October 23, 2024 • 25 mins
Marketing and advertising leaders from Disney, Warner Bros., NBCUniversal, Google, Nvidia, CVS, Ford, Pintrest and other blue-chip firms share insights on how to break through in a moment of transition from media and tech. HIghlights from the Variety Ad Week studio presented by Canva include conversations with creatives engaged in marketing and advertising pursuits including Terry Crews, Common and Camila Cabello.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
A pitch for a film or TV project is only
as good as it's pitch deck. Design your next pitch
deck with Canva. Canva is the online design platform for
entertainment professionals. With Canva, it's easy to visually express your
film or TV idea. Just start with a designer made template,
(00:20):
then add imagery, video, and audio from Canva's massive content library.
Go from your screen to the big screen. Nail your
next pitch with Canva at canva dot com Slash Entertainment.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
I love the freedom that we have with this work.
I love the people that I'm working with. I love
that is based in the thing that I love most,
which is creativity.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Welcome to Strictly Business Varieties weekly podcast featuring conversations with
industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. I'm
Cynthia Lyttleton, co editor.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
In chief of Variety.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Today's episode features highlights from the video studio the Variety
hosted in New York this month in conjunction with Advertising Week.
We spoke to a who's who of cmos and advertising
mavens from the entertainment industry, as well as blue chip
brands such as Nvidia, Spotify, Ford, CVS, and T Mobile.
We also spoke to some on the creative side, including
(01:29):
musician and activist Common whose voice you heard at the
start of this episode, Camilla Cabello, and Terry Crews. The
interviews at the studio presented by Canva were conducted by
me and Todd Spangler, my variety colleague, who is no
stranger to strictly business listeners, and Brian Steinberg, our man
on the mad Men beat, who has forgotten more about
(01:50):
Madison Avenue than most of us will ever know. Three
days of speedy chats with highly motivated marketers left us
with a strong sense of where they are focusing their
efforts and how they see the next twelve to twenty
four months playing out. It won't be dull, so don't
go anywhere. We'll be right back. With insights and observations
from executives from Disney, Warner Brothers, Discovery, NBC, Universal, Pinterest, two,
(02:16):
b IBM, and more.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
There are a lot of moving parts to a film
or TV production. Canva can help everyone get on the
same page. Canva has templates for storyboards, call sheets, and
series bibles. Canva whiteboards are fantastic for plot and story brainstorms,
production timelines, and more. When you're ready to roll, Canva
(02:46):
makes it easy to work together on your project face
to face or online in real time. Go from your
screen to the big screen at canva dot com, Slash Entertainment.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
And we're back with a special episode of Strictly Business
from our Adweek studio, presented by Canva. There's no shortage
of turmoil and transition across media and in the wider
world these days. We thought it would be good to
start on a positive note by asking people what they
love about their work. Here are some quick hits from
Google's Sean Downey, Canva's Jimmy Knowles, Disney's John Campbell, in
(03:25):
Vidia's Jamie Allen, and Twob's on Jolly's suit.
Speaker 5 (03:29):
Well, the best thing about my work is it's a
hard job because you're in a time of transformation. The
industry is changing every day, and I just love to
solve new problems.
Speaker 6 (03:40):
For me, the most exciting thing is just how playful
and tactle the brand is.
Speaker 7 (03:45):
You wouldn't think at one hundred year old's company that
an idea comes out and you can actually put it
to life. And we're in our fourth cohort now and
we're helping these small underrepresented businesses go through this white
glove service at Disney to help them grow their own
businesses and have all boats rides. So I love the
entrepreneurialness of the Walt Disney Company.
Speaker 8 (04:05):
Probably my favorite thing about the job is just the
openness of the organization to knowledge. Should never be a
barrier or a blocker to go and engage with people.
