“Talent is critical to the journey of transformation for marketing these days. As we all know, many of our organizations have been disrupted and are all undergoing transformation to drive growth,” Sison says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

“We talk about how we build brands in this new world, we talk about marketing technology, data and analytics. But we often forget about the importance of people and talent as a critical component to driving successful growth and change within the industry itself.”

Within J&J, the marketer has decided that “All of our marketers need to be better scientists,” along with better strategists to sort out data that can drive business success and better storytellers “to make sure that we’re able to tell a consistent brand story across screens.”

The final “s” is for socializers, “because we need to create that relationship that’s much more social with our consumers and our brands,” Sison says.

J&H’s engagement with its consumers reveals that they are expecting “a great deal of value exchanged with our brands these days in terms of not just the education but also a broader set of experiences.”

It goes beyond mere products to services powered by technology, for example apps or the Internet of things.

“We at J&J have begun to recognize this and are building new engagement touch points, if you will, with our consumers to make sure that our brands are relevant in that exchange of value.”

This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions. Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find more videos from the series here.

That age cohort, consisting of those born between roughly 1995 and 2008, has been the subject of focus groups, the results of which have formed the Navy’s most recent content for its Forged by the Sea campaign, says Capt. Matt Boren, CMO, Navy Recruiting Command.

“Most of them have something unique that drew them to the Navy, and we define those as rewards of the Navy,” Capt. Boren explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference.

Some prospects are drawn to meaningful venture or creative innovation, while a third group is “traditionalist” in nature by virtue of having family members in the military. The last group respond to ads or displays of strength, according to Capt. Boren.

“All three of those pillars really want to find teamwork and opportunity, so we call that a stability seeking behavior across all three genres.”

Asked about specific KPI’s, he says the big picture starts with creating awareness about a branch of the armed forces with which not everyone is completely familiar.

“We have a system where we go from awareness to them engaging with our content, ultimately driving them to navy.com. We consider that our recruiting hub and there we have a call to action,” says Capt. Boren.

That might be an 800 number someone can call, filling out lead-gen form or an email. “They will do some form to get their name and information in our system, at which point we take that from a gross lead and we start a process we call blueprinting.”

After checking those prospects for age, citizenship and other aspects of eligibility, “then we get them on the phone” gauge interest and eliminate such disqualifiers as medical or criminal backgrounds. At the bottom of the funnel emerge qualified and interested leads. “That’s what we pass to our field recruiters.”

Since 1973, when the Navy became all-volunteer, it’s had nine different advertising taglines, but none of them invoked the word “sea” until now, Capt. Boren notes. The Navy’s agency in Memphis is Y&R, whom he describes as an “outstanding team. I’ve been ecstatic with what they’ve produced” in partnership with media agency Wavemaker to drive a deeper connection between media, content and technology.

He presented on the main stage of the ANA with Amanda Richman, CEO  of Wavemaker, U.S.

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

Noting margin inadequacies at agencies and profit-and-loss challenges at marketers, it’s logical to take a close look at what can be done in-house, Kassan says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference.

“Those are competing dynamics and I think it’s a chaotic moment and I think there is more that clients, marketers can do themselves. That doesn’t negate the need for an agency because the agency is that outside-in perspective that you can’t always get looking inside out,” says Kassan.

“You run the risk if you create an in-house agency at brand X, that your team is only focused on brand X and they don’t get the horizontal visibility and influence that you get if you’re working across many brands.”

Taking more functions in-house also impacts the recruitment of talent when creative or media practitioners decide whether they want to work on just one client or vertical category, according to Kassan. “Or do they want the variety is the spice of life approach where they get to work across a portfolio of clients?’

The ANA surveyed 412 of its members in August 2018, 52% of whom were at the director level or above. According to the survey, 78% of ANA members have some type of in-house operation compared to 42% 10 years ago.

Kassan believes that advances in technology and automation will continue to be driving force for marketers deciding to do more themselves. “Will that trend continue? Yes.”

He perceives more transparency in what people are talking about at the ANA conference, and not just pertaining to media buying and placement “but also transparency about the actual conversation. Marketers and agencies actually talking about what are the benefits and liabilities of going in house. I think it’s a good conversation and we’ll see a lot of movement in that regard.”

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

“We put a lot of effort on remodeling restaurants and making sure that the restaurants have the latest design. We always study the type of guests who come to our restaurants and we try to offer a layout to accommodate them,” Machado adds.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference, Machado talks about a company culture focused on design, good service and modern technology.

The “design bucket” includes being able to accommodate, say, families who need four seats or people who need a power outlet and WiFi to get some work done at a Burger King location. “Try to understand who is the guest of that particular location or the country so that we make sure we offer that experience,” Machado says.

Bucket #2, “guest friendliness,” covers seemingly simple concepts like getting someone’s order right and serving food while it’s still hot. “It’s basic stuff, but if you don’t get that right, the experience will not be great. It’s one of the biggest challenges we have to make sure that our culture permeates to the restaurant.”

