From Creative to Content: Why All Marketing Should Be Performance Marketing

Elise Stieferman:  Hello and welcome to The Loop Marketing Podcast! I'm your host, Elise Stieferman, Director of Marketing at Coegi. Today we have a special episode featuring a live recording from the Midwest Digital Marketing Conference, hosted in St. Louis on April 18, 2023. In our session, 'From Creative to Content: Why All Marketing Should Be Performance Marketing," Coegi's Director of Innovation, Savannah Westbrock, and I discuss: - The importance of breaking down the silos between creatives and media operations for the sake of great content - Creating a new definition for ‘performance marketing’ and - Best practices for building KPIs at each stage of the marketing funnel Visuals from the presentation can be found in the description of this episode. Let's get started. Savannah Westbrock:  Thanks everyone for joining us. Elise and I have worked together for a number of years at Coegi. We are a digital agency here in St. Louis. And our topic today really bloomed out of how our time together at this agency has grown. So we started about 10 years ago. We were an agency trading desk. Super, super performance marketing focused really heavily on programmatic, on social, on search.  But as we've grown, we've realized that in order to create really effective marketing strategies that are serving not just our interests and meeting our KPIs, but serving our clients' ultimate business goals, we had to tear down those arbitrary walls between our creatives and our media people.   Elise: So today we're talking about the world of performance marketing. And I'm sure when I say the term performance marketing, there are certain connotations that everyone in the room has with that. Things like last click attribution, things like very clear ROAS, things like you can only really tell, clear ROI from things like search or lead generation campaigns on LinkedIn or other social channels. But the reality is we have seen that evolve substantially in our time with Coegi. And there's especially been a big evolution in what performance marketing means over the last three years or so.  So when we think about performance marketing, I bet there are two sides in the room. We have the side over here that's going, no, please don't talk about data anymore. We talked about data all day. We love data.  Data helps me inform my marketing strategies. But I don't want to talk about stats or math anymore. I want to think about the big picture. I want to think about personas, things that are a little softer, a little bit more brand oriented.  And then we have the other side of the room that's like, yes, I get to dig into the analytics, I get to dive in to understand which audiences are resonating most with my brand, which channels are truly driving impact to my bottom line and what's overall going to excite my CFO. But the reality is, the left side of the brain is probably those of you who are thinking like, no, performance marketing isn't really where I like to live. I know it's a necessity. It's an evil that exists to be able to prove that my marketing is working. Whereas the other side that really likes performance marketing are those who love, thrive and advocate for the data.   But the reality is that the world of marketing is not just left brained or right brained. You have to fuse those worlds together to have a truly comprehensive, holistic view of how your marketing is working and be able to tell a story to people across the organizations, whether it's people who are in the marketing department themselves, your CEO, your friends over in finance and sales, and be able to truly talk about realistically, where is marketing impacting our bottom line of revenue.  So our agenda today, first we're going to talk a little bit about the evolution of what we have seen in terms of the world of performance marketing and how that landscape has shifted over time. The second is thinking about the downfalls of falling victim to thinking about the short term success of your brand. Trying to always drive the strongest ROAS, the lowest CPA, the lowest CPC and being cost obsessed in some ways. And then lastly, we'll focus on producing performance-driven marketing that still heavily focuses on who the consumer is and what they truly care about.  Savannah: So we are going to set a level playing field here, at least try to talk about how the performance marketing landscape has shifted and evolved. And to do that, we're going to have to get a little bit nostalgic about the shape of the internet 30 years ago. So if you'll indulge me, some of you may recognize this, for those of you who don't, you are looking at the first ever internet banner ad. This ran, as you can probably tell from the charmingly nineties art direction, about 30 years ago. It was live for three months, and it spent a flat $10,000 per month and it led to a 44% clickthrough rate.   Elise: And that's compared to your average click through rate of a display ad today. 0.1% if you're lucky.  Savannah: If you're lucky being the keyword there. So as we look at this, it is so unthinkable to think of those results today. I mean, not only because our entire performance landscape has evolved, our ad technology has evolved. Something like this wouldn't even be approved in any sort of inventory SSP today because it doesn't even have the brand on it. It's AT&T if you're curious.  But really what we're seeing here is kind of like the granddaddy of our whole industry, because as things have evolved, search came onto the scene. I know we've talked a lot about SEO at this conference, but also social media revolutionized the game. Again, introduced us into what's called Web 2.0 and introduced vertical video. We've got digital billboards now. The internet connectivity has really skyrocketed. Even if we ignore the nineties and what feels a little bit quaint now, we're looking at a world where connectivity has never been higher and we could even draw additional arrows in the future.   