Tag: marketing

How BNY Mellon Marketing Sings with Hamilton

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Unlike the rest of us, brands truly have no age. The ones that endure for decades—centuries, even—merely find a way to reinvent themselves time and time again. And sometimes that “way” comes in the form of an opportune moment in popular culture, like in the case of 232 year-old company BNY Mellon. BNY Mellon saw and seized the chance to engage with an insanely popular Broadway musical whose starring character just happened to be its founder—Alexander Hamilton. As Global Head of Corporate Marketing Aniko Delaney tells it, “Hamilton” opened a stage door that allowed her company to share its story in a more engaging way than ever before.

(To listen to the podcast click here. What follows was originally published on AdAge.com in late 2016).

The Opening Scene

When Aniko Delaney became the Head of Corporate Marketing, she was well versed in the BNY Mellon brand, having been the head of marketing for six of its businesses. In addition to further building a reputation as a respected and trusted organization, says Ms. Delaney, BNY Mellon’s executives also hoped to modernize its message.

Fortunately, when Ron Chernow’s book, Hamilton, became Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway sensation, the real Mr. Hamilton had already been playing a starring role at BNY Mellon—for over two centuries. “As long as I’ve been at the company,” says Ms. Delaney, “we’ve always celebrated our founder Alexander Hamilton and his pioneering and innovative spirit.” As the show garnered acclaim, Ms. Delaney and her team understood that popular culture was celebrating a hero they knew well. They seized the opportunity, launching a year-long campaign to complement the moment.

“We affectionately call it the Hamilton campaign,” she says, “but we officially call it our ‘Invested In Our Legacy’ campaign.” Throughout, BNY Mellon’s message can evolve into something relatable and relevant, with a story well-suited for digital and social media.

Act I: The Content

Ms. Delaney and her team worked with creative agencies like Chiat/Day to bring the BNY Mellon story to life, launching on the organization’s 232nd anniversary. The company rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, deployed shareable fun facts about Hamilton’s bank on Facebook and LinkedIn, GIFs during the “Hamilton”-swept Tony Awards and a dose of humor from the voice of Alexander himself. For example, this Tweet: “Lin-Manuel gets a Tony for Best Book! Much-deserved, tho at a mere 20,000 words, I call it a pamphlet. A.Hamilton.” Says Ms. Delaney, “Hamilton was such a prolific writer, so can you imagine him trying to tweet?”

With a blessing from the C-suite, the social component of the campaign allows BNY Mellon to enter conversations where it may not have been welcome before, Ms. Delaney says, ultimately boosting brand visibility. “Gerald Hassell, our chairman and CEO, is an Influencer on LinkedIn, so he really has set the bar very high for our company,” she says. “It’s very important to reach out to our diverse constituents in channels that they use.”

The campaign also features a series of videos for web and social, as well as TV spots bookending PBS/WNET’s documentary, “Hamilton’s America,” of which BNY Mellon is a sponsor. “It really brings to life not only the story of the show, but also the story of Alexander Hamilton,” says Ms. Delaney.

Act II: The Continuing Story

As Ms. Delaney and her team move forward with the campaign, she floats the idea of using new media, even VR, to tell their story. But to remain effective, the message must still resonate. “More and more, especially with social media channels, we have to be really careful to make sure the content is educational and meaningful, but then have some fun with the creative,” she says. “Again, this is a theme we’ve been using as long as I’ve been with the company. Now, we’re just able to tell the story in a much more engaging way.”

So far, the collective effort to modernize has put up impressive numbers, with triple-digit increases in engagement and awareness on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, according to Ms. Delaney. Maybe more impressive, however, is the intangible impact on not just BNY Mellon’s public audience but also the company—the true measure of a good story. Call it the Hamilton effect.

“The content resonated, and I think it’s more than just how cool Hamilton has become, but it’s the person he was. He was truly insightful and innovative, but he also got things done. He was an implementer,” says Ms. Delaney. “Having that special connection has inspired our employees, clients, and other constituents to be really proud of the company that Hamilton founded.”

 

(This article first appeared on AdAge in late 2016).

How Cirque Du Soleil Soared Above Vegas

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To keep a brand fresh, one must inevitably change it, but as the former VP of Sales & Marketing of the Retail Sales Division at Cirque du Soleil, Alma Derricks knows that not every trend is suited to reach the customers in every industry. In fact, her discerning tastes were part of the reason why The CMO Club awarded her with a Customer Experience Award late last year. So, follow the marketing ringleader as she guides us through how Cirque Du Soleil kept delighting audiences in a highly unusual, highly competitive market. [Note this podcast episode was recorded in late 2016 and this post is based on my AdAge column that ran on December 14th, 2016. Derricks has since left Cirque but I suspect you will find her insights timeless – click here to listen now.]