Rounding out Burger King’s trio of priorities is using technology to change the way that people interact with the brand. “I’m not even talking about advertising or social media, I’m talking about at the restaurant,” Machado says, citing amenities like self-ordering kiosks, mobile ordering/payment systems and CRM. “The basic things that we have to do at the restaurant because today technology is empowering us to do that.”

Asked about his participation with the ANA’s CMO Council in conjunction with the Cannes Lions, Machado calls it a “huge opportunity and responsibility. I want to learn and I also want to contribute.”

Noting that things are “just getting started” with the CMO Council as people continue to get to know each other and decide what to pursue, he shares his hopes for the next gathering in June of 2019 at Cannes. “My expectation for Cannes would be to have even more clarity in each of the work streams, in each of the pillars that we have as part of this initiative” along with having better connections with Council members “because I think that’s also part of the benefit of having a council is the networking.”

This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions. Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find more videos from the series here.

Whereas shoppers’ in-store experiences might once have involved interacting with a cashier or other employee, now they’re researching and buying products online, engaging in customer service follow-up and making a lot more returns, Rogers explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference.

“All of that has really changed the nature of the relationship with the customer and now what we have historically defined as marketing or the communication piece is really a small piece of the overall pie now,” says Rogers, who had been Chief Marketing Officer at Walmart. “Structurally, what we’ve done is we’ve made the job of the chief marketer bigger. And so now it’s chief member officer instead of chief marketing officer. Every customer touchpoint digitally and physically along the way now resides within the marketing team, and that’s a big change.”

Rogers is one of many marketers who are involved with the ANA’s CMO Council along with the Cannes advertising festival. He likes the opportunities to brainstorm, think and ideate with other marketers who are experiencing similar challenges.

“The challenge is when you’re in your own organization, everybody kind of already expects you to know all this stuff. So it’s cool to have a safe place where you can go and network and think and be around a bunch of smart people to cultivate ideas that you can then bring back to your company. This group has a high ROI in terms of the things that I’m able to take from it and bring back to my company.” Rogers adds.

When the CMO Council convenes again at Cannes in June of 2019, Rogers hopes to see guidelines or recommendations “about what companies can do in terms of their org structure, to position themselves to really go and address customer experience broadly.” He thinks it’s a “good idea for this group to provide guidance to corporate America on how to do that.”

This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions. Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find more videos from the series here.

“You need to nurture it and you need to sort of grow and develop that talent. I’m a firm believer of great marketing talent is going to lead to great and big growth for our companies,” Rutledge adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference.

Rutledge had a key role in two sessions at the conference: Leading Disruption To Drive Growth, wherein she shared the stage with executives from Procter & Gamble, Deloitte and Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, and Leveraging An Iconic Brand To Fuel Business Globally.

“American Express does a lot to nurture its talent,” Rutledge explains. “We have great learning programs that help our marketers understand and grow as well as we’re really caring so much about leadership and personal leadership and are really caring about their career development and how we can be there for them and have their back every step of the way of their career.”

Reflecting on one “fabulous” conference session, she cites examples of action items that can be taken both as individuals and as a group in terms of furthering the marketing industry, from partnering with universities together, from clearly defining and expanding the definition of marketing.

Also a firm believer in the need to “market the marketing,” Rutledge says “that’s what I think we need to do.”

This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions. Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find more videos from the series here.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing conference, A+E’s EVP of Ad Sales discusses why advertisers haven’t taken the full plunge into advanced targeting and the likelihood that the ad-supported model is in the future for companies like Amazon, Netflix and the planned Disney service.

He says advertisers are “getting so pressured to prove the effectiveness of every nickel they spend. Everyone’s known for a long time TV works, especially on the upper-funnel metrics of awareness and all that. But there’s been like a vagueness to that. It doesn’t really tie back to ROI as cleanly as some other things.”

Being able to more closely tie TV ad exposure to tangible business results “gives the ammunition that the marketers need to keep recommending premium video as that centerpiece and not be shifting money somewhere else,” Olsen says.

Advertisers are looking to strike a balance “between what digital is claiming it can do and what we’ve always known TV could do, and then just really getting to kind of the right balance to answer on the effectiveness of both,” he adds.

It’s worth noting that while age and gender has been the transactional TV demographic for years, secondary targets have been available for more than three decades, Olsen observes. TV networks have the tools to go beyond, say, trying to reach everyone ages 18-49 to more strategic targets.

“Clients I think are interested but they’re not jumping in with both feet yet” given questions about data quality and scalability. “So I think it’s finding the right balance between what is still mass, what is targeted and then you take it a step further, what should go to addressable, et cetera.”

Then there’s the viewer balancing act. While many are seeking to avoid ads, that comes with a higher cost.

But Olsen points to signs of hope. “Some of the stuff we’ve seen, though, isn’t as daunting as it may look right now,” he says. “Some of the S-VOD penetration is kind of hitting a ceiling here in the U.S. and I think those companies are actually looking at ad models themselves.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Netflix has an ad model, Amazon, the new Disney service. All those things eventually have ad models as part of that product. I think they will be more tailored ads and more personalized will be kind of the magic to it.