We are looking here because in order to understand what we're saying today about performance marketing, we have to keep in mind the future of the internet is not slowing down. Even with our privacy landscape, something we're all very cognizant of, even with the cookieless future, we're still entering a world where a metaverse may exist. We're entering a world maybe a little bit quieter where all of our devices are smart devices. I mean, my refrigerator asked me for my wifi password and for some reason I don't think that that's weird, right?  Because that's just the normal state of things today. And what this has unlocked for marketers is a ton of opportunity, but also a ton of intimidation about, okay, how do I plan for a world that is this disparate, that has this much inventory in it, that has this many opportunities for messaging?   It has changed the game, not only from a data and analytics perspective, but from the messaging and branding perspective. For now, it's not just about, how do I have one ad for each stage of the funnel? It's about, how do I create personalized content that's going to resonate with people? But the biggest change of all is truly about our data. And this is day two of a marketing conference. Data as a word is starting to kind of not mean anything. When I'm talking about data, I'm really just talking about the information we now have at our fingertips. So compared to the marketing of 30 years ago, we have such a better understanding of our audience than we ever did before. Not only our audience's behavior, but also what we can plan for proactively and how we can segment our audience to truly focus on the people we most want to drive that change from.  Additionally, we have such a better understanding of the performance of our campaigns. In the last session, we highlighted how dashboarding has really changed the game. You can make those on demand insights and pull reports as quickly as we need. We no longer have to wait for the inventory owner, the website owner, to tell us after our campaign ran how many people clicked or how many people watched our video. We've got all of that at our fingertips.  Elise: I think a keyword to pull out there is transparency, that we have access to that data in near real time. But we also are able to kind of debunk the historical expectation that search is the only place where you can go and drive results because they lean so heavily on things like last-click attribution. Same thing with Meta. And we just talked about this a little bit last session as well with iOS14 and realizing that things we thought were maybe conversions were not actually conversions or would would've been driven anyways. So having that transparency and kind of level setting the reality of what performance is, is really coming to fruition for the smart marketers today.   Savannah: Absolutely. And the biggest part of that is placing your consumer experience at the center of all of your decisions because we know so much more now when we combine these audience insights and performance insights into the reality of our consumer journey. And what we've discovered is that the reality is a lot more complicated than we initially may have thought it was.  So the way we are planning now is we are assuming the marketing funnel three years from now, five years from now, is going to look as antiquated as that 90’s banner ad does to us today. Because the world we are living in has that bloom of connectivity, that ever-changing internet. We've made the point that all of our marketing platforms and tools like to refresh their settings every two weeks, regulation is coming in, but none of that has changed the consumer experience, right?   So while we are busy talking about that, we're missing out on the reality of what people truly want with their brands and what people are truly evaluating. Things are not as simple as awareness to acquisition. And really, if you're still planning your marketing campaigns that way, you're stopping the conversation way too soon.  You're stopping once you get to that conversion that leads to a sale. But think about your own buying behavior. If you work for a soap brand, people buy soap all the time. Even if you work for a car company, people are going to have to buy another car in their lives. You don't want to be marketing in such a way that once you get what you want from the consumer, you're stopping. You have to look at this infinite swirl that people have hung themselves in where the relationship building opportunity truly exists as we're planning our marketing campaigns.   Elise: And similarly, marketers historically have identified performance as just those last two pieces of the inverted pyramid. That's performance. That's what's driving my revenue. But realistically, you have to think about performance at each stage of this infinity sign to be able to identify the signals that somebody is actually becoming interested in your brand, that they're actually going to have a propensity to buy the brand, to talk about your brand at the family dinner table, and be able to attribute performance at each of those stages to make the most of your marketing budget.   Savannah: And in order to do that, you have to look at what the reality of your own consumer journey is. So think about your brands, your clients, and go through this exercise of asking, what does that infinite loop look like for them? And this looks a little intimidating on this giant wall, but really this is just an evolution of the funnel we used to work with, right? So that trigger moment, part of the assumption in the marketing funnel that really doesn't work anymore is the thought that we have any control over someone's first awareness moment with our brand, right? Odds are, if you're a digital marketing company, you have a channel strategy, but people live their everyday lives, they talk to each other, they talk to their families, they're watching YouTube.   