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Valnet’s Ji Heon Kim on how the publisher encouraged users to authenticate themselves Jun 19, 2025

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With websites covering topics like entertainment (ScreenRant), gaming (Polygon) and automotive (CarBuzz), Valnet caters to users across a wide array of interests.But according to Ji Heon Kim, Valnet’s head of monetization, Valnet realized it could create more value for its users by encouraging them to subscribe or authenticate themselves.Maybe a “mass scale” of users wouldn’t sign up for their websites, but perhaps 10% would. And, as Kim puts it, that “10% would still be valuable, and we can do a lot with that 10%.”“We created more value to [those] users, more exclusive content and high-quality content,” Kim says. “All of that became an initiative on the content side for us to deliver a premium model and give users an incentive to sign up.”Kim further talked with The Current Podcast about balancing advertiser value, user experience and performance, which he says are “always affecting each other.”Episode TranscriptPlease note, this transcript may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.Damian Fowler (00:00):I'm Damian Fowler, and welcome to The Current Podcast. Today we're talking to one of the biggest digital publishers. You might not know by name, but you've definitely read their stuff. I'm talking about Net. The company behind Screen Rant, the Gamer, Kaleida make use of, and a bunch of other sites that rack up hundreds of millions of sessions every month. Joining me today is Ji Kim Valnet's, head of monetization. Ji'S been leading the charge on everything from supply path optimization to first party data to figuring out how to drive real revenue without compromising the reader experience. We'll get into some of the big shifts they've made in their tech stack and how they're bringing newly acquired brands like Polygon into their ecosystem and what other publishers can learn from their approach.Ji Kim (00:52):At Valnet, I'd like to think of us as a publishing powerhouse. We started very small. Our motto is humble and hungry. We like to remind ourselves that it's always good to keep a humble mindset. I've been at NET for 10 years and we've grown tremendously. We've went through a lot ups and downs, but even as we grow, we like to think that we're small and agile and the publications we range from automotive, gaming, technology, entertainment, but entertainment has always been our flagship, but we've been kind of branching outside of that and trying to expand more and more. And then we have some lifestyle brands as well as sports.Damian Fowler (01:35):Let's talk about a moment that changed the game for Net. Can you walk us through your, I guess we're going to talk about supply path optimization at first anyway, which is a hot topic around these parts and what work you did around supply path optimization, like cutting resellers and boosting direct inventory. Could you talk us through that a little?Ji Kim (01:57):It's an ongoing process. It's certainly, I think most people agree that SPO is not an easy thing to achieve. You can commit to it one shot, but that's much harder to do considering that there will be a revenue impact. So for us, we tried both ways. We took a few sites and we took the direct approach and we saw a pretty decent stability, and then some other sites did not, and then we have to kind of revert back to it. SPO, it was always a topic that was talked about but not well enforced. And tradedesk took a big initiative to push publishers towards it. And then we started working closely with Jounce Media as well, with Chris Kane started kind of talking through some of the ideas, how should we go about it? How do we retain the value and still achieve removing the resale alliance and keep our inventory as clean as possible?(02:51):But initially our outlook of SPO was about making our inventory as clean and transparent as possible. Net considers ourselves as a premium publisher and we want to make sure that the advertisers see that as well. So we were heading in that direction. But ultimately, I think the biggest challenge with SPO was it's impossible to do an AB test because you have one A TXT file and you can't test one setup with the resell alliance, one setup without. So that's been pretty challenging to understand where's the value going, where is it coming from? And even with the Resell Alliance, when you talk to the SSPs with Resell Alliance, they'll go, oh, these are PP deals. These are not just rebroadcasting and all this stuff. So trying to understand the granularity and all that details of what each resale align means was very difficult. But ultimately we know we have to go in that direction, but we know it's not going to happen overnight, so we're kind of just taking a step at a time.Damian Fowler (03:51):That's great. What would you say was the kind of catalyst or moment that sparked that shift?Ji Kim (03:57):We always talked about advertiser value. It is important to yield as much value as possible and get the performance that we need. We always think that advertiser value is important, and when we think about that, it's like you go through stages. You go, okay, viewability needs to be important. Let's get viewability up to above standard, above average, make sure our CTR is good, but it's high quality clicks. It's not just users just clicking on stuff. Then you go through the lines and eventually you get to SPOs. Make sure that advertisers know what inventory they're getting access to, what they're buying, and make sure that they're getting insights. The transparency is there. Then we've increased the value of our inventory.Damian Fowler (04:46):Yeah, I mean that's the key, right, obviously. And speaking of that, having made these changes, are you in a position to be able to see the kind of impact that they've had from a revenueJi Kim (04:58):Perspective? Honestly, I don't think I can everything, especially with these kinds of stuff, what I've learned is it doesn't change overnight. Let's say we remove all the reseller lines yesterday. Today, likely the performance is going to drop initially and maybe things recover over time, but there's so many moving parts that it's hard to associate the value towards SPO, and that's a lot of things that we do in this industry. But I think that's when we like to look at it as, you know what? Ultimately we are improving the quality of our inventory, so we will get rewarded at some point. And that's how you move forward. But with SPO, I think the other side is that it's not just about removing reseller lines. You also have to market yourself and tell the advertisers that, Hey, we have gone in this direction. We have removed the reseller lines. All of our inventory is direct. It's clean. And that part is also hard to do. We haven't spent a lot of time or resources into marketing ourselves, and that's why we talked about, people may not know net, but they know our brands. It's the same thing. It's like we are now making a big push to let people know who Val net is, and that's going to go in hand in hand with this stuff.Damian Fowler (06:21):In terms of that messaging around the surgery as it were you're doing on the supply path, does that land well with advertisers?Ji Kim (06:32):I think it's always positively looked at when you tell them, it's like everybody, it is never negative, but I don't know if actually if it's meaningful for them because at scale, they're buying at scale. So yeah, we're a big publisher, but they're also buying at multiple publishers. Maybe only small portion of their budgets come to us. So it's positive, but I don't know if it's all that meaningful to them. At least that's what I've felt.Damian Fowler (07:04):So in addition to the SPO, what other tweaks or changes are you as head of monetization looking at to basically bring in those ad dollars and keep readers satisfied, I suppose?Ji Kim (07:17):Yeah, so there's three things. So we looked at the advertiser value, but then there's the user experience and then the performance side. So always those three things, there's constantly affecting each other. Ad density is probably one of the biggest part of advertiser value and performance and user experience. So we are constantly trying to reduce our density, and we look at this metric impressions per session and request per session. So we look at that and injections our injections based on content length, a paragraph breaks and all that stuff. So we'll try to work with the content team to create optimal breaks. I'll have a little sit down session with the content team. The leads say, okay, this is how the admin injection works, and how you break out your content really does impact, because we won't break a paragraph in half to inject an ad. So there needs to be natural breaks for the ads to inject. So if you have massive paragraphs, we're going to have less ad injections, which is fine if the content works like that, but they also need to think about how all this stuff works.Damian Fowler (08:26):That's really interesting. I mean, I think that sweet spot between not being the Vegas strip, but also ads have to populate at the right time to have value.Ji Kim (08:35):For net, we've focused mostly on open market programmatic spend. We have a small direct initiative. This is something that we've been trying to grow, but when you don't have huge direct sales initiative and direct spend coming in, you kind of need the density because the CPMs that you get from open market is much lower. So we want to try to move away from that as much as possible. I don't think found that will ever be a publisher where we drive like 50% of the revenue from direct sales, but we want to grow it to maybe 15, 20%. And once we do that, we can yield higher CPMs, which allows us to reduce the density, which would be better for advertiser value, better for user experience, and we'll still get the performance that we need to kind of go forward.Damian Fowler (09:24):So it's a balance.Ji Kim (09:25):Yeah. Yeah. I think if we can drive higher CPMs, we would love to reduce density, but it's always the constant battle between the two of, okay, well we reduced density. Oh, we went too far. Okay, we got to bring it back a little bit.Damian Fowler (09:38):How difficult is it to kind of innovate in ad tech? This is a broader question, I guess given how fast things are changing, especially on the programmatic front,Ji Kim (09:47):It's been very, very difficult. Rapidly changing environment is definitely one of them, and you have to adapt quickly. For example, the video definition of having instream outstream, and then now there's a third definition of accompanying that stuff. When it happened, the enforcement happened quickly, so we had to adapt quickly, and that's difficult. But innovating is, I think, much more difficult than just adapting to the new policies and new rules. So many different ways to innovate pre, for example, you have the open source code, you build that, but there's so many customizations that you can do and even a single customization, you interpret how you should approach that topic and how you should build your tech. So you kind of have to talk to your developers and walk through. And our biggest challenge I would say was bridging the gap between developers and ad ops. I was like, because I am an ad ops guy, I understand programmatic landscape very well, but our developers do not. And I'm not a developer, I'm not a technical guy. Obviously through 10 years I've learned a lot of stuff, but still, if I needed to build something, I'm not going to be able to tell them exactly how to build it. So you need somebody in the middle that understands both sides,(11:03):And that was the most difficult part. And eventually we did find resources that they were able to bridge that gap and were able to build stuff. But ultimately, there's just so many different ways to build your product and you want to make sure that product that you build or tech stack that you build is going to keep that balance that you need between the user experience, the performance, and the density, everything that pertains to page speed as well. If you build it to be too slow, everything gets affected as well, and that's harder to tell. So yeah.Damian Fowler (11:37):So how have some of these technical changes influenced your broad and monetization philosophy?Ji Kim (11:43):Yeah, so I guess one of the things, if we talk about authentication, we talk about cookie deprecation and why authentication became so important to majority of the publishers. And I remember our thought process around authentication was pretty pessimistic, I would say. But eventually we said know what? We can create content or value for the users that's going to want them to sign up and want them to get authenticated. And we said we got to start somewhere. Ultimately, maybe we've become a little bit more realistic about what critical mass of a value would be if we're at, if we're expecting 50% of users will log in, that's not going to happen, but 10% is still very meaningful. So it was about our philosophy was changing, about our expectations changing and still understanding that 10% could be very valuable and we can do a lot with that 10%. So we created more value to the users are more exclusive content, high quality content, high quality videos. All of that stuff became an initiative on the content side for us to deliver the premium model and to give users the incentive to authenticate a sign up on.Damian Fowler (13:03):That's really interesting. I think one of the things that also I'm hearing is that you kind of have different audiences, but you're getting to understand your audiences. I mean, this strategy gives you more insight into who's coming.Ji Kim (13:15):Yeah. We also created what we call threads. They can talk about the article, talk about topics that we're discussing, and that really improved our engagement.Damian Fowler (13:30):As you look to the future, how do you think about, as it were, locking in some of these changes and this value that you see from this audience?Ji Kim (13:40):So I want to go back a little bit about innovating and how difficult it is. So I went through the stages of, okay, what am I focusing on to optimize to yield more value? And initially it was demand. Okay, we want to work with as many high quality as P as possible, but then you do work with all of them. There are going to be going to be one or two that come here and there, but generally speaking, they're not going to create incremental value. They'll just take a piece of pie that was taken by somebody else, not meaningful value. Then you work on ad tech innovation, all that stuff, and that we'll continuously work on that, but that also has lots of limitations, and you eventually reach a plateau point of say, you're not going to find a lot low hanging fruits. So now we come to premium inventory, which we need to learn our users, we need to learn who they are so we can offer these users to our advertisers to grow our PMP programmatic direct, as well as your conventional IO based direct deals that's going to yield as higher CPMs.Damian Fowler (14:53):Yeah, I mean, talk of premium inventories is characteristic of the moment we are in when it comes to programmatic sales for publishers.Ji Kim (15:02):Yeah.Damian Fowler (15:04):Let's draw back and look at the big picture and some of the kind of industry context. I guess think I'm correct in saying Valnet reach has more…