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

“I took the time to read through it and understand what they were seeing, and I think that sometimes there are facts that are buried in that tell a broader story, Marla Kaplowitz says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference. “We speak to agencies every single day who are either working with some in house teams or they’re working directly with marketers. And there is no right way and you have to really consider what is right for you.”

The ANA surveyed 412 of its members in August 2018, 52% of whom were at the director level or above. For 44% of respondents, their in-house agency was established within the past five years, contributing to the recent rise in overall penetration of in-house agencies, according to the survey.

Among other survey findings, services performed in-house that have grown significantly over the past five years are content marketing, creative strategy,
 data/marketing analytics,
 media strategy,
 programmatic media and
 social media (both creative and media).

The survey reveals that top perceived benefits of in-house agencies are:

*Cost efficiencies

*Better knowledge of brands

*Institutional knowledge

*Dedicated staff

*Speed, nimbleness

Asked to identify a single primary benefit of having an in-house agency, cost efficiencies was top ranked by a wide margin, according to the survey.

“The most telling stat in the report is that 90 percent of ANA members still continue to work with an outside agency,” Kaplowitz says. “I think that when you look at the kind of work that is going on right now in the marketplace, from media and the complexity that is happening in the digital supply chain, if you’re looking at programmatic and all the technology, you need outside perspective.”

She adds that producing “brilliant” creative requires “outside provocation and thinking. When you’re working with an agency on content, you want a strategic planner who is looking at what is going on in culture and not just looking at one particular brand but looking across all the different categories and working with different people in the agencies.”

Kaplowitz says the most important thing to understand about agencies is their ability to help drive business growth and “helping to be an extension of that client and that client team. You need that outside perspective, you need that outside thinking to push and provoke.  You don’t get that when you’re with your own team.”

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

It’s a situation that many retailers would love to find themselves in, Gomez explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference.

“The retail industry is going through a massive transformation,” Gomez says. “If you read the headlines, what you’re reading about is there are so many retailers that are on the verge of bankruptcy or actually going bankrupt. They’re closing stores.

“Those retailers that are going to survive are going to be the ones that can invest to create a differentiated, compelling guest experience.”

For Target, whose brick-and-mortar locations and online presence Gomez says are frequented by 80% of Americans, investments are made with an eye toward creation a shopper experience that can’t be found elsewhere. “We’re remodeling our stores, we’re opening new stores in urban locations, on college campuses, we’re investing in supply chain so we can get product to you faster than anybody else and we’re launching a ton of new owned brands,” he says.

So the Target challenge is “how do we come across as small? How do we come across as local? How do we come across as your Target?”

While mass-targeted advertising across the country is a given, Target also invests in such a way that’s “very bespoke for that community.” Tactics can include charitable works and local events to “make sure that we’re showing up in a way that’s going to be relevant for that neighborhood.”

Asked about the work he does with the CMO Council partnership of the ANA and the Cannes advertising festival, whose representatives gathered in Orlando recently, Gomez points to common issues as a binding element.

“It doesn’t really matter what industry you’re in or how big your company is. We’re all dealing with the same challenges. And Cannes gives us a great forum to get together to talk about the solutions and that’s what I expect to happen in June.”

His hope for the agenda next June in Cannes is “that it becomes very clear, specific and tangible and that we have some early wins so it can build some momentum.”

This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions. Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find more videos from the series here.

Suitably, Charney’s presentation at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference was titled The Most Feared Four-Letter Word In Marketing. That word is risk, and it’s something that the marketing department of the insurance giant has long championed, he explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“Risk? First of all, it’s my favorite four-letter word of any four-letter word in marketing and in general. You’ve got to take risks. It’s got to be a company, a culture of risks,” Charney says.

With Flo, portrayed by actress and comedian Stephanie Courtney, one might not think there’s too much risk involved, even though some of her characters can be hard to relate to. Fact is, she’s attracted a great deal of detractors (to put it mildly) among American consumers. But it’s helped Progressive stay top-of-mind.

“It’s all about being part of the consideration set, Charney says. “If I’m thinking about insurance, I got to think about Progressive. I see that woman Flo, I’m thinking about Progressive. Then I go and I quote with Progressive and I convert with Progressive. Next thing I know, I’m a customer for ten, fifteen years. It’s a very competitive environment right now.”

There are 36,000 “marketers” within Progressive, according to Charney. “And in some ways, they really represent our brand, and they also have to be themselves. We don’t want to change who they are, we want them to be who they are. And if they get a chance to take a risk and we support that risk, it extends throughout the company.”

When Flo emerged 10 years ago, there was an obvious risk, Charney says, because she was a woman with black hair and a beret, red lipstick and crazy eyelashes. “That was a risk ten years ago. Now it’s nothing. But we have eight other campaigns besides just the Flo campaign.”

If it seems like some Progressive commercials are impromptu, that’s on purpose. They are shot using script outlines and improvisational actors exclusively.

