How to master ‘always on’ advertising

Ryan Barry: 

Hi, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Inside Insights, a podcast powered by Zappi. My name is Ryan and I'm your co-host and I'm joined, as ever, by my friend, Patricia Montesdeoca, Patricia. What's up?

Patricia Montesdeoca:

Hey dude, it's a nice, cool day here. It's a little bit misty and the dogs have been particularly playful, so it's a good day all around. How about you?

Ryan:

It's a good day all around. You know what? All good. I'm preparing to take our executive team on an offsite, the first time the group's been together since we formed, which is crazy, because I know you know this, but we restructured our management team last year and it's our first time getting together since, whatever you want to call the last year and a half. So I'm actually preparing to go play golf in the rain with Megan Reinhardt, who is one of our key account leaders who runs our Pepsi business and she's lovely. So I'm very excited about that.

This is our third episode of season three and, and this is an episode I've been looking forward to for a while.

I actually wanted to do this episode sooner, but schedules and work and life always get in the way, but I wanted to invite Christine Avallone who runs advertising research for Verizon Wireless to join us. They're doing some incredible work and I think it's the work that Christine and her team do that I wanted to share with everybody but also, I think there's so many learnings from the telecommunications industry that can help consumer packaged goods, companies, restaurants, technology, businesses and the reason I say that, Patricia is, the pace at which telecom moves. 

I don't think any other industries move as fast. It's competitive as hell, everything's always changing, there's new offers, new promotions, new technologies, and all that, to say, you still have to build a brand, and I think Verizon's done a really incredible job of balancing those two tensions and Christine leads their ad research team and she's somebody who I've personally learned a lot about advertising from and so I'm excited to share her perspective with all of you.

Patricia:

I'm looking forward to listening to it, go for it, she's amazing.

[Music transition to interview]

Ryan:

Hi everybody, really excited for this conversation today. I have the pleasure of introducing you to Christine Avallone, who's the lead brand and communication insights at Verizon Wireless. For those of you who don't know, you probably don't watch TV or turn on your phones at all, but Verizon is a top 10 advertiser in the United States. They do incredible work, both with brand and performance advertising and Christine not only is an incredible advertising insights leader, she's also a fellow Rhode Islander and you are the first fellow Rhode Islander I've had on this podcast, so shout out to the 401. I've not changed my 401 number Christine, have you actually moved on from it?

Christine Avallone:

I have not.

Ryan:

Yes. Team Rhode Island. And for those of you who don't know much about Rhode Island, you should visit it in the summer. We have beautiful beaches and beautiful food, but people in Rhode Island, they stay tight. We like each other because it takes a total of an hour to drive around the entire state. And there's this weird dynamic in Rhode Island where everybody knows each other. We didn't know each other until about seven years ago, but I'm really glad to know you, Christine. 

So I want to jump right in because we got a lot to talk about. You're somebody who I admire on so many levels and I think everybody who's listening today, you're going to learn a ton about advertising, about how to build teams, about how to engage with agencies and cross-functional partners. So enough from me, let's turn to you, Christine. Talk to us, just start us off, what got you into telco, take us through a little bit of your journey that got you to the job that you're in now.

Christine:

Sure. So I'll take a huge rewind, which is, I've always been a market researcher throughout all my career and it started with mail surveys. So I'm rather dating myself where we were scanning mail surveys for satisfaction studies, but that wasn't rewarding enough at the time, I wanted New York City and the dreams that come with that. So I moved to New York City to work at a boutique research agency, and that's where I really got myself grounded in advertising and brand communications research. I was spending a lot of time with financial service clients as well as healthcare. But the thing that was still missing for me was being closer to the brand and also having those strategic conversations with stakeholders, you're not always on the supplier side, in the room to understand how the work that you're doing is impacting business decisions.

