July 2, 2020 • 41 mins
It's not just about marketing for Brad Hiranaga. As the Chief Brand Officer, North America for General Mills, Brad has been helping the company realize its potential as a force for good: from encouraging families to connect around the dinner table, to fighting the hunger gap with the No Kid Hungry initiative. In fact, he's been working tirelessly to improve food security and accessibility during this pandemic. Learn why he was so committed to brands as a 5-year old (hint: it had something to do with living so close to Nike!), how a landscaping gig played an outsized role in his understanding of business, and how he's harnessed teams and research to modernize legacy brands.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of My
Heart Radio. I had a pretty massive failure about five
or six years ago, and it was actually on Tartinos.
We were taking a pizza and we were going to
move it from being a circle pizza to a rectangle pizza.
The reasons we did that our consumer research said, hey,
this is a good idea. Our supply chain absolutely needed
(00:24):
to do that. My gun initially was like, I don't know,
this feels like it's such a big change. I kind
of allowed myself to go down that path because when
we did launch it, immediately a business dropped by about
I was like, oh my god, I completely broke this business.
(00:46):
Hi'm Bob Pittman, and welcome to another work from Home
episode of Math and Magic. Stories from the Frontiers and Marketing.
Episode by episode, we dispect marketing and business, examining that
special relationship between the analytics and the creativity. Today, we
have someone who is an avowed practitioner of the combination
of left brain and right brain. He calls those folks
(01:08):
and people his name Brad Uranaga, Chief Brand Officer North
America for General Mills. Brad grew up in the Pacific Northwest,
the creative kid who loves sports and student government too.
He has worked on iconic brands and moved them from
nostalgia to current and epic with great success. He has
(01:31):
fully formed important insights about hiring a culture that helped
build a strong organization. He started his career in finance,
including at Starbucks, went to the mid West for his
NBA at Michigan, and then discovered his true calling marketing.
He's one of the top thinkers in marketing today with
visible successes to validate his theories. Brad welcome, Thanks so
(01:52):
much for having I love that intro and hearing your
voice makes it sound ten times better. Well, listen, we're
gonna dig into some real meaty stuff, but I first
want to do our you in sixty seconds feature, So
you're ready, I'm ready? Yes, Okay, here you go. Do
you prefer sunrise or sunset? Sunset, football or basketball, Basketball,
(02:13):
Instagram or Twitter, Instagram, Seattle or Minneapolis, Seattle Beach or Mountains,
Oh Beach for sure, Nike or Adidas, Nike, Pizza or Tacos.
I will go with pizza marketing or finance marketing. Smartest
person you know? My dad first job babysitter favorite cereal,
(02:35):
Lucky Charms, who would play you in a movie. I'm
gonna take some liberties here. I'll say Ryan Reynolds, title
of your memoir, unlocking potential favorite music artist. I'm gonna
say Drake, favorite Star Wars character, Bubba fet favorite video
game Call of Duty? And what's one food you'd never eat?
(02:57):
Mm hmmm, probably blowfish. That's a good choice. So let's
jump in. For the past few weeks, we have really
seen our society shaken to the core. We've seen broken
consumer habits, and it's forced us all to examine ourselves
and the world around us like probably we've never done before.
(03:18):
As a marketer, how have you dealt with it? Our
purpose as a company has been to serve the world
by making food that it loves. It quickly shifted when
COVID nineteen really hit hard in March two, changing the
last word from loves to needs, and I think that's
where we really started to have even more empathy with
our consumers because it wasn't enough just to be marketing
(03:42):
and selling anymore. It was really truly to understand what
people were going through. You know, we're fortunate to be
in an industry that has been one that people need
even more as folks have shifted to home and making
more meals at home, and so our role to really
play was to ensure that we could just get food
eight that people needed and make it as accessible and
(04:03):
affordable and safe as possible. And so the first few
weeks really were kind of a testament to our supply
chain that they were able to really turn it on
in a way that was able to really fill that demand.
I was kind of ostruck really by the way that
they worked. And we've talked a lot about frontline workers
in different industries. Certainly the folks that work at our
plants are part of that really heroic group, and so
we've been doing our best to support that group. As
(04:24):
we've kind of understood what new demand looks like, we
really started to change how we think about what our
roles are. Our marketing philosophy is trying to be action
lead action first, and then talk about it. And so
how do we give people tips, ideas, tricks to be
able to stretch their dollar and afford more food and
make more things out of their pantry, refrigerator, People spending
much more time with family, How do we help provide
(04:46):
content that's much more about creating those kind of moments
that you want with your kids, or really teaching them
how to cook for the first time. And so the
pivot on how we've become much more human centric and
action oriented in a way that feels really good. As
a marketer, it feels like doing our part to help.
It felt really good to be able to play that
role given all the challenges that we're facing right now.
You know, I've seen some talk about General Mills mission
(05:09):
to solve the hunger gap. Can you talk a little
bit about that. The hunger gap has always been something
that specifically as we look at North America, has been
a challenge. I think within the last few months that
gap has accelerated and increased as people have lost jobs,
as kids who actually relied on lunch and breakfast programs
at school, we're no longer able to go to class.
(05:31):
And so we've done some really great work in partnership
with Feeding America and No Kid Hungry to really solve
the problem of hunger. That's a role that General Mills,
is one of the biggest food manufacturers in the world,
doesn't take lightly. We need to play that role to
solve that gap. And it also works into our employees too.
We have tons of employees that give their time to
volunteer at food banks and to do their part for
their communities, and that's really been a part of the
(05:52):
DNA of General Mills. So let's talk a minute about
what this has done to the consumer. You were talking
about kids learning to cook for the first time. How
has the consumer behavior changed and how much of it
do you think that's permanent. I'd say the shifts have
been really significant. One shift they'll talk with you a
little bit about is just how people are shopping consumer
(06:14):
package food industry. Shopping online has really kind of lacked
a lot of other industries as people just haven't been
as comfortable buying groceries and food three Amazon or Walmart
or Roger or whatever channel they were looking to buy.
Through the shift that we've started to see, there has
been a dramatic uptick. Obviously, these people don't want to
spend as much time in grocery stores or going out
of their homes. That is something that we foresee sticking
(06:36):
not just through this year, but for the foreseeable future
and growing. Folks that may have been technology adverse or
didn't want to try the experience. Now I've kind of
been forced into that. Certainly, there's gonna be times when
you want to go to a store and go to
the market. But I also think once you experience how
easy it is to buy online and the kinds of
solutions that companies like General Mills can provide to consumers,
it becomes really a great experience. That's your core of
(06:59):
it is technology. You know, here at iHeart, we found
that it is greatly accelerated people's discovery that they could
get the radio on a lot of other devices other
than a radio device, doubling tripling use on smart TVs,
video game consoles, smart speakers, etcetera. What you're looking at
is ten years of technology adoption crammed into a few months.
(07:22):
We see it in our business. Sounds like you're seeing
in your business. What do you think that meets overall?
For marketers? How do they have to adjust to that
huge jump in technology adoption. We had fashioned ourselves a
lot of times to say, hey, we're a technology company
that sells food. The reality is that we still have
a long way to go to really matching the kind
(07:43):
of experiences that companies who are built out of technology
already delivered to consumers. And so one of the things
that we've been talking about lately is if you or
I have a great experience buying a airline ticket or
booking something on Airbnb, or a piece of content that
you enjoy watching through Netflix, that xs experience is really great, remarkable,
then every other experience you have via technology is going
(08:05):
to be held up to that level. That's what we're
talking about. In terms of our technology, it's no longer
even close to being good enough for us to say, oh, well,
this is how our competitive food brands are doing it,
and we're about the same or a little better than them.
We have to look at what the best experiences. Shifting
to an experienced lead mindset is really where marketing is
going to go. And as we look internally, it's the
(08:26):
way we're set up and the way that we work,
and maybe the talent the partners we have. There's really
a tremendous opportunity for us to start to think differently
about do we have the right capabilities and the right
kind of people in the right roles. Because we've gone
from a very product centered mindset to starting to move
now it's much more of a user based mindset. I
believe we're going to be going after talent and tech
companies or agencies that have more of an expertise there
(08:47):
to bring that in and really start to think about
that language and embedding it in the way that we
create experiences. I'm really excited about that because our brands
are bigger than just products. They tell stories, but they
also need to be about services. They need to elevate
themselves up to experiences. So I'm going to get into
some of that with you, but first I'd like to
go back in time to understand how you developed. You
grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where in two places
(09:10):
that gre up in Portland and then just south of Seattle.
And your dad was from Hawaii. Your mom was from
the Pacific Northwest. And they were teachers. Is that right?
They were, Yeah, both of them started off as teachers
in their career. How having teachers as parents affected you?
What kind of household was that like? First and foremost,
it gave me a much deeper empathy for people that
have chosen that profession. It's pretty outstanding. And the other
(09:31):
piece of it was in our house, everything kind of
had a learning agenda in mind. There was always learning
and always opportunities to learn. And really this push of
always being curious asking questions was good and okay, and
trying to figure out answer to those questions was a
big part of our childhood. I think my sister and
I really benefited from that. My dad eventually transitioned out
and went into more of a corporate business career and
(09:52):
human resources. My mom always stayed involved with school. She
substitute taught, she created an art literacy program. I feel
really fortunate to have grown up in that way and
been able to bring a lot of that curiosity and
constant thirst for trying to learn and figure out what
drives people and what makes brands interesting and where trends
are going. And I think that's part of a marketer's role,
(10:12):
is that not only creates curiosity for our function or
for other marketers, but really for the whole company. How
can we create a learning mindset for our whole organizations?