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Gallo Winery’s Amy Lund on bringing wine to the NFL Jun 11, 2025

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In this episode of The Current Podcast, hosts Damian Fowler and Ilyse Liffreing sit down with Amy Lund, VP of integrated marketing and corporate communications at E. & J. Gallo Winery, to talk about Barefoot’s bold move to become the official wine sponsor of the NFL.

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CNN International Commercial’s Rob Bradley on evolving a legacy media company Jun 04, 2025

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In this episode of The Current Podcast, we’re joined by Rob Bradley, SVP of digital revenue, strategy and operations at CNN International Commercial. He shares how CNN has evolved far beyond its broadcast roots — and how it’s now helping brands tell more impactful stories across everything from connected TV (CTV) and free ad-supported television (FAST) channels to TikTok and LinkedIn.Episode TranscriptPlease note, this transcript may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.Damian Fowler (00:00):I'm Damian Fowler.Ilyse Liffreing (00:01):And I'm Ilyse Liffreing.Damian Fowler (00:02):And welcome to this edition of The Current Podcast.Ilyse Liffreing (00:09):This week we're thrilled to be joined by Rob Bradley, the senior vice rresident of Digital Revenue Strategy and Operations at CNN International Commercial.Damian Fowler (00:18):Now, Rob has played a key role in CNN's evolution over the last 10 years from a broadcast powerhouse into a cutting edge digital platformIlyse Liffreing (00:26):That includes launchpad, CNN's AI powered advertising tool that's been driving smarter, more targeted campaigns for nearly a decadeDamian Fowler (00:35):From global banks to tech giants like Samsung and even government launchpad has helped brands show up on CNN's platform in ways that are both innovative and effective.Ilyse Liffreing (00:45):So in this episode we'll explore that journey, how launchpad got its start, what it's become today, and how CNN is helping advertisers navigate a complex digital world using deep audience insights and data at scale.Damian Fowler (01:00):So let's get into it. So Rob, let's start by talking about Launchpad. Not everyone's familiar with it, but it's been designed to help brands market themselves to CNN's audience. So I know it's eight years old. Can you talk about the tool and how it's evolved to this point?Rob Bradley (01:19):Yeah, I mean, to take a step, media companies and news brands today need to be so much more than just a platform where someone can serve a traditional ad to reach an audience. Of course we do that and embrace that, but our audience exists in a multitude of different environments. Now, of course, o and O, which can be TV to digital assets, websites, but of course Fast and CTV now. And of course they're all across social, which means that when we're working with brands today, we need to have tools that enable us to reach audiences in all of those environments. Essentially our clients expect that from us. So we have to innovate to be in those places. And also of course, by utilizing areas our audiences exist in today such as social, it means we get a broader reach. So we try and of course a lot of brands are nervous about social, and of course we do compete somewhat, but I like to flip it on its head and think about how can we use audiences on off platform environments to our advantage?(02:16):So launchpad essentially is a good example of that. It's an in-house social media agency, essentially utilizes latest talent. I would say. I think people do come first that really understand the latest technology to help us understand our audiences both on and off platform. That did launch really just reaching audiences in places like Facebook, but now it's across all the meta platforms, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, and more. And over the years that team, through utilizing technology, have automated processes. We understand sentiment of what people are consuming, how they feel against our content that we distribute both on and off platform. And then we use those insights to indeed empower the next piece of creative, let's say. And it feeds into our brand studio, which is called CNN Create, which actually touches about 70% of our campaigns now. So it's all about the way we go to market is really about selling stories and content and then utilizing the impressions and volume of scale we have around that in a smart way.Ilyse Liffreing (03:15):And today, CNN Parent Company, Warner Brothers Discovery has only massively grown since the launch of launchpad and has so many touchpoint and audience insights. You have the entirety of the Harry Potter world and DC comments to seen in news. How do you make sense then of all that data and how does it come together to benefit a launchpad campaign?Rob Bradley (03:41):So first of all, I'd say there's still a job to do and an opportunity of gathering all that together because there's so many touch points that both can power the marketing of movies that say as well as the targeting of campaigns. And those targeting of campaigns can of course be owned and operated environment. So again, we can push audience insights into social platforms to target through tools like launchpad, but ultimately by understanding who our audiences are means that we can do three things. We launched a product called WBD AIM basically, which was actually born out of CNN, used to be CNN aim, and it stands for Audience Insight Measurement. And really it means that of course we talk about targeting quite a lot, that's where the rubber meets the road. But really as a severe successful media company today, you need to go to market with insight led sales.(04:29):So use that data to inform sales to the clients, proving upfront why you've got the right audience and why they should trust you. And then of course there's the targeting the audience piece, and then there's the measurement of proving what you have done has worked. And so that aim piece all comes together as one kind of data play. And where we have had success of bringing that together so far internationally is CNN Eurosport D plus in the UK and TNT Sport in the UK now exists in one platform. And also of course that's really good for programmatic as well. We can push those audience insights, put them into the marketplace and enable brands to buy programmatically against that. So very much in the programmatic space, we're aiming at the more premium PG programmatic direct marketplace.Damian Fowler (05:16):Can I just ask you off the back of that, do you see news as part of that whole package or it's not a sort of siloed separate piece of what you are offering?Rob Bradley (05:27):Yeah, that's a really good question. I think if you are a brand that wants an engaged audience and you want to be part of a conversation that's happening today or drive a conversation, news obviously makes sense. But of course I wonder if this is where you're going. News environments are challenged at the moment in some respect. There is a prevalence of I think, unfair news avoidance in the industry, particularly with very blunt keyword block lists that are being used, which is pretty well covered in the press and that is a major challenge. However, sports has a similar issue, right? Because words like shoot and shot and attack are used all the time just as though are news. So actually sometimes if people think of news straightaway, but there's a broader issue with that. And the reason why I mention that because actually news and sports is both live, it's what's happening today, it's audiences certainly where we sell it can be sports enthusiasts across both platforms at the broader end, it can be business decision makers, it can be C-suites, it can be high net worths bringing those audiences and ultimately linking it to what WBD has an abundance of is very premium, very trusted, very brand suitable environments you could say.