So I wanted to get closer to that and I also wanted to be able to have stronger relationships. I'm a people person and not all researchers, some are headphones on and data where others are all about the sales and the relationships, but you don't always have both. So it was really my aspiration to find a client side role, but my life took a turn, I took a leap, took two years off with my kids and I'd love to tell the story. I went back to work with a one year old and a five year old and landed myself at Verizon. And I think what interested me about that opportunity was it wasn't only a client side role, but Verizon was in its infancy of having a centralized insights team. So it was really this opportunity to build, build the team, build the methodologies as well as build relationships. And so that's what really attracted me to the opportunity. And here we are three years later.

Ryan:

Three years later, and you know what, I would've said five because, and we'll get into the progress in the steps because holy crap, you've made a lot of progress. And what I find interesting about your move is, when you're on the vendor side, you learn a lot about a lot of different industries. I've only ever worked on the vendor side. And I personally really enjoy telco and QSR for the same reason, but with a different application. So in restaurants, it's about menu innovation and you have to constantly keep up. Telco is the same with advertising. I mean, so you're on air all the time with something different. And so talk to me a little bit about some of the differences in telco to say a CPG or a finance or tech or some of the other verticals that our audience might be in.

Christine:

Sure. So for starters, we're on air 365, so you don't have those bursts in a campaign, so that's one thing that's very different. And the reason for that is it's so promo driven and it's such a competitive landscape, so we're really building off or shifting and pivoting because of what our competitive landscape is looking like. So when you think of what was happening this summer or late last year, a lot of what we were hearing from our competition was now speaking with these promos that were not only to bring in prospects, but speaking to their base. So it's a very different landscape because you're constantly having to pivot and it could be within a week, two weeks that we've got to come out with something new because of what competition is doing.

Ryan:

Yeah, exactly. It is pretty intense. Because of that intensity, I think it was probably easy in some ways to stand up the vision that you had for the ad program, but hard in other ways, because there's BAU literally every single day. You started three years ago on this journey, and we were talking off air about, at the beginning of the time, how tactical the work was, and now how strategic it's become. Take us through that journey in terms of what you saw when you got in, and maybe some of the key moments along the way that got you to a place today, where you're finally feeling that the impact is quite strategic across the world.

Christine:

Sure. So because of the speed of Verizon, where insights fit into creative development was rather late stage and was often an opportunity to either validate or to optimize in the market. And so given that CMI as a centralized team was in its infancy and still building those stakeholder relationships, combined with the fact that where we were in creative development, it was hard to have an upstream impact. We were really in a place that was late stage, go no go or some optimization in markets.

Ryan:

So how did you go from that to making more of an optimization impact, measurement impact, as you went forward? Because you're in that place now, but that wasn't always the case as you just said.

Christine:

Sure. So I think there's a few things and the most important piece is we had to educate our stakeholders as well and also encourage them that we weren't going to get in the way. So part of it was exploring what those solutions were for a quick go no go decision and when the question they had was more complicated, and also being able to rise to that occasion when it was more complex and perhaps needed a custom solution, so that we had to reassess what our toolbox was as well. 

So we had some standard solutions that could not only get them to quickly go no go, could sometimes answer some of those more complex questions, but also to bring them along those journeys so that in parallel we could be doing something else more complex. I think that was one piece of it and the other piece of it was getting that seat at the table with them so that we could have those ongoing discussions because it was rather transactional because of the speed of Verizon.

And so really getting ourselves upstream to what they were working on in Q4. And what was the vision for the holiday? So that we could start to curve out those opportunities, even if they weren't asking the questions.

Ryan:

I love the two points there, so not getting in the way and being proactive are two key takeaways and customer experiences is obviously and rightfully a term everybody's talking about, but that isn't just an external thing, that's an internal thing. 

I know insights oftentimes is branded as the rubber stamp, the death to creativity. And there's always tension with creatives and data people, which I think is wrong because of that getting in the way of optics. So how did you go about the stakeholder management side of changing that narrative from being in the way to we're part of the crew here?

Christine:

I think part of it was leaning into who was that partner that was going to go along that journey with us. And when we married that with, we were also changing our campaign and moving from a spokesperson campaign to the white site background that you see today, which we call reason. So when we had that formula of finding a partner that was open to going along these journeys, as well as a need from stakeholders to go deeper and have more insights to impact those changes, we were right to reassess how we did the work that we were doing. And then the third piece of it was also reassessing the tools and the programs we had, the partners we had and what were the systems in the processes to make all that work and educate our stakeholders as well.