Your brand has probably come up somewhere in their lives in a way that you have no influence or control over. But what you can do is try to think strategically about, alright, what is my trigger point? What is that moment that's going to take someone from being loosely aware of my brand to actively researching and considering, do they want to hire my service? Do they want to buy my product? That's what takes us into this upper area on the top that might look like a consideration phase, but so much more goes into it than just evaluating or doing a few quick Google searches and trying to see, is this the brand for me?  This elongated stage of consideration is getting longer and longer because consumers also have so much information at their fingertips. They have thousands of product reviews or service reviews, they've got testimonials, they're getting random tags where people are just mentioning your product.  All of that content is hitting them at the same time. And sometimes it can lead to a little bit of analysis paralysis. So imagine yourself trying to pick a brand new Netflix show to watch and then getting overwhelmed and just going back to that comfort sitcom that you always go back to for a lot of ways in human behavior. You're going to see that happen in marketing as well.  Another assumption we've been guilty of making in the past is thinking that, my product is at a lower price point, so someone's going to make that consideration phase or that research phase pretty quickly - within a few months or so. So that's the only time I'm going to market. I'll tell you, if you humanize your strategy, you realize you can poke holes in some of those assumptions. I mean, I bought a car in two days once because my husband got a new job and we realized we had to move to different cities for a brief period. Normally, that would be a really elongated process, but just the necessities of life and being humans, we had to go really fast.   Elise: And yet your behaviors, as the person who maybe took 6, 12, 18 months to buy a car may have looked kind of similar. You were aware that there was a certain type of vehicle you wanted to buy, you wanted to buy a sedan, an SUV, etc... You might hop on their website to understand, what are all the features I can expect from this car? And then, evaluating the price. I mean, even in a short time period, you have the transparency of what one dealership is asking for the same car over here, right? So you have to just be able to be patient and understand where the consumer is in their journey and how quickly they are moving on to their next step in that journey and align that message accordingly.   Savannah: Exactly. And then our overall point here, you can't just stop your messaging. Once I bought that car, right? Because we had that accelerated timeline, I fell back on this little bottom dotted line here. I drove a Toyota, so we bought him a Toyota because I was familiar with that brand already. I had those experiences, I didn't have time to see a bunch of commercials, a bunch of promotions. We just went with what we knew. And that's the little human insight that is true across any sort of service.  People are hiring any sort of brand, any products we're buying. You want to get people from that purchase point into one of these different avenues, right? Starting with the top one, that passive loyalty, you might also have heard of that called a brand preference. So odds are, someone is going to maybe buy your product for the first time, they're going to try it, and then they're not going to need it again for two to three months. But, they are going to be willing to try a competitor's product or maybe go to this restaurant instead of that one. It doesn't matter that they're the same cuisine, I just want to try them. Right? What you want is to get someone from that stage, to your active loyalty, someone who is going to advocate for your brand. Someone who's going to tell their friends and family - you've gotta try this. This was like the best Indian cuisine I've ever had. The coolest sponge on TikTok is actually legit guys. That's what you're wanting to drive.  If you plan your campaign without thinking about the future someone is going to have with your brand, you're back in that funnel stage and you're missing all of that. And that relationship building at the end is what's really going to drive the difference for the future of your brand and leveling up your marketing campaign into serving your actual business goals.   Elise: So then thinking about aligning KPIs at each stage of this elongated journey, yes, there will be times when media metrics will do the trick. Things like understanding reach and frequency at the awareness stage. So, how much of your target audience is aware of your brand, looking at things like time spent on site and Google Analytics might help you understand potential interest in your brand. And then of course being able to tie back to the purchase that happened somewhere like e-commerce.  But realistically, there may be times where media KPIs don't tell you the full picture. And I would argue that a lot of the time that's the reality. And so you have to turn to things like advanced measurement to be able to get a little bit more detailed into things like which messages are driving that brand residence, which audiences are propelling that consideration of my brand or their likelihood that they're going to recommend my brand to others. Even sales lift studies, especially for CPG brands where the majority of sales are happening in store, you're going to need that connectivity to be able to understand if the marketing exposure of those audiences is actually driving the outcome you're anticipating at each stage.   