(06:39):And that marketplace of WBD and WBD Connect is the programmatic marketplace will keep growing.Ilyse Liffreing (06:47):Now you talked about how your bridging basically social to programmatic. Have you seen one success in that so far and interest from the brands you've been working with?Rob Bradley (07:00):I think it's basically it was quite an early adopter of programmatic in the belief that it enables the human led work media owners to grow. And that has been proven in embrace technology to do what it does well, highly scaled targeted impressions that started on the website that say ever increasing on CTV and FAST for us, joining all that together, putting our own data into those environments, trying to work at the premium end of it so that we get the yield up and really embracing the technology to do that married with what only we can do best, which is linking directly with a brand, understanding a brand on their agency. In many markets we go brand direct though really understanding what their challenges are and what stories they've got to tell. And then coming up with this multi-platform strategy that can include programmatic maybe at the mid funnel or the performance end, but also linking it to a full multi-platform strategy, which may include CTV, fast Web and tv. And actually 80% of our direct campaigns include all of those platforms and include that social piece. And I think the reason why I've sort of spoken about social in is I think people often wonder about how we can utilize it to make money, but actually it's a really important part of our business where we're kind of using the best of what programmatic can offer, the best of what social can offer and then the best of storytelling.Ilyse Liffreing (08:27):Yeah, perhaps I would love to hear about a brand that perhaps you guys have been working with and how you are really measuring that success. I'm curious if any platform or audience perhaps outperformed your expectations.Rob Bradley (08:43):Sure. Well, I spoke about linking CNN storytelling that could have social impact in some way or drive conversations or change opinions. And that is when we have a really strong partnership with the brand, that's what we do for them. Really it's about how can we change perhaps a view or input a view into someone's mind that they may not have had about a brand based on facts or something that brand is really genuinely doing to try and make the world a better place beyond just perhaps selling a product. So CNN Embarks on a really bold program with Samsung recently, it was exactly a campaign that I said truly multi-platform include tv, digital, social, so use launchpad for off platform distribution and it really highlighted how Samsung technologies are being used to make the world a better place. Everything from the way they t trawl the ocean to dig up fishing nets and some of those fishing net parts are used in their mobile phones to a great story around how their TVs add access for the heart of hearing where we had a gentleman that was on stage with Beyonce who was doing sign language while she was performing, who went viral because he's an incredible character that really can literally make you hear the song using his hands.(09:54):It's amazing with hisIlyse Liffreing (09:55):MovementsRob Bradley (09:55):And he uses a Samsung TV at home, he feels it gives him what he needs considering that his hard of hearing challenges. So all those stories, it does involve a product, but really it's about a person, a human led story. We know that human led stories cut through a cluttered internet more particularly if they have some sort of emotional response that they offer, I can make you sad, happy, and ultimately the goal was to shift opinions about that brand. So looking at the data that we have, but 81% agreed that seeing the branded content that Samsung made made them think they were a more socially responsible company. 86% agreed that the branded content salt told them something about Samsung they didn't know before. And 84% agreed that branded content showed the value of Samsung as being more attention grabbing. So there's those hearts and minds movements that these campaigns at the brand's level kind of goals that they have. And that's really what we did with this campaign.Damian Fowler (10:53):That was great. Yeah, that's an interesting convergence of values and emotion and storytelling, but if we could sort of maybe look at some of the takeaways from the Launch Bank campaign and then get bigger from there. How did you measure success? I know you just mentioned some metrics right there for Samsung specifically, but did any platform or audience outperform your expectations?Rob Bradley (11:19):Yeah, I think we try to be platform agnostic somewhat when it comes to what the campaign goals are. So take within social, if the campaign of course is reaching consumers, we're more likely to use meta talk environments, YouTube, however of course if the campaign is more skew towards as a business audience, LinkedIn is more increasingly used. So it's not necessarily that one platform surprises because we'd set up the campaign at the start to meet those specific goals of that campaign. And within Samsung of course this was a consumer campaign, so those consumer platforms to reach and actually for that, TikTok did provide, and I think it was one of the first times that they'd ever worked with TikTok with a media owner and they trusted us because of the relationship that we have to deliver that campaign on TikTok. So that did have for one of the first times we've used it, a really important play within our overall multi-platform strategy.Damian Fowler (12:15):You mentioned insight-led sales, that means you have a good view of audience segments. Could you talk a little bit more about that and how you think about audience and how you break it down? And then the second part of that I guess is was there any unexpected reaction or behavior response from campaigns from these different areas of viewership?Rob Bradley (12:39):Yeah, I think we've had to get really sophisticated with understanding audiences and I'm linking who our audiences with our content. It touches on something I was talking about previously when it comes to the changes around news and news avoidance and brand safety and brand suitability. But that doesn't mean that all politics content should be blocked, for example. So I suppose there's the traditional side that we have of understanding our audiences of, okay, this is someone that's interested in reading a lot of business articles around finance. And then we can layer in personal identifying data where we have it and define and target that audience. But now we also add a layer in, we built a tool called sam, which is a sentiment analysis moderator, which also now kicks out a positive and negative sentiment score on our articles. So we know that if an article is about a scientific breakthrough, for example, that's a cure for a disease that may have innovation, technology may be very positive, but actually the word disease might have been blocked if you're using a more blunt keyword list. So with our clients, they trust us to use SAM to use more positive and negative targets. So we layer the kind of contextual element as well as the data element, and that runs on pretty much every single one of our direct campaigns.Ilyse Liffreing (13:56):Very cool. It sounds like a use of AI right there, if I'm not mistaken.Rob Bradley (14:00):It's an interesting one because we've had it for about five years and it is AI is machine learning and the reason we built it is because it ultimately unlocks more impressions than perhaps some of the off the shelf tools do.Ilyse Liffreing (14:11):Very true. Because also you're not just selling content to, you're selling a sustainable digital business. Would you say is your North Star when balancing that audience trust with monetization being CNN is such as a storied publication and company with multiple digital touch points?Rob Bradley (14:38):Yeah, good question. I mean, first of all, CNN's a global brand that's built on trust. We have some of the world…

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Chuck E. Cheese’s Melissa McLeanas on becoming a media network for families May 21, 2025

