the notion of what it means to be a good neighbor. Jake’s able to represent that good neighbor spirit in the game.

CM: There are some synergies between your brands. Can you talk about the value of cross-brand promotion here?

AG: For State Farm, we were already good partners with iHeart. And what I mean by that is a partner who understands our culture, understands what matters to us, has worked with us and activated for a long period of time and knew what our brand safety guidelines were. That really matters to State Farm. So, right out of the gate, there was a trust with iHeart in particular. We were both jumping in, and I think I can say for both of us, this was a leap—no small amount of money here. So the synergy there, at least to start, was: At least we are doing this with someone who understands how important our brand safety and attributes are.

The other reason that iHeart was a really great choice for us was the scale. They’re reaching nine out of every 10 Americans, and the media mass network of broadcast and podcast, where we are already enjoying a lot of benefit, is something that was important to us. Again, because we are not a global brand, and to surround people in the United States with our message is difficult [when you] just have the power of one country. This reach that iHeart has was really critical to agreeing to go into it.

GT: You see a lot of brands jumping into the metaverse or opening their own parks or land, but it’s a real commitment to program new content and new experiences on an every day, every week, every month basis. The equation is great for iHeart and for the brands and for the artists who perform in the metaverse at State Farm Park and iHeartLand because we have the promotional power to go on iHeart’s broadcast radio stations, across iHeart’s podcast network and our streaming platform. And we can rally users and tell consumers every day about what’s happening in Roblox, in Fortnite, and we can pull consumers in on a regular basis. And there’s consumers who may not even go to iHeartLand in Roblox, but will know that those things are happening and they’ll hear about State Farm Park and then they’ll understand the brand is about innovation and engaging consumers in new and fun ways where music and gaming collide.

CM: Music and sound branding are key features of the activation. Do you see audio playing a pivotal role in the development of metaverse activations moving forward?

AG: Yes, audio will be part of the metaverse. And music. My guess is that it’ll be fully immersive. One of the interesting things is that we have stadium rights in the real world. And if Charlie Puth was playing a stadium, maybe he would do multiple days or he would have to go on a world tour to hit the number of people who attended the State Farm Park iHeartLand concert that he just did in one go. That notion of democratizing access to these famous artists is really appealing to us. And I think that the metaverse provides that opportunity. I don’t have to get on a plane. I don’t have to pay for this huge ticket. I don’t have to wait until the summer—whatever it is. I can just attend in the metaverse.

GT: If you’re Charlie Puth or Lauv, which are the two concerts we’ve done to date, as an artist it’s an amazing experience, too. Charlie got to perform once, and that concert was probably the equivalent of doing 50 to a hundred sold out shows in Madison Square Garden. So all of a sudden he’s got so many of his fans, as Alyson said, who can access a new experience. Now, how concerts evolve and what exactly is the interaction and the interplay between the music and the gaming experience, that’s one of the big new questions that we’re all just learning about. But the music community is equally interested in figuring out the right interaction between a performance and their music and the games and the experience. It’s a whole new way to see a concert and not just be sitting in a seat.

AG: This is just pondering the future of the metaverse, but it occurs to me that it could potentially be the present-day radio or television, where it’s a gathering place for the family as well, depending on what is happening in the metaverse. Most people think it’s the kids and they’re putting on a headset and stealing themselves away. And maybe some of that is true, but with these kinds of experiences evolving, I think families can participate together and talk and discuss—the way the radio and the television changed family dynamics when they were each introduced.

Stay tuned for part 2 of our conversation with iHeartMedia and State Farm, to come later this week on Chiefmarketer.com.

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According to a study from ecommerce analytics tool provider Triple Whale, ad spend on TikTok in Q2 was up 53 percent from the previous quarter. Meanwhile, Facebook and Instagram’s ad spend slowed in comparison. An article in Multichannel Merchant explores TikTok’s recent success with younger, engaged audiences, plus additional statistics surrounding DTC purchasing behavior.

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Fun fact: David’s Bridal, a company that has been selling dresses since the 1950s, now spends half its social media budget on TikTok. The strategy arose from the brand’s need to build engagement and close sales more than increase brand awareness. A piece in AdExchanger explores the company’s recent social push and how influencers factor heavily into its marketing strategy.

