Think of Brands as Living Organisms Ft. Laura Jones

Laura Jones:

We don’t look at brands, just in the isolation of their category. We fundamentally have studied that brands that break away from their categories are actually defining their brand by the broadest imaginable space. So if you’re a brand like Heinz, like ketchup, you’re not just looking at how you’re doing in the context of other shelf stable tomato based condiments. You’re looking across how you stand in the entirety of the grocery store. That’s really important because if you can identify your competitive set as broadly as possible, it opens up more possibilities for growth.

Adam Kerpelman:

Hey everybody, it’s the data driven marketer. I’m Adam.

Mark Richardson:

I’m Mark.

Laura Jones:

I’m Laura.

Adam Kerpelman:

Welcome back for another hang in the data basement. Thanks for joining us, everybody and special thanks to our guest this week, Laura Jones, who is chief strategy officer of WPPs BAV and consulting division BAV group. Did I get it?

Laura Jones:

You got it. You passed the high test and the acronym test.

Adam Kerpelman:

We’re here to talk about branding. So I don’t don’t want to disrespect the fact of understanding why we say all of that in this context.

Mark Richardson:

The fact that abbreviations are just an inherent part of this media universe. There’s usually like six of them because all the companies are combining.

Adam Kerpelman:

Right.

Mark Richardson:

Consuming each other and adding each other’s bylines.

Adam Kerpelman:

Absolutely.

Laura Jones:

At some point they just kind give up.

Adam Kerpelman:

So yeah, past that, I’ll throw you for a quick intro, kind of how you find yourself there. And then we can talk a bit about WPP and all that kind of stuff for anybody. Who’s not sort of familiar with the agency.

Laura Jones:

Cool. Thanks. Excited to be here. So I’ve spent almost 20 years in the world of brand strategy. Come out of a creative strategy background, always in big agency life. I found myself about six, seven years ago, recognizing more and more that data was a super important part of the branding equation and that it was really being underutilized by many marketers. I mean, marketers today have so much data at the back end: performance metrics, KPIs, analytics, campaigns, all of that, but not a lot of marketers were actually using that data further up the stream in making those initial brand strategy, brand positioning decisions.

Laura Jones:

So we like to say at BAV we bring data to the opinion party. We actually, through our model are able to quantify what drives brands, what drives and grows brand developments, how to revitalize brands when they get sick and bring all of that data to marketers in order to help them set strategies that are going to meet their objectives. Really now the world’s evolved to one of experience the brand and the experience are interwoven and the brand in some ways is the experience. So making sure that people understand what the sum total is of all of their marketing touch points, not just in various channels and various silos is really important part of what we do.

Adam Kerpelman:

Interesting. We were talking a little bit before we started recording about our scenario that we talk about openly on the podcast, a bunch. Being acquired by a big company. We are getting to see from the inside the branding exercise that is trying to take literally 180 years of data and turn it into something and we’re like, “There’s so much interesting stuff,” which makes it a really exciting challenge at this time.

Adam Kerpelman:

But also I’m amazed that even at a data company, we are so behind on using data or the things that we sell data to people to do. But I think that’s just the state of the world. I guess I’m lucky to professionally have been able to ride the edge of, I loved how you said it, the opinion party. I talk about it often on here when we go down the agency rabbit hole. That was always my least favorite part of the creative process especially if you’re in the position of the executive position of sort saying, “Okay, we’re going with that one and not that one.” I have always had that voice in the back of my head going, but that’s kind of just based on that you like it more.

Mark Richardson:

Biases are going to pollute every decision. It’s human nature.

Laura Jones:

Absolutely. No one’s got a crystal ball, right. There’s tons of examples I used to, back in the day, I worked on the MasterCard account. I don’t know if you remember the priceless construct that was around for many, many years. But the famous story about that campaign was that they actually put the two creative executions that, and a different campaign into testing and the other campaign actually did better. Then one of the executives just kind of made a gut decision and said, “Nah, I think this other one, I think we’re onto something here.” So it’s a bit, I mean, all of data is a little bit of art and science.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah, sure.

Mark Richardson:

Art and science, we always talk about testing is the scientific method. The cream is going to rise to the top because your audience is going to show you what the right answer is that you don’t necessarily have to worry about getting the right answer yourself.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. So before we jump into those weeds, really the interesting. That’s where mark and I love to play in that space of, but also we could be,

Mark Richardson:

We can also talk ad campaigns.