So we all think that way. Let me jump a
little bit and stay in the same time period. You
grew up in the seventies, eighties, and nineties and probably
the hippest place in the country then Pacific Northwest. Can
you paint a picture of that time and place. My
(10:35):
high school in college years were Big Harbert's Comma and
Seattle's areas in Washington State, probably in that moment kind
of the height of where music was really literally being created.
Growing up in the environment of gray, cloudy Seattle days
where everybody wore flannel and had long hair, and coffee
(10:56):
was becoming a big thing, and we're all getting introduced
to bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Sound Garden.
It was awesome that music scene and that vibe and
that part of the nineties and into the two thousands.
I mean, it really had a pretty transformational imprint on
the city of Seattle and in the Northwest because a
band like Pearl Jam, they were out and about in
(11:17):
the community in a way that made you feel really
proud of me part of Seattle, and it was just
a fun period of time to be a part of that.
So you talked about babysitting. What other jobs did you
have as a kid? I mentioned babysitting as a first
because I was really proud of the fact that most
of the times girls did that role. And I had
neighbors in our neighborhood who had boys and they said, hey,
(11:38):
do you want to interested babysitting that? So I did
that and I learned a ton of what to do
and what not to do in raising kids. The other
jobs that I add I did a lot of landscaping work,
so I was outside a lot, and I enjoyed that.
I had a job all through college in the summers,
and I worked at one of the best named companies
in the world's called Tacoma Screw Products. It had is
many different kinds of fasteners and screws and nuts and
(11:59):
bolts that you can have. Imagine more than I ever
thought was possible. Um, the opposite of being a handy guy,
Like I'm not good with that stuff. But every summer
of my best friend and I would work at different department.
So we were working and receiving, and then we work
in shipping, and then we worked the front desk, and
then we'd work the forklift and we'd move palletts. I
get experience a whole business and see it from every angle.
(12:19):
That was probably one of my more formative years. And
then my senior year in college, I was the vice
president of our school. That was a full time pretty
much a full time job that just provided a ton
of leadership opportunities. We had about a half million dollar
budget that we were responsible for. We were responsible for
bringing in entertainment in bands like we brought in food Fighters,
which is a huge deal, and we were also responsible
for all the other clubs that were on campus, and
(12:40):
just a great opportunity for me to learn how to
lead a team, how to run a business, how to
have a budget, and so those experiences were really formative
for me as I got into my next phase of
my career. Did you ever think about brands from marketing
as a kid? Did that ever go through your brain?
I have been in love with brands probably since I
was about five years old. The reason was, you know,
one of the best brands probably in the world grown
(13:02):
up right outside of Portland was Nike, and because I
love sports and because of the location. I remember being
pretty explicit at a really young age. My parents would
always joke with me that I had to have certain
clothes that had the squosh on it or I wouldn't
wear it. I laughed about that now because I still
in the same way. I still love Nike and I
still love that brand. And the other great part about
Seattle was just the explosion of companies that happened there
(13:25):
in the nineties Microsoft and then you had Starbucks, and
you had Amazon, and on and on and on. So
when Starbucks hit the scene and I eventually got a
job there, I was super excited because I gotta see
Howard Schultz talk a lot about his belief of the
Starbucks brand and the experience that he had when he
was in Europe, and how he wanted to bring it
to the world, and his aspiration was to be a bigger,
more impactful brand than Coke. I got to be a
(13:46):
part of that as that was really starting to form
and become bigger. It just reaffirmed us to what I
wanted to do, and so I eventually went to back
to school. I chose Michigan because it was known for marketing.
It's eventually why I chose this field, because I just
love the idea of brands. I love the motion they
have with them, and I love that people can be
loyal and advocate for brands. I'm very fortunate to be
working on the brands that I get to today. Let's
(14:07):
jump into Michigan. You're in the Pacific Northwest, and you
decide I'm going to get my m b A at Michigan.
Now you said it's because of marketing, but that must
have been a hell of a culture shock. It totally was.
But the program that they had there was really focused
on a few things. One was teamwork. You're gonna work
in teams and everything you do, So I love that
(14:29):
collegial feel. The other part of the program that I
liked it was actually quite blue collar in a lot
of ways. The kinds of students they wanted to attract
were the kinds of people that would roll their sleeves
up and really dig into a problem. I love that
idea of like getting into something deep and not sitting
at it from above. And so those values really matched
up really well what I wanted to do. In addition
to it being great marketing in a national business and
(14:50):
some other programs I was interested in, it's been an
amazing alumni network. I love going back to ann Arbor.
It's an amazing town, and so I'm really proud to
have gone to school there, and I try to represent that.
Be is. They have a lot of values that are
online with mine to have my brands. They're a great
brand in it themselves. So why did you think you
need the NBA, you were doing finance, Starbucks, you were
some nice places. What was it that said I need
(15:11):
the NBA. I felt like to transition into the next
level of leadership, that it would be an accelerator for me.
I felt like I wanted to do something different, and
I wanted to challenge myself, and I wanted to be
around new people that I could go and learn from.
I didn't know about brand management as a career path specifically.
When I was going back, I knew I wanted to
do marketing more broadly, But as soon as I stepped
(15:33):
foot on campus and I went to like one employee event,
I was like, Okay, I'm sold, Like this is what
I want to go do. What it does give you
is a different kind of perspective across all these opportunities
that you're probably not going to run into that many
times in your life. A network of people that are
massively talented that I still say in touch with many
of them, that are doing amazing things in their career
in other places, and just time to reflect a little bit.
(15:55):
There is a fast pace to it. You're learning, you're
going to classes, you're joining clubs, all that stuff. But
up been back They're like, Okay, I can actually reflect
on my life and what path do I want to
go on? What did you get out of the Midwest
that you use today in its formed sort of the
basis for your view of marketing. The truth is, even
though I've grown to love Minneapolis it's a wonderful city,
(16:17):
in the back of my mind, I'm still very much
West Coast like, I still feel like I represent the
West Coast and my beliefs and in my vibe and
what I try to think about. And so I will
say what I love about the Midwest, though I've been
in cities like in Urborn Minneapolis, which are really progressive,
really thoughtful cities with diversity from different places. So there
actually is quite a bit of diverse thinking and learning
(16:39):
that happens in these places that I've been able to
be in. And then in the city like Minneapolis, you
don't have to go very far to get really rural,
and I think the ability to be in places where
you get a different kind of outlook in life is
really helpful to provide different perspective as a marketer. I
think it makes me a more appreciative marketer. The different
kinds of people that are out there. But you know,
it's interesting a lot of these CpG companies. This has changed,
(16:59):
But I was in schools, like the next thing you
do after you go get your NBA if you want
to be like a really great marketer, as you get
to a CpG and you learn how to do the
marketing there, and I still think there's a lot of
credibility to that. But certainly a Procter and Gamble or
a Freedomly at PepsiCo or some of these other companies
General Mills, you're going to get immersed in, like how
to think really strategically about marketing and segmenting and targeting
and positioning and building great brands, and so those fundamentals
(17:22):
are transferable no matter where you end up. Marketing at
those companies too means a little bit something different when
you go there. You got to learn the whole business.
I've gotten this job and I've been able to meet
other cmos and talk about their roles, and a lot
of times they talk about marketing and the definition of
it can mean so many different things in different places.
They'll say, well, I do marketing, and then we get
into it and really are talking about advertising media. And
(17:43):
while I view that as part of marketing. I also
because of the way that we set it up at
General Mills, it's so much broader than that. We have
to know the p m L, you have to know
the forecast, you have to be in the supply chain.
You got to know the consumer and the brand in addition,
and so I think that breath is what I've really
come to love about the job. More on Mathew Magic
right after this quick break. Welcome back to Math and Magic.
(18:13):
Now let's hear some more from my conversation with Brad
hire Naga on this podcast. I always am interested in
how people got their break into the business. Story. You
get your m b A from prestigious school Michigan and
you wind up at General Mills. How part of the
benefit of going to the school like a Michigan or
(18:35):
some of these other grade schools that are out there
is you know, companies come to recruit there. I interned
at PepsiCo and down Fridol in Dallas and I loved it,
So I was sold. I was like, I want to
do this career. I want to go to brands. The
benefit for me to come to Mills and the opportunity
there was that it has so many brands and so
many categories, and I thought, Okay, if I can learn
how to market food, which is one of the most
(18:56):
intimate things where you have to build trust with people
to put something in their body, then it will pay
off in whatever I market in the future. So I
actually started out in a role that was in food service,
in a restaurant accounts. I didn't even know General sold
that stuff, and so when I came in the door,
they were like, Hey, you're going to be working on
restaurant accounts and helping support Subway and McDonald's. And I
was like, what do you mean, I'm not working on cheerios.