Speaker 9 (04:17):
So I feel like my job is very literally sitting
at the intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, and I
came from more of the tech side, so like, my
comfort zone is platforms and data and algorithms and scale,
and now I get to be part of storytelling.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
We'll call this section what do you Need to Do
to Thrive? We get down into the nitty gritty of
what it takes to grab people by the eyes and
ears and stand out in a world awash in marketing messages. First,
we hear from Terry Crews about why he formed his
own creative advertising agency Super Serious. Then NBC Universal Sports
(04:55):
marketing chief Jennifer Storms explains how the Paris Olympics and
all their glory I really greased the company's Infinity Loop,
and Warner Brothers Digital marketing chief Cameron Curtis wraps it
up with thoughts on the metrics that really matter to him.
Speaker 10 (05:11):
What inspired this was the fact that I love entertainment period, okay,
and I found that we found that people didn't view
commercials as entertaining, but we do. And my thing is
everything truly is entertainment. And when I hooked up with
Matt was years ago on the Old Spice campaign, and
(05:36):
we realized that it changed the game in so many ways.
People were watching each commercial in a row on YouTube
for like a half an hour, and we were like, wow,
it changed the game in so many ways. We realized
it is entertainment and no matter whether there's a two
hour movie, a half hour television show, or a thirty
(05:58):
second commercial has to be entertaining. I can't tell you
the number of campaigns up turned down because they didn't
want me to serve the audience. And I looked at
the brief and I'm like, man, what are you talking about.
There's no serving anyone here. It's just sell, sell, sell.
Speaker 11 (06:16):
And the opportunity there is very much around the infinity
loop that we've created with linear and with streaming. That's
a superpower internally because we did it for the Olympics.
We're doing it for Brilliant Minds, where you're leveraging both
the NBC and then the next Day on Peacock as
this sort of infinity loop to bring audiences and create
a larger audience. In totality, we have over nine million
(06:39):
cross platform on Brilliant Minds just in this short time.
And when you look at something like Bravo where we
have Next Day on Peacock as well, over the past year,
every single Bravo show has had increased audiences and we
attribute that very much to that infinity loop that we
sort of create as a company.
Speaker 12 (06:58):
You know, sentiment is key for us, but also volume.
You know a lot of times I think you'll find
studios touting views on trailers or views on spots, and really,
you know, those are you can buy views. What you
can't buy is conversation. And I think when you're generating conversation,
you can tell you have true heat. And so a
lot of times we're analyzing social volume and social sentiment
(07:19):
ahead of anything else because that really signifies that something
is breaking through, you know, and I think that's that's
what our key mission is today.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Here are more thoughts about where things are headed. CVS's
Parbender Dariwall, who heads the Retail Giants New Media Exchange
Advertising Unit, spoke about the rise of retail media networks
and how they might intersect with TV in the future.
Ford CMO Kelly Donahue says her big challenge of the
future will be to sell consumers on self driving cars canvas.
(07:50):
Jimmy Knowles talks experiential brand building and to be CEO.
Angeli sud wraps up with thoughts about what it's going
to take to have to be mean some thing in
the minds of consumers.
Speaker 13 (08:02):
When you think about commercialization of streaming versus traditional linear TV,
there is a really big role here that retail media
can be playing. The connectivity that retail media can bring
to streaming TV is there's a match made in heaven
(08:22):
there and the way in which we can work. So,
how do we layer on data and assets into the
streaming TV and addressable audiences to really drive more impact
for advertising that can sit across that channel. And I
see that continuing to grow and I'm sure we will
announce some partnerships on that during over the course of
(08:44):
the next twelve months.
Speaker 14 (08:45):
Another thing we're looking at is you know, really building
out our entertainment offerings in the center screen of the car.
So we just launched our new Ford Digital Experience software
and now you can download apps and watch you know,
Prime video or to be who I just earlier, or
Peacock or Max right on the center screen while parked,
(09:06):
not while driving, not while driving, only well parked.
Speaker 6 (09:09):
One of the important things for us as an experiential
team is to make sure that as we as we
have that act of perception shifting, or as we're encouraging
people to remember Canvas the brand that you use to
make your wedding, save the dates, save the dates, and
your birthday party invitations, but also think about Canvas this
tool that's empowering your workplace to collaborate, that's helping you
(09:31):
to create content at scale.