Adam Kerpelman:

The extension of product led growth, as an idea is testing. You can run a campaign for a feature before the feature exists and people will sign up for it if you do all the branding and stuff on the other side and get the test in market. That still blows minds when it’s a thing that Mark and I feel like we’ve always just of been aware of. Anyway, that’s the rabbit hole. But first let’s back up to how you ended up where you are, which will get us to the size of the agency.

Adam Kerpelman:

I’ve been excited for this conversation, because I’ve put in some time at the big agencies before landing where I have. So it’s like, I don’t think people understand the amount of work and the amount of thought and the amount of other things that go into these things that come out the other side as 32nd Super Bowl spots that they go, “Huh. That was funny.” But it still serves a real purpose. Speak to that a bit. How did you end up in the space that you’re in and then also, I mean, you’re at the top at this point. You’re working on Super Bowl commercials. That’s awesome.

Laura Jones:

Yeah. Well always more to go, but yeah. So just my journey started out I was one of those strange children that really loved word play, I suppose. I guess the word for now is nerd. I watched Bewitched as a child, Good Old Darren as an advertising. I just always kind of knew that I wanted to live in a world that you get to create and also make money. So advertising was just something I always want to do. I actually started out in business development in new business and working on pitches and it was a really great place to just see the entirety of the agency process happen from front to finish, especially a new business pitch. You go through every single phase from strategy all the way through production, usually in the span of way too short of a time for it to actually happen in real life.

Laura Jones:

But it was really great. I found through that process that the people I gravitated towards the most in the room were the strategists, the people that were digging in to problem solving, learning, going out there and talking to people and understanding what drove human behavior and insights. So after sleeping under my desk for the better part of a year and working 24 hours a day, basically I made a jump over into strategy and just right from there, I started working on some of the biggest brands in the industry, Mercedes-Benz, as I mentioned to work on MasterCard Verizon for many years. I always was fascinated by the emergence of all of the digital tactics and the proliferation of data, but really what does it all mean? How do you tie it together at the highest level and actually make sense of it all? So people really are entering into what they understand to be essentially what a brand is, which is the promise of an experience.

Laura Jones:

It can get really easy as you just said, to get lost in the weeds in the woods and all the cool things that we can do with technology. But how do you ladder that all up and tell stories and actually make meaningful connections with people through, not only products and services, but just as brands have evolved to stepping in for government, stepping in for trust. People are brands now. Every single account you follow on, take your choice of social platform. That’s a brand. So it’s really been interesting and exciting to watch the space evolve and to help marketers kind of wade through and sift through it all. So I’ve been having fun. I actually find to your point about transformation, really a brand and a strategy starts on a page and the process by which getting that off the page out of people’s brains circulated and embraced by an organization to where it actually is impacting behavior, impacting someone asks, “Hey, where do you work? What do they do?” Et cetera.

Laura Jones:

All of that is really a big challenge in change management. So understanding not only how the mechanics of that work from a marketing ecosystem perspective, but from a change management ecosystem perspective and from an internal company wide communications, that can be as important as external paid owned, earned media, and really putting those pieces together. We’re asking a lot of marketers today, especially CMOs. We’re asking them to lead transformations. We’re asking them to transcend silos across data technology, IT, infrastructure, people to some extent people functions and organizations. The amount of collaboration that takes is no small fee, especially when there’s multiple completing priorities and metrics and ways to be measured. So I really am an integrator at heart and I love bringing together all of those different streams to make progress.

Mark Richardson:

You said a lot of good stuff there. I almost wanted to take, the idea of change management kind of connected to one of the original statements you had made about your reason for being and what you’re doing at BAV right now is revitalizing brands when they get sick. That just stuck out to me. I’m curious, when you’re talking about fortune five hundreds brands like Mercedes, MasterCard, Verizon, I think the external perception is that those are very healthy brands, but they may have the internal perception that something is wrong. We’re sick from the inside. How do you go about auditing or diagnosing the biggest challenge that a brand has in terms of its strategy or presentation to the market?