(19:18):
And I'm like, no, no, if we do channels and
that's your first and you work at Starbucks, so it's
a good fit. But I went in that job and
I learned so much about sales and about understanding the
channels and about restaurants. And I've been fortunate to do that,
and then I've worked on big brands like Pillsbury and
small brands like Betty Crocker, and epic brands like Totino's
and delicious brands like Old Opasso, and those kind of
(19:41):
diversity of experiences have really been such a benefit. They've
allowed me to see different consumers, different brands, and then
I've had the opportunity as well to just come into
roles that were off the beating path. What came to
me about five years into my career was an opportunity
to go lead a digital team. And at the time
it was very ambiguous what that meant. I had done
some digital, more keating, we had some success on Pillsbury,
(20:01):
and so I said, sure, I'm gonna go form whatever
this is. It was more an opportunity to really come
in and build a team. There's already this great talent
that was in these jobs, and I was able to
take them and bring back my commercial understanding and put
them into roles that helped them start to transform the
thinking of how we did brand building. The CMO that
worked at the company, his name is Mark Addicts and
he since retired, an amazing marketer, a legend. He's always
(20:23):
been a huge mentor for me. He gave me some
opportunities to really take that project and lean into and said, hey,
we got this thing called the future marketing. We need
someone to drive it. You get the commercial side, you
get the digital side. You seem to have a understanding
of where we need to go, like help craft this,
and so that's really been my career in the last
ten years has been figuring out how to do that
and having a ton of failure along the way, but
really starting to plot what does the future look like
(20:45):
and how do we bring not just one or two
of our brands to it, but all of our brands
to it, and all of our marketers there and all
our agency partners to that place. You've talked about moving
some of the most trusted iconic brands, which your company's
very well them for, from nostalgia to epic and current.
Why and how did you do that? And talk a
(21:06):
little bit about the internal pressure you must have gotten
not to mess with the classics. One of the opportunities
in a brand that was kind of a sleepy brand
but was doing okay when I got to work on
it was Totinos, and that's a almost a billion dollar brand.
It sells pizza, rolls and pizza. When I inherited it,
it had been doing a lot of pretty standard kind
of marketing. It was an after school snack, It was
(21:27):
targeted towards moms. It was doing fine, and so you know,
when things are going okay. It's not always the easiest
time to come in and say let's do something different.
But what I started to see right away was that
there was a huge opportunity and the brand had dabbled
in other places before. It had sponsored the X Games,
it had partnered with snowboarding athletes, and it had built
this kind of community people who love the brand. We
(21:48):
just said, hey, we've had a huge opportunity. We're not
tapping into. How do we experiment with this consumer group
who actually loves the brand? And how did we happen
to that insight and really started to build this branding
culture because otherwise it's not relevant, it never stands out,
no one notices it. We went with that mindset into
gotta do what we had to do day to day,
and we have to craft the future. And in that
future crafting, we were really kind of set free. So
(22:10):
we went into all these different passion places around the brand.
We explored comedy, we explored comic con, we explored passion
projects around gaming. We even explored stuff around marijuana culture,
and we follow a consumer and where they went. We
wanted to Tina's to really be epic around leisure, like
championing anything you could do to live the most leisurely
life stle that you could. And so we created this
(22:31):
brand idea called Live Free, Couch Hard, and everything was
built around owning the couch. So it made our partnerships
with people like Twitch and other kinds of video games
like Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed an Xbox. It
made it really like a seamless thing, and that's what
our consumers were already doing. Anyway, we did in a
very absurd, irreverent, but very self aware way, and we
were able to craft a brand that started to break through.
(22:54):
It's given new life to it. We're able to really
flip the brand over and say, okay, we still got
to talk to moms about making sure they're buying product,
but really this brand at its heart is for this.
We call them instependent. But like these people who are
seventeen years old, knowledgeable luck culture, they want things when
they want it, like, let's make the brand for them.
What I'm most proud about is that we're able to
use that success to break through old, old, old traditions
(23:15):
that generals that need to evolve. We weren't allowed to
advertise on rated our movies. We weren't allowed to be
in certain cable programs because it was too mature. We
weren't allowed to market around things like marijuana. And that's
not right for every brand, and certainly not for a
lot of our brands that have younger audiences, but for
the audiences we're going after, and for how pinpointed and
targeted we could get, it was right. We were able
(23:36):
to break through that way and really start to lead
the company to think much more progressively. When you say
they had rules that you couldn't do it, who sets
those rules? Where they set long ago and no one
questioned them? Are they set by committee or the CEO
or the CMO? How do things like that happen in
a company that has to kind of longevity that General
Mills has. I think some of them are traditionally said
(23:57):
and no one questions them. Old rules like that happen
in a lot of places. We also have a Responsible
Marketing Committee that's very effective and looks across all of
things that may not comply with our marketing policies. Our
lawyers and our marketers that are on that committee. I'm
one of the people now on it. Ironically, are pretty
flexible in terms of thinking like we're constantly evolving what
that looks like. But I will tell you going to
(24:19):
that committee five six seventy years ago, marketers would get scared.
I think like I don't want to take this and
then get shut down, or I don't want to take
this and it's gonna look bad if it doesn't work.
Instead of putting it the other way, like let's go
to that committee and like let's build on it and
come with new ideas. It was kind of seen the
other way, but it took some things like Totino's running
into things. And our team was awesome and they were like,
you know what we see ourselves kind of the renegade
and where the change age. And to be honest, I
(24:41):
had lots of great support from other leaders around the
company that were like, dude, go like push it, push it,
try it be different, Like we don't have enough of that.
I won't name the lawyer, but I had one lawyer
it was like telling me one day, He's like, we
don't get sued enough. You should try to get a
suit more. And I was like, well, I don't know,
I'm gona take that advice completely. Nevertheless, that was a
good period of time for us to really test those parameters,
and what we found was that the company was Radio
(25:01):
Evolve that just needed some brands to kind of step
up and push on some old rules. As you move forward,
you have to take a lot of chances. No one
gets it right all the time. Everybody's got failures. What
was your biggest failure with a brand and why and
what did you learn from it. I had a pretty
massive failure about five or six years ago, and it
was actually on the same brands on Totinos. We were
(25:23):
taking a pizza and we were going to move it
from being a circle pizza to a rectangle pizza. At
the time, our consumer research said, hey, this is a
good idea. Our supply chain absolutely needed to do that
because the equipment we had needed to be redone and
we didn't have a capacity to make the pizza we're
making at the time, so we need to replace it.
And that was the way to do it and meet
the demand that we had of consumers. I inherited that
(25:44):
project kind of halfway through, and my gun initially was like,
I don't know, this feels like it's such a big change,
Like how are we going to make this change? And
then seeing the research and talking into the supply chain
the reason to do it. I kind of allowed myself
to go down that path because when we did launch it,
immediately business dropped by about I was like, oh my god,
I completely broke this business. That's such a big decline,
(26:05):
especially in CpG. If I would have followed my gut
a little bit more, I think I would have prepared
for the launch of it in a more aggressive way
to help people make that transition. Fortunately, we were able
to do some reactions and do some marketing tactics and
bring people back along, and the business is now bigger
than it's ever been. But at the time and the
crisis around that and in the fear because that is
one of our biggest businesses, I felt like I messed up.
(26:28):
You mentioned at the beginning, like there's this left brain
right brain balancing act that we all have to do.
I think in that instance, I leaned way too heavily
into logic, being myself into thinking it was the right
thing versus feeling that it was the right thing, and
so I always try to find that balance based off
of that learning that in that instance, I definitely was
off balance making that decision. Let's talk about left brain
right brain. When I was in college and was a
(26:50):
sociology major spending a lot of time and what is
now called research or data, I was cautioned by somebody
that research is not policy making at best, it conditions
your gut to make a gut decision. You talk a
lot about left brain right brain. Indeed, this podcast is
about math and magic, that mix that seems to be
(27:13):
when you get it right, create the great successes. Talk
to me a little bit about that and what role
that place in both your organization and in your own
view of marketing. I really like the way that you
talked about research. That makes a ton of sense to me.
What we're looking for within marketers and our organization. It's
people that can do both those things, or if they're
firmly in one camp or the other, we know where
(27:33):
they kind of fit. We did some team building with
my leadership team a few months ago. They basically put
us into a color wheel. I ended up being on
the color wheel I think yellow, which was about ideas.
There was other people in our group that were green,
which is about people first. There was another group that
was more about command first and red, and there was
last group was blue, which is more about logic and
numbers first. And what we found was that a lot
of people are group were much more balanced, but in
(27:54):
most other functions in our company, people were much more blue,
which is like I need the numbers, and then they
were read and to make the command knowing that, like
I'm much more in the idea of state, but I
know that people need to see that first, and so
when I want to sell an idea, it's helpful for
me to have that context so that I can sell
them with the numbers or with the quantitative or with
the KPI is up front. I think a lot of
time great ideas, really creative people in companies get lost
(28:17):
because the people ultimately making the decision or holding the
pen to the actual checkbook don't understand how it drives
the business. And so ultimately you have to have both.
We're really trying to push our teams to have that
experience where they're like they understand the business and commercial
side enough of it that it has to make business sense,
but then it also has to have I love what
you say, the magic sense to it. What's what's the
sense of the idea that's going to be so creatively
(28:40):
amazing and remarkable that people are going to fall in
love with it and talk about it. So that's part
of the in mindset is can you bring the logic
with that creative essence of the idea. Do you think
there are many people actually who can do both or
do you think most people are either analytical or creative.
It's a little bit of a unique trait to be
completely balanced. I think everyone kind of leans one way
(29:00):
or the other. I think there's also a place for
everybody too. It's a comment upon leaders to be able
to figure out the right mix of those people and
build that on their teams. Another way of looking at
ideas is this concept we talk a lot about orchestration,
like how do you orchestrate an insight into a strategy,
into an idea into an activation and learn about it?