“We don’t try to get normal actors. So the energy on set is incredible,” says Charney. “It’s almost like Curb Your Enthusiasm, if you follow that. We get script outlines and then we’ve got to get certain messages across, but we let the improv actors have fun with it. And we are surprised sometimes with some of the content we get.”

While he professes an inherent love for marketing, Charney believes that his compatriots need to get braver. “Take risks. It’s a good thing. And when it pays off, it pays off big.”

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

“I think we’re at an inflection point,” Rothwell says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing Conference. “Scale has been lacking in certain areas, which made it tough I think as an investment prioritization for some brands and agencies,” Rothwell adds. “But now we see a lot more scale coming through those OTT, set-top box VOD and, increasingly, addressable linear opportunities.”

Calling advanced TV “the umbrella term for all of those opportunities or anything outside of the linear stream,” Rothwell says he’s “getting the sense that people are really leaning into it now. ”

In a Beet.TV interview with Brian Wallach, who is SVP, Chief Revenue Officer, Advanced TV, FreeWheel Markets, Wallach explains how FreeWheel’s new DRIVE platform is designed to unify advanced TV offerings with unified audience measurement.

To align with a more scaled, dynamic TV offering, Rothwell discussed the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video’s latest output: A Buyer’s Guide to the New Living Room.” This reference guide provides media planners and buyers with tactics and workarounds to take advantage of what the new living room can do for advertisers.

Every quarter, increasing volumes of digital and dynamically delivered video advertising are accessed via set-top boxes and (OTT) devices on the big screen. This now accounts for 57 percent of all non-linear impressions, according to the FreeWheel Video Monetization Report (VMR) Q2 2018.

“Combine the reach of broadcast television with the dynamic insertion and dynamic advertising opportunities through these new devices and you can combine that reach now with precision. TV being that full-funnel opportunity for advertisers,” says Rothwell.

This is not to suggest these still-growing channels are not without their challenges. “Currently, there’s a lot of constraints getting in the way, whether that be measurement, technology and partners.”

Hence the following guideposts for buyers from the FreeWheel Council’s “A Buyer’s Guide to the New Living Room”:

• Become a subject matter expert in the new living room to gain advantage for your clients while these channels are still nascent and growing

• Create a plan using complementary channels to balance reach and precision, leveraging the common and unique attributes of each

• Work through measurement hurdles and leverage the tools and KPIs that are available to access these engaged yet underserved audiences

• Personalize messaging and manage frequency through addressable options with creative diversity on all campaigns delivered to the new living room

• Optimize for scale by adjusting your KPIs for platforms as necessary such as viewability targets in channels that aren’t able to be measured

“We are as an industry starting to understand what we need to do to make it a more viable opportunity for brands,” says Rothwell, who is VP, Global Agency, Brand & Industry Relations. “Really get that first and third party data to light up and create additional value, create additional precision for those advertising campaigns.”

He sees a “wide appreciation” for the reach of TV programming, regardless of how it is accessed, to help build the purchase funnel and using addressable advertising options to help push consumers to the transaction phase.

“Consistency and standards obviously come next, and we’re starting to see some of that already as well,” Rothwell says.

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

“I don’t think we should try to mimic business models that aren’t necessarily thriving,” Hammer adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference.

“The media and publishing world themselves are trying to figure out how to evolve. I don’t think the right model is actually trying to be a publisher where KPI is quantity at scale and trying to be in everyone’s lives all the time.”

A better approach is to determine whether brand-generated content has a purpose, an audience need and desire plus brand purpose and an ability to help drive KPI’s, according to Hammer.

For IBM, it’s about “making less matter more, as people want to have fewer but higher quality impressions, engagements, experiences with brands.”

The company tries to figure out the right number of engagements, which could be between four and 10. “It might not be fifty, it might not be a daily publisher per se that maximizes our relationship with the audience, because we’re only creating stuff that matters to them.”

Hammer led one of the conference’s three kickoff sessions titled The End Of Advertising As We Know It: Now What? One of the session’s talking points was “The key is to stop selling and do a better job of connecting.”

Asked about his work with the ANA’s CMO Growth Council and its client-centricity vertical, he says that driving the most effective ways of engaging with consumers needs support at the C-suite and board levels “to really drive the change. But then it’s mostly a people and change-management exercise than a technology based thing that needs to happen.”

Hammer doesn’t doubt the power of television as it continues to evolve and shift. “If it wasn’t powerful, you wouldn’t see digitally first companies actually going into TV. It just is a medium that needs to be explored the right way. Just like any medium.

“If we just focus on making great stuff, the channel, no matter what channel it is, will continue to perform. If we focus on just making a bunch of stuff and lower budgets, then we’ll ruin the experience and every channel will continue to erode.”

This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions.  Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video.   Please find more videos from the series here.

“I’m going to suggest that we have to figure out how to pull them both together around one consumer in order to really drive the growth we want. But it’s not an either or. But it’s an and,” says Eric Reynolds.

Reynolds was referencing his talk at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ Masters of Marketing conference, where he discussed “the tension between performance marketing, or growth marketing, and brand marketing.” His presentation was titled Path To Growth: A Modern Marketing Dilemma.