Laura Jones:

Yeah. Great question. So at BAV, in order to diagnose and understand where a brand sits in the marketplace, we study it. Over 30 years we’ve been collecting data in the marketplace and we essentially measure a brand on four pillars of true brand equity. We’ve got differentiation, which is kind of like, it sounds, how different a brand is. But more deeply than that kind of meaning a brand has. We’ve got relevance, which is how well it fits into people’s lives. We’ve got esteem, which is how well respected a brand is. Then we’ve got knowledge, which is one step deeper than just awareness, it’s familiarity. From those four pillars, we actually are able to plot on what we call a power grid essentially. It’s your standard two by two, where a brand sits and culture. That’s really important because we don’t look at brands just in the isolation of their category.

Laura Jones:

We fundamentally have studied that brands that break away from their categories are actually defining their brand by the broadest imaginable space. So if you’re a brand like Heinz, ketchup, you’re not just looking at how you’re doing in the context of other shelf stable tomato based condiments. You’re looking across how you stand in the entirety of the grocery store. That’s really important because if you can identify your competitive set as broadly as possible, it opens up more possibilities for growth. I don’t know if you saw, speaking of ketchup, Doritos is actually coming out with a ketchup.

Mark Richardson:

No, yeah. Did not catch that. No.

Adam Kerpelman:

That could be worth it. Just off the initial pop. You get out of people like me that are going to go, “Yeah, that’s right.”

Mark Richardson:

Exactly. I mean their partnership.

Adam Kerpelman:

Taco Bel [inaudible 00:12:52] Me with that all the time. Ah, I’ll try it.

Laura Jones:

Oh yeah, yeah. The amount of money we spent DoorDashing Taco Bell to our house is.

Adam Kerpelman:

Pandemic problems.

Laura Jones:

Shocking. Sure. So anyway, we approach where brands sit from a very quantitative point of view because the first thing about knowing where you’re heading is knowing where you’re starting from. So, that’s really important part of our methodology.

Adam Kerpelman:

We have a really interesting situation. Kind of what you made me think of is it feels immediately just an opportunity to talk about ourselves. But look, it’s what we’re living through D&B’s a B2B company. So I have a lot of pitches I give that are very like, “Okay, but that doesn’t work on B2B.” Then I end up trying to decide how far down the rabbit hole of explaining modern communications to people I need to get to sell this pitch upstream. It gets to this idea of there’s really cool stuff on the brand side that we don’t really play in around social sentiment and stuff like that.

Adam Kerpelman:

But then also now, we live right at the edge where it’s encroaching on B2B and people will flatly say, “Oh, that tactic doesn’t work for B2B.” It’s sort of like, “Yes, but it works for brands.” We have to start thinking even of cross deal B2B brands, the way that we think of consumer brands, because you’re still just trying to reach people. So the competition game now is, yeah, you are Nike, even though what you sell is weird B2B enterprise software and getting that, I guess the change management part. Okay, how do you sell that idea upstream? Because it’s such a weird paradigm shift for people that it used to, how marketing used to be to where we are now.

Mark Richardson:

It’s rejiggering. It’s like, it’s Tesla’s not a car company. They’re a data company, right?

Adam Kerpelman:

Or a climate change company,

Mark Richardson:

Or climate change like a sustainability.

Laura Jones:

Absolutely. We see that all the time. You said, what I think are the magic words and what we say all the time is B2B is really just people making decisions, the B2B sales arena, and you’re competing with Headspace and mental availability with B2B brands, just like you are for any other brand that they’re putting on their grocery list or that they’re looking to purchase a car, et cetera. There’s just so much crossover now with brands to your point about Tesla. When you think about enterprise level brands, Microsoft just came out with a clothing line. So you really need to think about even B2B brands in overall, a very holistic way. The B2B brands that do have the most power in the leadership quadrant in our study are actually brands that cross over into culture, that cross over and make connections with people just outside of the very specific silo.

Laura Jones:

It was funny. I was looking at Forbes or Fortune, one of the top brands list and how that list has changed in the last 10 years. It’s all data service providers and a lot of brands probably that your traditional household name, let’s call it, have never heard of. But those are the brands and the types of business models that are leading today’s economy. You’ve got to build those brands, nurture those brands and think about those brands holistically. They don’t exist in a vacuum when you leave your job as someone that buys B2B products and services, you don’t take that hat off and park it. I mean, you probably don’t even leave an office anymore, especially how all of the hybrid working is happening. So it’s really important to think about that. Even we do some work in the healthcare space and we say, “Okay, what works from a regulatory perspective with doctors or with nurses or HCPs.”