Because if they weren't part of that and coming along that journey with us, it's a lot harder to navigate a conversation of what is an easy question versus what is a difficult question. So they then were primed to be able to know when they came to us to say 24 hours is impossible, whereas before it may have been a hard conversation in a 24 hour turn, they were asking why not?

Ryan:

So you find the right partner, the right moment in the company's trajectory, based on the strategy, you can ladder that to the why. And then when you're thinking about tooling, which I think a lot of people, Christine, make the mistake of going to the tool first, you're bringing those same people along on the journey. This solves a part of the problem we've all aligned, that is a problem type of thing. And any other solutions that you brought in, it's a little masterclass in behavior change Christine, this morning, I like it.

Christine:

You made me think of something. One of the pitfalls that I can now look back, and we've seen this a few times over, as we bring different stakeholders along this journey into our vision for the ad measurement ecosystem, is we sometimes see that there's this default, that some select tools are the answers to all questions, and it seems depending on the stakeholder, they may lean into a different one. And I think that that's a really key piece as well, because we've had to rethink how we approach the questions they have and how we intake some of those questions, because historically it may have been, can you do a quick turn copy test? Can you track this in the market this week? Can you get me the new numbers on 5G perceptions? And we had to reassess how we worked with those partners, so they weren't thinking a specific tool was the holy grail to all of their questions.

Ryan:

Yeah. So almost moving from, I'd like a happy meal to, I have a problem, how can we solve it? Is that the reframe that went on?

Christine:

Exactly. So I can't say that our journey is over there, we're reassessing it again. Because as our relationships have gotten deeper, as we have built these relationships and had strategic impact on campaigns, we have to reassess those tools and how they're used again and again. So we've certainly made some headway, but I don't think the journey's over.

Ryan:

Well, the journey, I think, you know what I've learned Christine, over the years, the journey is the fun part. And I think we all sometimes talk ourselves into, one day it'll be utopia, but I think what I've realized personally is that's not true, there's no such thing because the day you stop building is the day that you stop iterating and that's problematic. And I know that that's your ethos, because obviously, we have a business relationship and we're constantly pushing boundaries, and I love that. 

So let me just say publicly, please don't stop pushing boundaries because you're pushing the right boundaries, my friend. All right, let's go to the second one proactive. So you talked about, catching them in stride and then when they weren't asking for something strategic, delivering it. Give me a few examples, what's a way that you can give proactive value to a creative, a planner, an agency that isn't, it's a green on your copy test?

Christine:

Great question. And because of the speed that we operate in and because of the volume, I think that my answer is so important because we don't always have the team or the infrastructure to test every single tactic. So it's really critical for us to be able to lean into best practice learnings and so I think that that's where it really shines. So we get a lot of questions about the articulation of our promotion, so how are we articulating it? Whether it's on us? Is it the language fee? Is it dollars? Is it a percent? We could do text all day every day for each individual promo, but being able to lean upstream and consolidate best practice learning that then becomes universal and can be impactful to not only a day to day stakeholder, a much broader team as well.

Ryan:

Yeah. I like that a lot. Okay. I want to take it into some advice for a minute. So if you were starting over tomorrow, same objectives, what advice would you give yourself? What changes would you make to how you went about the work that you've been doing the last couple years with your team?

Christine:

What changes would I make? It's a very hard question.

Ryan:

Yeah. It's a tough question, think about it as if somebody else is listening to this and is saying, I need to overhaul the way we do advertising research. What are some pitfalls that that person might encounter, maybe another way to think about it?

Christine:

Sure. So I think one of the biggies for us was thinking about our benchmarks and our norms and what was our competitive landscape, what were the key products and who were the targets? And that was critical. And if I could do it again, no crystal ball, so we have to be able to set something up that can be as universal as possible as our business changes as well. Because the last thing you want is your recent and relevant norms to become obsolete. And so when we think about the world that we live in, where we've got promotional ads and we have brand ads, we have consumer ads and B2B, we have mobility and we have home. And then we've got products like FIOS versus 5G home. It's really critical out of the gate to think that process through so that you can continue to reap the value of the giant database that you're sitting on.