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Chuck E. Cheese's Melissa McLeanas joins hosts Damian Fowler and Ilyse Liffreing on The Current Podcast to discuss how Chuck E. Cheese is leveraging its iconic IP for the streaming era, what advertisers are excited about and more.Episode TranscriptPlease note, this transcript may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.Damian Fowler (00:00):I'm Damian FowlerIlyse Liffreing (00:01):And I'm Ilyse Liffreing,Damian Fowler (00:02):And welcome to this edition of The Current Podcast.Ilyse Liffreing (00:09):This week we're thrilled to be joined by Melissa McLeanas, Vice President of Global Media Licensing and Entertainment at Chuck E. Cheese.Damian Fowler (00:18):For people who grew up in the us, Chuck E. Cheese means childhood birthday parties. It's long been a go-to destination for pizza games and the giant mouse that knows every kid's name.Ilyse Liffreing (00:29):In short, it's a pop culture icon with over 500 worldwide venues. But under Melissa's leadership, the brand is leveling up by launching the CEC Media Network in partnership with programmatic platform future. Today,Damian Fowler (00:42):It's a big move that signals a shift from just a physical play space to a full on entertainment platform, think digital storytelling in store screens, branded content and advertising that actually fits into the family experience.Ilyse Liffreing (00:57):We're going to jump in and talk about why in venue media might just be the next big driver of customer loyalty and growth.Damian Fowler (01:07):Chuck E. Cheese is such a nostalgic brand, especially in the United States, but here you are launching a full media network, which is a kind of big new chapter for you. Can you walk us through the vision and the strategy behind the CEC Media network and what is bringing it to life?Melissa McLeanas (01:26):Absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me. It is an incredibly exciting time at CEC Entertainment. Then Chuck Cheese, I would say it's a bold new chapter for the company and the Media network is really just a piece of that. The brand has been going through an incredible transformation over the last few years, and really at the heart of that is the vision to establish this brand as a global leader in entertainment. Now, I say that, but it's really reestablished the brand in entertainment. Chuck E. Cheese was born in entertainment. I don't know if you know, but the E in Chuck E. Cheese stands for entertainment. And really when you think back to where we started, we were a leader and really established the category of EAT entertainment. And as that space has evolved and family entertainment centers have really taken that center stage, we've continued to be a leader and an innovator in that space.(02:14):But a few years ago, I would say we probably hit a wall and it was a little bit tired. The bones were good as they would say, but it was really time for a reset and bringing a new leadership team to the forefront with a new background and experience in entertainment. We established several different strategic objectives, one of them being the division that I lead, and that's media licensing and entertainment. So really very simply put, the mission is to really drive incremental value and revenue for the company in a new way. So all US locations, we've invested over 350 million back into the business, a capital investment, and I'm happy to say that right now at this point we've completed the US all US locations, so just under 500, no small feat, and we're about to finish our own Canada locations as well. And what this looks like is cosmetically update to the interior and the exterior, a revamp of menu, all new games, and that entertainment package now features a large video wall. And then of course our character program.Damian Fowler (03:16):That's a lot right there. It's almost like you've had a complete perception shift in terms of what you're doing. It sounds like you are a channel in and of your own right and media channel. You mentioned out of home, but there's also CTV on all those points. This is a kind of multistream content strategy. And could you just talk a little bit more about how that will ultimately reach all of these consumers and how it'll deepen engagement, I guess, for families who go to all these different venues in the US and around the world?Melissa McLeanas (03:50):So yeah, that's a great point. So I guess let me step back and actually talk about what that content looks like. Within our fund centers, we have entertainment programming, let's call it a 90 minute loop, and it consists primarily of entertainment, content, family friendly entertainment content. Of all these initiatives, obviously the first and foremost most important thing for us is to make sure that we're delivering an amazing experience for our guests. And so that content must do that. It has to be relevant for our families, it has to be engaging, and it really has to convey everything that our brand stands for. So that's a mix of our own original content. So I talked about that, the library. And so we continue to create new content and then we pull from our library of content. So we really look for things that are a little young, but it has to be appealing to an older guest.(04:37):At the same time, there can be aspirational content, so maybe some of our 10 year olds and 12 year olds are there with younger siblings, and then you got your parents. So there's a lot of opportunity there. The other thing that digital screens in this update to programming does is it allows us to do regular seasonal updates. And I think that's also really important, especially as we're growing programs like our membership program, our past program, we've got some repeat visitation, we're consistently updating and keeping that fresh throughout the year. Now as part of that, there's a lot of partner opportunities. And so for our entertainment partners, like I said, you can get the latest clips from your newest release for some of the newer content creators. We've got an active captive audience sitting right there paying attention to those screens, and we've created an environment where they're tuning into those screens. And so bringing our characters, since we do all of that content ourselves and working with other content creators to create some co-branded content, there's a lot of different ways for partners to really be a part of that entertainment experience.Ilyse Liffreing (05:38):Now I know it's early days too, but perhaps you can talk about some of those partnerships that you have going on with needy buyers and national advertisers and then how important the media network is to Chuck E. Cheese's broader business evolution.Melissa McLeanas (05:54):Absolutely. I'll actually take that moment to do a quick and talk more specifically on the advertising opportunity. I think a lot of what we're doing with the content and the characters is incredibly exciting, but it's also a really exciting time in the digital out of home and out of home space. So if you look at other venue operators and retailers, they're debuting these owned media networks. And so we've really took a page out of their book and we said, Hey, we've got this updated experience, we have this traffic. How do we really bring this to partners in a big way? And so on the, I would say the tech solutions side, we've had some really strong relationships with Panasonic so that we've got media players in advertising solutions that are going to support the various types of advertisers locally, regionally, nationally. And then we most recently have a relationship with Vista Media, so we were able to integrate their supply side platform directly into that CMS.(06:44):So that gives us access to a wide array of advertisers, and they're coming straight through programmatic, so turnkey solution for those who are buying programmatic space. So we're seeing a lot of advertisers come through there. And then we've got some more strategic relationships in the entertainment space. Kids BOP is one of those. They've been a partner for many, many years. And in addition to some of the entertainment content, they've really leveraged these screens to advertise tours to localize and talk specifically to upcoming tours at a specific venue ahead of that. We've worked with the Harlem Globetrotters to do the same, and then we have a various CPG toy, again, family appropriate, parent appropriate that are really taking advantage of those screens. And then of course we're talking out of home, but I don't want to forget too that we also announced a partnership with Future Today.(07:33):And so in addition to having this opportunity around content in our venues, we also have this content online. So we've had a lot of this on YouTube and YouTube kids. We actually started putting our content there in 2012 and have been doing so in a more meaningful way in the past few years. And with this new relationship with Future Today, a leader in the CTV space, not only are we getting content on their Happy Kids channel and their network alongside the co melons and the Paw trolls, but in the future we're working towards launching our own streaming network. So Chuck E. Cheese branded Fast Channel, so ad supported, but again, leaning into the content and the IP and engaging those guests and those fans and then offering that opportunity to brand safe and family friendly advertisers.Ilyse Liffreing (08:17):I know Chuck E. Cheese has traditionally been mostly about the physical experience before all of this. I remember going there as a kid, my dad brought us there all the time growing up, and obviously that part of the business is not dying down at all. I'm curious how many screens you have at each of the 500 plus venues that will be part of this network.Melissa McLeanas (08:41):So every location has a video wall, and that's going to be the focal point of when you walk into Chuck E. Cheese and it's incredibly important. You really can see that almost anywhere in most locations. Every one of our locations is unique, they're like children. They vary in size and layout, but really that video wall is huge. And then screens and the number of screens is going to depend on that layout and how big the location is. So it can be anywhere from six to 15 to 18 in some of our larger locations. So it's done strategically to make sure that there's visibility no matter where you are. And then audio isn't tied to those screens, so audio is just piped uniformly throughout the entire locations.Ilyse Liffreing (09:21):Besides those giant screens, are there any other ways you guys are blending that physical presence within the new digital touchpoints that you're bringing?Melissa McLeanas (09:30):So like I said, the character program is, I mean the epitome of the live physical experience. And so we really try to find a balance between how we take the digital parts of our brand and our entertainment and balance that with the interactive and the physical. So when the character, when Chucky comes out, whether it be for a birthday or for a dance, there's also supporting content on the screen that really help families follow along, be able to follow and interact with their parents and their friends and all of that. So we want to make sure it's on an interactive dance floor. So there's a lot of different ways to bring that to life. We also just recently launched a STEAM program, and so that is rooted in the media that you see on those screens, but then as part of that curriculum, those kids go off into the game rooms and they're playing with the games and they're doing all the different tasks that they've learned.(10:21):We did that in partnership with stem.org and then just digitally throughout the locations, our menu boards are all digital now. We've done some tremendous and deep upgrades in terms of innovation and technology, so no more tickets, which some people get sad about because that visual of having that bucket of tickets feels so iconic. But etickets are far more efficient for families that are trying to get through the price counter and out the door. So we've got Etic, we've got Play Pass, no more tokens, the menu boards, the games. We're really leaning into digital. It makes us more efficient when we need to make changes. We think about testing menu items in certain local and regional rollouts that's all supported digitally. It's far easier to make those updates on the backside than it is to roll out new point of sale and printed materials. And so we're looking for those digital opportunities throughoutIlyse Liffreing (11:11):Life. Things are certainly changing.Damian Fowler (11:12):They really are. Let's talk a little bit about some of the takeaways from all of these innovations. Now, let's say you're a family, you've been exposed to the video wall and the games room and you go home. How is this exposure being measured across the network, if you like?Melissa McLeanas (11:28):Yes, feedback is everything. We actually have a really active fan base and we do have guests who are reaching out to give us feedback. We have an in-house insights team and we have regular surveys, and then they're asking questions across every element of Chuck E. Cheese because we want to make sure that we're understanding as we update and introduce new exactly what's working, what's not and what can be better and happy to, the screens in the entertainment continues to have a really positive score. A very high guest are seeing it, they're tuning in and they love the entertainment. And so we'll continue to watch that. And when it comes to the advertising campaigns, from a measurement perspective, we're working with companies like Place their AI and an IMP purview to measure the impressions through our door as well as impressions against our screens, both being well-recognized auditors, if you will, in that space.(12:20):We don't sell tickets, so that's important to make sure that when we do these campaigns we can accurately say this is how many folks we're actually exposed to those screens. And then as we continue to work with our partners, and then I think this is something you'll see, especially in the digital out of home space, it's constantly evolving. And so for us it's really important to work with partners on their campaigns and understand those KPIs because we are a unique platform and the guests are engaging with these screens maybe differently than they might and screens out in a different venue. And so we want to make sure that the content that we're delivering, one, again, great guest experience and it's appropriate for our families, but two, it's achieving what our partners are looking to do with these campaigns.Ilyse Liffreing (13:04):So you've spoken about how Chuck E. Cheese as a brand spans generations. How do you ensure that the content and messaging then stay relevant to today's kids while still honoring the brand's legacy from the past?Melissa McLeanas (13:18):It's an amazing gift to have a brand and a character that has touched almost five decades, and that comes with great responsibility first and foremost, at the heart of what we are still, where a kid can be a kid. So as we continue to innovate and evolve for these families, we never lose sight of that. We are a kid first space. So while our content could be developed with co-viewing in mind and there's some Easter eggs that maybe parents will understand, but it's…

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PayPal’s Jenna Griffith on building a media business from transaction data May 14, 2025

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Jenna Griffith, VP of global ad operations at PayPal, shares how the fintech giant is using shopper insights to power a new kind of media network.

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DSW’s Sarah Crockett on building a flexible brand for unpredictable times May 07, 2025

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One year into her role as global CMO at Designer Shoe Warehouse (DSW), Sarah Crockett is reimagining how the legacy retailer shows up for today’s consumer — across 500 stores, an upgraded e-commerce experience and a newly expanded digital media mix.