Speaker 9 (09:33):
What we're finding is we need to build the two
B brand versus just market a title or one thing
you can find on the service, and we need to
have that show up as something different. We need to
break through. Right You're in a kind of a sea
of sameness and screaming right now, and that means you
got to take creative risks and you have to the
way we think about it is like we want to
(09:53):
we want to embody the passion and ethos of our fans.
We want to find a way for that to show
up in our brand, and we want to is our
brand to reinforce a value proposition, which is free, frictionless entertainment.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
It's an age old question and the answer changes every day.
What do consumers really want? Here are some thoughts, starting
with Google Sean Downey, who talks about the YouTube shorts program,
Camilla Cabello on the community of music lovers, Spotify's Jess
Levinson on serving gen Z by staying out of their way,
(10:24):
and Warner Brothers Cameron Curtis gives us an inside look
at how the studio scored with a done to promotion
on TikTok by offering a smorgasboard of key art and
clips and encouraging fans to do their best. Curtis puts
it well when he says, delivering ready made clip art
and such to the vast expanse of TikTok users is
(10:45):
a sea change in mindset. Instead of zealously guarding every
stitch of material that gets out, efforts like the done
to promotion make fans the quote copilots of studio promotional campaigns.
Speaker 5 (10:58):
Curtis explains, if you look at consumer behavior, consumers are
more often than not doing a couple of things. They're
streaming and they're scrolling, and I think brands know that.
So we do a couple of things with brands. One
we like to put them in a multi format approach
because for them, audiences matter most, and they're finding that
(11:19):
they're getting more shorts in that multi format mix because
it's what the creators are building and it's what the
consumers are watching, and as long as that fits into
their business strategy, you're going to see them invests more
in those things because it drives the right outcomes when
mixed with everything else. And we have brands that love
thinking about doing shorts only because they're trying to drive
(11:39):
awareness and engagement and they're learning that the more quick
burst of awareness they can create, they can drive a
lot of engagement to their own sites to give them
better content and better fill and that's something that the
creators have learned themselves. If you actually look at how
creators use shorts, they're using it to drive interest to
their long form because they're trying to get engagement and
(12:01):
interest and then build that community somewhere else, as opposed
to maybe just looking for something that's trending.
Speaker 15 (12:08):
Music lovers are such a passionate community, and when people
get to just like gather in person, and now there's
so many new ways to do it. To do that,
it doesn't have to be like a standard concert. It
could be I don't know, like a small like acoustic set,
or it could be like I remember, I think you
guys did this with Doja Ket when she did like
(12:29):
the Spotify in person for I think it was I
don't remember, but I think you guys did like a
live album installation and I was like, WHOA, that's so sick.
So I think, yeah, creative ways for people to partner
to bring like a unique experience like a twenty twenty
four experience to fans is like so exciting and fun.
Speaker 16 (12:48):
We want fans to be able to access the content,
the playlists and the creators that they want without getting
in their way. So first and foremost, like the ad
experience is super non interruptive on Spotify. But then again,
like seventy one percent of gen z are telling us
that they viewed Spotify as the antidote to Doom scrolling.
Speaker 12 (13:10):
On TikTok, we worked with a new feature called their
Spotlight Unit, and essentially what that did was it took
all of these assets that we were creating and put
it into one location so that when fans searched or
wanted to learn more about Doom, they found all of
this incredible content. It also added attributes to all the
user generated content that was coming from the work we
were doing. And what that did was as you were searching,
(13:33):
you were encountering people that were, you know, doing cosplayers
or reacting to trailers or celebrating the movie. And so
when you think about when you think about money can't
buy opportunities, when you think about real heat, you know
a lot of times that shows up with user generated content.