Ryan:

Yeah, it's interesting because I think sometimes people think, oh, it's easier in telco because it's one brand, but what you just unpacked is a bunch of complexity, B2B versus consumer, home versus mobility, FIOS versus 5G and then there's the constant tension of promotional advertising versus brand building advertising. And so I think what I'm hearing you say is that you have to be intentional about the composition, the audience, the benchmarks you compare against because you can't just look at a holistic Verizon set of thinking because of that complexity.

Christine:

And the other piece for us was out of the gate, we were looking at mobility differently than we were looking at home. So what are the consistencies that need to be true across these different products or across different footprints? Because there is a world where someday we are just connected and it will be obsolete, whether you are connected through your phone or connected through your home. So we want to be as consistent as possible for that day where you are just connected and you're not thinking about what that device or that product is.

Ryan:

How do you draw commonalities between what are still different PNLs in a business? So it's not only a world that's going to become connected, which will unpack next, but let's be real, it's the same consumers in most cases with the exception of B2B, obviously being a very different persona set sales process, et cetera. How do you go about understanding where there's linkages versus where it's different? And obviously I don't want you to disclose anything proprietary, but just in abstracts or macros, how do you untangle those two things?

Christine:

I think this is one where I don't have the silver bullet and until our business is operating in that way, that they are connected, in many ways we're still operating separately. The vision when we reorged two years ago with Verizon 2.0 was really to bring that together so that we're thinking about consumer and business as opposed to by product. We're not quite there yet, I think we'll start to realize that in a few more years with the power of 5G to bring it together. So for the most part, my team hasn't been challenged with that on a day to day basis. It's certainly in the back of our minds, but I think again, it goes back to the benchmarks, the norm, the audience. And so when you're thinking about FIOS and 5G home versus mobility, the lowest common denominator is our gen pop wireless consumer. There's a subset of them in the FIOS footprint, there's a subset of them in 5G home.

So how do we build our infrastructure to, I don't want to call it the lowest common denominator, but the broadest reach so that we can then be able to understand how these other segments may be similar or different to our broadest target?

Ryan:

Yeah. Because there's an insight mining job within that, isn't there? To understand where the commonalities are. So I'm pleased to hear you say there isn't a silver bullet. These things are tough too, I mean, I run a small business relatively speaking and we have two main pillars and the truth is they're not different, really. You innovate products and offers and then you market them, but we still have the constant tension of ad versus innovation and how do you integrate them? And you keep the PNL separate, but the integration really shouldn't be, but it's, I think this is the age old, functional versus problem centric tension that companies always go through. And I think we sometimes try to reorg our way to get there, but there's a swing between these things. So before we talk about connectedness, which I'm really excited to talk to you about, you have another big tension in your business, it's brand building.

And I think Verizon does a beautiful job of brand building, but also the constant ebb and flow of, oh crap competitor, A's done this, we've done Y, we've got a new promo with Apple, now we've got a new promo with Google. How do you manage the tensions between what I'll call, performance based or promotional based advertising versus building long term brand? How do you measure that and how do you set those things up? And I particularly think this is going to be a relevant question for those on the line who are in industries that are becoming performance based. And I'm thinking of you, my CPG friends, because econ's here and you're now going direct to consumer and in Kroger. Can you give me some great advice on that balancing act?

Christine:

Sure. So when I started at Verizon, one of the big questions for us is we wanted to be building our prominence with brand building, especially on the heels of a lot of messaging around our CSR initiatives and 5G was on the horizon. So at that point we started to do a lot of work to understand what would the impact be on our bottom line if we started to put more behind our brand building advertising as opposed to promo? So I think that was critical first to understand what the impact is to the bottom line. And then now that I flash forward three years and we're thinking about 5G, there's really a common thread because in our brand advertising, we're talking about the coverage and the speed of 5G and the reliability and the superiority of our network. How does that thread carry over to our promotional advertising?