Among other insights Reynolds shares in this interview with Beet.TV, he talks about the slow and steady decline of linear television as a means of reaching consumers and how Clorox has been moving out of both print and TV in favor of digital—video in particular.

Why performance marketing does very well is because it’s data-rich, agile and nimble. “It’s actually way much more consumer-focused than classic brand marketing, which is the way I grew up. It’s because they’re very intimate with the consumer and they change fast,” Reynolds says.

The problem with performance marketing is “you run out of steam fast…because you fundamentally don’t know the person you’re trying to build a relationship with your brand. It’s just a bunch of clicks and data and sets. And that will get you so far.”

On the other end of the spectrum, brand marketing provides a strong understanding of consumers at a life and a category level. “It creates enduring ideas that keep people coming back. And you need both is the point. If we’re all just about activation through data, then we really don’t have a brand,” Reynolds adds.

“But if we’re only talking big, thematic, large-scale ideas that are slow, well we’re not rising to the challenge that consumers expect us to do, which is to have that real time, that intimate, be-useful relationship so you really need to do both.”

Asked for a breakdown of Clorox’s media choices, Reynolds says they’re constantly changing but tied less to a “big, strategic choice” and much more to “following where consumers are open to receiving messages and information from us. And what that means broad-scale is for a us a consistent decline in linear TV, year on year on year, and a rise in more assignable media like digital display, video, social. And we see these trends continuing.”

As the company’s analytics have evolved, providing ever more insight into how media is performing for sales, “well over” 60% of Clorox’s media is now digital.

“Now video, though, is the place where it’s all heading towards, because for our categories and our brands, it’s the place where we tell the richest stories, the kind of stories whether they’re product stories or category stories or brand stories, that seems to be the place where consumers want to engage with us.”

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

This was the challenge for Chicago-based advertising agency SCC, which became the Cubs’ agency of record in late 2012—when the team had just capped a 101-loss season. SCC’s work involved crafting “a different theme or campaign every year that really has followed the cadence of the team’s progression,” President & Managing Partner David Selby says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

That progression continued as this was written, with the Cubs losing game #2 of the National League Championship Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Chicago Tribune provides details of the game at Dodgers Stadium.

Prior to engaging SCC, ownership of the Cubs had just transferred to the Ricketts family and the team had recruited as its President Theo Epstein from Boston. The plan to turn the franchise around wouldn’t happen overnight, nor could predictions of its success.

“In 2013, when we couldn’t talk about players and we couldn’t talk about baseball as we were rebuilding the team, what we could talk about was commitment,” Selby says. This was communicated in the form of “dramatic, authentic fan stories.”

Fortunately, 2014 was the 100th anniversary of Wrigley Field, “this iconic venue where we play.” So the Cubs created a season-long event called The Party of the Century.

Things picked up the following year with the addition of Joe Madden as Manager and pitcher Jon Lester, formerly of the Boston Red Sox, to the point where “we could maybe shift our voice to be a little more confident. And so what we did was introduce a little more aggressive language,” says Selby. The next theme was Let’s Go and it focused on team momentum, not individual players. “It seems subtle but it was actually more confident than maybe we were confident in or comfortable with at the beginning of that season.”

The Cubs made it to the playoffs in 2015 but lost to the New York Mets. Heading into 2016 expectations were high “but we wanted to keep everything in check. We’re going to be honest with you,” Selby says of team communications to fans. “We invited them along on this journey.”

At 5 a.m. on the morning of Nov. 3 of 2016, after the Cubs had notched the World Series, the team issued a commemorative spot featuring musician and Cubs fan Eddie Vedder’s Someday We’ll Go All The Way, which eventually earned some 36 million views.

“The Cubs didn’t spend one dime of paid media on it,” Selby says. “That was this powerful statement from our fans to us about what this win meant.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.

“One of the refreshing parts of the conference today is seeing the marketing community galvanize as trying to be a single voice and just renewing the importance of the investment and what marketing can do.”

In this interview with Beet.TV, Zambianchi reflects on the importance of measuring campaign results and how quickly the digital media ecosystem has advanced when compared to the traditional television business.

“Measurement is everything,” says Zambianchi. “I don’t think anyone’s comfortable anymore with just having communications out there but really tying it back to how we can affect the business.”

Agencies can be “very powerful” by collaborating and setting up frameworks to measure their efforts to determine “what we’re doing is moving product off shelf, is bringing foot traffic into stores.”

Asked about the growing potential of reaching consumers with premium video, Zambianchi references the evolution of TV “let’s say from how prevalent it was in the 1950’s, when it was in fact in every household.”

It took roughly 30 to 40 years to get beyond three TV networks, and 40 to 50 to get into cable and satellite offerings. Comparatively, digital consumption and the accompanying ecosystem has changed dramatically in just 20 years and shows no signs of slowing down.

“It’s so difficult to even project where it’s going to go, it’s moving so rapidly,” says Zambianchi.