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MilkPEP’s Miranda Abney on reclaiming milk’s cool factor Apr 30, 2025

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Milk is back in the cultural conversation. Miranda Abney, MilkPEP’s VP of marketing joined The Current Podcast to explain how a marathon for women helped boost milk’s messaging.

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Firestone Walker Brewing’s Dustin Hinz on tapping beer and sports fans through CTV Apr 23, 2025

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Firestone Walker Brewing Company’s CMO says connected TV has made it easier to reach its sports-loving customers.Episode TranscriptPlease note, this transcript may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.Damian (00:01):I'm Damian Fowler.Ilyse (00:02):And I'm Ilyse Liffreing.Damian (00:03):This week we're really excited to talk with Dustin Hinz, the Chief marketing officer of Firestone Walker Brewing the craft brewery based in California.Ilyse (00:12):Dustin has been the chief marketer at Firestone for almost six years. He's an award-winning marketer who knows how to build a culturally relevant brand.Damian (00:21):Also, he's a musician and he helped build Guitar Center into that powerhouse brand It is today. He worked there for 17 years and you can ask any guitarist about Guitar Center and its Importance. And then he was an Ernie Ball music man, which is famous for its guitar strings, which I love. I'm curious though, Ilyse, do you play the guitar?Ilyse (00:40):I wish, but Okay. Damian, we're here to talk beer and how to market it in a crowded marketplace. So let's begin. So Dustin, can you tell us a little bit about Firestone and the brand 805? It seems it really has a West Coast vibe just like me. I'm from the West coast so I can see that. I feel it.Dustin (01:04):Firestone Walker is the culmination of David Walker and Adam Firestone's love for beer. And they met back in the nineties when David fell in love with Adam's sister and there's great stories about that. And then they found they had this mutual love for beer and the central coast of California. David being an expat in British and Adam being a Californian, they founded this amazing brewery on the central coast and really focused on just a few craft beers. DBA was their first beer and then Union Jack and there was a lot of craft was sort of an early movement. And then back in 2012 they stumbled upon this idea of 8 0 5 and 8 0 5 is the area code for the big swath of the Central coast, a big piece of California all the way down to Ventura County where actually I grew up. We like to say that the goal of 8 0 5 is to be the most globally recognized, regionally available beer in the world.Ilyse (02:03):Very cool. But there are a lot of beers out there, even craft beers. What would you say is the point of differentiation? Is it the taste? Is it the West coast vibes? What would you say?Dustin (02:15):I think the biggest point of differentiation in beer is the brand position. Obviously great brand position and great marketing is not going to solve a lousy product, so you got to have amazing product and we're trying to focus on being odds of the evens and really investing in our own legend and trying to stand for something and be the alternative choice. And thankfully beer is so big and there's so much opportunity that you can carve out a pretty nice size of the pie for yourself if you want to focus on being the alternative premium choice.Damian (02:43):One of things that you just said about the importance of marketing and how marketing can drive the business seems key to this. Is there anything that you could point us to that you'd say, this was the moment where I created brand awareness above and beyond or something like that?Dustin (03:05):The first one with the traditional 8 0 5, the black can I was very lucky to inherit five and a half years ago a slogan called Properly Chill and Properly Chill sort of was the slogan for this idea that life on the central coast was a little different, right? And what we did last year and then going into this year, and I believe that this is going to come out right around this new campaign is going to drop, is this idea telling the story of our brand through the lens of our customer. We have this amazing roster of ambassadors, we call them Authentico and eight oh five Authentico and Professional surfers, motocross Riders, boxers, MMA, fighters, artists, tattoo artists, you name it, it spans the spectrum. There's over 50 of them and they kind of cover every single different customer group that we believe the brand represents and we tell the story of that brand through those consumers or through those athletes.(04:06):And then a couple other examples were what we did was Summer of Cervesa when we launched the extension of 8 0 5, the first extension after 10 years, which was a Mexican lagger themed version of 8 0 5 with a little bit of lime in it. And the idea at the time was when you were looking at the marketplace, Mexican laggers were really on the rise. Corona obviously as an incredible background. Modelo has now at this point become the number one brand in the US surpassing Bud Light and Consumers were definitely reaching for this idea of sort of an escapism beer. So when we launched the campaign with summer survey, so we realized that we had to do something to stand out and create some differentiation between 8 0 5 blonde and 8 0 5. And so the 8 0 5 cervesa campaign was the first time we ever showed the product in color. 8 0 5 has been black and white since its inception in 2012. And with 8 0 5 Cervesa was the first time we ever put the product in color in the advertising. And it was a game changer. I mean, we sales went from moderately successful to up 20% pretty consistently because we were able to create that differentiation in the idea that Cervesa was a light and refreshing product.Damian (05:24):Wow, I love that just by adding color. But it is interesting that you started out in black and white as a kind of campaign. Why black and white?Dustin (05:32):I think they realized they needed to do something different to stand out back then. And trust me, it is a conversation pretty regularly when we're working on new ideas of, there is a lot of consternation around the idea of how do we maintain the brand identity and not stray from it because we want to be timeless, not timely. So we're very, very focused on, hey, every decision we make is going to have an impact a decade from now, two decades from now. Because the greatest brands in beer are multi-generational.Ilyse (06:02):Totally. And I know we talked about this earlier because it can be really difficult to market alcohol products, especially on platforms like social media where there are age roadblocks. What are the channels that you decided to lean into for these campaigns and are there any that you're experimenting with now?Dustin (06:24):I'd say at-home is a good third of our total media investment and then a big shift to TV about two years ago. And with connected TV platforms continuing to become more robust, it's made it a hell of a lot easier for us to get more geo-targeted because I think that spray and prey doesn't work when you're a regional brand and you want to get really focused on zip codes and you want to try to drive measurement. And so connected TV has been huge for us and whether that's through our partnerships with the World Surf League or we're just doing a sports our brand, what we know though is that from all of our consumer data is that a huge percentage of our customers are sports fans. They watch a lot of football, they watch a lot of baseball. So what we do is we take our brand to those channels and through partnerships like ESPN, we've been able to really connect with consumers and drive some really nice measurable lift for the brand. You're watching a sports game and you're going to see beer brand X or insurance brand X with an athlete for that sport. And then you see our spot, which