So you've been starting to see that in the last year. And a lot of it is less about research to connect the dots and more about the sharing of information. So we've established many forums for that, we have a forum where we're bringing insights and brand teams and promotional teams and PR and media analytics, bringing all those folks together so that we all have a shared forum for information. I think that that's really the critical piece as you're starting to see that thread connect between our brand messaging and our promotional messaging.

Ryan:

It's funny, you make that sound really easy. You know what it got me thinking of, when I was in business school, we learned about integrated marketing communications and that's what you just articulated. And it is so hard with organizational structure to do that. How do you make sure your brand messaging is going to have subtle references to the promotions or the product functionality that you're inevitably going to feature in your product or your promo spots? Yeah, I guess it really is just that simple, be intentional about it and make sure the message threads across. Everybody's listening to you as a marketer come on, it's easy, right?

Christine:

That research or insight can make that, we can give the spotlight to that insight. However, the power to make change is in how our stakeholders work together. So there's a different group of stakeholders for our brand advertising than our promotional advertising. So our role, a lot of times has been to connect those dots for them because they might not have visibility to each other, but we can make those connections. And then part of it is the way that they're working together. And I think that that's a challenge for our industry is we may have the insight, but we don't have the power to change behaviors in the organization.

Ryan:

It's so true. And there's two things in what you say that are worth discussing. I mean, the first is you allude to what an insights person's job becomes, and it is a connector, isn't it? It's hey, you and you, I see something that could get y'all talking. It's a much better approach to being an insights person than running projects all day, frankly, if you're actually helping a company connect dots. But it also, it goes back to something that really resonates with me on a human note, it's everything looks good on a whiteboard, you have functions and processes, but what you say is right, it's incumbent upon the people talking to each other, which you can't really write an SOP for, it's like it's human beings working together.

I think it's one of the trickier things to get right in organizational structures is you can structure your way to hell, if the people don't talk, they don't talk. And so I think it's a responsibility for us as the voice of the consumer department to say, hey, the customer wants y'all talking, so please get on the same page, it's really interesting. All right, let's talk about connected TV now. 

I don't have cable anymore. I am unplugged. I watch TV sports, when I was watching Thursday night football last night, I saw some of your sports. They looked like TV sports to me, but the buy, the research, the creative in today's market research climate is still digital versus TV. This drives me nuts, tell me where you see this going as the consumer becomes less and less aware of the different channels that they're on and more saying, it's just how I'm consuming content.

Christine:

So there's certainly a shift to digital and how advertisers are sending their dollars. And then I think that also pushes us to rethink how we measure, and I think it becomes much more complex and that I think it pushes us to think about marrying behavioral data to attitudinal data more so, it also demands this level of, I'm going to call it personalization or one-to-one marketing. So I think that for that piece, that goes back to the infrastructure we have today in our team and the ways of working, we're not set up for what the demand may come from that. So where we lean in again is best practice because we will not be able to touch every single digital asset and segment every message the way our team is set up today. Considering the size of Verizon, our insights department is relatively small.

But I think the other piece is the context. So historically we've thought about consumers consuming television ads on their couch, in their home as a captive audience. So we also need to rethink the context that consumers are consuming these advertising. And that's really where we're pushing the envelope now, because there are different best practices when you've got a captive audience than if you have a distracted audience that may have multiple devices while they're getting exposed to advertising.

Ryan:

It really is fascinating. I mean, if you go to the far end of the spectrum of personalization, and if connected TV becomes increasingly a thing, and you're starting to see companies like yourself and others experiment with it, you can get to a degree of programmatic placement to an ad that is just relevant to somebody who consumes certain media and buys in a certain way. And that does turn creativity on its head I think, particularly as you think about the production that goes into television advertising, it's almost like we're going to have to get to a place where we can scale banner ads on TV. And that's bananas to me, to think about how we would research that? And I think you're right I mean, you're being modest in saying how lean you are, for the amount of thinking and work you do. I mean, you've got a lean team, so we're here talking to Christine, but shout out to everybody on Christine's team, because y'all do incredible work for the size you are and the scope that you've been given.