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Ahead of the 2022 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which activated in person last week in the south of France for the first time in three years, we picked the brain of one of the boldest risk-takers in consumer health marketing at the moment: Patricia Corsi, Global Chief Marketing & Digital Officer at Bayer Consumer Health. Tackling the taboo surrounding conversations about women’s intimate health, Corsi created an educational, entertaining, influencer- and expert-led campaign on TikTok for the global brand Canesten dubbed the “Vagina Academy.” Following is an excerpt of our conversation with Corsi about the brand’s journey through developing the campaign, its strategic marketing goals, obstacles encountered along the way—including censorship—and the importance of taking risks within the consumer health category.

Chief Marketer: How have you shown up at Cannes this year, as a marketer and with the brands you oversee?

Patricia Corsi, Global Chief Marketing & Digital Officer, Bayer Consumer Health: This has been a wonderful year for us from a creativity point of view. In the past 12 months, our brands have been recognized by numerous different awards. Cannes is always very special, and this year it was our record number of submissions. I’m very excited about that because I see the momentum from the team and in consumer health as an industry, and in our agencies as well.

Last year I had the opportunity to be a juror, not as the jury president, like this year. It was so inspiring. It was a fantastic show of creativity and greatness in this area, ideas that were outstanding in an industry that really needs this.

CM: Regarding your creative campaigns, you’ve been working on incorporating science into them. Can you talk about that?

PC: This is an area in health that has been a big challenge for the creative industry for many years, but we also have to recognize that most of the consumer health companies come as divisions of pharma companies, which are not well known for being strong in brand building and brand development.

The first step was to understand that having [great] science is non-negotiable. And then, the regulations are there for a good reason, because it’s not like other categories. When something goes wrong, people’s lives are at stake. But this shouldn’t stop us. I think that the best ideas normally come when we have constraints, and [know] when to be clear, what the boundaries are and then move forward.

CM: Tell me about the Creative Council you formed and how it informs your campaigns.

PC: The Creative Council is a forum with our strategic partners. We have key marketers in each one of our regions, and then we have CMOs and digital officers from external, noncompetitive companies like Danone, Dole, Google, et cetera. It started with a very simple idea: collaboration and learning from each other is the only path forward. Everyone put their time in pro bono, because we want to make a change in the industry—not just for Bayer. And of course, the things that we discussed there will help inspire other CMOs from a consumer-centric point of view and help our partners better understand this industry and the challenges [faced by] other countries and partners.

We’ve had quarterly meetings, for almost two years, and we focus on a couple of strategic topics. For example, how do we use data to drive creativity? Another strategic topic would be marketing for good. There is one that we are implementing now in Brazil that is something that we want to change systemically—the lack of diversity in the advertising industry. We partner with the Creative Club (the Brazilian version of the ANA in the U.S.) and we have a contest for people who aim to be in the creative business who come from low-income households, and specifically for the black community. They will have the chance to work on briefings for our brands, and the ones who win will get mentoring from the best creative directors in Brazil, as well as exclusive training that will put them in a competitive situation versus people that have a lot of means, contacts, family connections, et cetera.

CM: The Vagina Academy campaign in Brazil, from the women’s intimate health brand Canesten, is taboo-busting, to put it lightly. What was the inspiration behind it?

PC: This is one that is very close to my heart because it came from a program that we have called Creative Unleashed, something that I started doing when I was working for Heineken. Our agencies have forums throughout the year where they can come and present great ideas for our brands, without any briefing, just out of passion for our brands. And Vagina Academy came from one of those forums.

The initial reaction internally was, oh, we love this, because it’s [really] the job of this brand. But can we just take the vagina name out of it? It was really funny. The agency almost fell out of their chairs, because, of course, if you take the vagina name of it, it loses most of its power.

But it was a great opportunity. This is not an industry that has been educated on risky, bold communication ideas. It was a great learning opportunity for everyone in the process, which I really embraced.

CM: What consumer insights did you base the campaign on?

PC: We started with data and it was telling us the following: Women’s intimate health is a real issue. When women have a problem, they feel ashamed. They feel people are judging them. They feel people are saying that they’re promiscuous, so they don’t tell anyone when they have intimate problems, including their doctors. That should be the most sacred relationship you have for your health, right? If you cannot talk to a gynecologist, who are you going to talk to?