He believes advertisers and agencies have just started to tap what premium video can do.

“Consumers have proven that they’re willing to trade their time to spend with brands with interesting content.”

MediaCom counsels its clients to “be true to their own brand values, bring interesting, engaging stories, be more creative. Media can be a force for that. It’s just beginning to blossom.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.

That ended with the World Series in 2016, triggering a change in communications strategies for the venerable Midwest sports franchise.

“We’re on an interesting journey with our fans,” Kenney explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

In recent years, as the Cubs struggled from one season to the next, stadium attendance mirrored the team’s on-field performance. Meaning it declined.

“There was a conversation really about filling the seats and coming back to Wrigley and staying involved and staying engaged with the team even if the results weren’t what everyone hoped for,” Kenney says.

That messaging lasted from 2012 to 2014. “By 2015, we could see the beginnings of a really great team. Then the narrative changed from rather than celebrate the ballpark or your commitment to the team and started focusing more on the players.”

Now it’s “more a celebration of this American pastime. Our team is now worthy of our fans’ love. It’s been kind of an evolution of messages.”

Throughout the decades-long journey, the Cubs benefited from their relationship with WGN, which by virtue of its status as a “super station” broadcast Cubs games to 70 million fans outside of Chicago, including Arizona, Colorado and Florida. That changed in 2015 when WGN converted its national outlet to a basic cable network.

“The super station allowed us to create fan bases in markets where they don’t have a team or where they recently got a team,” Kenney says. “When we play the Diamondbacks or the Rockies or the Marlins, a lot of times those are home games for us because WGN has created such a following in those markets.”

Partially offsetting the loss of super station carriage is the way that Cubs fan interact with multiple screens and platforms while keeping tabs on the team’s travails. “The additional information that’s available to everyone now has really created this very social experience when people watch games, even when they’re not at Wrigley field.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.

“The strategy that we employ for DCO is very different on the consumer side of the business than it is on our commercial side of the business, says Dina Gowar, Chief of Staff, Digital Marketing Team, Dell, which has employed the targeting technique for about three years.

On the consumer side, Dell uses DCO in the traditional retargeting sense of cross-selling and up-selling. Such tactics are “based on what that customer was doing, what we know about them, what they were looking at, what they would genuinely be interested in,” Gowar adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

Dell is more focused on relationship building with its commercial clients and prospects, seeking to nurture trust and loyalty. Thought leadership content in the form of ads touting white papers or case studies are employed depending on the solution a website visitor had viewed.

Online selling changed dramatically for Dell with its landmark acquisition of EMC a year ago, which yielded “a huge portfolio of solutions and services that you can’t just buy with a click,” says Gowar. “It’s a much longer process…nine months from when someone might start looking at something to when they ultimately buy that solution.”

In the interim, sales and marketing need to be closely aligned to ensure that messaging is appropriate, because a prospect that expressed interested in particular solutions or services at the beginning of their search might be looking for something entirely different over time.

While at the Masters of Marketing confab, Gowar is pleased with the “feel good factor” expressed by so many brand representatives and encouraged for the advertising and consumer-engagement implications in a city that was ravaged by Hurricane Irma.

“There’s so much wrong in the world right now, let’s leverage the eyeballs that we get, our brand position and brand equity and followers to try to bring people together,” she says. “It’s great to be here and share the love amongst your peers and colleagues.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.

“I think a lot of marketers today start with a creative brief and the idea, ‘Here’s my message. Go find me places to put that message at.’ I think that is the backward- looking view, says Brad Feinberg, Sr. Director, Media & Consumer Engagement, MillerCoors.

MillerCoors’ planning starts with “dimensionalizing the person, humanizing the business and the brand and understanding them from a multidimensional perspective,” he says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

Going beyond demographics requires studying peoples’ behaviors and attitudes, especially as it relates to consuming beer and on what occasions. “Then you go to the right places,” says Feinberg, an aspect that has major geographic implications.

Then comes defining “the moments that matter” when MillerCoors messaging will resonate best and that will break though. “Something they don’t avoid.”

Asked for his thoughts on the value of one-to-one marketing, Feinberg points to the elimination of waste in not serving ads to people who aren’t likely prospects. And while the “funnel” may exist, it’s not an off-the-shelf item.

“I don’t think there’s a very linear funnel as has always been described in marketing textbooks. I actually think the funnel is much more complex than that.”

One-to-one marketing takes in such elements as geography but also shopping behavior. For example, in some markets the convenience store is the primary destination for those seeking a 24-once beer at the end of the workday, but shoppers haven’t necessarily made up their minds as to exactly what to purchase.

“A lot of it is very impulsive behavior. As long as we’re there at that moment, that’s the opportunity for us to create something customized,” Feinberg adds.

Like other marketers, MillerCoors is aiming less at disruption and more at earning consumer attention.

“I think we need to refocus ourselves on reinforcing their behavior than disrupting their behavior. It’s really critical for us to create messaging that consumers are seeking out. Content that they are seeking out in environments that are most relevant to the brand,” Feinberg says.

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.