And who on our team can see the bigger chess
(29:22):
board and all the pieces and be able to kind
of orchestrate them beautifully to that execution. It's hard to
find that talent people that can do that, and I
think that's true in marketing. I think that's truugh in
supply chain or finance or any other functions or industries
that you might be in. But the great thing is,
I think there's an ability to find people that can
do that and put them in the right positions, and
then give them the people around them that are maybe
(29:43):
a little more analytical or maybe more creative. Another interesting
spin on this organization that we've been talking about is
you know the people in the company that are amazing
disruptive thinkers, and you also know the people in the
company that are amazing executors, and you need both of
those things. But some of the most often forgotten people
in those companies are the connectors that connect the dots
(30:03):
between the two. We don't necessarily see them. They kind
of make it happen, but they don't get the reward
for getting it done or the word for coming up
with the idea. Understanding as a leader like I need
all those things? How do I get them? You need
them all? Let's talk a little bit about your views
on things I'm at I heart number one audio company
in America. I have a bias, but I've been particularly
interested in your comments about shifting more resources to audio
(30:26):
radio podcast. Why did radio get forgotten? I think because
video more easily conveys the marketing idea to people in
a border. Even today, when you're going to go show
a marketing concept to people, it's really easy just to
be like, Okay, here's the fifteen second video that I
want to show you so you get the idea. I
(30:48):
also think that TV as a medium, even still today
as people continue to migrate into other channels, hold such
a significant weight because of what people think about television,
and it's been interesting how you want to actually have
the most reach, you actually want to go into radio.
I know for us today, when we talk about an idea,
where does this idea need to go? Where can it
(31:09):
adjoy or solve a problem in people's life? And that
leads us to much more holistic thinking of ideas that
a lot of times it's like, well, this is a
voice thing because we actually want it to be solved
through either a voice command or it actually has a
much more musical piece where we want people to listen
to it and have that emotion. When you can center
it that way, it allows us to be a lot
more channel agnostic or pick the right roles for channels
(31:30):
as they come forward. But certainly the push that we've
had the last couple of years, I think you guys
have done a really great job of getting brands to
think about this is to really understand in what ways
then if you're reconsidering radio and sound an audio, does
your brand need to show up in those spaces people
are multitasking. You can't leave out sound in the radio
and just focus on video and vice versa. And so
(31:51):
how do those things even work together? And that's where
we've done a lot of work to advance ourselves, like
what is our mnemonic, what is our sound architecture? How
do we want to sound on? And I'm excited about
that because that's to me, where we've had more of
a gap than we should have in our plans over
the last number of years. It's interesting to me is
having spent a lot of years in TV, I think
if TV is America's hobby, radio has been America's companion.
(32:14):
We keep people company. Other companies besides yours, like P
and G has gone from probably three or four years
ago not even being in the top two hundred radio advertisers,
so I think last year they were number one or
number two, So there's definitely a trend moving here. And
then of course, we finally in radio have a new
shiny toy called podcasting. It's really taken the world by storm.
(32:36):
How do you think about podcasting. It's elevated to a
level where you know, we used to talk about what
shows we watch, and now in conversations people are talking
about what podcasts they listen to, and it's become a
cultural currency in a way because the topics are so diverse.
There's the intimacy that I know you've talked a lot
about that you have. It's that one to one connection
where I can just listen to someone talking. I feel
(32:58):
like they're talking to me individually versus a show or
a movie where it's much broader for everybody to me.
There's a ton of potential on that, and a lot
of our brands are moving that direction. They're figuring out, Okay,
what ways can we show up? How do we continue
to push our brands to show up in those spaces
really creatively and use those dynamic channels in ways that
they haven't been used before. I'm super excited about that.
(33:19):
The podcast space for us is something we're highly interested
in doing more and more work in. Let's talk a
second about TV. CpG and TV synonymous. TV has always
been the foundation of most CpG campaigns, and yet now
we have all these great scripted TV shows moving to
subscription service and not being available and adds supported TV.
(33:41):
How has that changed the thinking about television and the
opportunities for the products you have. I think it changes
almost day by day, especially in the space of different
formats and platforms that are popping up all over the place.
What does that mean? We're still pretty diverse and where
we try to invest in and TV is still a
part of that. But it goes back to what are
our consumers doing, where are they spending time, and where
(34:03):
they're going to be receptive to things that we could
provide to them in some of our brands to really
kind of recraft the role of what advertising actually is.
And it's probably going off to back to you know,
you talked a little bit Procter and Gamble, but vacuum
into the days when they were creating soap operas to
run their heads between. There's a lot of opportunity for
us to tell different stories with our characters, with our
consumers that we could do a lot for ourselves to
(34:26):
shift the thinking of what that means. How do we
start to shift this the stories and content that's useful
and enjoyable and interesting. We've been in conversations with lots
of different kinds of creators, some in agencies, some in Hollywood,
some production, and like, how can we think about these assets?
And this I p differently, and certainly you've seen things
with like Lego, and I think toy companies have done
it really well crafting movies and series and all those
(34:47):
types of things. We're still kind of early stages with
where that's going, but I think we have to go
that direction. Let's jump to some advice. How should people
think about hiring? You've built some really interesting, cutting edge teams.
What's your secret source there? I think the first thing
that if you're responsible for leading a team is to
be really reflective and open with yourself about what you're
(35:10):
great at and what you're not great at. I've come
to terms with things that I'm not good at over time.
And knowing the kinds of people that you need on teams,
both from a talent and expertise perspective, in strengths that
offset things that I don't have, has really been a
big part of my philosophy over time. The second pieces,
I love to hire for diversity, and I mean that
partially in terms of diversity of ethnicity and preferences and
(35:33):
all that kind of thing, but I also means that
in diversity of experience. People who have had experiences in
different industries or agencies or in different career paths. Those people,
I feel like make really good partners because they see
the world through different lenses and had experiences they can
bring to the table. And then the last part of
it is people who are nice people. I've worked on
teams where one jerk can throw off the whole dynamic
(35:57):
of the team. So holding fast the values of being
a good person kind of one another, I think is
really important in building the right chemistry. And I'll be
honest with the current team I've got, I'm really happy
about it. It's taken time to get it to a
place where it gets as high performing as it could be,
or as it should be. If you could give some
advice to your twenty one year old self, what advice
would that be? I would say, never operate out of
(36:19):
fear of making the wrong choice. I think a lot
of times when you're at that age, you feel like, Okay,
I gotta make the right choice at the right time.
And I think life has a way of guiding you
down paths that you're meant to go down. At the time,
I felt like I was way more in control probably
than I really was, And honestly like getting back to
a place where I could have been a little more
present and a little more accepting of the way things
(36:40):
were going, not trying to control everything would have made life,
I think, a little bit easier along the way. And
the other part I would have probably told myself is,
don't be afraid to take big swings at things. I
feel like I have over my career here and there,
but I think more consistently, like trying those big things
and failing potentially is totally fine, and actually, like I
look it that now, I'm like, I have a different
(37:01):
perspective on that at my age that I did back then,
which is like failure is actually really productive and good.
Back then, I didn't want to fail. I want to
look like I was doing everything the right all the time,
and that's just impossible. We end each episode by giving
some shout outs. Instead of our usual focus on marketing people,
let's focus on just marketing math and magic data analytics
and the creative. What's your favorite marketing success, Your company
(37:23):
or anywhere else built on data and analytics. Driven by that,
I will tell you we have made some really big
strides in data and analytics and technology in general. We
have coupled platforms. One is like Pillsbury dot com and
Betty Croker dot com, which are basically recipe and meal
solution sites in platforms, but also our box ops for
education platform. The way that that works is once people
(37:44):
sign up to the app and they scan their receipts,
they're able to localize, personalize the schools that they want
to give money to. What's really cool for us is
that is we're able to look at that. It gives
us the data to be able to say, Okay, what
kind of things are these folks buying that they would
value more of us, they can donate more of their schools.
We're really starting to use that information to give people
more customized, personalized solutions so that it's less of things
(38:06):
that they wouldn't want and more things that they're really valuing.
This concept of moving from mass marketing to one to
want at mass, I think it's starting to happen, which
back to your point on radio is another thing that
I love. It feels much more one to want at
mass when you think about radio, I'm excited about it
because personalized experiences for people for a big CpG scaled
company that has household penetration is really hard to conceptualize.
(38:30):
So we needed the data and we needed the personalization
ability to activate behind it, and we're starting to do that.
So let's go to the other side of it. Creative.
Do you have a success that you think about that
you admire that came off just share creativity. Somebody had
a brilliant idea and just did it. This is gonna
(38:51):
sound massively simple, which I guess sometimes the best ideas are.
Our Cheerios team has done some amazing work over the years,
and that business has been on fire the last couple
of years. They have really started to embrace this benefit
that's always existed in the brand, which has been about
heart health. It's very simple thing that the marketing teams
and the research developments came back with. It's like, hey,
(39:11):
did you know that we can actually make cheerios in
the shape of hearts. They launched this idea which is
just all around like heart shaped cheerios and against super
simple creative idea what had an amazing impact on the
business and an action like that then allowed us to
lock all sorts of different ways and creative and content
and partnerships and ways to make people who are wanting
to extend their lives longer and live a healthier life
(39:32):
do it in a way that the product brought it
fully around that. To me, it is a great push
in to creativity and done really simply in a really
elegant way. Was really cool, Brad. Great conversations, even though
it's by phone. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so
much for having me. I love talking to you. I
really appreciate it. Here are a few things I picked
(39:55):
up in my conversation with Brad. One build your business
for today and tomorrow. At a company with a huge
legacy like General Mills, you need to make sure you're
meeting today's demand while preparing for tomorrow's marketplace to connect
with consumers you already have. When Brad learned that video
gamers already liked the Totino's brand, he marketed directly to
(40:17):
them and sales grew even bigger. Three higher people who
are connectors, as Brad says, you need creative and analytical
types on every team. But don't forget to have people
who can bring everyone together. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening.