Laura Jones:

Those are people too. Those people have families. Those people are Googling things just like everyone else. So it’s really important to keep in mind the entirety of the expectations set by the marketing ecosystem and all the other experiential places in their life. Then people wanting that same experience in how they’re being marketed to as a “B2B decision maker.”

Adam Kerpelman:

Which everyone in our marketing space knows exactly what you mean when you say that. Important term of art, if you want to make it in B2B marketing. So stakeholders and decision makers.

Mark Richardson:

Just wanted to add on this, on the stakeholders, decision makers and how the similarities and differences between B2B and thinking about people as individual decision makers. It’s that when you have teams, when you’re talking about a B2B team, it’s not only, “Hey, is this apple going to work for my smoothie when I bring it home from the grocery store?” You’re thinking about, has this tool the right tool for my development team? Is it the right tool for my sales team to downstream the insights we need or to get reporting on the cadence or the predictive modeling that we want to understand about our CRM.

Mark Richardson:

All these things you can’t just think about yourself in a silo and how you want to make or use a tool or use a service or a vendor. This has got to touch multiple people. So I’ve got to get buy in now. That makes the job of the salesperson. I think that much harder because you’ve got to be able to shift and move between these different roles and understand how your product or your brand can serve multiple teams. You’re not just convincing one person of their needs state, you’re evangelizing a whole suite of solutions and having to master different levels of expertise so you can convince different disciplines that you are the right answer for them.

Laura Jones:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, not to be discounted. I know people are people in all of that, in some ways though, we can’t ignore the fact that these are complex multilevel decisions that oftentimes can be not so easy to implement. So you’ve got to have a lot of alignment. I am in such awe of the role of solutions architect, because I find a lot of similarities in between a solutions architect and what I do as a strategist, which is you’ve got multiple different, let’s say ten drills of a certain project. There’s so many co-dependencies. As you start to unpack what implementing a solution in one place does, you need to think about all of the things that it’s impacting and how are those going to be impacted and how do you bring everything together into a cohesive ecosystem? I think obviously sales 101, the most important thing is the speed that you can move when there’s trust.

Laura Jones:

So making sure that you understand, not only the technical aspects of what needs to be done, but also the stakeholder mapping of who needs to be influenced and what are the challenges they’re likely to overcome. Ultimately, how can you build that trust? So when things go wrong, because let’s face it in implementation, things always go wrong. You make sure that they know that you will be right there to make sure that it goes off without a hitch or that you can quickly troubleshoot. But I think, again, that’s where it comes down to having the added layer of, sure all of that can be done on a hand to hand combat sort of layer. We used to say, I’m sure it’s probably one of the oldest little attitudes in the B2B book, but it’s like no one ever got fired for buying IBM.

Laura Jones:

When you think about that statement, there was this air cover that the brand provided even in the B2B setting that just said, “Sure, yeah. Like GCP, it’s got Google in it. Right. I’m going to go for them.” It’s interesting, you look at Kyndryl and Spinning Off is kind of like, “Oh, how are they going to do a brand that came out of a huge conglomerate that has invested brand equity.” You’ve got to think about what is the promise that you’re making to people when they’re buying from you outside of just those day to day people that they’re interacting with and where are they seeing other evidence in the real world that that brand, and that company lives up to what it’s promising that it’s going to execute for you.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. So what you’re talking about is the thing that comes up all the time on the podcast, which is just the complexity of everything now and how marketing looks way more like engineering than it did 10 years ago, than it did two years ago at this point, because the pandemic has accelerated so much with remote work and the adoption of digital alternatives. For some percentage of people, it is never going to go back like me. It’s like your analogy earlier, when you were talking about a brand as a living organism, it’s just sort of the extrapolation of that thing of, okay. Imagine how complex that is with all the data we have for marketing. It’s even bigger. If you’re talking about a giant brand with massive awareness out there, all kinds of different plays in the field. That becomes the analogy. So a lot of times the branding, I would imagine for you, exercise is come in and thinking of it.