Savannah: And that is what brings us to one of the things we want to caution you against, which is truly the downfall of that short-term thinking. Thinking, okay, what serves me as a marketing strategist or a performance strategist or someone who's hands on keyboard, oftentimes we're looking at our KPIs and we hit that KPI and we go yay and we high-five our coworkers. But the reality for your brand or your clients is that those easy quick wins are not going to pay dividends long term. They're truly not what is going to push your brand forward or your client's brand forward. Especially for the agency folks here, if you want to make yourselves really sticky, you have to demonstrate that we're not just looking at what makes us as an agency look good, we're looking at what your true business goal actually is.   And to Elise's point, what metrics or what things outside of media do we need to pull into our reporting and our evaluation to understand how to level up? A big part of pulling in those other teams is bringing your brand teams and your media teams back together, right? A lot of times we have this artificial division between the people who are in charge of branding and creative and our logos and our personas. And then our media and analytics people get that handoff effect where we say, all right, we've got our plan, we'll put it in our platforms, we'll go. But none of those people are really talking to each other throughout the lifetime of a campaign. And we're kind of shooting ourselves in the foot by doing that. We have intelligent strategists tackling that same ultimate business goal from so many different angles, but if we don't bring them back together, we're missing out. We're artificially separating that left brain and that right brain.   Elise: And I think this can be a key point of why we're seeing so much in-housing happening with brands that have historically worked with agencies. They're feeling like there's so many disparate teams that aren't talking the same language and that it's requiring extra effort for the brand team to get back to what they actually care about, which is driving results and strategy and not going to the nuances of how I'm going to set up this campaign and this channel and things along those lines. So the more we're able to unify that process, the better off everyone's going to be from the agency side to the brand   Savannah: So that's our philosophy. But we've got some practical tips here for how we can shift from that sort of short-term thinking to building a still performance-driven, but really consumer-centric, marketing strategy.   Elise: So what we mean by performance-driven is that you are always thinking about the long-term impact of what your marketing's going to do and making sure it is held accountable at each stage along the way - from when the idea is coming to mind about what message you're going to put out there to what major tagline is going to differentiate your brand from the competitor. You're always looking for that accountability and not just ROI.  And so the first thing you can start to think about during this process is that you have to stop siloing the media strategy from the creative strategy. And even today, I think that's what a lot of teams are experiencing. They're perceived as disparate skill sets that maybe aren't necessarily needed to inform one another. But the truth is we need both to talk the same language to drive that performance we're talking about.   So I'm sure a lot of us have seen the show MadMen. Long gone are the days of the Don Drapers of the world getting in the room with the brand and saying, Heinz, the way you are going to take over the condiment category is from this image and this tagline. It doesn't matter where Heinz shows up, it is going to move your brand off the shelves. The reality is, in a very complex media ecosystem where there are a lot of digital touchpoints, we have to think about where Heinz is showing up on your social media? Is this still image going to work on TikTok? Not today. It's going to be seen or perceived as inauthentic and be swiped by as quickly as it came up on the screen. So you have to have your creative team talk to your media strategist to be able to figure out what's going to resonate on each of these disparate platforms.   How do we evolve the brand ethos so that each channel is driving that desired performance and getting you to where you want to go. So taking this a little bit further from the creative side, as we're thinking about the brand idea, we're probably generating these personas. We've got Evelyn, who's an account executive who loves playing with her dog in the park, who loves to sell. So she's always on LinkedIn, and she loves to go to Target. Awesome. But what does your media team need to know about that?  They're over here thinking, okay, I think I get the concept of Evelyn, but how do I translate that into what is actually going in the platform or how I choose which billboard I'm going to buy? They're over here thinking, which data sets are going to make sense? Am I going to find Evelyn in a contextual environment?  Are the Evelyn's of the world more engaged on cable TV or streaming tv? They're taking this concept and bringing it to real life of what it means to actually activate the idea.  And truthfully, because we're speaking different languages, you have to get both sides in the same room and say, Hey, creative team, this is what I'm hearing about Evelyn, is my translation actually correct of who you're perceiving? We're going to be reaching based off of all your focus groups, based off of all your syndicated research, based off of what we know about your CRM system. And if the answer is no, you go back, you start that conversation over again until you get the unified perspective of where you're going from here. And so we go back to the infinity sign, there is no handoff.  We are constantly working with media and creative and hand in hand to understand - is the message that we first tested against our focus group actually performing the way we thought it was?  