might have a bull rider in it or a surfer or a motocross rider, and it just stands outIlyse (07:33):With your brands embrace of sports and kind of that measurement piece of CTV, you must love that more live sports are coming into the connected TV space.Dustin (07:47):I think the beneficiaries of this sort of democratization of content and it's making things more competitive. So as you see the Disney Network, Hulu, ESPN, or you go to YouTube TV and some of the other platforms that are continuing to open up, it makes it really easy to be competitive in the space or to at least have a voice. I think our team's been really good at identifying those opportunities, proving the efficacy of those investments so that we can continue to do them.Damian (08:15):You hinted at something about the seasonality of marketing and I'm kind of interested in that as a marketer of beer and I guess in lots of ways, as you said, you're kind of marketing lifestyle, you have associations with surfers and athletes and the summer. I'm curious how often you think about the need to refresh campaigns and how do you keep them relevant to the culture cultural moment?Dustin (08:42):Yeah, great question. You definitely have to, in beer, especially with the retail partners, you need to be seasonal. I spent the first 20 years of my career on the music side as a retailer, so I know what retailers want. They're going to want, Hey, it's Memorial Day, I'm going to have a display in my store for a week and a half, two weeks. It better fit the theme of Memorial Day. Now how you do that, you can do that without just stars and stripes. There's other ways to do that, but the I idea of escapism and patriotism to a degree, but when you look at the retail calendar, there are a myriad, there's like 16 major temples that you have to win. So our team is definitely working to make sure that we're taking the overall thematic of our brand and pulling that down into those temples.(09:33):And that fits the larger brand story because obviously you don't want to have 16 different TV spots throughout the year. So we'll have several different campaigns throughout the year, but then those drop down into Cinco de Mayo or Day of the Dead or 4th of July. So you have to, depending on the channel that we're in, yeah, some stuff has to be far more granular to make sure that it's serving the need of that retailer or the desire of that retailer, and as well as making sure that we're still maintaining the brand identity that we want to have. While everybody else does Super Bowl and does football, we're doing the World Surf League pipeline, which is the Super Bowl of surf, so is the official beer of the WSL when everyone's doing Super Bowl, we're doing surfing.Damian (10:10):Now, Dustin listeners can't see this, but I know behind you you've got some fantastic vintage guitars there, which I wanted. I know that you are a musician and before you worked at 8 0 5, you worked as a marketer in the music industry, including for Ernie Ball, music Man and Guitar Center. And I'm kind of interested in the kind of synergies that you might have found there between marketing to musicians and the kind of now the position you're in now marketing beer.Dustin (10:42):It's really sort of a story of serendipity. I got my first guitar when I was 14 years old and it sort of changed my life. Music just bordered became this obsession and it's what I wanted to do, started a band and typical story, didn't go to college, was like college, I'm going to be in a band, mom, what are you talking about? So I begged her at the time she was working, she was the executive assistant to the CEO O of Guitar Center back in the nineties when they were still a small company. And I said, Hey, just give me a job in the mail room or something, and so just give me the summer. Let me prove to you that my band can be in great before I have to go to college. And so she got me a job in the mail room and said, three months, that's it. And three months turned into 18 years.(11:35):I worked my way up to vice president and that typical age old story. But what I found really early on when I got there was, and I remember there was a moment, I was there a couple of months working in the mail room, excited in the mail room is right next to the marketing department and there was a great VP of marketing. It was Mike. I still talk to him to this day, 20 something years later. He always says, his joke is, you're the best hire I ever made. But I remember looking at the marketing materials and saying to the guys like, Hey, we're not marketing to, I'm the customer. Why don't you talk to me? We should change the way that we talk to the customers because this doesn't make sense. I'm the customer, I don't want to read this. So I pitched him some ideas and he's like, yeah, that's a great idea. You want a job in marketing?(12:18):And I went from $4 and 50 cents an hour to $9 an hour. I thought it was rich. I'm 18 years old. And I started that journey. And I think what I realized really early on, and what was great about Guitar Center was that our mission was to mint new customers. We realized early on through a great visionary, CEO, we had Marty Albertson was that we had to make sure that we were creating musicians. There wasn't a lot of 'em. When you think about the population of the world, it think it's like 2% our musicians. So if you want to continue to sell guitars and you want to continue to sell instruments, you've got to inspire people to want to play music. So our mission became taking this great feeling and propelling that and perpetuating it to get more people excited about it. And we became a platform for artists and creating, over the course of my 20 years, I got to create TV shows and write documentaries and make slashes documentary.(13:09):I got to things that you would only dream of when you were a kid to make art with other artists that inspired the world. And I think the common thread through all of that was that great marketing, great brands stand for something clear and enduring. I'm very, very lucky that as a songwriter and a musician early on, that I found this extension of that creative process to sort of keep me inspired. I mean marketing in a lot of ways, your writers, your songwriters, your creatives, and you get to do that while also tackling, for me at least the necessary evil of lift analysis, analytics andDamian (13:46):Some of those things that come with the business. Our musicians have to be marketers these days anyway. Right.Ilyse (13:50):That's very true. And that 2%, we at least have two in our miss because Damian's a musician as well. But yeah, it's so interesting that you talk about that area of the population and in some ways it's almost harder to reach those very niche communities.Dustin (14:09):Yeah, there's that great quote. I don't know if it came from Nike, it was probably Nike, but what's that speak to the core loud enough that everyone else can hear? I mean, I think that's been a mission of music. I mean, remember the indie movement or the punk movement, it was like everybody didn't want to be mainstream, and it was just like, do this thing, own your audience. And then what happens is the cool thing, everybody wants to sit at the cool table. Everybody wants to be a part of the movement, but you can't market to the people that want to be in the movement. You have to market to the people who have started the movement, and then what happens is then you can maintain some credibility.Damian (14:40):I'm just curious to get your high level perspective on what do you think needs to change in the ad marketplace today, which as we all know, is very much digital programmatic.Dustin (14:52):I think product placement right now, especially on podcasts, is just incredibly oversaturated. And I understand that when you've got a major budget and you're moving money around and you're trying to do everything you can to drive eyeballs, but I have this conversation all the time with the agency. I'm not interested in the…