“Doing good can be very good business,” says Beitler. “In the future, particularly with the way millennials and even the next generation feel about companies’ responsibilities, it’s very likely that you won’t be able to do good business without doing good.”

Lane Bryant was one of many brand marketers showcasing their purpose-driven positioning and communications strategies at the 2017 Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers. In this interview with Beet.TV, Beitler explains Lane Bryant’s efforts to change the way women see themselves and how the world perceives them.

“We want a world where all women are seen as beautiful, all women love fashion, all women have access to amazing fashion. If she’s more confident, if she feels more comfortable, the truth is she’s going to spend more on apparel.”

Along the way, Lane Bryant has broken new ground in sponsorships with the likes of Sports Illustrated and Glamour, to name just two. Just over a year ago, the retailer founded in 1904 took the title sponsorship of the first SI Swimsuit Issue to feature plus-size models in a campaign titled “This Body.”

Lane Bryant inked the Glamour magazine’s first-ever apparel licensing deal and teamed with Refinery29 to help surface the “invisible majority”: the 67% of American women who wear plus-size garments. “Our goal is to reshape the way that we see women,” Beitler says.

Asked how the company measures campaign success, he cites brand growth and consumer perception. Last month, the YouGov BrandIndex listed Lane Bryant #1 in most improved brand sentiment among millennials, ahead of brands like GE, Royal Carribbean Cruises, Tesla, Forever 21, Payless and Nintendo Wii.

As Beitler notes, that ranking was among “not just women but millennials in general.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.

Last spring, one2one Media set out to leverage an integrated set of systems and technology to drive efficiency and yield by automating workflows and providing a unified reporting approach for addressable video. Six months later, President Mike Bologna voices no regrets.

“Our thought process has been spot on. There’s huge demand in the market for what we’re doing and the reception from agencies and advertisers has been fantastic,” Bologna says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

One-to-many could well describe advertisers and agencies “having to communicate and talk to 12 different systems using 40 different pieces of technology and 100 different data partners,” Bologna adds. “We do that all for them.”

Right now, the primary source of addressable video right comes via the two minutes of ad inventory each hour that MVPD’s serve up either through linear or the video-on-demand stream. This represents most of one2one Media’s campaigns, with the other 30 percent extending out on to connected television, tablets and smartphones.

“Because we use the same data sets and the same matching agents, we’re able to create an unduplicated reach and frequency of the ads delivered to those specified segments and then tie it back to sales,” Bologna says.

Advanced TV company Cross MediaWorks launched one2one Media in April of 2017, adding to a portfolio that consisted of creative and media agency TCA and video solutions provider Cadent.

“Over last six months alone we’ve seen an increase in customer billings by over 50 percent. That leads me to believe that the industry is really starting to tie together the value of a one-to-one video spot and the sales attribution associated with it.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.

“Make an impact, make peoples’ lives better, build businesses, create jobs, build brand equity. I think that’s really positive,” Stengel says at the annual gathering of the Association of National Advertisers.

Spoken like a true educator, befitting Stengel’s status as Senior Fellow & Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School, which he joined this summer to help run the Kellogg Markets and Customers Initiative. In addition to Masters of Marketing, he still keeps tabs on events like Advertising Week in New York and is well versed with marketers’ concerns about brand safety within the digital media ecosystem.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Stengel, who runs the consultancy Jim Stengel Co., talks about the importance of giving creatives a free rein to collaborate with marketers so that each brand can activate its unique purpose.

“I think the creative community still brings so much value to companies,” Stengel says. “The ones that are getting the most value from the creative community are the ones that are sharing their business challenges, sharing their opportunities, sharing their business goals and giving them simple, inspiring briefs.”

A good example would be Apple’s Think Different campaign in the late 1990’s because it derived from a simple brief, according to Stengel.

“Make us relevant again. That’s what Steve Jobs said.”

Whether it’s computers or Cadillac’s desire to build “a modern luxury brand,” the creative minds involved should benefit from shared thinking and then be free to follow their instincts.

“You don’t want to put creative people into a disciplined silo,” Stengel says. “Get really good people, get a sense of team, give them your purpose your business challenge and then let the ideas fly.”

He’s happy to hear discussions about purpose, ambition, meaning and ideals as brands try to stay relevant in a sea of consumer choices.

“Purpose is here to stay,” Stengel says.

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.

This is one of the concepts behind comScore’s rollout of its new Activation suite, an offering that enables cross-platform targeting based on audience segments while drilling deeply into website content.

“One of the keys there is safety can have a different specific meaning depending upon whom you are as a brand,” says Aaron Fetters, SVP National Agencies & CPG Business at comScore.

“What our capability enables is for a brand to be very specific as to I’m okay showing up against this type of content but not this type of content,” Fetters adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).

“Our data’s ability is to go down into the actual text level within a page and say this is what this page is about and it’s a place that I’m okay to be.”

comScore Activation incorporates both digital and television viewing data along with contextual and verification technology to account for brand safety, viewability and invalid traffic. It is currently available in more than 15 leading ad tech platforms, including Adobe, AppNexus, Centro, Salesforce, Tru Optik and Videology.