And if you're an audience member wondering about a movie,
(13:53):
what better way than to find out more about it
than to see creators and influencers and cast talking about
it directly to you. I was really excited that we
had cast responding to user comments on TikTok. So we
had one example where Austin Butler had commented back to
a fan and later encountered that fan in real life
and so what we had was a major star of
(14:16):
a movie seeing a fan and recognizing the fan before
the fan had a chance to recognize the star. And
I think about the way TikTok forms connections in that
way and how powerful that is, And to me, that's
a lot about the future of what we're doing, is
making audiences the co pilots of our campaigns and not
the passengers.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
That's a really great way to say it. We couldn't
talk to people about the future of their business without
those two little letters cropping up AI here with thoughts
about how to manage the introduction of this life changing technology.
Is IBM's Jonathan Adishek, Google's Sean Downey, Warner Brothers Discoveries,
(14:56):
Bruce Campbell, and Ford's Kelly Edwards.
Speaker 17 (14:59):
The way I look at A and we look at
it in many ways and inside of IBM is there's
a big iceberg. The top twenty percent of that iceberg,
that's the consumer facing applications of AI. We're really focused
on the eighty percent of the iceberg down below, where
the enterprise changes are going to happen and where the
changes to the business are going to happen.
Speaker 5 (15:20):
Well, the biggest myth is that AI is going to
remove their job or it's going to do the job
for you. In reality, AI is going to be next
to everyone to help them do their job better. And
if you start thinking about transformation of skills in workforce,
it's using AI to power insights, or power media buying
at scale, or power creativity in production. And then you
(15:44):
let the humans next to it do the hard strategic work,
interpret data, build better creative ideas, use those insights to
build better planning tools, and really learning how to sit
next to AI and have it do the work that
produces growth while you do the work that has the
strategy that tells them how to grow. And getting people
to see that and build their functions and their businesses
(16:04):
to take advantage of that is the big work.
Speaker 18 (16:06):
Right now, even beyond the sort of legal issues. Look,
we particularly those of us like myself who don't come
from the creative side, we recognize and appreciate our single
most important asset as a company is our content engine
and our relationships with great creators, the creative geniuses who
produce things like the Last of Us and Game of Thrones.
Speaker 19 (16:29):
And we won't do anything to alienate that community when
it comes to AI. On the other hand, when you
look at areas like you know, visual effects again, languaging
things that might be able to be done with our
video games business and our animation business. At the very least,
we have to be aware of everything that's out there,
and that I would say that's kind of the stage
(16:50):
we're in right now, careful experimentation implementation, where we all
feel very comfortable with what we're doing.
Speaker 14 (16:57):
For me, thinking about AI, it's a ton of striving
and what that future could be and how you really
usher people into that because that is a very different
leap from chat.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
GPT wow. AI is already a game changer for companies
that know how to harness the tools. Here's Canva's Frank
Cortesi and IBM's Jonathan Adischek with real world results.
Speaker 20 (17:19):
At Canva, we kind of really employed this attitude of
AI everywhere, so we're always constantly looking to see what
areas of the business we can kind of help supercharge
with AI or make things go faster and more efficient,
more effective. So that comes from everything from thinking about
first draft ideas that are going to be leveraged against
campaigns or certain times of the year thinking about how
we use AI for media targeting, measurement and things like
(17:41):
that with our media agencies and our partners, and I
think you know, when it comes to using AI, you
can really help do a lot of them mundane things
a lot quicker.
Speaker 11 (17:50):
Right.
Speaker 20 (17:51):
You can create an ad once in Canva and then
you can kind of tell a exactly how you want
it to be changed for various different places, for localization,
different times of the year.
Speaker 17 (18:00):
For us, we're using AI to get so much more
relevant and personalized journeys for our clients. We're using it
to understand where we should show up. Today, we do
half the number of events that we did two years ago.
We're getting five percent more client interests because we're so
(18:20):
much more focused in where we're showing up, and we're
getting those client interests at thirty to forty percent less
per client interest than we did in the past. AI
is helping us get much more targeted. You mean the cost,
the cost is coming down.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
When the subject is AI and what it can do
and should do in the future. Nobody has more knowledge
than the folks at Nvidia who have been doing it
for more than thirty years. In Nvidia makes the cutting
edge microchips that deliver the enormous computing power required by
AI programs. Jamie Allen, director of AD Tech and Digital
(18:56):
Marketing Industries for Nvidia, spoke about where he sees AI
making a big difference in media and how what's.