Adam Kerpelman:

Healthcare is the right analogy because. The most aggressive answer is rebrand. Let’s take Bell Telecom and turn it into Verizon. That’s a pretty big project. You could also try to increase the credibility of Belt or whatever became Verizon over time by deploying a bunch of tactics, but it’s incredibly complex. So the thing of, okay, do you pick to turn the ship or do you pick to reboot the whole thing gets to one of the notes I had before, even before showed up, prep notes. This is my favorite. Yeah. Now I can talk about this thing that I was stoked about.

Adam Kerpelman:

I watched some chunks, your talk from Southwest Southwest in 2017. The thing that stood out to me because where I think we are right now inside of D&B. It’s like, okay, is it time to diverge from the brand to do another thing? Then we fall back in or is it, I love that slide about divergent versus convergent. I find myself often the one who’s pitching the divergent opinion and it’s not popular cause it’s sort of like we could reverse rebrand or everything into this one that you just bought instead of the 180 year old stalwart institution, obviously it’s not going to happen, but it’s a worthwhile thought experiment.

Laura Jones:

Yeah, absolutely. What we would do in that case and many times is we look at both equities of the brands and the complimentary aspects and branding, especially brand architecture. It used to always be this binary. It was kind of a house of brands or a branded house. It’s moved beyond that, to this notion of agile branding and really thinking about as a brand, as an operating system. So what is the open source platform? People can’t just have a brand shoved down their throat anymore, whether it’s a consumer brand or it’s a brand that you work for or you were acquired and you feel like you were a part of one organization that had all these values and all of a sudden. You don’t just wake up the next day and the men in black kind of thing comes across your eyes.

Laura Jones:

You totally forget about it. You’re like, “OK, now I am ENP.” It doesn’t work like that. I think that’s something that should be celebrated and acknowledged because the brand transformation process through that, it can be long and people can lose the plot along the way. But the most important thing to remember is that, like you said, a brand is a living, breathing organism. A brand doesn’t sit on a page. We like to say at BAV burn your brand book. I mean brand books, I don’t know if anyone remembers back in the day, you get a 50 page guidelines and this is how they’ll. Obviously from a consistent standpoint, that’s important to have a starting point, but really a brand being a promise in the experience and also making sure that it’s a values-led brand, a brand that gives people enough of a runway to feel like they can be a part of something.

Laura Jones:

Then acknowledging that within a company, there’s so much diversity or at least hopefully more and more there should be. There’s diversity along all the different dimensions. There’s no one size fits all approach. I mean, think about the world of return to office versus hybrid work. That battle is never going to have a majority opinion. Just like audience insights and segmentations and personas, that all exists within a company as well. So thinking about multiple entry points that all hang together under a set of consistent mission values, but then leaving it open to some extent to interpretation of how you want to be innovators and connect with your audiences is through this awesome fun podcast.

Laura Jones:

I’m so happy to be here and be talking to you and have all sorts of content, that works. If you want to have a super traditional sales force driven, let’s have account reps and go out to lunch like that works too. But it’s no longer a one size fits all approach. The more diverse the tactics can be, the more vibrant brands can be. The more opportunities you have to connect with people, how they want to be connected. It’s kind of, let’s say golden rule of marketing 2.0. Don’t treat people how you want to be treated, treat people how they want to be treated and reach people how they want to be reached.

Adam Kerpelman:

For anyone who wants to check out a brand book. NASA’s brand book is open source. It’s not open source. It’s public. If you’re a US citizen, you can just go download it. I have a hard cover bound version of it that I paid for on Kickstarter. Has all when to use the worm logo versus the meatball logo. It’s like, yeah. So I think the other thing you mentioned that I’m interested to chase, if only again for selfish reasons, because we’re dealing with it internally is the internal versus external piece. A thing that I found myself talking about a lot is the extent to which if you’re at a big enough company, a company the size of D&B, our team members are a statistically significant population. So if we want to test whether or not giveaways and raffles will work on the general public as a lead gen mechanism, we can do it by testing our own of internal population.

Adam Kerpelman:

Like I’ve advocate for things, “Yeah. Well let’s test out the email templates in there first for the new branding stuff and let them see it first.” Everybody feels included. We can get feedback internally from at D&B it’s 8,000 people. We get only a portion of that. We’re running a statistically significant test on whether or not this brand resonates. I think marketers are used to the idea of, “Okay, now you have to evangelize the messaging internally.” We’re used to that part. I think we’re not quite used to the extent to which it’s this sort of ongoing community project now. Potentially if you want to really leverage the stuff that I’m talking about.