That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening
(40:38):
to Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio.
The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to
Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling are Wonderful Talent, which
is no small feat. Nikki Eatore for pulling research bill plaques,
and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch,
and of course Gayl Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
(41:01):
next time, h
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of My
Heart Radio. I had a pretty massive failure about five
or six years ago, and it was actually on Tartinos.
We were taking a pizza and we were going to
move it from being a circle pizza to a rectangle pizza.
The reasons we did that our consumer research said, hey,
this is a good idea. Our supply chain absolutely needed
(00:24):
to do that. My gun initially was like, I don't know,
this feels like it's such a big change. I kind
of allowed myself to go down that path because when
we did launch it, immediately a business dropped by about
I was like, oh my god, I completely broke this business.
(00:46):
Hi'm Bob Pittman, and welcome to another work from Home
episode of Math and Magic. Stories from the Frontiers and Marketing.
Episode by episode, we dispect marketing and business, examining that
special relationship between the analytics and the creativity. Today, we
have someone who is an avowed practitioner of the combination
of left brain and right brain. He calls those folks
(01:08):
and people his name Brad Uranaga, Chief Brand Officer North
America for General Mills. Brad grew up in the Pacific Northwest,
the creative kid who loves sports and student government too.
He has worked on iconic brands and moved them from
nostalgia to current and epic with great success. He has
(01:31):
fully formed important insights about hiring a culture that helped
build a strong organization. He started his career in finance,
including at Starbucks, went to the mid West for his
NBA at Michigan, and then discovered his true calling marketing.
He's one of the top thinkers in marketing today with
visible successes to validate his theories. Brad welcome, Thanks so
(01:52):
much for having I love that intro and hearing your
voice makes it sound ten times better. Well, listen, we're
gonna dig into some real meaty stuff, but I first
want to do our you in sixty seconds feature, So
you're ready, I'm ready? Yes, Okay, here you go. Do
you prefer sunrise or sunset? Sunset, football or basketball, Basketball,
(02:13):
Instagram or Twitter, Instagram, Seattle or Minneapolis, Seattle Beach or Mountains,
Oh Beach for sure, Nike or Adidas, Nike, Pizza or Tacos.
I will go with pizza marketing or finance marketing. Smartest
person you know? My dad first job babysitter favorite cereal,
(02:35):
Lucky Charms, who would play you in a movie. I'm
gonna take some liberties here. I'll say Ryan Reynolds, title
of your memoir, unlocking potential favorite music artist. I'm gonna
say Drake, favorite Star Wars character, Bubba fet favorite video
game Call of Duty? And what's one food you'd never eat?
(02:57):
Mm hmmm, probably blowfish. That's a good choice. So let's
jump in. For the past few weeks, we have really
seen our society shaken to the core. We've seen broken
consumer habits, and it's forced us all to examine ourselves
and the world around us like probably we've never done before.
(03:18):
As a marketer, how have you dealt with it? Our
purpose as a company has been to serve the world
by making food that it loves. It quickly shifted when
COVID nineteen really hit hard in March two, changing the
last word from loves to needs, and I think that's
where we really started to have even more empathy with
our consumers because it wasn't enough just to be marketing
(03:42):
and selling anymore. It was really truly to understand what
people were going through. You know, we're fortunate to be
in an industry that has been one that people need
even more as folks have shifted to home and making
more meals at home, and so our role to really
play was to ensure that we could just get food
eight that people needed and make it as accessible and
(04:03):
affordable and safe as possible. And so the first few
weeks really were kind of a testament to our supply
chain that they were able to really turn it on
in a way that was able to really fill that demand.
I was kind of ostruck really by the way that
they worked. And we've talked a lot about frontline workers
in different industries. Certainly the folks that work at our
plants are part of that really heroic group, and so
we've been doing our best to support that group. As
(04:24):
we've kind of understood what new demand looks like, we
really started to change how we think about what our
roles are. Our marketing philosophy is trying to be action
lead action first, and then talk about it. And so
how do we give people tips, ideas, tricks to be
able to stretch their dollar and afford more food and
make more things out of their pantry, refrigerator, People spending
much more time with family, How do we help provide
(04:46):
content that's much more about creating those kind of moments
that you want with your kids, or really teaching them
how to cook for the first time. And so the
pivot on how we've become much more human centric and
action oriented in a way that feels really good. As
a marketer, it feels like doing our part to help.
It felt really good to be able to play that
role given all the challenges that we're facing right now.
You know, I've seen some talk about General Mills mission
(05:09):
to solve the hunger gap. Can you talk a little
bit about that. The hunger gap has always been something
that specifically as we look at North America, has been
a challenge. I think within the last few months that
gap has accelerated and increased as people have lost jobs,
as kids who actually relied on lunch and breakfast programs
at school, we're no longer able to go to class.
(05:31):
And so we've done some really great work in partnership
with Feeding America and No Kid Hungry to really solve
the problem of hunger. That's a role that General Mills,
is one of the biggest food manufacturers in the world,
doesn't take lightly. We need to play that role to
solve that gap. And it also works into our employees too.
We have tons of employees that give their time to
volunteer at food banks and to do their part for
their communities, and that's really been a part of the
(05:52):
DNA of General Mills. So let's talk a minute about
what this has done to the consumer. You were talking
about kids learning to cook for the first time. How
has the consumer behavior changed and how much of it
do you think that's permanent. I'd say the shifts have
been really significant. One shift they'll talk with you a
little bit about is just how people are shopping consumer
(06:14):
package food industry. Shopping online has really kind of lacked
a lot of other industries as people just haven't been
as comfortable buying groceries and food three Amazon or Walmart
or Roger or whatever channel they were looking to buy.
Through the shift that we've started to see, there has
been a dramatic uptick. Obviously, these people don't want to
spend as much time in grocery stores or going out
of their homes. That is something that we foresee sticking
(06:36):
not just through this year, but for the foreseeable future
and growing. Folks that may have been technology adverse or
didn't want to try the experience. Now I've kind of
been forced into that. Certainly, there's gonna be times when
you want to go to a store and go to
the market. But I also think once you experience how
easy it is to buy online and the kinds of
solutions that companies like General Mills can provide to consumers,
it becomes really a great experience. That's your core of
(06:59):
it is technology. You know, here at iHeart, we found
that it is greatly accelerated people's discovery that they could
get the radio on a lot of other devices other
than a radio device, doubling tripling use on smart TVs,
video game consoles, smart speakers, etcetera. What you're looking at
is ten years of technology adoption crammed into a few months.
(07:22):
We see it in our business. Sounds like you're seeing
in your business. What do you think that meets overall?
For marketers? How do they have to adjust to that
huge jump in technology adoption. We had fashioned ourselves a
lot of times to say, hey, we're a technology company
that sells food. The reality is that we still have
a long way to go to really matching the kind
(07:43):
of experiences that companies who are built out of technology
already delivered to consumers. And so one of the things
that we've been talking about lately is if you or
I have a great experience buying a airline ticket or
booking something on Airbnb, or a piece of content that
you enjoy watching through Netflix, that xs experience is really great, remarkable,
then every other experience you have via technology is going
(08:05):
to be held up to that level. That's what we're
talking about. In terms of our technology, it's no longer
even close to being good enough for us to say, oh, well,
this is how our competitive food brands are doing it,
and we're about the same or a little better than them.
We have to look at what the best experiences. Shifting
to an experienced lead mindset is really where marketing is
going to go. And as we look internally, it's the
(08:26):
way we're set up and the way that we work,
and maybe the talent the partners we have. There's really
a tremendous opportunity for us to start to think differently
about do we have the right capabilities and the right
kind of people in the right roles. Because we've gone
from a very product centered mindset to starting to move
now it's much more of a user based mindset. I
believe we're going to be going after talent and tech
companies or agencies that have more of an expertise there
(08:47):
to bring that in and really start to think about
that language and embedding it in the way that we
create experiences. I'm really excited about that because our brands
are bigger than just products. They tell stories, but they
also need to be about services. They need to elevate
themselves up to experiences. So I'm going to get into
some of that with you, but first I'd like to
go back in time to understand how you developed. You
grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where in two places
(09:10):
that gre up in Portland and then just south of Seattle.
And your dad was from Hawaii. Your mom was from
the Pacific Northwest. And they were teachers. Is that right?
They were, Yeah, both of them started off as teachers
in their career. How having teachers as parents affected you?
What kind of household was that like? First and foremost,
it gave me a much deeper empathy for people that
have chosen that profession. It's pretty outstanding. And the other
(09:31):
piece of it was in our house, everything kind of
had a learning agenda in mind. There was always learning
and always opportunities to learn. And really this push of
always being curious asking questions was good and okay, and
trying to figure out answer to those questions was a
big part of our childhood. I think my sister and
I really benefited from that. My dad eventually transitioned out
and went into more of a corporate business career and
(09:52):
human resources. My mom always stayed involved with school. She
substitute taught, she created an art literacy program. I feel
really fortunate to have grown up in that way and
been able to bring a lot of that curiosity and
constant thirst for trying to learn and figure out what
drives people and what makes brands interesting and where trends
are going. And I think that's part of a marketer's role,
(10:12):
is that not only creates curiosity for our function or
for other marketers, but really for the whole company. How
can we create a learning mindset for our whole organizations?
So we all think that way. Let me jump a
little bit and stay in the same time period. You
grew up in the seventies, eighties, and nineties and probably
the hippest place in the country then Pacific Northwest. Can
you paint a picture of that time and place. My
(10:35):
high school in college years were Big Harbert's Comma and
Seattle's areas in Washington State, probably in that moment kind
of the height of where music was really literally being created.