Speaker 8 (19:05):
Really exciting in the space at the moment. Broadly in
media entertainment, the evolution of what we can do with
three D in video with the intersection of artificial intelligence, graphics,
video three D processing is going to really evolve how
we can create content, interact with content from a consumer
(19:26):
point of view as well as a creative point of view.
I think that the analytics space across all media industries
is going to be really supercharged with the new types
of computing and generative AI that's coming. There's some amazing
companies that we're working with at the moment who are
doing really groundbreaking like mathematics, like physics based maths to
(19:50):
solve problems, especially in advertising and areas like causality to
link work and creative to actual sales, which is really
really exciting. The advertising industry is one of the biggest
data flywheels of any sector. Really. You can also look
at financial services and healthcare as similar volumes of cyclical
(20:10):
data information. As we increase the efficiency in the speed
of processing data, you can create more intelligence from that
data faster, and this is where we come into the
world of generative AI and the tools that we're building
to enable enterprises both the end users of advertising, so
the CMO groups in the industry as well as the
(20:33):
agencies and the ad tech companies, to be able to
derive huge amounts of value from that data faster. That
will then enable the ability to create things like fine
tuned language models much much quicker with high levels of
accuracy that can then drive faster recommendation, really good consumer interaction.
We took in Video's long history of making things very
(20:56):
efficient and bundled it up essentially into container service, so
you can go and take a model from whether it's
Lama or whether it's a Mistral model, or any of
the models the partners that we have and run them
as efficiently and fastly as possible with the support from Nvidia.
So while we don't need to go and make proprietary
(21:18):
tools for everyone, they can take those off the shelf
models and work with our toolkits to make them specific
to them through fine tuning and rag and augmentation models.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
We started off each interview with a lightning round of
questions to warm up our guests and bring out a
bit of personality. Here you'll hear from CBS's Parbender, Dariwall,
Google's Sean Downey, t Mobile Cmo, Viana Hegd, NBC Universals
Jennifer Storms, Disney's Danielle Brown, Warner Brothers Cameron Curtis, NBC
(21:52):
Universal's Jamie Cuthbert, Canvas Frank Cortesi, and IBM's Jonathan Adischek
on Wisconsin white.
Speaker 17 (22:01):
Border, mood board.
Speaker 13 (22:04):
Definitely the white board, whiteboard or mood board.
Speaker 5 (22:08):
I'm definitely a mood board person.
Speaker 10 (22:10):
Ah cool.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
So I kind of do this exercise.
Speaker 10 (22:13):
It kind of count how many negative energy meetings I
have and how many positive energy meetings I have. So
I'm always trying to offload what I call the negative
energy meetings.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
Opening ceremonies or closing ceremonies.
Speaker 11 (22:25):
Oh, that's like choosing a favorite child. That's not fair.
It's it's going to be opening ceremonies.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Danielle Team Picnic, team.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
Bowling, Bowling. I'm competitive bowling. Favorite Warner brother Jack, Harry
sam or Abe.
Speaker 20 (22:42):
Jack favorite font Hewlettica's pretty clear times.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Are really I'm an aerial girl. Myself team picnic or
team bowling, Bowling.
Speaker 17 (22:53):
I'm from Wisconsin. We love boling.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
We close with the dose of gratitude. Terry Crews made
us all misty with his heartfelt observation about how he
hopes his life story can prove to others that with
hard work, just about anything is possible. And finally, Canvas
Jimmy Knowles and Pinterests Judy Lee shared their enthusiasm for
(23:20):
their like minded brands. It's infectious.
Speaker 10 (23:24):
When I was a kid in Flint, Michigan, working in
Hollywood was a kin to flying to Mars, and they
were like, dude, you can't go to Mars. You die
in Mars, you know. But I'm on Mars. I did
it and people were like this, dude made it to Mars,
you know what I mean? Like, everyone was like I could.