But you're right, there's a theme in that, it's not just we can't test the ad that's going to go in front of Ryan Barry or Christine Avallone, we have to then get to a place of abstraction. What are the lookalike models? And I think that's going to be a really interesting theme to figure out, not only how we marry behavioral data to get to those lookalikes, but how do we measure that? How do we drive creative best practices for that? It's going to get harder my friends, I think is the punchline.

Christine:

And I also think it nods to cross-functional partnerships, so we've got teams in media, we have a marketing effectiveness team, so how do we partner with them? Because our team leans much heavier in the pre-market optimization, in the creative development. So how are you marrying the insights that a department like ours has with some of the technology and the tools that other teams have to really round this out? Whereas historically, we may not have had to bring those insights together as much.

Ryan:

Yeah, it's so true. Christine, thank you. This has been epic, I could talk to you about advertising for a while. Those of you who don't know, Christina and I, we had a very geeky dinner a few weeks ago when we talked about advertising for a long time. It would've been cool to record that dinner because we probably had a three hour version of this. But I just want to thank you for your time, and on behalf of my audience, thank you as well, because I think everybody who listened to this has learned a lot. Final question, what do you see the role of insights being five years from today? Where do you think our industry's actually going?

Christine:

So maybe not the popular answer, but I can see there to be less survey based research. We're leaning much more on AI and the power of the insights leader is really being that strategic consultant to help interpret the data and to help bring those stakeholders along that journey on how they're using the insights to action on. The reality is anyone can use a DIY tool. So the role of us is to ensure that if we are doing something survey based, that it's done in an accurate representative way, but how are we leaning into new tools, given the speed and how are we that partner to our stakeholders along the journey?

Ryan:

I love it. And you know what, there's a lot of behavior change that needs to happen from a skilled development perspective and how organizations set up insights, I think to get there. But I'm with you, the more we know about people, the less we have to ask them, the more the things we ask them become prescriptive, proactive insights. And there is a skill reframe for insights people to deliver on the mission you just said to get out of the weeds and synthesize and curate and be comfortable in conversations with potentially creatives who have an ego and media people who believe in AB testing or whatever that tension might be. And it's because of leaders like you, Christine, that we'll get there as an industry. And so thank you. I really appreciate your time today. It's been really fun.

Christine:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Ryan:

Team Rhode Island, into the weekend we go, you guys aren't going to see us because this is just a podcast, but we mistakenly, both wore the exact same colored blue today. So we've been very on and brand together today. Christine have a great day. Thanks so much for your time.

Christine:

Thank you.

[Music transition to outro]

Ryan:

So, Patricia, a little bit of a glimpse inside the tent here of Inside Insights. We record interviews when our guests can do them.

Patricia:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ryan:

You then take some time to think about them and you share those wonderful summaries that you always do.

Patricia:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ryan:

As I said in the intro, I'm going to Iceland next week with our leadership team and I'm refusing to take any internal meetings, which means I've rushed your process a little bit. So I'd like to say thank you for rushing your process and I'm sorry about that, but I'm excited to hear your takeaways, because I really enjoyed the conversation with Christine. We covered a lot of topics from tactical stuff to big stuff, but I'd love to know what kind of your key takeaways were.

Patricia:

You know, there's no rushing Christine. She is just such a master, and I might even go to say, she's a master at insights. She's a master at change management and she's a master at human beings. I was so impressed with the ease with which she told her story. So this time the story, it's not going to be 10 bullets. It's going to be a story. I'm going to paraphrase her story with very specific points because it was just so beautifully told I was totally caught up in it. You asked her a lot of very pointed, very difficult questions and she needed to make sure that she did not tell too much of the secret sauce at Verizon.

Ryan:

True. Very true.

Patricia:

She did a fantastic job. So let me just start with your question to her, of course after you talk about Rhode Island, which I thought was fantastic. I'm looking forward to one date driving around Rhode Island for an hour.