Step right up

Throughout her career, Alma Derricks has gravitated towards moments of inflection, the latest of which found her with Cirque Du Soleil last July under a new ownership structure. It was her ideal scenario. “I love getting to ask questions, top to bottom, without any regard for how things have always been done. And that’s what I walked into,” she noted.

She soon learned that Cirque, even as a 30-year-old institution, largely grew organically and as a consequence hadn’t relied on marketing thinking to drive sales. Today, sales are still strong, but the market has tightened thanks to competing residencies from artists like Britney Spears and Celine Dion. “In Las Vegas, we sell as many as 20,000 tickets a night. It’s a lot of inventory in a very, very busy town,” she says. “My job is all about keeping our shows top of mind.”

To make Cirque the most prominent carnival barker in town, if you will, Derricks’ team had to reinvent their marketing. “We have to always make the loudest noise in that environment and make sure that visitors are still aware that we’re around, that we’re exciting and that we’re vital,” she said.

Backstage access

A big barrier for Derricks’ team was helping consumers differentiate between Cirque’s shows. “One of the real challenges we have is needing to flip the brand script in Vegas and emphasize the show ahead of the Cirque brand.” After all, no two productions are alike. “They all have very, very different personalities,” said Derricks. “The thing that I’ve been working on quite a bit is: how do you communicate that each show is the only show you have to see?”

One strategy involves pulling back the curtain—something Cirque had previously been reluctant to do. ”It’s something that our founder was very, very cautious about in the early days of social media,” explained Derricks. However, audience expectations have changed, and social media is one marketing tool not to ignore. “So we’re trying to find ways to facilitate that via social media and social content and by creating events in Las Vegas that are complete behind-the-curtain experiences.”

The show must go on—again

Another strategy—one that Derricks was particularly proud of—was to refresh one of its most popular shows: The Beatles’ LOVE. “I didn’t completely understand until we were well into the process that Cirque has never rebranded an existing show,” exclaimed Derricks. For LOVE’s tenth anniversary, Derricks and her team revamped the music, show and visual identity of the production, recognizing that advancements in tech over the last decade would enable an enhanced experience.

“Cirque has always taken pride in its fusion of technology and artistry,” she offered, “so it seemed very natural as the tenth anniversary approached to rethink the staging, effects, and imagery. The original show was very nostalgic. Today, it’s more colorful and, at the same time, showcases the fact that The Beatles are as relevant today as they were in the 60s.” For fans, the revamp was a couldn’t-miss.

Audience participation

Lastly, Derrick and her team seized the chance to use their expertise for an additional source of income. “We’ve actually created an entire line of business called SPARK that serves as a learning laboratory for corporate teams,” providing interactive business training and team building with a customized curriculum. Companies like Adobe and Google number among the participants. “It’s both an amazing bucket list moment and a chance to really learn about trust, team building, operational excellence and customer service in a very tangible way,” explained Derricks. “It’s taking off like a rocket, and has not only created a new way access the brand but also makes a strong statement about who we are.”

Transformational B2B Marketing — The Modern Software Factory

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When Lauren Flaherty reflects on the changes that have taken place in the software industry since she came on board as CMO of CA Technologies in August 2013, she recognizes that today everyone operates on a sped-up clock. Gone are the days of months-long product development cycles. Technology has enhanced – and disrupted – every single industry, and Flaherty’s was not exempt.

In 2014, when she launched CA’s “Business Rewritten by Software” campaign, companies were beginning to understand the importance of reinventing their business models using software, but the technology was still left in the capable hands of the I.T. department. Today, I.T. is no longer separated from the business, but instead uniquely intertwined with its mission. Flaherty recognized that shift, which structured her team’s latest campaign: “Modern Software Factory.”

[To listen to the podcast now click here.]

During her four years at CA Technologies, Flaherty also learned invaluable lessons on transforming your brand, believing what you preach, and making the product experience real and tangible for customers.

Flaherty explains that every brand transformation has to start from the inside, and that it needs to permeate throughout the entire company. For example, employees should be receiving company-related news from the company, not external sources. When CA underwent its own transformation, Flaherty’s team implemented the changes six months prior to going public with them. She found it important to consult with her sales leads and get their unique perspective about the pain points their customers were experiencing. That helped her evaluate whether the transformation they were implementing was on point and would be well received.

Because CA’s products promised agility, Flaherty found it important to hold the company to the same standards. Rather than operating under drawn-out production cycles, she made sure her team worked in mini-sprints that built on the customer feedback they were receiving. This helped them get the product out to market faster in a way that was always relevant to the customers. During the process, Flaherty found that there was no longer a separation between tech and business – the two were entirely intertwined. The language and medium her department used to talk about their products needed to address both C-suite executives and I.T. teams.