And if not, what are some other iterations we have in our wheel set that we can bring out and try and be willing to understand that it's not working out the way I thought it was going to. Learning is better than your biased opinion. You have to be willing to understand when you're wrong and have that transparent conversation with your client. They're going to respect you for having that transparency with them. Similarly, who we thought was maybe going to really resonate with the brand, your different audience groups, maybe they're not driving the sales you thought they were going to - that's probably going to change your messaging strategy.   It'd be really bad if your creative team is totally onto another project and are so disconnected from that process that we have to bring them in and catch them up. Then it takes even longer to correct course for the brand. And similarly, we're always evaluating which channels are driving performance. We believe it's important to build an ecosystem around individuals based off of where they choose to engage, where they're most attentive, where they have a propensity to take the actions we're wanting them to take and be able to add budget where it's performing as expected and be okay with taking budget from TikTok even though it feels super exciting because we've never been on there. But if it's not driving the results that you're desiring, get rid of it from your mix.  So how do you break down barriers between your media and creative teams? First, get all your partners in the same room. Even if it is in-house, don't silo your creative side from your media side, from your analytics side. Bring everyone to the table to have a very honest conversation about what's working, what's not, and where to go from here. The years of annual planning, they also have to die with the marketing funnel, because if you're planning on a 12 month basis, more than likely you're falling behind your competitors every single time. So usually quarterly is what we would suggest just to make sure that we're giving algorithms time to breathe and optimize. That we give our people time to analyze and draw out those insights. But you have to bring everyone to the table for those conversations. You also have to kill the handoff process. Creatives should be involved at every step of activation of those messages. We should give them the feedback of what we're seeing on the platform or in traditional channels and be able to figure out how to get better the next time.  Lastly, continue to focus the conversation on the consumer, because the more we become internally focused about what the brand wants, the more we lose what they actually care about. And the more we lose what they actually care about, the worse your performance is going to get. So we have to push away from the gut reaction of what are my ads? Which channels am I going to run on? And instead, go back to the philosophy of - what does my consumer care about and how do I build that into my marketing strategy?   Savannah: If you go through that process of journeying, not only from awareness to acquisition, but everything that happens afterwards and truly understanding your audience and getting that buy-in from your client, from your brand teams, from whomever your decision makers are - it's going to be much easier to advocate, to get all of your people in the same room, to have that continuous conversation. Because you're going to realize that running an annual campaign or single message for a year is really leaving your consumers behind.   Elise: So you're probably thinking, that's all nice and good, but what does that mean in actuality? That brings us to point number two, stop building ads and start creating content that is focused for your consumer.  Every single one of us in the room is bombarded with ads every day. And I would say that, for the majority of us, content isn't even all that present. It's maybe 10% of what we're being exposed to in a sponsored way. The vast majority are ads. And so what are ads? Ads are, here's my brand, my brand's important, remember my brand, don't remember the competitor, remember my brand, buy now. I don't care if you just met my brand for the first time. I think that you should go ahead and buy my product. And it doesn't matter if it's soap or a car, but buy it.   And then what are you going to do to make me money? It's all about what the brand wants regardless of where the consumer is in that journey. It's getting back to the very bizarre initial display ad - click here because whatever goes beyond this click has gotta be good. Click it, you're going to like it. And apparently back then people did - 44% click through rate.  But people today are smarter. They want authentic engagements with brands, they are demanding it and if you don't provide that authenticity to the brand, they're going to ignore you or maybe even really grow to dislike you. , make sure that they're hiding your brand as they're scrolling through Facebook. So then we had to think about content. Now what does that really mean?   It's getting back to making the consumer the star of the show. It's not putting Baby in the corner, it's lifting Baby up and being like, I know who you are without being super creepy. I'm being personalized in a nuanced way. I'm not putting your name in this ad. Hey Elise, would you go get a t-shirt that says your last name? That's creepy. We don't want that. But we do want nuances of what these people care about. Getting to the values.  - what do I care about as a human? Where do I go in my day to day? What are my hobbies? What are my personal motivations in life? And even who am I buying this product for?   