Growing up in the environment of gray, cloudy Seattle days
where everybody wore flannel and had long hair, and coffee
(10:56):
was becoming a big thing, and we're all getting introduced
to bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Sound Garden.
It was awesome that music scene and that vibe and
that part of the nineties and into the two thousands.
I mean, it really had a pretty transformational imprint on
the city of Seattle and in the Northwest because a
band like Pearl Jam, they were out and about in
(11:17):
the community in a way that made you feel really
proud of me part of Seattle, and it was just
a fun period of time to be a part of that.
So you talked about babysitting. What other jobs did you
have as a kid? I mentioned babysitting as a first
because I was really proud of the fact that most
of the times girls did that role. And I had
neighbors in our neighborhood who had boys and they said, hey,
(11:38):
do you want to interested babysitting that? So I did
that and I learned a ton of what to do
and what not to do in raising kids. The other
jobs that I add I did a lot of landscaping work,
so I was outside a lot, and I enjoyed that.
I had a job all through college in the summers,
and I worked at one of the best named companies
in the world's called Tacoma Screw Products. It had is
many different kinds of fasteners and screws and nuts and
(11:59):
bolts that you can have. Imagine more than I ever
thought was possible. Um, the opposite of being a handy guy,
Like I'm not good with that stuff. But every summer
of my best friend and I would work at different department.
So we were working and receiving, and then we work
in shipping, and then we worked the front desk, and
then we'd work the forklift and we'd move palletts. I
get experience a whole business and see it from every angle.
(12:19):
That was probably one of my more formative years. And
then my senior year in college, I was the vice
president of our school. That was a full time pretty
much a full time job that just provided a ton
of leadership opportunities. We had about a half million dollar
budget that we were responsible for. We were responsible for
bringing in entertainment in bands like we brought in food Fighters,
which is a huge deal, and we were also responsible
for all the other clubs that were on campus, and
(12:40):
just a great opportunity for me to learn how to
lead a team, how to run a business, how to
have a budget, and so those experiences were really formative
for me as I got into my next phase of
my career. Did you ever think about brands from marketing
as a kid? Did that ever go through your brain?
I have been in love with brands probably since I
was about five years old. The reason was, you know,
one of the best brands probably in the world grown
(13:02):
up right outside of Portland was Nike, and because I
love sports and because of the location. I remember being
pretty explicit at a really young age. My parents would
always joke with me that I had to have certain
clothes that had the squosh on it or I wouldn't
wear it. I laughed about that now because I still
in the same way. I still love Nike and I
still love that brand. And the other great part about
Seattle was just the explosion of companies that happened there
(13:25):
in the nineties Microsoft and then you had Starbucks, and
you had Amazon, and on and on and on. So
when Starbucks hit the scene and I eventually got a
job there, I was super excited because I gotta see
Howard Schultz talk a lot about his belief of the
Starbucks brand and the experience that he had when he
was in Europe, and how he wanted to bring it
to the world, and his aspiration was to be a bigger,
more impactful brand than Coke. I got to be a
(13:46):
part of that as that was really starting to form
and become bigger. It just reaffirmed us to what I
wanted to do, and so I eventually went to back
to school. I chose Michigan because it was known for marketing.
It's eventually why I chose this field, because I just
love the idea of brands. I love the motion they
have with them, and I love that people can be
loyal and advocate for brands. I'm very fortunate to be
working on the brands that I get to today. Let's
(14:07):
jump into Michigan. You're in the Pacific Northwest, and you
decide I'm going to get my m b A at Michigan.
Now you said it's because of marketing, but that must
have been a hell of a culture shock. It totally was.
But the program that they had there was really focused
on a few things. One was teamwork. You're gonna work
in teams and everything you do, So I love that
(14:29):
collegial feel. The other part of the program that I
liked it was actually quite blue collar in a lot
of ways. The kinds of students they wanted to attract
were the kinds of people that would roll their sleeves
up and really dig into a problem. I love that
idea of like getting into something deep and not sitting
at it from above. And so those values really matched
up really well what I wanted to do. In addition
to it being great marketing in a national business and
(14:50):
some other programs I was interested in, it's been an
amazing alumni network. I love going back to ann Arbor.
It's an amazing town, and so I'm really proud to
have gone to school there, and I try to represent that.
Be is. They have a lot of values that are
online with mine to have my brands. They're a great
brand in it themselves. So why did you think you
need the NBA, you were doing finance, Starbucks, you were
some nice places. What was it that said I need
(15:11):
the NBA. I felt like to transition into the next
level of leadership, that it would be an accelerator for me.
I felt like I wanted to do something different, and
I wanted to challenge myself, and I wanted to be
around new people that I could go and learn from.
I didn't know about brand management as a career path specifically.
When I was going back, I knew I wanted to
do marketing more broadly, But as soon as I stepped
(15:33):
foot on campus and I went to like one employee event,
I was like, Okay, I'm sold, Like this is what
I want to go do. What it does give you
is a different kind of perspective across all these opportunities
that you're probably not going to run into that many
times in your life. A network of people that are
massively talented that I still say in touch with many
of them, that are doing amazing things in their career
in other places, and just time to reflect a little bit.
(15:55):
There is a fast pace to it. You're learning, you're
going to classes, you're joining clubs, all that stuff. But
up been back They're like, Okay, I can actually reflect
on my life and what path do I want to
go on? What did you get out of the Midwest
that you use today in its formed sort of the
basis for your view of marketing. The truth is, even
though I've grown to love Minneapolis it's a wonderful city,
(16:17):
in the back of my mind, I'm still very much
West Coast like, I still feel like I represent the
West Coast and my beliefs and in my vibe and
what I try to think about. And so I will
say what I love about the Midwest, though I've been
in cities like in Urborn Minneapolis, which are really progressive,
really thoughtful cities with diversity from different places. So there
actually is quite a bit of diverse thinking and learning
(16:39):
that happens in these places that I've been able to
be in. And then in the city like Minneapolis, you
don't have to go very far to get really rural,
and I think the ability to be in places where
you get a different kind of outlook in life is
really helpful to provide different perspective as a marketer. I
think it makes me a more appreciative marketer. The different
kinds of people that are out there. But you know,
it's interesting a lot of these CpG companies. This has changed,
(16:59):
But I was in schools, like the next thing you
do after you go get your NBA if you want
to be like a really great marketer, as you get
to a CpG and you learn how to do the
marketing there, and I still think there's a lot of
credibility to that. But certainly a Procter and Gamble or
a Freedomly at PepsiCo or some of these other companies
General Mills, you're going to get immersed in, like how
to think really strategically about marketing and segmenting and targeting
and positioning and building great brands, and so those fundamentals
(17:22):
are transferable no matter where you end up. Marketing at
those companies too means a little bit something different when
you go there. You got to learn the whole business.
I've gotten this job and I've been able to meet
other cmos and talk about their roles, and a lot
of times they talk about marketing and the definition of
it can mean so many different things in different places.
They'll say, well, I do marketing, and then we get
into it and really are talking about advertising media. And
(17:43):
while I view that as part of marketing. I also
because of the way that we set it up at
General Mills, it's so much broader than that. We have
to know the p m L, you have to know
the forecast, you have to be in the supply chain.
You got to know the consumer and the brand in addition,
and so I think that breath is what I've really
come to love about the job. More on Mathew Magic
right after this quick break. Welcome back to Math and Magic.
(18:13):
Now let's hear some more from my conversation with Brad
hire Naga on this podcast. I always am interested in
how people got their break into the business. Story. You
get your m b A from prestigious school Michigan and
you wind up at General Mills. How part of the
benefit of going to the school like a Michigan or
(18:35):
some of these other grade schools that are out there
is you know, companies come to recruit there. I interned
at PepsiCo and down Fridol in Dallas and I loved it,
So I was sold. I was like, I want to
do this career. I want to go to brands. The
benefit for me to come to Mills and the opportunity
there was that it has so many brands and so
many categories, and I thought, Okay, if I can learn
how to market food, which is one of the most
(18:56):
intimate things where you have to build trust with people
to put something in their body, then it will pay
off in whatever I market in the future. So I
actually started out in a role that was in food service,
in a restaurant accounts. I didn't even know General sold
that stuff, and so when I came in the door,
they were like, Hey, you're going to be working on
restaurant accounts and helping support Subway and McDonald's. And I
was like, what do you mean, I'm not working on cheerios.
(19:18):
And I'm like, no, no, if we do channels and
that's your first and you work at Starbucks, so it's
a good fit. But I went in that job and
I learned so much about sales and about understanding the
channels and about restaurants. And I've been fortunate to do that,
and then I've worked on big brands like Pillsbury and
small brands like Betty Crocker, and epic brands like Totino's
and delicious brands like Old Opasso, and those kind of
(19:41):
diversity of experiences have really been such a benefit. They've
allowed me to see different consumers, different brands, and then
I've had the opportunity as well to just come into
roles that were off the beating path. What came to
me about five years into my career was an opportunity
to go lead a digital team. And at the time
it was very ambiguous what that meant. I had done
some digital, more keating, we had some success on Pillsbury,
(20:01):
and so I said, sure, I'm gonna go form whatever
this is. It was more an opportunity to really come
in and build a team. There's already this great talent
that was in these jobs, and I was able to
take them and bring back my commercial understanding and put
them into roles that helped them start to transform the
thinking of how we did brand building. The CMO that
worked at the company, his name is Mark Addicts and
he since retired, an amazing marketer, a legend. He's always
(20:23):
been a huge mentor for me. He gave me some
opportunities to really take that project and lean into and said, hey,
we got this thing called the future marketing. We need
someone to drive it. You get the commercial side, you
get the digital side. You seem to have a understanding
of where we need to go, like help craft this,
and so that's really been my career in the last
ten years has been figuring out how to do that
and having a ton of failure along the way, but
really starting to plot what does the future look like
(20:45):
and how do we bring not just one or two
of our brands to it, but all of our brands
to it, and all of our marketers there and all
our agency partners to that place. You've talked about moving
some of the most trusted iconic brands, which your company's
very well them for, from nostalgia to epic and current.