We discovered in a couple of countries that, on average, 70 percent of the women would not say the word “vagina” to their gynecologist—someone who has studied this word and this organ, back and forth, inside and out. This was the first piece of data. The second one was more observing consumer behavior and looking at how we can help. We observed that when women got in front of the shelf to buy products for intimate health problems, it was like a pitstop in Formula One or NASCAR, because they were so worried that someone would see them buying that product. And most of the time, they would buy the wrong product, because they were not even reading it.

It is not a simple category to understand. One of the consumers said, “I would find anything that has a flower on it, and I would buy it,” because a flower is a gentle way of saying vagina. I found that hilarious. But on the other hand, poor lady! Did it solve her problem? The answer is no, because of course she bought [the wrong thing.] We looked at that and we said the only way that we are going to help them is by democratizing the discussion about vagina health and making it mainstream.

CM: Did you face any opposition from the Brazilian community for shining a light on a taboo topic?

PC: We started facing problems that we never thought we would have. The wonderful thing is that the Brazilian team really bought into the idea. You want a country that is going to lead [a campaign] to be into it. There are so many working women in Brazil that they felt the responsibility to do something to help.

We wanted to do this in a super organic, democratic, modern way. So where are we going to go? TikTok. We go to TikTok, and TikTok loves it. We said we are going to have lots of different influencers and physiotherapists for vagina health. We had people who really knew what they were talking about.

But then TikTok came to us and said, oh, there is one small problem. The word vagina is censored on TikTok. So, how are we going to do a program that is called Vagina Academy when the word is censored? This is where I go back to what I mentioned to you before: Collaboration gets us further. We worked with our agency partner, TikTok and our team in Brazil and we managed to uncensor the word.

This was also a great opportunity to show that we respect diversity. At that point, we had just joined the Unstereotype Alliance from the United Nations. We made sure that all different women in Brazil felt represented, all the different ethnicities, women with physical disabilities. We had a great representation of women, different ages, et cetera. We delivered the equivalent of 17,000 classes on intimate health. There was no program in the country that has done that.

These are the type of things that when you come to health you want to do, but you are always afraid that something’s going to block you. It started as a use case in Brazil, and now it’s in Europe, Asia Pacific, and each different country is putting their nuance into it. For example, in Australia, it’s called the University of Down Under. In Italy, they have managed together with Meta to uncensor “vagina” on Facebook. Every single country that we go to, we look back and see that we are making a difference. It’s a shame that we don’t have this brand and this product in the U.S., because it would be a no-brainer to democratize women’s intimate health there.

CM: Who enrolls in this? Are you targeting all female consumers?

PC: This is a great question, because the answer is quite tricky. Our target is expanding in this way versus how it started. We started in a very traditional way with women who look like women and were born like women, from age 15 to maybe 45. And now it’s changing a little bit. The trans community was something that we hadn’t had in our thoughts. We are learning how to cater to them.

So, how do we do it in a way that is also inclusive to them? We don’t have the answer yet. But just last week, a very generous person from our team in one of the countries who is a transgender had a conversation with me to help me educate myself and to talk about the challenges and problems, and it was wonderful session. I’m very grateful that there are people who are really willing to stop what they’re doing to help me to learn more. And with that, [we’ll] be able to serve them better.

CM: Beyond the personal passion that you have for this topic, what are the strategic marketing goals of this campaign? What’s the business objective?

PC: We want to continue to consolidate our brand preference and our brand loyalty. Second, we want to increase the level of experience with our products. This goes back to the point that people were not staying long enough in front of the shelf to buy the right product. How do we come across from a packaging design point of view, so people know what to look for? The consumer experience with our brands goes from shelf to usage at home.

And of course, brand equity over time—more than just short-term gains. In all the countries where we have implemented this, we have grown market share. As important as growing market share is our ability to increase brand love and brand equity through time, because we believe there is an opportunity for us to serve women’s intimate health, even further than what we are doing at the moment.

CM: In terms of platforms you use to market this campaign to consumers, are you going beyond TikTok to reach people?

PC: We use different platforms in different countries. In Italy, we have Meta. In Brazil, we had TikTok, and a lot of the influencers also put the same content in Instagram. But the most important strategic channel decision is that it was not going to be a campaign in the traditional media [sense]. We also did a lot of direct and ambient out of home.