He said it, and there were a lot of things
(23:45):
I said and people remember. And I think that is
the best part, because the best part of being me
is showing that everyone else can do it too.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
It's amazing, so well said.
Speaker 6 (23:58):
I feel very lucky to work at a company with
leadership that is so supportive of taking those big swings.
It's not afraid to fail, it's not afraid to make mistakes.
And it's been an incredible learning process getting to build
and work with the amazing team that I do over
the past few years.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
And it just sounds like so much fun.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
So it is.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
It is.
Speaker 17 (24:15):
That's why we do it.
Speaker 4 (24:16):
Yep, and I feel like we should do something together.
Speaker 10 (24:18):
I don't know the vibes.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
The vibes are.
Speaker 6 (24:20):
There, your lips, the God's yours, Judi's rock and roll.
Speaker 13 (24:23):
I'm ready.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Thanks for listening. Be sure to leave us a review
at Apple Podcasts or Amazon Music. We love to hear
from listeners. Please go to Variety dot com and sign
up for the free weekly Strictly Business newsletter, and don't
forget to tune in next week for another episode of
Strictly Business.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Marketing budgets for big movies often exceed the production budgets.
That's because promotion is super important. Promote your film or
TV project with the help of Canva. Canva has promotional
templates like press kits, film posters, and social media assets,
so you'll never begin from a blank page. They also
(25:16):
make it super easy to design a website for your
project too. Go from your screen to the big screen
at canva dot com. Slash Entertainment
A pitch for a film or TV project is only
as good as it's pitch deck. Design your next pitch
deck with Canva. Canva is the online design platform for
entertainment professionals. With Canva, it's easy to visually express your
film or TV idea. Just start with a designer made template,
(00:20):
then add imagery, video, and audio from Canva's massive content library.
Go from your screen to the big screen. Nail your
next pitch with Canva at canva dot com Slash Entertainment.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
I love the freedom that we have with this work.
I love the people that I'm working with. I love
that is based in the thing that I love most,
which is creativity.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Welcome to Strictly Business Varieties weekly podcast featuring conversations with
industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. I'm
Cynthia Lyttleton, co editor.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
In chief of Variety.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Today's episode features highlights from the video studio the Variety
hosted in New York this month in conjunction with Advertising Week.
We spoke to a who's who of cmos and advertising
mavens from the entertainment industry, as well as blue chip
brands such as Nvidia, Spotify, Ford, CVS, and T Mobile.
We also spoke to some on the creative side, including
(01:29):
musician and activist Common whose voice you heard at the
start of this episode, Camilla Cabello, and Terry Crews. The
interviews at the studio presented by Canva were conducted by
me and Todd Spangler, my variety colleague, who is no
stranger to strictly business listeners, and Brian Steinberg, our man
on the mad Men beat, who has forgotten more about
(01:50):
Madison Avenue than most of us will ever know. Three
days of speedy chats with highly motivated marketers left us
with a strong sense of where they are focusing their
efforts and how they see the next twelve to twenty
four months playing out. It won't be dull, so don't
go anywhere. We'll be right back. With insights and observations
from executives from Disney, Warner Brothers, Discovery, NBC, Universal, Pinterest, two,
(02:16):
b IBM, and more.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
There are a lot of moving parts to a film
or TV production. Canva can help everyone get on the
same page. Canva has templates for storyboards, call sheets, and
series bibles. Canva whiteboards are fantastic for plot and story brainstorms,
production timelines, and more. When you're ready to roll, Canva
(02:46):
makes it easy to work together on your project face
to face or online in real time. Go from your
screen to the big screen at canva dot com, Slash Entertainment.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
And we're back with a special episode of Strictly Business
from our Adweek studio, presented by Canva. There's no shortage
of turmoil and transition across media and in the wider
world these days. We thought it would be good to
start on a positive note by asking people what they
love about their work. Here are some quick hits from
Google's Sean Downey, Canva's Jimmy Knowles, Disney's John Campbell, in
(03:25):
Vidia's Jamie Allen, and Twob's on Jolly's suit.