Why and how did you do that? And talk a
(21:06):
little bit about the internal pressure you must have gotten
not to mess with the classics. One of the opportunities
in a brand that was kind of a sleepy brand
but was doing okay when I got to work on
it was Totinos, and that's a almost a billion dollar brand.
It sells pizza, rolls and pizza. When I inherited it,
it had been doing a lot of pretty standard kind
of marketing. It was an after school snack, It was
(21:27):
targeted towards moms. It was doing fine, and so you know,
when things are going okay. It's not always the easiest
time to come in and say let's do something different.
But what I started to see right away was that
there was a huge opportunity and the brand had dabbled
in other places before. It had sponsored the X Games,
it had partnered with snowboarding athletes, and it had built
this kind of community people who love the brand. We
(21:48):
just said, hey, we've had a huge opportunity. We're not
tapping into. How do we experiment with this consumer group
who actually loves the brand? And how did we happen
to that insight and really started to build this branding
culture because otherwise it's not relevant, it never stands out,
no one notices it. We went with that mindset into
gotta do what we had to do day to day,
and we have to craft the future. And in that
future crafting, we were really kind of set free. So
(22:10):
we went into all these different passion places around the brand.
We explored comedy, we explored comic con, we explored passion
projects around gaming. We even explored stuff around marijuana culture,
and we follow a consumer and where they went. We
wanted to Tina's to really be epic around leisure, like
championing anything you could do to live the most leisurely
life stle that you could. And so we created this
(22:31):
brand idea called Live Free, Couch Hard, and everything was
built around owning the couch. So it made our partnerships
with people like Twitch and other kinds of video games
like Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed an Xbox. It
made it really like a seamless thing, and that's what
our consumers were already doing. Anyway, we did in a
very absurd, irreverent, but very self aware way, and we
were able to craft a brand that started to break through.
(22:54):
It's given new life to it. We're able to really
flip the brand over and say, okay, we still got
to talk to moms about making sure they're buying product,
but really this brand at its heart is for this.
We call them instependent. But like these people who are
seventeen years old, knowledgeable luck culture, they want things when
they want it, like, let's make the brand for them.
What I'm most proud about is that we're able to
use that success to break through old, old, old traditions
(23:15):
that generals that need to evolve. We weren't allowed to
advertise on rated our movies. We weren't allowed to be
in certain cable programs because it was too mature. We
weren't allowed to market around things like marijuana. And that's
not right for every brand, and certainly not for a
lot of our brands that have younger audiences, but for
the audiences we're going after, and for how pinpointed and
targeted we could get, it was right. We were able
(23:36):
to break through that way and really start to lead
the company to think much more progressively. When you say
they had rules that you couldn't do it, who sets
those rules? Where they set long ago and no one
questioned them? Are they set by committee or the CEO
or the CMO? How do things like that happen in
a company that has to kind of longevity that General
Mills has. I think some of them are traditionally said
(23:57):
and no one questions them. Old rules like that happen
in a lot of places. We also have a Responsible
Marketing Committee that's very effective and looks across all of
things that may not comply with our marketing policies. Our
lawyers and our marketers that are on that committee. I'm
one of the people now on it. Ironically, are pretty
flexible in terms of thinking like we're constantly evolving what
that looks like. But I will tell you going to
(24:19):
that committee five six seventy years ago, marketers would get scared.
I think like I don't want to take this and
then get shut down, or I don't want to take
this and it's gonna look bad if it doesn't work.
Instead of putting it the other way, like let's go
to that committee and like let's build on it and
come with new ideas. It was kind of seen the
other way, but it took some things like Totino's running
into things. And our team was awesome and they were like,
you know what we see ourselves kind of the renegade
and where the change age. And to be honest, I
(24:41):
had lots of great support from other leaders around the
company that were like, dude, go like push it, push it,
try it be different, Like we don't have enough of that.
I won't name the lawyer, but I had one lawyer
it was like telling me one day, He's like, we
don't get sued enough. You should try to get a
suit more. And I was like, well, I don't know,
I'm gona take that advice completely. Nevertheless, that was a
good period of time for us to really test those parameters,
and what we found was that the company was Radio
(25:01):
Evolve that just needed some brands to kind of step
up and push on some old rules. As you move forward,
you have to take a lot of chances. No one
gets it right all the time. Everybody's got failures. What
was your biggest failure with a brand and why and
what did you learn from it. I had a pretty
massive failure about five or six years ago, and it
was actually on the same brands on Totinos. We were
(25:23):
taking a pizza and we were going to move it
from being a circle pizza to a rectangle pizza. At
the time, our consumer research said, hey, this is a
good idea. Our supply chain absolutely needed to do that
because the equipment we had needed to be redone and
we didn't have a capacity to make the pizza we're
making at the time, so we need to replace it.
And that was the way to do it and meet
the demand that we had of consumers. I inherited that
(25:44):
project kind of halfway through, and my gun initially was like,
I don't know, this feels like it's such a big change,
Like how are we going to make this change? And
then seeing the research and talking into the supply chain
the reason to do it. I kind of allowed myself
to go down that path because when we did launch it,
immediately business dropped by about I was like, oh my god,
I completely broke this business. That's such a big decline,
(26:05):
especially in CpG. If I would have followed my gut
a little bit more, I think I would have prepared
for the launch of it in a more aggressive way
to help people make that transition. Fortunately, we were able
to do some reactions and do some marketing tactics and
bring people back along, and the business is now bigger
than it's ever been. But at the time and the
crisis around that and in the fear because that is
one of our biggest businesses, I felt like I messed up.
(26:28):
You mentioned at the beginning, like there's this left brain
right brain balancing act that we all have to do.
I think in that instance, I leaned way too heavily
into logic, being myself into thinking it was the right
thing versus feeling that it was the right thing, and
so I always try to find that balance based off
of that learning that in that instance, I definitely was
off balance making that decision. Let's talk about left brain
right brain. When I was in college and was a
(26:50):
sociology major spending a lot of time and what is
now called research or data, I was cautioned by somebody
that research is not policy making at best, it conditions
your gut to make a gut decision. You talk a
lot about left brain right brain. Indeed, this podcast is
about math and magic, that mix that seems to be
(27:13):
when you get it right, create the great successes. Talk
to me a little bit about that and what role
that place in both your organization and in your own
view of marketing. I really like the way that you
talked about research. That makes a ton of sense to me.
What we're looking for within marketers and our organization. It's
people that can do both those things, or if they're
firmly in one camp or the other, we know where
(27:33):
they kind of fit. We did some team building with
my leadership team a few months ago. They basically put
us into a color wheel. I ended up being on
the color wheel I think yellow, which was about ideas.
There was other people in our group that were green,
which is about people first. There was another group that
was more about command first and red, and there was
last group was blue, which is more about logic and
numbers first. And what we found was that a lot
of people are group were much more balanced, but in
(27:54):
most other functions in our company, people were much more blue,
which is like I need the numbers, and then they
were read and to make the command knowing that, like
I'm much more in the idea of state, but I
know that people need to see that first, and so
when I want to sell an idea, it's helpful for
me to have that context so that I can sell
them with the numbers or with the quantitative or with
the KPI is up front. I think a lot of
time great ideas, really creative people in companies get lost
(28:17):
because the people ultimately making the decision or holding the
pen to the actual checkbook don't understand how it drives
the business. And so ultimately you have to have both.
We're really trying to push our teams to have that
experience where they're like they understand the business and commercial
side enough of it that it has to make business sense,
but then it also has to have I love what
you say, the magic sense to it. What's what's the
sense of the idea that's going to be so creatively
(28:40):
amazing and remarkable that people are going to fall in
love with it and talk about it. So that's part
of the in mindset is can you bring the logic
with that creative essence of the idea. Do you think
there are many people actually who can do both or
do you think most people are either analytical or creative.
It's a little bit of a unique trait to be
completely balanced. I think everyone kind of leans one way
(29:00):
or the other. I think there's also a place for
everybody too. It's a comment upon leaders to be able
to figure out the right mix of those people and
build that on their teams. Another way of looking at
ideas is this concept we talk a lot about orchestration,
like how do you orchestrate an insight into a strategy,
into an idea into an activation and learn about it?