It wasn’t a PR stunt, but in Brazil, for example, we had a bus going up to the favelas—the low-income places—to deliver these educational classes. And in the UK, we are also approaching the educational system on how to change the way intimate health is taught to adolescents, to teenagers in school. Each country has a different way of executing the principles. But the strategic principles are all the same. We want to use media that is in line with the people who we are talking to—and this means non-traditional media.

The second thing is that there is an over-index on education versus product selling. There are lots of things where, as a portfolio, we don’t have an offer. Nevertheless, even if we don’t have an offering from a product or service point of view, we believe by partnering with women on their needs we’ll increase their love for the brand, their loyalty and brand equity. And in some countries, we have started to test telehealth and use bots. Because we know that this is a taboo topic, there are a couple of questions on intimate health that are very easily responded to by bots, to help tackle [the fact that] some people still feel ashamed. We are also testing some solutions in the digital world.

CM: Speaking more generally, what are a couple of trends that global marketers should be keeping an eye on today?

PC: The first one is looking at data to drive insights and creativity. The second one is the power of collaboration. In the past, there was a tendency to integrate with one partner as the solution. The last one is the opportunity that digital transformation brought to marketers—the ability to test and try things. When I started my career, there was not a lot of space to try things, because if you do something wrong on a TV ad, or a print or radio ad, you lost the whole thing. The risk was so big. Now, with digital, there’s A/B testing, understanding how the consumer feels about different messages, personalization, precision and programmatic. I think there is this great opportunity to be more courageous and to take a little bit more risk, specifically in health.

Of course, I’m not talking about regulatory risk. I’m talking about creative risks. Sometimes the default expectation is that everyone in the room will like an idea—and that that’s the best idea. I tend to think that if everyone thinks that one idea is good, we are missing something. The best ideas for me are the ones where you really want to hate it, but you love it, and you feel uncomfortable with it. It makes your heart beat.

Now, I see a great opportunity to do this more with business focus. A couple of years back, we had a wave of brilliant creativity. But they did nothing for company results. I think it’s the combination of creativity that has stopping power with consumers and driving business results. It is what gives us credibility and continues assurance from the business to continue doing the things that we can do best. The trend of the Chief Marketing Officer or marketing head as just an expert in advertising is long gone.

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Claiming that your brand’s marketing philosophy is “social-first” is one thing. Truly walking the walk is another. Boardroom, the sports business media network founded in 2019 by Kevin Durant’s investment company 35V, is a shining example of the latter.

What started as a series on ESPN+ has evolved into newsletters, podcasts, premium video, written editorial and daily news that garners millions of monthly unique views and boasts tens of thousands of subscribers—all accrued in less than three years. Critical to the network’s growth was a test-and-learn strategy to pinpoint what content—and in particular, what format—worked best on social, and then applying that to developing its editorial strategy.

“While it sounds a little crazy to have done it that way, it was extraordinarily helpful because by the time we were hiring a full editorial staff, a full video staff and an audience development team, we already had these great use cases for what really worked for us on social,” Boardroom and 35V CMO Sarah Flynn told Chief Marketer. We spoke with Flynn about Boardroom’s growth strategy, its three-tiered target audience, experiential marketing plays and next steps for the brand moving forward.

Chief Marketer: Boardroom launched just prior to the pandemic in 2019. Today, it brings in 2.3 million unique views to its website, 216 million impressions and 8 million video views monthly. Discuss your growth strategy for the brand and how you achieved this success.

Sarah Flynn, CMO of Boardroom and 35V: When we first started growing the network, the most important thing was making sure that we had a differentiated voice and that we weren’t just another sports platform. People cover things on social media; there are a lot of different perspectives in the world. We needed to establish the “whys” of our existence. Once we started doing that, we were able to galvanize our network organically, through word-of-mouth, and have the athletes, entertainers, executives and people in our circles understand what we were trying to do and support it and promote it, which provides a halo effect and starts the initial organic growth.

Then, once we went through phase one, we were able to put our foot on the gas a bit more with an organic and paid social media strategy, digital marketing in general, and continuing to create awareness through the way that we cover different athletes, executives and entertainers, and making sure they’re sharing and reconnecting with their audiences. As well as starting to be more constructive about where we see ourselves out in the world, like being at VeeCon and the upcoming film we have, “NYC Point Gods,” and having that be affiliated with Boardroom rather than going full 35V. It’s being thoughtful about the places that we can be in the world, in addition to the “always-on-ness” of marketing on social media and continuing to drive people back to our site.