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Dow Jones’ Sherry Weiss on marketing at the speed of a newsroom Apr 16, 2025

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Dow Jones CMO Sherry Weiss reveals the marketing strategy behind growing subscription businesses for publications like The Wall Street Journal. Episode TranscriptPlease note, this transcript may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.Damian Fowler (00:00):I'm Damian Fowler.Ilyse Liffreing (00:01):And I'm Ilyse LiffreingDamian Fowler (00:02):And welcome to this edition of The Current Podcast.Ilyse Liffreing (00:09):This week we're delighted to talk with Sherry Weiss, the CMO of Dow Jones.Damian Fowler (00:14):And Sherry's responsible for growing Dow Jones' subscription business across the publisher's. Numerous business titles, which include the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch, and Investors Business Daily,Ilyse Liffreing (00:26):But that's not all. Sherry also heads up the brand and enterprise go-to-market strategy for Dow Jones Research and Newswire services like TibaDamian Fowler (00:35):In an era where publishers are facing many challenges to their business models. From the pullback of third party cookies to the advance of ai, Sherry gets into how the publishers answering back by building a subscription strategy.Ilyse Liffreing (00:48):We start off by talking about the Wall Street Journal's latest campaign.Sherry Weiss (00:56):So it's your business. It's not only our new campaign, but our new brand platform, which we launched in June of last year. A little bit about the history of how we got into this new platform. So our previous platform was Trust Your Decisions and I joined the organization about two and a half years ago. One of the first things that the team and I did at that point in time is really dive deeply into understanding our current and then our future growth audience needs. And when we were going through that research, one of the things that came out was the idea around trust and how that's table stakes(01:33):And what our audience are saying that's a given and kind of don't tell us to trust you, we will determine that. And so we realized that there was this need to speak a little bit differently to our future audiences and also to crack the code on what Wall Street Journal is. So Wall Street Journal is a storied brand, it's well known, but oftentimes we were seeing with our growth audiences that people did not think the journal applied to them. And in all of our customer research, what we were beginning to piece together is the folks that read the journal and folks that we believe are our editorial content applies to. They have a lot of similarities underlying them. They're all ambitious, they want to be knowledgeable, they're quite intellectual, but they may be in different stages of their career. And so part of what we needed to do with this brand platform was help bridge the gap is to explain to our future audiences why the journalist for them.(02:31):And the other thing that's interesting about this campaign is that it's the first time in quite some time that we truly leaned into the journalism, our actual core product. And in that campaign we brought out specific articles into the actual campaign and balance those articles between things that you would expect the journal to write about and things that you would not expect us to write about. And a really good example is that we had an article around folks that were becoming lifelong renters and those were decisions that they were making. And so one of our headlines leaned into that. Another one was around make hotdog economics your business when you talk about food and inflation. And that was showing up in a hot dog truck. And the great thing there is it killed two burns with one stone because we were able to go loud with an awareness campaign, but it also enabled us a way to drive back to sampling. And in all of our campaigns we had QR codes, it actually drove back to the original article and that was quite successful.Damian Fowler (03:38):That's really fascinating. One of the things before we get into what you learned from this campaign, how did you identify where those potentially net new audiences readers were coming from? You say you have this core group of people who are interested in business, but then you have people who are kind of adjacent to it but also interested in business. I'm just curious, how did you think about that and how did you sort of build that into your strategy?Sherry Weiss (04:06):Sure. So everything we do is data-based and customer reader first. So as part of this re-looking at our platform, we did a deep audience study and within that audience study we went out obviously across the market around news readers who are willing to pay and really started having deep conversations, both qualitative as well as quantitative research into what people are looking for and also finding common threads around attitudes and life point of views. And what we found was we have a really core group of readers tried and true folks that you would expect over index more into investing and working on Wall Street and more of your traditional business folks, but business expands so much more than that. And what we were finding is that there were a deep growth area where there are people who are outside of what we would say are our traditional professions, marketing, consulting, government actually that have, they are interested in the type of content that we write, they just may not be aware that we're writing it. And again, as I mentioned, we're also looking at our audiences that it's not so much around your profession or where you live, but the attitudes in which you hold in common, right? So your desire to be well-informed, your ambition to get ahead in whatever way you want to get ahead, they all have that in common. And so that's really how we started crafting the growth audiences. And then obviously within that with the research we gleaned a lot of information on where they're engaging and that's where we would go out to find in marketing. Interesting.Ilyse Liffreing (05:51):Now you said the first phase of the campaign started in June and I remember going to the Wall Street Journal house in Canon, seeing that all over the place there, what other areas did the campaign come to life in that aspect besides maybe the articles?Sherry Weiss (06:09):Sure. It's interesting because again, all of everything really in the campaign, everything that we put forth had an article that was underlying it. But the cool thing about it is that you could do what you would call traditional marketing. So display on social out of home, we did a Penn Station takeover, but you could also, we were able to leverage this campaign to make it more experiential as well. So as you mentioned, we had the Wall Street Journal, cafe A can. If anybody listening was in there, you probably saw there were things like our salt and pepper shakers and on there had QR codes that had, I can't remember the article that we raised there, but it drove back to an article that had something to do with salt and pepper on the menu. Everything had a article that was associated to it. And so there was an article that we were featuring Make Sleep, divorce Your Business, and we were able to put that above a space that was a mattress store, make EV economics your business, and we would take out space in charging stations so you could take the content that we write about, which is so embedded in every day, build it into the context in which a potential reader is engaging and that actually cracks the code, right?(07:24):It's your business. It's so much more than stock trading or what's happening in banking these days.Ilyse Liffreing (07:31):Yeah, it's everywhere.Sherry Weiss (07:32):Yeah, exactly.Damian Fowler (07:33):And you're sort of changing perceptionSherry Weiss (07:35):OfDamian Fowler (07:35):The paper.Sherry Weiss (07:36):Yes, definitely.Damian Fowler (07:37):And now obviously the Wall Street Journal is one of several publications that you manage. I guess it's maybe the vanguard of the Dow Jones Business publications, but you have many other prestige publications like Barron's Investors Business Daily, which is probably more niche for people actually on the front lines of business. When you think about the whole portfolio, are there crossover audiences or are they distinct audiences?Sherry Weiss (08:04):I mean, the short answer is yes and yes. So the nice thing is, as you had mentioned, we have a four premier consumer publications, wall Street Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch, IBD, all of them in one way, shape or form is journalism with a business lens. But each one provides a different take on an issue or a topic and serves a different purpose. And you mentioned IBD, right? IBD is really focused on helping people make decisions on trading in growth stocks. And it's not just about information but tools that investors can use. And so we believe that there are, again, taking an audience first approach, there are audiences that fit squarely into each one of those publications but may not overlap. But we also believe that there are audiences that would find value across all of our publications. And interestingly enough, we had done some testing into this over the last two years, really more so from a marketing offer.(09:10):What happens if you bring somebody on with an introductory subscription offer to a variety of our publications? And we found that number one, people were opting into it at really high take rates. We also found that once they were on this proposition, people were reading actively across our publications were very engaged and increased engagement over standalone and retain better. And so we've now made this into a true proposition WSJ Plus, and this is just the beginning, but basically we target very specific audiences who are investors who are hungry for knowledge from all different angles, and WSJ Plus is a platform that enables them to do that.Damian Fowler (09:56):What was the kind of goal there? In a way,Sherry Weiss (09:58):The main goal is to provide additional value and deep in relationships with our subscribers and frankly our future subscribers. But we know across our ecosystem that we have news and information. And then if you think about Dow Jones overall and news data information and analysis to help people, whether it be you as a person outside the office or in a professional capacity to make decisions. And so the idea around the plus offering is how do you open that up so that your readers are able to find additional ways to find value with youIlyse Liffreing (10:36):When you have so many publications and you are trying to grow a business, that first party data that you get from subscribers is very important. How is the Wall Street Journal and other publications under Dell Jones, how are you guys using that first party data to perhaps reach new subscribers and then I guess carry on that same messaging across publications?Sherry Weiss (11:08):Sure. Prior to joining Dow Jones about two and a half years ago, I come out of consumer financial services most of my time in the credit card industry. And for anybody who has worked in credit cards or financial services knows that everything that you do, all of your strategies are seeped in deep, deep data payment companies know a lot about you. And so one of the first things that I did when I came in was really to take a look at how we can start supercharging our strategy to not make it a holistic strategy actually or a monolithic strategy, but really start building out personalized ways of engaging with our prospects and our readers. First from a segment perspective, but eventually we want to get to a way of engaging via a of one what worked in media a few years ago is not going to be the secret sauce that drives growth for the future. And so leaning into unlocking our data and analytics is important. Over the last two years, we've built out an internal analytics team really focused on building out predictive models to help drive our strategies forward. And that obviously is all built off of our first party data. A really interesting one that is in beta right now when you talk about this is more around engaging and retaining our customer base is being able to predict customer behavior based on market fluctuations(12:34):And really being able to take not only our first party data but indices and market research sets and pull together into models to say, okay, what flags are there four weeks out from a market shift that could help us determine whether or not we need to think about our retention offers more aggressively or whether we should be leaning into paid media a little bit more to start acquiring customers on certain products that perhaps are more sensitive to market shifts.Ilyse Liffreing (13:06):That's so fascinating. So basically if the market is down, say like today if the market is down, you can predict that you'll have more readers that day.Sherry Weiss (13:20):Well, it could be one of a few things, right? In some respects, and it's interesting because how you apply that model across each one of our products, and as I mentioned it's not just publications but there's tools as well. How you tweak that model to help you make decisions is going to be different based on how someone uses each one of your products. So in some cases, if you have a product that's more geared towards trading and you're seeing swings, let's say the market is swinging upwards, you really want to lean in during that period of time to start acquiring customers because there's an uptick in interest. Or to your point, if you are seeing volatility in the market and they're coming to the journal or they're coming to market watch to understand that that also is a time to really start thinking about is your engagement strategy different? Are you willing to shift again from an acquisition perspective, pull forward media that you would've been spending later in the year? Things like that secret.Ilyse Liffreing (14:16):How are you guys able to predict that though four weeks in Advance?Sherry Weiss (14:19):That secret secret? That's the secret sauce. Okay. Secret sauce, that's the secret sauce you don't have to tell us,Damian Fowler (14:25):But it's fair to say that the marketing campaigns are much faster now and more(14:30):Iterative based on current eventsSherry Weiss (14:33):Very much. And I think that is the other area that we've focused on When I first came in, if you are in marketing in a news organization and you cannot respond at the speed of news, then you are not appropriately supporting your newsrooms. And when we first came in, we did an end-to-end assessment of how quickly we would be able to get creative into market based on breaking news. And it was days and we're now at a place where it's hours and in some case less than an hour. So being able to react that quickly, and it's not just about creative development, but making sure you have your audience targeting in place, you're able to turn things on. It obviously was a mix of people, process and tooling. So yes, we are able to react very quickly.Damian Fowler (15:20):That brings us to a question we might call a bigger picture question, but so in terms of the marketing channels that enable you to react to these conditions, where do you see value? Where do you look?Sherry Weiss (15:34):Well, let's put it this way. We're looking daily and constantly evaluating where we're putting investment in and where we're showing up. And it's also very product specific. So there's certain products that are quite niche that you're leaning into, really niche influencer strategy for instance. And then there's oth…

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Stellantis’ CMO Raj Register on knowing your brand’s true north Apr 09, 2025