Laura Jones:

Absolutely. A lot of that goes back to organizational structures. More and more we find, and you saw in classic examples of a brand would run an ad on the Super Bowl and talk about pay equity or gender equality. But then their board was not representative or they didn’t have equal pay. So the alignment of those things internally and externally is really important. A lot of times it comes back to the way the organizations are structured. Think about the people function and chief people officer or human resources, depending on how it’s being called.

Adam Kerpelman:

So many names.

Laura Jones:

So many names, so many names, and sure you might all sit on executive committee together, but how many times are you doing ad boards and ad reviews with the people function and say, “How do we think this is going to play internally?” Or asking those people to be experts in segmentation or know the audience internally as well as you need to know it externally from a sales and a marketing perspective. So that’s really where the role of a marketer is even more important to understand, not only external audiences, but the internal ones as well. It’s a lot to ask.

Adam Kerpelman:

A lot to ask.

Laura Jones:

Of any one person or any one function within an organization because at a certain level, all of the lines blur together, but it can really make the difference. That’s why I think we see a lot of success overnight, seemingly, although nothing happens with the snap of a fingers with smaller kind of mission based organizations that go from zero to 60, hockey stick growth is because it’s just much easier to control the message with fewer people in a smaller environment. But, at some point to scale, everyone needs to get that chain of both internal and external communications aligned. To your point, a lot of times what it looks like internally is just a bunch of emails. How do we communicate to all these audiences internally and not send a bunch of emails? Are you producing your internal content? You’re all hands meetings, your event activations to the same extent that you would produce them for an external client because your employees are arguably one of your most important audiences to make sure that you’re getting people on board with the mission.

Adam Kerpelman:

Then you led me to my favorite thing to say on here that it’s the essence of my take on modern media is that essentially the more hyperbolic way I say it is, nobody’s allowed to suck on camera anymore. Every company is a media company to some degree because your competition in market for attention share on LinkedIn. If you want to amplify your content is brands that at least work with the agencies that do this stuff and they approach it in that way where the thing I share most often lately is Apple’s keynote presentations. They really went, “Okay, this isn’t in person anymore. Then it has to look like a blockbuster movie,” and it works. They do it really well, but the modern landscape is like, “Okay, it might have to be 20%, not as cool as Apple’s stuff,” because I don’t have time to go fly a drone around, but you can get pretty close between agencies and internal resources. It’s especially in the B2B space, there’s a lot of reorienting, but bluntly, the thing just needs to be flashier. Nobody’s going to care.

Laura Jones:

Oh yeah. What’s your thirst trap LinkedIn post?

Adam Kerpelman:

Exactly. Yeah.

Mark Richardson:

What’s your VIP online experience? How cool are you with your mimosa on your yacht?

Adam Kerpelman:

For sure. So, just to jam on a broader topic for a minute before we get out of here, what’s your favorite ad of all time or the first ad that you remember? This maybe another lens.

Laura Jones:

The first Ad that I remember. Wow, gosh, let’s throw back. Well I am a child of the eighties and so the jingle is just ever prominent in my mind. Yeah. I don’t know. I’m going to go with Go-Go My Walking Pup.

Adam Kerpelman:

Oh my God. I forgot about that.

Laura Jones:

Walking down the street. She wags her tail at the friends we meet.

Adam Kerpelman:

I was the demographic for more the boyed out version of that. So it was a monster that can bust out of its chains or whatever.

Mark Richardson:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Pizza Thrower for sure

Laura Jones:

Yeah. Oh yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

The best one of all time is tough because I think this is the magic of the whole thing. To me, the ones that tell stories that really, I go back, I watch, I have a playlist of ads I watch on YouTube every once in a while. Because I’m just like, they make me happy. There’s there’s a bunch of really good Nike ones. But the first one that made me really feel like, “Okay, there’s a thing here other than just get my attention for 30 seconds.” It was Nike’s, it was also an eighties one, Nike’s Mars Blackman adds, the Spike Lee ones. “It’s got to be the shoes.” That was the first time that I was like, “Ooh, this feels like film school now instead of just trying to sell me a stupid consumer packaged good.”