And who on our team can see the bigger chess
(29:22):
board and all the pieces and be able to kind
of orchestrate them beautifully to that execution. It's hard to
find that talent people that can do that, and I
think that's true in marketing. I think that's truugh in
supply chain or finance or any other functions or industries
that you might be in. But the great thing is,
I think there's an ability to find people that can
do that and put them in the right positions, and
then give them the people around them that are maybe
(29:43):
a little more analytical or maybe more creative. Another interesting
spin on this organization that we've been talking about is
you know the people in the company that are amazing
disruptive thinkers, and you also know the people in the
company that are amazing executors, and you need both of
those things. But some of the most often forgotten people
in those companies are the connectors that connect the dots
(30:03):
between the two. We don't necessarily see them. They kind
of make it happen, but they don't get the reward
for getting it done or the word for coming up
with the idea. Understanding as a leader like I need
all those things? How do I get them? You need
them all? Let's talk a little bit about your views
on things I'm at I heart number one audio company
in America. I have a bias, but I've been particularly
interested in your comments about shifting more resources to audio
(30:26):
radio podcast. Why did radio get forgotten? I think because
video more easily conveys the marketing idea to people in
a border. Even today, when you're going to go show
a marketing concept to people, it's really easy just to
be like, Okay, here's the fifteen second video that I
want to show you so you get the idea. I
(30:48):
also think that TV as a medium, even still today
as people continue to migrate into other channels, hold such
a significant weight because of what people think about television,
and it's been interesting how you want to actually have
the most reach, you actually want to go into radio.
I know for us today, when we talk about an idea,
where does this idea need to go? Where can it
(31:09):
adjoy or solve a problem in people's life? And that
leads us to much more holistic thinking of ideas that
a lot of times it's like, well, this is a
voice thing because we actually want it to be solved
through either a voice command or it actually has a
much more musical piece where we want people to listen
to it and have that emotion. When you can center
it that way, it allows us to be a lot
more channel agnostic or pick the right roles for channels
(31:30):
as they come forward. But certainly the push that we've
had the last couple of years, I think you guys
have done a really great job of getting brands to
think about this is to really understand in what ways
then if you're reconsidering radio and sound an audio, does
your brand need to show up in those spaces people
are multitasking. You can't leave out sound in the radio
and just focus on video and vice versa. And so
(31:51):
how do those things even work together? And that's where
we've done a lot of work to advance ourselves, like
what is our mnemonic, what is our sound architecture? How
do we want to sound on? And I'm excited about
that because that's to me, where we've had more of
a gap than we should have in our plans over
the last number of years. It's interesting to me is
having spent a lot of years in TV, I think
if TV is America's hobby, radio has been America's companion.
(32:14):
We keep people company. Other companies besides yours, like P
and G has gone from probably three or four years
ago not even being in the top two hundred radio advertisers,
so I think last year they were number one or
number two, So there's definitely a trend moving here. And
then of course, we finally in radio have a new
shiny toy called podcasting. It's really taken the world by storm.
(32:36):
How do you think about podcasting. It's elevated to a
level where you know, we used to talk about what
shows we watch, and now in conversations people are talking
about what podcasts they listen to, and it's become a
cultural currency in a way because the topics are so diverse.
There's the intimacy that I know you've talked a lot
about that you have. It's that one to one connection
where I can just listen to someone talking. I feel
(32:58):
like they're talking to me individually versus a show or
a movie where it's much broader for everybody to me.
There's a ton of potential on that, and a lot
of our brands are moving that direction. They're figuring out, Okay,
what ways can we show up? How do we continue
to push our brands to show up in those spaces
really creatively and use those dynamic channels in ways that
they haven't been used before. I'm super excited about that.
(33:19):
The podcast space for us is something we're highly interested
in doing more and more work in. Let's talk a
second about TV. CpG and TV synonymous. TV has always
been the foundation of most CpG campaigns, and yet now
we have all these great scripted TV shows moving to
subscription service and not being available and adds supported TV.
(33:41):
How has that changed the thinking about television and the
opportunities for the products you have. I think it changes
almost day by day, especially in the space of different
formats and platforms that are popping up all over the place.
What does that mean? We're still pretty diverse and where
we try to invest in and TV is still a
part of that. But it goes back to what are
our consumers doing, where are they spending time, and where
(34:03):
they're going to be receptive to things that we could
provide to them in some of our brands to really
kind of recraft the role of what advertising actually is.
And it's probably going off to back to you know,
you talked a little bit Procter and Gamble, but vacuum
into the days when they were creating soap operas to
run their heads between. There's a lot of opportunity for
us to tell different stories with our characters, with our
consumers that we could do a lot for ourselves to
(34:26):
shift the thinking of what that means. How do we
start to shift this the stories and content that's useful
and enjoyable and interesting. We've been in conversations with lots
of different kinds of creators, some in agencies, some in Hollywood,
some production, and like, how can we think about these assets?
And this I p differently, and certainly you've seen things
with like Lego, and I think toy companies have done
it really well crafting movies and series and all those
(34:47):
types of things. We're still kind of early stages with
where that's going, but I think we have to go
that direction. Let's jump to some advice. How should people
think about hiring? You've built some really interesting, cutting edge teams.
What's your secret source there? I think the first thing
that if you're responsible for leading a team is to
be really reflective and open with yourself about what you're
(35:10):
great at and what you're not great at. I've come
to terms with things that I'm not good at over time.
And knowing the kinds of people that you need on teams,
both from a talent and expertise perspective, in strengths that
offset things that I don't have, has really been a
big part of my philosophy over time. The second pieces,
I love to hire for diversity, and I mean that
partially in terms of diversity of ethnicity and preferences and
(35:33):
all that kind of thing, but I also means that
in diversity of experience. People who have had experiences in
different industries or agencies or in different career paths. Those people,
I feel like make really good partners because they see
the world through different lenses and had experiences they can
bring to the table. And then the last part of
it is people who are nice people. I've worked on
teams where one jerk can throw off the whole dynamic
(35:57):
of the team. So holding fast the values of being
a good person kind of one another, I think is
really important in building the right chemistry. And I'll be
honest with the current team I've got, I'm really happy
about it. It's taken time to get it to a
place where it gets as high performing as it could be,
or as it should be. If you could give some
advice to your twenty one year old self, what advice
would that be? I would say, never operate out of
(36:19):
fear of making the wrong choice. I think a lot
of times when you're at that age, you feel like, Okay,
I gotta make the right choice at the right time.
And I think life has a way of guiding you
down paths that you're meant to go down. At the time,
I felt like I was way more in control probably
than I really was, And honestly like getting back to
a place where I could have been a little more
present and a little more accepting of the way things
(36:40):
were going, not trying to control everything would have made life,
I think, a little bit easier along the way. And
the other part I would have probably told myself is,
don't be afraid to take big swings at things. I
feel like I have over my career here and there,
but I think more consistently, like trying those big things
and failing potentially is totally fine, and actually, like I
look it that now, I'm like, I have a different
(37:01):
perspective on that at my age that I did back then,
which is like failure is actually really productive and good.
Back then, I didn't want to fail. I want to
look like I was doing everything the right all the time,
and that's just impossible. We end each episode by giving
some shout outs. Instead of our usual focus on marketing people,
let's focus on just marketing math and magic data analytics
and the creative. What's your favorite marketing success, Your company
(37:23):
or anywhere else built on data and analytics. Driven by that,
I will tell you we have made some really big
strides in data and analytics and technology in general. We
have coupled platforms. One is like Pillsbury dot com and
Betty Croker dot com, which are basically recipe and meal
solution sites in platforms, but also our box ops for
education platform. The way that that works is once people
(37:44):
sign up to the app and they scan their receipts,
they're able to localize, personalize the schools that they want
to give money to. What's really cool for us is
that is we're able to look at that. It gives
us the data to be able to say, Okay, what
kind of things are these folks buying that they would
value more of us, they can donate more of their schools.
We're really starting to use that information to give people
more customized, personalized solutions so that it's less of things
(38:06):
that they wouldn't want and more things that they're really valuing.
This concept of moving from mass marketing to one to
want at mass, I think it's starting to happen, which
back to your point on radio is another thing that
I love. It feels much more one to want at
mass when you think about radio, I'm excited about it
because personalized experiences for people for a big CpG scaled
company that has household penetration is really hard to conceptualize.
(38:30):
So we needed the data and we needed the personalization
ability to activate behind it, and we're starting to do that.
So let's go to the other side of it. Creative.
Do you have a success that you think about that
you admire that came off just share creativity. Somebody had
a brilliant idea and just did it. This is gonna
(38:51):
sound massively simple, which I guess sometimes the best ideas are.
Our Cheerios team has done some amazing work over the years,
and that business has been on fire the last couple
of years. They have really started to embrace this benefit
that's always existed in the brand, which has been about
heart health. It's very simple thing that the marketing teams
and the research developments came back with. It's like, hey,
(39:11):
did you know that we can actually make cheerios in
the shape of hearts. They launched this idea which is
just all around like heart shaped cheerios and against super
simple creative idea what had an amazing impact on the
business and an action like that then allowed us to
lock all sorts of different ways and creative and content
and partnerships and ways to make people who are wanting
to extend their lives longer and live a healthier life
(39:32):
do it in a way that the product brought it
fully around that. To me, it is a great push
in to creativity and done really simply in a really
elegant way. Was really cool, Brad. Great conversations, even though
it's by phone. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so
much for having me. I love talking to you. I
really appreciate it. Here are a few things I picked
(39:55):
up in my conversation with Brad. One build your business
for today and tomorrow. At a company with a huge
legacy like General Mills, you need to make sure you're
meeting today's demand while preparing for tomorrow's marketplace to connect
with consumers you already have. When Brad learned that video
gamers already liked the Totino's brand, he marketed directly to
(40:17):
them and sales grew even bigger. Three higher people who
are connectors, as Brad says, you need creative and analytical
types on every team. But don't forget to have people
who can bring everyone together. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening.
That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening
(40:38):
to Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio.
The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to
Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling are Wonderful Talent, which
is no small feat. Nikki Eatore for pulling research bill plaques,
and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch,
and of course Gayl Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
(41:01):
next time, h
Host
Bob Pittman
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