CM: So, the athletes and executives you cover are a key part of your word-of-mouth strategy.

SF: Athletes, executives and everybody in our network. We couldn’t do what we do from an editorial coverage standpoint if we didn’t have some of that buy-in from the early days. When we first started, we knew we had access and understanding. We used that as an asset on the content side, and it was also how we were thinking about it on the marketing side, because we knew that if we had buy-in from a lot of those people, they would start talking about it. They would subscribe to our newsletters. For a little while at the beginning, the core of our audience was actually the people that we were covering—and they were telling their fans.

And obviously, we have the force that is Kevin Durant. His fans knew early on, and that helped us get a jump start on follower and traffic growth, but also helped us understand what that audience and fans really want to see so that we were able to craft our content strategy around it. And the content piece and the marketing piece have to go hand in hand.

CM: After establishing your voice, how did you determine what your fans wanted?

SF: We did a lot of testing on social, and not just topic testing, but format testing, seeing what worked organically, seeing what performed well, if we put paid spend behind certain things. There was almost an entire year around building the social strategy where we didn’t have a full editorial strategy in place or a full internal team. We had not ramped up hiring yet because we wanted to do a lot of that content-type testing and make sure that the things we thought people wanted to see were really the things they wanted to see—before we actually grew our team and understood the needs that we had internally.

While it sounds a little crazy to have done it that way, it was extraordinarily helpful because by the time we were hiring a full editorial staff, a full video staff and an audience development team, we already had these great use cases of what really worked for us on social. [We would say] here’s some of the things that we’ve done, from a video and interview perspective, that have really worked well. And here’s how we think those things can translate to the larger editorial and content sphere.

CM: You used a social-first strategy to help build your content strategy.

SF: Yeah. Boardroom started out as a show that we did with ESPN, but even as we were doing that show, we knew we wanted to do more. We wanted to make it a network. So, piggybacking off of what we did with that show and transitioning it into something that was social-first was that initial incubation phase.

CM: You launched Boardroom just before the pandemic. How did that factor into your growth?

SF: The pandemic helped us focus on the things we knew we could do and what worked. From a sports business perspective, while it became very hard for places with live sports to understand where they needed to pivot, how they were going to make up for things financially, our coverage and our network is built off the business in and of itself. So, we were able to cover where people were putting sports spending dollars now that you didn’t have traditional sports on live TV, such as the NBA doing a 2K tournament on broadcast TV instead of having live games.

The business of it never stopped. A lot of people had to figure out how to innovate and do different things. We were really early to doing one-on-one interviews with people on Zoom, [and asking questions like] what are you doing? Are you thinking about your business? What does this look like? Being able to have those kinds of conversations early on helped us cut out some of the noise from a focus perspective, because we were able to double down on what was working.

Max Verstappen (Red Bull) -150
Charles Leclerc (Ferrari) +145
George Russell (Mercedes) +1800
Sergio Perez (Red Bull) +2400
Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes) +2800
Carlos Sainz Jr. (Ferrari) +5000

A breakdown ahead of the Baku Grand Prix. https://t.co/sJa5Nd0ILS

— Boardroom (@boardroom) June 12, 2022

CM: What is your current target demographic? And how do you see it expanding?

SF: There are three buckets of fans that we speak to in slightly different ways. One is what we like to call the modern day sports fan, which is somebody who can be a more casual fan, but who’s really interested in the sports business in and of itself. They might not watch every single game on TV, but they’re probably seeing the highlights on Twitter. They’re scrolling through their Instagram and understanding what’s going on. They do care about who’s the GM of this team, or who’s buying this team, or what’s my favorite player doing off the field. It does skew largely male, 18 to 34, but we’re seeing an increase in female followers as well.

Then there are two sub-audiences. One is young entrepreneurs—people coming out of college who are thinking about business and the world of work in very different ways. They want to know what’s going on in Web3, in crypto, and they want to know what’s going on in new verticals, new sports tech, things like that. The content that we provide can help educate them on that. They’re not going to get that kind of information at a place like a CNBC or a CNN anymore. They’re going to a place like Boardroom. They’re having conversations on Reddit.