At the ANA confab, Fetters says he’s heartened to see that advertisers have not just embraced the pursuit of a cleaner digital media ecosystem but that they’re thinking beyond that goal to focus on campaign effectiveness. One of their priorities is the balance between digital reach and efficiency.

“It’s great to know I have a clean supply chain. But the next step is to say am I maximizing the reach of my message to an audience,” says Fetters. “Am I capping frequency at a level that I want to, or is this just a strategy that’s not working for me?”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.

So it’s a bit ironic that brands’ best hope derives from a trend dating to the 1990’s: one-to-one marketing, but with a twist. “Storytelling is dead,” says Rajamannar, who is CMO & CCO of the financial services company. “It’s all about story making.”

Not that pursuing this strategy comes easy, Rajamannar explains in this interview with Beet. TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

“Many of the CMO’s have bigger technology budgets than the CTO’s. And that really calls for a level of understanding,” he says before declaring that finding the marketing talent that is required these days “is going to be a nightmare.”

While one-to-one personalization became something of a fad in the 1990’s, there’s no reason why the concept won’t work today, according to Rajamannar. But there’s a hitch.

“Should we be focusing on advertising the way we always focused on advertising at all? Whether it’s one-to-one or one-to-many, consumers are telling you ‘I don’t want your stupid ads. I want my uninterrupted experience.’”

As evidence, he points to the continued rise of ad-blocking software, with some 200 million active users at the end of 2016. By the first quarter of 2017, this had increased by about 25 million, driven in part by manufacturers preloading the software into their devices.

“So as a consumer, with two clicks you block the marketers form your interface altogether.”

It gets worse when one factors in services like Netflix, with nearly 100 million users. “That’s millions of hours of viewability that’s gone,” Rajamannar says.

About four years ago, Mastercard pivoted to experiential marketing. One example from early 2017 was its campaign for the Grammy Awards that included an experiential record store and interactive music experiences for fans who unlocked special offers via a $1 Masterpass purchase, as RetailDIVE reports.

“Give experiences to consumers which are memorable, which are positive, which are maybe once in a lifetime. Then they will tell the story of the brand to their circles. They become your brand ambassadors.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.

That $100 million “was just part of that effort where what we found is there was not enough assurance that our ads weren’t going to show up in the wrong place. We did not want our ads showing up in anything associated with violence, bigotry or hate,” Pritchard says in this interview with Beet. TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).

“Since we couldn’t be assured of that, we pulled the money.”

Two reasons why P&G has been so adamant about cleaning up digital media stems from its inherent waste and fraud, according to Pritchard.

“Part of that is the maturity of the ecosystem. Now that it’s 200 billion dollars it was time to make sure that it’s cleaned up,” he says.

P&G teamed up with, among others, the ANA and the Media Ratings Council to focus on digital ad viewability, verification of ad delivery, anti-fraud and brand safety.

The company cut some of its estimated $2.4 billion in annual ad spending to reduce digital ad waste and “invest in doing what really matters, which is better advertising and better innovation,” Pritchard says. “It was kind of a pretty big move, but it paid out because we still grew, we still delivered our objectives.”

In addition to digital media, P&G also cited cuts to agency and production spending that lead to a quarter-over-quarter profit margin boost of nearly one percent in the fourth quarter, as ADWEEK reports.

P&G has four main expectations for its partners in digital advertising, according to Pritchard: delivering data show ad viewability, third-party verification of audience reach, assurance that P&G ads aren’t being served to bots and, finally, “make sure they can assure us that our ads are going to show up where we want to place them, not in terrorist videos.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017.  The series is presented by FreeWheel.   Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.

Anton, who is President of Meredith Xcelerated Marketing, has a theory for how this happened, as she explains in an interview with Beet.TV at the annual Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

Instead of organizing themselves to best serve consumers with optimal content, some marketing department brethren think, “Hey wait, I’m a channel lead. I’ve got to protect my channel. I need to make sure my budget’s as high as last year. I’m competing with the other folks that I work with.”

The answer, according to Anton: “Reorganize the marketing department around the consumer as opposed to being channel-centric.”

Having been in the content business for more than four decades, MXM is in sync with the content-generation demands of the current consumer marketplace. Now Anton is seeing some clients paring back on paid media for more reliance on organic earned and owned media, with search engine optimization critical to driving website traffic.

“Many of our clients have very ambitious goals around traffic generation and yet they don’t have big paid budgets,” Anton says. “So you really have to be creative about driving that traffic through excellent SEO.”

MXM planted its flag in the mobile space in 2008, so “We’ve been thinking mobile since way back,” Anton adds.

The agency has already embraced virtual reality in a pilot for a paint company client that shows consumers how certain colors look throughout an average day. “To have something like VR to be able to bring to clients is an awesome tool,” says Anton.

We interviewed her at the ANA Masters of Marketing annual meeting in Orlando. This video is part of a series produced at the conference. Beet’s coverage is sponsored by Cadent. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.