Ryan:

Shout out to everybody from Rhode Island. Very important.

Patricia:

You started saying to her about, "Okay, what did you learn about different industries and how do you feel that you're no longer on the vendor side, you're on the supplier side?", and she took that because she knew she was going to be talking to us today about advertising and building teams and engaging with agencies and cross-functional partners, and she started telling the story of amazing change at Verizon. So, once upon a time she arrived at Verizon when it was absolutely late stage Insights, she and the team she was hired on to build up the team, only came on to any campaigns to either say, go, no-go at the end or to even, decide when the ad was in market, how it was doing and it didn't need any optimization and now you and I both know that's pretty late stage.

Now she wanted to be much more active, and much more, coming very early in the process and she had to convince them this because you know, legacy is legacy and it was something that was very difficult to change because Verizon, as she said, is on 365 days a year. So there's no time to change, there's no time to think about it, so people just go on with the inertia. So she went through and she started working very slowly and persistently to show them what could be done. She started by taking advantage of late last year and the summer where the competition was so ripe and trusting so much, and everything was going crazy and they had to react because the competition was talking to new customers and bringing in their base. Why do I say this? Because she talks about a perfect storm. She talks about the right moment in the industry and the right moment in the company and the right moment for her.

So that's a perfect storm and she took advantage of it, to be perfectly honest with you, just a small aside, I think she made that perfect storm because not everybody could take advantage of that as well as she did.

Ryan:

Yeah sure.

Patricia:

So she took the opportunity and she started saying, "I'd like to say that Insights needs to be more centralized in this team", and she started assuring them that Insights, the team, and Insights, her and her people, would not make the process slower or more complex. She assured them, she promised them, I can imagine the conversation, that it was not going to go worse, it was going to be better. She talked to them about having an impact earlier so that the ads would be of higher quality and that's how she convinced them that it was going to work.

She began exploring solutions and tools. In essence, she refurbished or refreshed her toolbox without forgetting the respect that needs to be paid to the legacy things, because she didn't want to forget that most of the time they had either quick, no-go, go, no-go answers to get done or more complex questions. So they would either have something quick or something complicated and that's why she had to be very respectful.

How did she manage this respect? She brought the stakeholders along in the tool discovery. So she did not keep them out. She did not make it a black box. She brought them with her and she did parallel testing with the methodologies, old versus new, the whole time, very open in her communication with everybody and this is what got them, her specifically, and her team in general, a seat at the table, where they could have ongoing conversations about the communication. Then she pulled an amazing trump card and she got proactive. She said, "Okay, now we're at the table, tell us. What's going to be worked on next? What are you doing for the holiday? What more do you need? What's coming up?".

Ryan:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Patricia:

Which, I can probably imagine their faces, they probably like, their jaw dropped.

"Oh my God, not only is she at the table, she's not making things slower. She's asking us great questions about what's coming up".

So, she started unpacking the process without changing how people thought that she worked the Insights team into the process and now she's part of the crew. Right now, as we all know, like all change, it didn't happen overnight. She had to lean into three different types of relationships, the relationship with her stakeholders and of course the creative journey, the relationships with the people creating the creative and pardon my redundancy, and number three, the relationships with the insights, tools and programs.

The whole time she's like, this is so easy, but she says that it was harder to navigate a conversation if one of those pieces was missing. So having all those players aligned that's what was the perfect storm, making sure that the right strategy fit the right tools.

So, when we continue that, she's talking about the relations getting deeper and you asked her about how the Insights is having a strategic impact on the campaign and how the journey continues and then you asked her about something difficult. The stress between promotional and brand. You asked her that and I thought to myself, "I wonder what she's going to answer here". But she said, "There are no silver bullets, there really aren't". She talks about silver bullets twice in the conversation and I'm going to get to the second one about advice to her younger self, cause I'd like to keep that for last.

Ryan:

It is true that there's no silver bullets. It's such a stupid point she makes, everybody thinks there is. There isn't.