The latest campaign, “Modern Software Factory,” built on the patterns Flaherty’s team observed throughout the last three years. This campaign worked to help people visualize abstract software concepts. They used television (an excellent medium for storytelling) to address the C-suite executives and partnered with CNN during the 2016 presidential election in what Flaherty describes as a “co-creation.” While it appeared to be a media buy, what her team actually did was create a seamless experience between two mediums; CA recognized that people would be consuming election coverage through various types of media, and by creating an app experience for CNN, CA was able to show – not tell – what they could do for brands. And in case you were wondering, the engagement and reach CNN experienced during that period would have taken years to develop without the help of the app!

Inside Story on Marketing the New York Times

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The Q&A below is simply the amuse-bouche of one of the most delicious podcasts I’ve recorded to date.  Please note that it was an honor just to get the interview with Meredith Kopit Levien, the Chief Revenue Officer of The New York Times. (Kind of like getting a table at Sylvia’s.)  Meredith is responsible for both marketing and sales AND has been a driving force behind The New York Times digital transformation and their stunningly timely “The Truth is Hard” campaign. For the main course, chomp into this podcast!

Drew: Looking back at the last four years at the New York Times what would you say is the most innovative thing you’ve hatched?

Meredith: I think the most innovative thing we’ve had to do fundamentally change our ad business. We really had to change what business we’re in, or expand the idea of what business we could be in. In the past, marketers have bought audience and adjacency from us. They wanted to reach our audience or or be next to our content because of what that content does for their brand. So much of our work now is also driven by what goes into the space that they buy from us. We launched T-Brand Studio initially to be really effective at making branded content, and it has morphed into a whole enterprise that can serve any need a marketer has around strategizing for making, distributing, or measuring content. We believed and continue to see whitespace in the market here. Who should help a marketer decide what are the stories that are going to engage people best? Surprise or interest people most? Know the right formats to really make people interested? That’s what the New York Times as a brand does for a living every day. So who better than us as an organization and a brand to help marketers do that.

Drew: Take us behind the scenes in the development of “the Truth is Hard” campaign and what inspired you to really to launch it.

Meredith: Thanks for that question; it’s my favorite one to answer of late. I’m going to go all the way back to a year ago, maybe more than a year ago. We made a decision probably 18 months ago that we needed to start thinking about The New York Times as a consumer brand and take its power as a brand much more seriously. The staffing decision we made around that was to bring somebody in to run brand. We hired a guy a year ago named David Rubin who is the Head of Brand. He works as a peer to our brilliant Head of Consumer Marketing, Clay Fisher. So it started with bringing in talent with deep, deep, deep brand thinking, brand planning, brand execution, experience.  So for the last year there was a budding intent to face the world more as brands do. And behind that intent was a sense that we are a world-class news brand, which to me means we define the category that we’re in and we deliver the work that we do and its products very very well. But we also had this opportunity to also to begin to become and behave like a world-class consumer brand.

Drew: Can you talk about the strategy development?

Meredith: We spent quite a bit of time on core brand principle definition, with deep, deep involvement from the newsroom at The Times. We arrived at a very simple brand statement, which is essentially that The New York Times helps people understand the world, and we arrived at a set of principles around which we would operate. Then as we’re doing that and as we’re beginning to really think like a brand thinks (what is our narrative, what are the messages, how do those messages look, where’s the consistency?), this stunning thing happened in the world: We had a presidential election. We had an extraordinary moment in terms of news cycle. We saw our traffic and engagement go to a place beyond anybody’s expectation. And then the news became the news. And so you asked why did the Truth Campaign happen?I imagine we would have done a brand campaign had the news not become the news. But I think what that brand campaign was, which was really about the process by which the world arrives at truth and the role that journalism plays in that, I’m not sure that that would have happened had the news not become the news. We did that with Droga, which we feel very proud of the work that they’ve done and very lucky to work with them. We broke the campaign the weekend of the Oscars. The first phase of the campaign essentially was meant to remind the world of the role that journalism plays in speaking truth to power, holding power to account, and how important it is to have journalism and high quality journalism as a partner on any individual’s path to finding truth. The second phase of the campaign, which we’ve launched just a few weeks ago, is a short film series that we’ve done with Darren Aronofsky, the incredible filmmaker, which is more about the craft of journalism at the New York Times. It’s about the commitment, the resources, and the expertise that it takes to cover the world and to find the truth, and to do so in a way that people can believe in and trust; in a way that gives people a tool to help make sense of what’s going on around them. And you can expect that we’ll continue the campaign on the other phases.