Is it for myself? Is it for my family? We should see and feel that in the content from the actual imagery to the copy itself and that's going to drive performance. And then also aligning that, as I mentioned to the consumer journey, you have to be very nuanced about when you're first exposing a consumer to your brand. And when you think you have gathered enough signals to deduce, it's always a hypothesis. If they're ready to buy and , sometimes you're going to get it wrong and that's okay, then you've reserved the ad a couple times. But then you don't just keep reserving the ad. You don't just keep retargeting, at a hundred frequency until you've beaten them into saying, yes, fine, I'll buy the soap! You have to be able to be nuanced about what that process and experience is throughout the journey.   And the sad and unfortunate truth is that if you don't nail that creative process, that content, it doesn't matter how smart, how data-driven, how KPI-focused your media strategy is. Your media performance is going to fail every single time because at the end of the day, people are paying attention to content. They don't know what objective you've optimized for in Meta. All they see is the content and what they're compelled to do next.  So you have to figure out how to create that nuance on a channel by channel basis, by audience and be able to marry the two to drive the outcomes you want to see. So how do you shift these mindsets? First, let's all collectively agree to do our very best to get rid of bad ads. We can't help the other players outside of this room, but people in this room let's all collectively agree that let's try to move away from bad ads that we personally hate that are driving that negative perception, that are driving negative roi, not driving the performance we want too.   Let's focus on persuasive content. And by persuasive I mean effective content and effective content doesn't always mean it results in a purchase every time. It means that you're moving the consumer along that journey. One step closer to being your advocate and bringing other people along that journey with you to grow the collective customer base of your brand. And then three effective content usually doesn't involve a bright shiny flashing buy now button. And usually DSPs today are also going to reject that because it's a bad user experience. So you have to figure out how to, in a nuanced way, in a little bit of a softer way, in a much more authentic way, get people to get on board with your brand and move along with you in the desired outcomes.   Savannah:  And that last piece is only going to become more and more important because every research study we have done about millennials, gen Z, gen alpha, they are very, very sensitive to hard-sell ad messaging. What they want to see is truly the content that respects their experience and lets them breathe for a minute.   Client Case Examples Savannah: So finally, we wanted to leave you with some inspiration. So we wanted to give some examples of brands that we felt are marrying this research and this creativity really well - with a Midwest spin because that's where we are.  So firstly, I had to give a shout out to St Louis Soccer Club. Obviously a new team, there's a lot of research that goes into building something like this, right? This logo incorporates the arch cleverly, incorporating the rivers cleverly, so much work and research into our region went into that decision. And while that was happening, we had our technical people saying, what about stadium experiences? Do they want a cashless experience? What research can we pull together from other sports stadiums? What is the consumer reaction to that? Do people like it? Do they hate it? How does it differ between all of the different types of personas who are going to attend one of these games? And what those teams were able to do is get this launched off the ground, which is a huge feat in and of itself, but also start that process of creating a team that's going to be as beloved as the Cardinals or as the Blues.     Elise: So Explore Minnesota is one of Coegi’s clients alongside our sister agencies. And something I felt like was really original and creative both from the data side and the actual messaging side was back in 2020, obviously during the Covid 19 outbreak, was not a great time for travel and tourism as all the shutdowns were happening. So we had to think about how to still drive traffic to Minnesota, because that's how their brand makes money.  But people aren't getting on planes, they're sometimes getting in cars, but what they do once they get to their destination is a big old question mark. So once we got past all of the shutdowns and where things were starting to open back up, there was still a pretty substantial amount of outbreak, we started to pull in data from the CDC to understand on a county level, which areas are experiencing a higher amount of Covid 19 outbreaks.   And as a result it'd be irresponsible for us as a media agency and for the brand to drive people to go visit those counties. So we would stop geo-targeting in those regions when there were some unsafe circumstances and instead drive to regions that were not experiencing those outbreaks. And oftentimes what correlated with those outbreaks were opportunities for social distancing. So things like going to parks or going to ski resorts were on the forefront.  Historically, the brand has tried to drive things like visitation to restaurants and bars in the region. We worked with the creative team and informed them, hey, how about we talk about things like taking your family on an adventure to a national park and shifting that messaging. Why don't we explore some new consumer segments, like dog enthusiasts, where you can encourage them to go visit their local parks.  So we're able to tie not only the activation in the platform in terms of geographic targeting, but also the creative message of what's the best message for the consumer given the circumstances. And what still creates opportunity for our brand to expand that consumer base and grow that affinity and marry the two to continue to propel the brand forward in a smart, conscientious, thoughtful way.   