Patricia:

And it shows how smart she is, how self-aware and how humble, so that makes her amazing in my book. So she talks about building the brand versus promotional because at the beginning, everything was, when she first got there, measured by the impact on the bottom line and you well know that that gives promotional the edge. So she started doing research to understand what the impact of brand advertising was at the bottom line. Oh, fast forward three years and guess what? They both have a very important impact on the bottom line, because you have to do both. So what she's dedicated time to doing is connecting the dots between brand advertising and promotional advertising, so she can have a common thread of communication through both types of advertising, making each stronger because one plus one, all of a sudden is not two. It's like a zillion.

Ryan:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Patricia:

And that's how she's changing things. She's made sure that the stakeholders, because this is all complicated, more because promotional ads and brand ads are managed by different groups of people. So she speaks about it as if it was easy, but she made sure that both groups of people saw all the research she did, knew what she was doing and she brought them together by connecting the dots and adjusting her Insights team to make sure that it happened.

So, now that's something that's really important. Now I've left what I think is the best for last. You asked her, give yourself some advice, give your younger self some advice, which I love those questions. I love when people do that. So she's like, "What would I do? I'd pay more attention to benchmarks, to norms, to competitive landscapes, the key products and targets to business changes to promotional landscapes", and she said that she would leverage databases. I thought that was so cool. I mean yes, it does speak to how geeky she is and we loved our geeks, but she speaks to the bricks and mortars of our business. She talks about the essentials. I'm going to go long, you know, Legos, she speaks about the big blocks, the things that make up our business and she talks about not anything sexier, crazy. She talks about making sure that the benchmarks that you use are the ones that you need to compare your business to, she talks about keeping up with the landscape so that you know if something's happening and you can get ahead of it, she talks about leveraging the databases because sometimes you don't have time to do the research. You just have to rely on the database and what it can tell you, that's when you have to reap the benefits of a gigantic database.

I mean, if you're going to be on the air 365 days a year, that's important, and she talks about using all that to find the consistencies and the differences so that you're not thinking about something specific…But that's what I got from her, looking for the commonalities and not the differences and she didn't mention lowest common denominator, but then she corrected. She goes, "no, I'm not going to use that term. I'm going to use commonalities." What is similar but still different. She was amazing. I really, really liked that because the whole time she talked about building your brand, monitoring the competition and making sure to keep it fresh.

Ryan:

And using the consumer to get people to talk who otherwise don't, which I think is... We talked about it in the interview, but that's a huge part of what the Insights person of tomorrow needs to be able to do.

Patricia:

Exactly, a connector, somebody who connects the dots, who sees the patterns and so she did all this and if I were to contradict her, if I may, I'm sorry, Christine, but I'm going to contradict you for just a moment and I'm going to say the silver bullet is understanding that the Insights person is about looking for the patterns or looking for the connections. It's a very large one and maybe she'll have issues, but we can bring her back someday and have her talk about that.

Ryan:

Yeah, I like it. I like it. Well, Patricia, thank you as always, your rush summary is just very good. I appreciate you. Our next guest, he's going to bring the heat. His name is James Sallows. He's running Insights Transformation at GSK and their Consumer Health division. James has worked all across this industry. We'll talk more about it when we interview him, but he's worked in data collection, he's worked in consultancy, he's worked in technology and obviously now he's working for one of the biggest companies on the planet.

He's going to bring a wealth of knowledge about Insights, Transformation. Let me just give you a punchline. It's not going to be about technology. It's going to be about people. Shocker. It always is. We always throw tools at problems and think we're going to solve them. Anyways, don't miss the episode. 

If you are not already subscribed, hit that button, you know it feels good. Give yourself a little dopamine release, give Kelsey another number towards our OKRs. It's a beautiful thing. James will be our next guest and we've got a few more heavy hitters coming up season three, but we'll tell you about those later. If you want us to interview you, if you know anybody that we should interview, hit us up, you know where to find us, otherwise, tell your friends about our podcast and we will leave you there. Have a great day, everybody. 

Bye Patricia, bye Kelsey, have a good day everybody.

Patricia:

You too. Bye.