Here are a couple examples of The Times’ latest ads:

Be Your Own Best Customer

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When Tom Libretto came to Pegasystems as Chief Marketing Officer in 2016, he recognized that the tech company was in the midst of a big change. Leadership was challenging many of their preconceived notions, and Libretto jumped right in to propel the changes. His first step was to get the lay of the land, so to speak, and understand what was working and what wasn’t, who were the star performers, and where the opportunities were for growth. Having worked at Lotus, Nokia, and Chase, Libretto brought with him an understanding of the discipline it took to effect change in a company. (To listen now, click here.)

For the smaller, more agile Pegasystems, Libretto knew he wanted to embrace real-time adaptive learning analytics. In this week’s podcast, he shares three takeaways for marketers to keep in mind as martech takes a hold on modern marketing.

The first takeaway is that if you’re selling a product to your consumers, you’d better be your product’s best user. One advantage Libretto had at Pegasystems is that their platform was one of the star performers. In fact, it was such an amazing product that they used PEGA to market, well, PEGA! Libretto described this as “drinking their own champagne,” but it helped convey a serious level of authenticity to customers. His team was also able to gain a unique perspective on their users’ issues and needs. And if the team ever created an update for the software they used in-house, it was automatically shared with their customers.

The second takeaway Libretto stressed is that the future of marketing is now. Some of us fear that the rise in cognitive artificial intelligence will put them out of our jobs, but the reality is that AI allows us to create a more personalized, seamless experience for customers. For example, with real-time adaptive learning analytics, Pegasystems is engaging in constant A/B testing. The time of “one-size fits all” marketing is in the past, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for storytelling. Marketers will likely always need human stories to engage with consumers on a deeper level. Technology simply makes it easier.

The final takeaway Libretto shared was actually one of the hardest lessons he had to learn in marketing, and that was, “Don’t be afraid to fail.” It’s in our nature to want to please our clients and sell products, but sometimes you must fail in order to learn. The most important part of failing, however, is learning from it. Libretto made sure his team knew to diagnose their failures, because then at least they wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. So, while Libretto wouldn’t tolerate all mistakes, per se, he made sure his team remembered: “If you’re not failing, you’re not learning.”

Engaged Employees Beget Better Marketing

Posted on by Drew Neisser

When you think about how companies motivate employees, you’ll likely think of human resources first. This wasn’t the case for Patti Newcomer-Simmons, Vice President of Marketing at Intuit. After she returned to the financial software company following a hiatus, Newcomer-Simmons realized that it was her responsibility to improve the lives of her employees if she wanted to increase company productivity. To empower her team to perform at optimal levels, she would need to invest time and energy into promoting employee engagement. (To listen to the whole episode now click here.)

Now, you might think that employee engagement simply means satisfaction with the company. Not so. When Newcomer-Simmons looked at metrics for Intuit’s employee engagement, she instead focused more on retention: Would the employee stay with the company even if they received a better offer from someone else?

Since her return to Intuit, Newcomer-Simmons significantly increased employee engagement—and thereby reduced turnover—which she described as one of her proudest accomplishments. So, if you’re wondering how you can do the same for your own company, you’ve found the right podcast! In this week’s episode, Newcomer-Simmons shared several principles that marketing leaders need to abide by to truly engage and empower their employees, ultimately translating that positivity into productivity.

The first of these principles was pretty simple: be open to your employees’ feedback. Newcomer-Simmons explained that there has to be some level of vulnerability on the part of any leader in the sense that he or she should always acknowledge that they could have done something differently. At Intuit, Newcomer-Simmons schedules monthly meetings and directly asks her teams for opinions on what she could do better in the future, what worked and what didn’t.

The changes she made in response to the feedback received weren’t always grand gestures. Sometimes it was as simple as being mindful of her presence or tone in meetings. Her openness and vulnerability allowed employees to feel as though their voices were heard, which translated to positive feelings towards their efforts and the company. Similar to how brands build loyalty with consumers, being open to feedback encouraged loyalty in Newcomer-Simmons’s team.

The next engagement principle Newcomer-Simmons shared was integrity. It wasn’t enough to listen to feedback and promise change—she actually had to do as she said. She refers to this as the “say-do” ratio. If she were to go back on her word after asking for constructive criticism, it could have been perceived as betrayal. Her employees would have been left discouraged, which would have eventually trickled into loss of engagement with the company. Because of Intuit’s limited window of marketing opportunities during tax season, it was vital to for Newcomer-Simmons to have all hands on deck, which was only possible if her employees were fully engaged.

The last principle she described was leading by example. Employees held to a higher standard than their team leaders and supervisors were at high risk of developing resentment towards the company. Or worse, they would do as their leaders did, which would cause internal conflict because of the discord in employee standards. Both would have negatively affected the company, which is why Newcomer-Simmons emphasized the importance of holding herself to the same standard as her team members. So, if you plan on to raise the bar and ask more from your team, be prepared to raise that same bar for yourself and lead by example.