Savannah: And so what we'll ask you to do, and what we'll remind you even, is that you also are a consumer. You're a marketer, but which brands have resonated with you? What you have seen that has persuaded you to take some sort of an action?  We gave a couple examples, but as you leave here, we want you to think about, what brands come to mind when you think about the people who are really doing content well? Who can I pull that inspiration from? Is there a competitor who's really smart?  One of my favorite ways to get inspiration is actually to look in a totally different category. For example, we're talking a lot in our industry about the cookieless future and regulation and what that might look like. We look at pharma, right? Regulated industries who have never used that data. What smart engaging ways have they been able to still persuade people through that content without that hard sell messaging and that really specific data?  Elise: So to recap, first we have to keep a data driven accountability without focusing too heavily on the short-term goals, the things that are just going to drive easy ROI, the low hanging fruit. Instead, we have to continue to push our peers, ourselves, the executive team to be able to think about the long-term vision for the brand and give them the data story that gives them confidence that we are getting them closer to the goals that we'd set out for ourselves.   Savannah:  Additionally, as we've said, you have to break down those barriers between your branding, your creative, your media, and your analytics teams to truly drive, not only step one, which is just getting that full-funnel success that we're all used to, but our ultimate goal of that continuous success, that long-term relationship building with our consumers.   Elise:  We have to continue to place the consumer at the center of the journey. Keeping in mind the brand goals, but not making them the star of the show. And make sure that we are speaking to them in a way that is going to align with their desires and what they want to hear from your brand at each step along the way.   Savannah:  And then finally making and planning for a test and learn approach, which is our little marketing way of saying like, just don't be afraid to fail a little bit. Don't be afraid to try the things that you don't have 100% confidence are going to work. Don't just plan your marketing campaign for that low hanging fruit, those audiences who are going to convert anyway. Think a little bit bigger, think about the relationships you want people to have with your brand or with your client or with your service. And look at how your messaging strategy and your media strategy can lean a little bit more toward that infinity sign shape and less of that funnel.   Q&A Where does the traditional idea of a call to action give in to this?   Savannah: Ultimately, I think we're looking for a little bit of those softer calls to action. So we're used to seeing, click here, buy now in the past 20 years. But as we look toward creating more of that content, you want to find the stuff that's going to persuade them to have that call to action moment internally, if that makes sense.  So certainly use your data to identify when someone is truly in market, when they're truly in that last stage of their consideration process, their research process. And at that point, continue to rely on signals you've used before to say, okay, you're ready. But then our ultimate point is don't hammer them so hard, especially once they've already purchased.   Elise: You have to think about the value exchange here, right? Consumers are getting a lot savvier about the data brands are acquiring on them, either through cookies, which are supposed to be deprecated in a few years. But they want to understand what they're going to get as a result of that CTA.  So giving them a guide that's exclusive that they aren't going to get readily from your website and they will feel like because they gave you their email, they're getting something in return and having a chance of a better experience with your brand because of that. And the more you ask them to do things where they don't understand exactly what they're getting out of sharing that information with you, the worse off it's going to be. Do you have tools or recommendations to use data to better understand where people are in their journey and to be more personalized with messaging? Elise: That's a good question. I feel like automation is in every single marketing headline we see right now. Right? And it's great from an efficiency standpoint to be able to be like, Hey Google platform, when you see this person has seen my ad for the first time, next time serve them this message and I don't even have to tell you to do it. We have to be careful about the human element behind the automation.  Savannah: Well I would say,yes, using our platform, sequential messaging tools, using the data we've always relied on that doesn't necessarily have to go away. Removing the funnel from our thinking is really about our thinking and our planning. So one thing we've done is rather than throw up a funnel slide and say, okay, awareness, we're going to look at viewability, we're going to look at brand lift. We build entire measurement strategies with that test and learn questions built in.  For instance, say we think based on the insights, based on our normal data, our engagement rates, our video completion rates, we think this group of people are probably more in the in-market phase. So let's test, say half of this audience is going to get this messaging, half is going to get this messaging. And that's where keeping those tight relationships and that conversation with your creatives is going to really help you long term. Because if you plan for it up front and say, at this point we want to test different messaging, they know what they need to provide or they can quickly create it.