Then the third I call the sophisticated audience, which is people who just want to be really well read. That audience skews a little bit older. They’re subscribing to New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and want to consume strong information and be informed. That’s an audience that people market to a bit less, but it’s one we think about all of the time. And then from an expansion standpoint, we’ve started doing a lot more music business coverage in addition to sports business coverage, and finding the right inflection points from a culture standpoint. A big goal of mine is to make sure we have the same strategy for music fans/music industry people that we did on the sports side.

CM: How have you shaped your testing and content strategy specifically? How do you find those inflection points?

SF: It’s three things. One, seeing how content performs across all different platforms, what’s hitting and what’s not hitting, and how we position it. Two, we’re always going to go back to that word-of-mouth and that our-network-is-educated strategy, because the more that our network is educated and excited about it, the more that translates eventually to fans as well. And three, A/B testing how content is presented on our site and who’s coming back for what kind of stuff, as well as paid strategy. If we are targeting new music audiences and we’re bringing people to the site, are they staying? Is that meaningful, and why or why not?

CM: Are you planning on experimenting with any new platforms beyond the ones you use now?

SF: Definitely. We’re in the process of revamping our website and doing some other things that will help galvanize and foster more of a community piece. I’m looking at platforms and strategies right now that will help a community conversation and perhaps unlock some experiences.

 

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CM: How is Boardroom planning to play in the metaverse?

SF: The metaverse is such an interesting conversation for us because it is a little meta: We’re covering what other people are doing in the metaverse. And then from a larger, 35V company perspective, we know what’s going on in the marketplace and we have brands and companies that we work with that have been extremely early adopters.

We’re being very cautious about the strategy that we craft there. The one thing that I would hate to do from a brand perspective is what a lot of the metaverse conversations are doing right now—which is a press play. [They] created a thing in the metaverse that you get press around. It doesn’t live, it doesn’t do anything special that you can’t do in Web2. We don’t want to create that. We want to use the metaverse and Web3 technology to actually cultivate community and do new and interesting things. I don’t think consumers’ heads are where they need to be yet for that to happen.

It helps us have constructive conversations about where we can be and how we can build, but I’m not going to jump into something just to jump into it. Everything that we do needs to be really thought out and well planned. We have the information and the tools that we need, but we’re not going to just show up tomorrow in the metaverse.

CM: What’s your experiential marketing strategy?

SF: Experiential marketing is really important to us, and there are three different ways that I’m thinking about it. One, we can approach any kind of experience from an editorial perspective and that can be very valuable. We look at where the conferences and events are, and how our editorial team can cover them on the ground and come back and tell fans about it.

Two, especially over the course of the next year, as you know, events are now really back to normal—in the way that we said they were going to be last year, but weren’t. We’ll start to appear thoughtfully and strategically in places where we know that there are fans and new audiences that we convert. A great example of that is we had a section called Boardroom Bleachers at VeeCon last month that was a targeted area for people to book meetings and network with each other, and have a space away from like the fray to have meaningful conversations and get business done.

Then three is, what are the opportunities that we have as a company to create our own events? The “NYC Point Gods” film that’s coming out with Showtime in July is a 35V project, but it is also a film about the cultural impact of the ’80s and ’90s, New York City point guards, how incredible they were, how they changed the culture and the sport, and the world around them. You’ll see Boardroom branding on that when it comes out. We’re doing a special premiere event in New York. Being able to create smaller touchpoints and connect them back to Boardroom is something that I’m always trying to figure out how we capitalize on.

CM: When it comes to marketing as an industry, any thoughts on what qualities a modern CMO should have?

SF: It’s about so much more than marketing than it ever used to be. The old school way of thinking about a CMO was, this is the person that’s going to come in, they’re going to spend a lot of money on flashy campaigns. They’re going to do a lot of paid opportunity marketing and they’re going to do whatever they can for brand awareness. And then that’s also the first person who goes on the chopping block when there are budget cuts, because they were spending all the money.

I am a marketing person first and foremost, but I’m a product person. I’m a business development person. I’m always figuring out what our revenue strategies look like. I have my hands in every aspect of this business, very necessarily. And I think that it’s true across all C-suite and executive jobs that, especially at organizations that aren’t huge, those roles are no longer as siloed as they used to be. And they can’t be. If you want be a successful, modern day CMO, you have to be willing to learn other new skills and be willing to put your hands in other territories in order to make things work.

The post Brands on Fire: A Chat With Boardroom CMO Sarah Flynn appeared first on Chief Marketer.