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Stellantis’ CMO Raj Register talks about building consistent storytelling across channels, what she’s learning from AI and why she’s obsessed with connecting marketing action to tangible business outcomes. Episode TranscriptPlease note, this transcript may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.Damian Fowler (00:00):I'm Damian Fowler.Ilyse Liffreing (00:01):And I'm Ilyse Liffreing.Damian Fowler (00:02):And welcome to this edition of The Current Podcast.Ilyse Liffreing (00:09):This week we're delighted to talk with Raj Register, the Senior Vice President and CMO for North America at Stellantis, one of the biggest names in the global auto industry.Damian Fowler (00:19):That's right. Stellantis is the powerhouse behind iconic brands like Jeep, Dodge, Ram, Chrysler, and so many more.Ilyse Liffreing (00:26):And as our North American fans may be well aware, stellantis just ran off one but two high profile spots at the Super Bowl in February, both featuring major celebs,Damian Fowler (00:37):Glenn Powell as Goldlock in the Ram Super Bowl commercial, and Harrison Ford who rarely appears in ads starring in the Jeep commercial.Ilyse Liffreing (00:45):Let's get started.Damian Fowler (00:51):The first thing I want to ask you, Raj, is how did it all come together?Raj Register (00:55):Yeah, that's a great question and not the most straightforward way that many would think. So at Stellantis we have something called a jump ball. And Jump ball basically means that we curate several agencies and we allow them to pitch and based on the pitch how we brief them and whoever comes up with the best idea pretty much wins the business. So for this past Super Bowl, we spoke to around 35 plus agencies and we were able to round them out to the best two, one for Ram, one for Jeep. So we go through several rounds of creative, we determine what's the best story, how does it really relate to our business? And from my perspective it was what's the best creative outside of that? Then what's the best thing that will help give us more runway past the Super Bowl? So outside of the creative is the business aspect and how are we going to perform and make sure that it delivers upon all of our goals.Damian Fowler (01:56):Now everyone knows, I guess at this point that the Super Bowl ad spot is one of the most coveted in the world and one of the most pricey I suppose. But wanted to ask you why was it important for Stellantis? I mean, you're the only order maker as I understand it, to have a spot during the game this year. Why was it important for you?Raj Register (02:14):There's a lot of dialogue around why were we the only one. I saw it as an incredible opportunity for us to be auto exclusive. When do you get to do that? During Super Bowl? It was really important for us to show up, not only to show that we're here, not only are we American born and we are proud of our brands, but when we think of everything we have to offer to our consumers, we wanted to leverage this as an opportunity to tell that story and give them an indication of who we are. And it was almost like a reintroduction back to America as well as supporting our UAW workers, supporting our dealers, supporting our employees. So I think it was a rally cry for us to just let everyone know that we're here and we're here to stay.Ilyse Liffreing (02:58):That's awesome. And such terrific actors in both of the commercials, Glenn Powell and Harrison Ford, and I feel like they speak to definitely different generations obviously of fans and types of moviegoers potentially. What were the main challenges of securing the talents?Raj Register (03:16):Gosh, so Glenn Powell, so we already have an established relationship with him for Ram. He did a really nice job with us for our integration that we had with Twisters. And so for him it was more of a natural fit. He has this serious nature, but he's also very funny. And so when we came up with the idea of Cody Lakson the Three Bears and using that old American fairytale to help bring to life something really cool and unique glim, I mean it was like a no-brainer, like let's extend this relationship because he's easy to work with, but then also he brings a lot to the table to help us with bringing things to life. So he was very involved with making sure that our script and how things showed up were authentic to him. But then also because he knows us as a brand, he knew certain things to lean into.(04:03):So he was a really good partner in that way. Harrison Ford was a lot more difficult for us to secure. So quite frankly, and if you've looked at any of the behind the scenes that were done, Harrison talked about his first answer was No, Olivier and a group of us went back and he started with a different script, one that paid homage to Harrison Ford, but then also related to us as a brand and the freedom of America. And so once we were able to align on the idea and have a script that Harrison actually reacted to in a positive way, he actually reviewed it with his wife and she said, now that's good. Then it was a matter of, okay, well who's the director who could work with him and make sure that this comes to life in the way that he's proud of as well as us? We tap James Mango and that was incredible. So they already have a really good relationship. Mango did four versus Ferrari, so he has this really extensive background in movies, but for commercials, this was, I believe it was his first one. And so just balancing the star power of Harrison, Mangold and Olivier, it was like the trifecta of greatness I would say. But it took a while for us to get to where we needed to be. We shot our Super Bowl at three weeks before,Ilyse Liffreing (05:24):Which that is a tight turnaround.Raj Register (05:27):It's a lot of pressure, but being on set and getting everything together, Harrison was amazing, but that one was definitely a day by day, how are we going to get this done? And just making sure that he felt comfortable with the commercial and it came out better than I could have expected. But that one definitely was a challenge, but in a good way.Damian Fowler (05:48):And it's interesting to note that Harrison rarely does commercials, so it was an amazing coup for you to getIlyse Liffreing (05:53):Him. Totally. And yeah, it's great that it came, but it's also a great example of the brand campaign overall because it's the power of choice and why was this the right message for the moment?Raj Register (06:08):Yeah, so just to clarify, so power of choice was our Ram ad and freedom of choice was our G ad. And so the reason why we chose those bookends of power and freedom one is it's the breadth and the quilt of America being able to make a choice and be happy and stand up for whatever it is that you want or whatever you believe in. The other part was is as we think about the way the automotive business is changing, there's a lot of energy around what type of vehicle should you choose? And our stance at Stellantis is, one, we want you to love our brands and our vehicles first, and then you make a choice as far as what platform or what energy you want. In both commercials we were able to highlight our ice vehicles, which is our gas hybrid and all electric.(07:04):With that being said, it's hey, making a choice should be fun. There's a lot of negative feedback around Bev versus not, or should you have a gas vehicle versus not. And for us it's you have the freedom or power to choose the vehicle that's best for you, and we want to make sure that you make a choice with us and giving customers the education of we are a company for a person like you and we just want you to choose with us. And so that was the premise of it and we were able to do it on one end very humorously. And the other was more around the freedom and pride of being American and being able to make a decision for yourself.Damian Fowler (07:43):Now, one of the most interesting things about the Super Bowl this year was that it was also streamed on Tubi, which is Fox's fast channel. And I wanted to get into this in terms of the campaign. How did you think about and come up with a digital strategy around that that goes beyond the second quarter ad?Raj Register (08:03):Yeah, so I'll just say even for the day of, it was interesting because being at Super Bowl, I got a chance to see what was happening on the two B app and really being able to just see the integration and being able to not only see our ad live, but also our halftime show. So that was incredible to see live TV while you're on the spot because it's a different experience. What consumers see at home is not the same as what you see in the stadium. The important thing for us was leveraging all opportunities from TV to streaming to social, to tell a complete story. And we want it to be just, okay, here's the TV spot and move on. How can we leverage other avenues to make sure that our story is getting out there and then continuing the story with our consumers or those that are interested in learning more. Yeah, there's a group that are watching on TV or in a environment where they're in a sports bar or something like that, but you also have these other group of customers that are watching on their phones. And so that's why it was important for us to leverage all avenues and all media channels to make sure that our collective 360 story was getting out there.Ilyse Liffreing (09:11):Totally. Did you know that it was going to be streamed on Tubi when you first made the buy?Raj Register (09:17):No, we didn't. And so I learned when I was in the suite with Fox Sports, and so they came and said, Raj, you can see everything live and here's how everything works. And so I had everything set up and it was really nice to see. So I was trying to balance be here in the moment, but then I was enthralled by Tubi and so throughout breaks and things like that, I was very much so engaged. So it was a surprise and delight for me and something that I'll definitely continue to leverage as we look at our media buying practices in the future.Ilyse Liffreing (09:49):Totally makes sense. Curious about how those overall numbers added to the results of the Super Bowl spots. And on that note, let's get into those results with the overall takeaway. First off, what was the reaction to the campaign overall?Raj Register (10:04):That one, we did something a little bit different than we typically do. So what we have normally done is Super Bowl is the coveted day. We don't do teasers as a company. Everyone sees it at the same time and it's under lock and key. And we tried something a bit different this year. So for Ram, we created some teasers and so we went live with our teasers a week before Super Bowl, and then on the Wednesday before we had an opportunity with the Today Show to show the entire commercial and really start some of the excitement and engagement before Super Bowl. From a press standpoint, the world knew or people knew that we would have a Jeep spot and we kept up with our previous practice of everything's under embargo, so no one knew that one, we had Harrison Ford or we had a two minute spot.(10:56):And so it was a complete really surprise to most people. And so to have that go live during the Super Bowl itself, I mean that just took off from a social sentiment standpoint. Me being a former Ford employee, I got so many text messages because the last line where Harrison talks about loving his Jeep even though his name is Ford, that was quite the zinger. And so everything that we've seen so far has been overwhelmingly positive. Positive sentiment for Jeep was 99%, and for Ram it was 98%. From a global PR standpoint, over 10 billion for ram, we had over 200 million views for Jeep, over 106 million views on social channels. So many recognition and rewards. Ad blitz was one where we were number one spot for Jeep, and so they just keep coming in. And so those are the things that you know, did the right thing.Ilyse Liffreing (11:52):Yeah, those are fantastic numbers.Damian Fowler (11:54):Amazing. I guess it's fair to say you hit your metrics for successRaj Register (11:58):For game day and right after. So another thing that we did differently this time is that we have usage rights for 90 days after Super Bowl, so it wasn't just a day of and done. We're leveraging the content for some localized messaging. We leveraged our websites CRM and really doing a complete 360 after the fact. So we'll have a postmortem after the 90 days of our campaign, which is something very different for us. And having cut downs and really being able to support more product and storytelling key, why buy messaging? And it's something that I think will be pivotal for us as a company and really set the stage for how we do things in the future.Damian Fowler (12:42):I'd love to zoom out a little bit. You have many iconic brands on your watch, not just Jeep and Ram, Dodge Chrysler and also European brands too. I wanted to ask you though, how do you balance your marketing across so many different brand identities while also sort of keeping in-house that cohesive idea of strategy for the whole company?Raj Register (13:05):At a company Stellantis where you have essentially a house of brands, you have the very all American Chrysler, Dodge, Ram G brands, and then Alpha Mayo and Fiat, each brand has its own DNA. And that's how I see it is the DNA is what sets the stage for the fabric of how that vehicle or how that brand should show up. And we need to be tried and true to that. Many times we get ideas and an agency may pitch us and it might be a great idea and say for example, they pitch us for Chrysler and it comes across as Dodge. I say that's a great idea, but it's very dodge, it's very brotherhood, badass speed power for Chrysler, more of the family with Pacifica and capability and off-road with Jeep and Ram also having capability. It's the only brand that has, and basically in the world that only does pickup trucks.(14:03):And so when you think of all those things, each brand has its own identity, and so you don't have to mix and match things. As individuals, we have our own personalities and as families, we have our own DNA. That's how I see the brands. And so that part to me is fairly easy to really just understand and make sure that there's clear lines of delineation. When I think of marketing though, there's best practices and there's things as a company that we know to be true. When we think about, for me, I have things that are considered either above the line or below and just really understanding what investment, what media channels, what optimization, what tactics are necessary for us to be successful with a particular nameplate or launch. And ensuring that I have a complete cohesive plan and really establishing what are my KPIs and goals and things that I need to make sure that I'm accomplishing.(14:58):If there's something that needs to be communicated and it falls below the line where we have maybe digital only or we're doing only experiential, really understanding what are my priorities, what am I trying to deliver upon? And then holding true to that. So as a company, having marketing rigor and expertise around what it is that we really need to establish as far as a North star. And then also working with our brand heads on does this meet the brand? DNA does it meet our customer goals? Does it meet our key why buys? And then you move forward. And so a lot of things we do are collaboratively. So it's not the marketing team on our own just driving things and bringing things out the door. It's how are we establishing what's ne…

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