Laura Jones:

Yeah. I’ve always loved that all of advertising is really just artists masquerading as business people trying to commercialize,

Mark Richardson:

100%.

Adam Kerpelman:

Trying To make a music video with LeBron James.

Laura Jones:

Celebrities and make art. But yeah, I mean, it’s funny right now we’d be asking each other, “What’s your favorite TikTok?” But it’s funny. I was reading an article in the times about how all there’s these doctors on TikTok that are aiming to use the platform to debunk medical misinformation. Some of them are spending upwards of 20 hours just to create one post. So back to what you were saying about how many people does it take to create one piece of content. The good content, it can take a while and making it seem effortless and authentic is really why our industry still exists. I think, and making sure that it ladders up to something, sells something, makes people feel a certain way. It’s all really, really important. I don’t think the professionals are going away just yet.

Mark Richardson:

I think one of my initial ideas for this talk was the anatomy of a Super Bowl campaign. We’ve kind of been in and around it. I don’t know if we’ve gotten deep into the guts of the Super Bowl campaign, but I’m curious, what do you think, in your experience, who has the hardest job in an ad agency in creating that campaign? Is it CMO? Is it the editor?

Laura Jones:

That’s a really tough question.

Mark Richardson:

I stole it from Reddit. So I can’t take credit.

Adam Kerpelman:

100 duck-sized horses.

Laura Jones:

Are we talking internal, we talking entire ecosystem, client side, and agency?

Mark Richardson:

I would say on the agency. So just on the agency side. So for people who are thinking who I’m more thinking about people who are intrigued by what you’re saying, who want to embody that role that you are in, who want, want to become an SVP, who want to lead these types of campaigns? What advice would you give them?

Laura Jones:

Yeah, it’s a great question. I would say that in order to make a campaign and I’ll say a campaign now, not an ad because I think that the days of the 32nd Super Bowl spotter long, long, long gone. It really is an interconnected multi-platform ecosystem that starts way before the game. If you do it right, goes way after. Start way earlier than you think you need to. The consensus building, the coalition building. Start with an actual human truth, not just as it’s seemingly so. Sure, you can buy splashy celebs, you can buy all the eyeballs, but really the work that’s going to resonate hits on some sort of intersection of cultural nuance, representation. Ultimately, why is the idea of a one stop shop? Super Bowl ad a little bit of, just again, one piece of the entire pie.

Laura Jones:

Because the fragmentation, not only of media, but the diversity of audiences, making sure that it’s representative, I think it can be really tough, especially now to be that person that’s an upstander in the room, making sure you’ve seen probably worse case scenarios of brands messing it up because there weren’t those people along the journey to ask the hard questions to say, “Have we talked to different groups of people? Have we made sure that all viewpoints are being represented?” Or from a cultural lens, “Are we making sure that we’re treating things appropriately,” et cetera. Then obviously testing is important, but making sure that ultimately you are making meaning for a brand and providing a vessel that can just be a launching off point for many other things. Ultimately the experience, right? The experience is the brand these days. So making sure that you’ve got your entire journey mapped out where that thing goes, where it leads to, where it comes from and how you’re going to use that to really enrich the perspective and the lives of people.

Adam Kerpelman:

That sounds like a pretty good place to wrap it up.

Mark Richardson:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

Our best conversation have a bunch of post-its. We’ll have to have you back just to talk about some of the more in the weed stuff we glanced off the top. This is great. Thanks a lot for joining us, Laura. So where can people find you if they want to talk to you about any of this stuff?

Laura Jones:

Yeah, absolutely hit me up Laura.Jones@BAVgroup.com or check me out Lap Jones, wherever you find your social content.

Adam Kerpelman:

Awesome. Well, yeah, thanks again. Thanks everybody for joining us for another Data Driven Marketer. I’m Adam.

Mark Richardson:

I’m Mark.

Laura Jones:

I’m Laura. Thanks everyone.

Adam Kerpelman:

Take it easy everybody.

Mark Richardson:

Thanks for listening to the Data Driven marketer. Our show is produced by Jessica Jacobson and Dan Saltzis. This episode was edited by Steve Kosh. The Data Driven Marketer is sponsored by NetWise, a Dun & Bradstreet company. Any views or opinions expressed in this episode do not represent the views or opinions of NetWise or Dun & Bradstreet