Speaker 5 (03:29):
Well, the best thing about my work is it's a
hard job because you're in a time of transformation. The
industry is changing every day, and I just love to
solve new problems.
Speaker 6 (03:40):
For me, the most exciting thing is just how playful
and tactle the brand is.
Speaker 7 (03:45):
You wouldn't think at one hundred year old's company that
an idea comes out and you can actually put it
to life. And we're in our fourth cohort now and
we're helping these small underrepresented businesses go through this white
glove service at Disney to help them grow their own
businesses and have all boats rides. So I love the
entrepreneurialness of the Walt Disney Company.
Speaker 8 (04:05):
Probably my favorite thing about the job is just the
openness of the organization to knowledge. Should never be a
barrier or a blocker to go and engage with people.
Speaker 9 (04:17):
So I feel like my job is very literally sitting
at the intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, and I
came from more of the tech side, so like, my
comfort zone is platforms and data and algorithms and scale,
and now I get to be part of storytelling.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
We'll call this section what do you Need to Do
to Thrive? We get down into the nitty gritty of
what it takes to grab people by the eyes and
ears and stand out in a world awash in marketing messages. First,
we hear from Terry Crews about why he formed his
own creative advertising agency Super Serious. Then NBC Universal Sports
(04:55):
marketing chief Jennifer Storms explains how the Paris Olympics and
all their glory I really greased the company's Infinity Loop,
and Warner Brothers Digital marketing chief Cameron Curtis wraps it
up with thoughts on the metrics that really matter to him.
Speaker 10 (05:11):
What inspired this was the fact that I love entertainment period, okay,
and I found that we found that people didn't view
commercials as entertaining, but we do. And my thing is
everything truly is entertainment. And when I hooked up with
Matt was years ago on the Old Spice campaign, and
(05:36):
we realized that it changed the game in so many ways.
People were watching each commercial in a row on YouTube
for like a half an hour, and we were like, wow,
it changed the game in so many ways. We realized
it is entertainment and no matter whether there's a two
hour movie, a half hour television show, or a thirty
(05:58):
second commercial has to be entertaining. I can't tell you
the number of campaigns up turned down because they didn't
want me to serve the audience. And I looked at
the brief and I'm like, man, what are you talking about.
There's no serving anyone here. It's just sell, sell, sell.
Speaker 11 (06:16):
And the opportunity there is very much around the infinity
loop that we've created with linear and with streaming. That's
a superpower internally because we did it for the Olympics.
We're doing it for Brilliant Minds, where you're leveraging both
the NBC and then the next Day on Peacock as
this sort of infinity loop to bring audiences and create
a larger audience. In totality, we have over nine million
(06:39):
cross platform on Brilliant Minds just in this short time.
And when you look at something like Bravo where we
have Next Day on Peacock as well, over the past year,
every single Bravo show has had increased audiences and we
attribute that very much to that infinity loop that we
sort of create as a company.
Speaker 12 (06:58):
You know, sentiment is key for us, but also volume.
You know a lot of times I think you'll find
studios touting views on trailers or views on spots, and really,
you know, those are you can buy views. What you
can't buy is conversation. And I think when you're generating conversation,
you can tell you have true heat. And so a
lot of times we're analyzing social volume and social sentiment
(07:19):
ahead of anything else because that really signifies that something
is breaking through, you know, and I think that's that's
what our key mission is today.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Here are more thoughts about where things are headed. CVS's
Parbender Dariwall, who heads the Retail Giants New Media Exchange
Advertising Unit, spoke about the rise of retail media networks
and how they might intersect with TV in the future.
Ford CMO Kelly Donahue says her big challenge of the
future will be to sell consumers on self driving cars canvas.
(07:50):
Jimmy Knowles talks experiential brand building and to be CEO.
Angeli sud wraps up with thoughts about what it's going
to take to have to be mean some thing in
the minds of consumers.
Speaker 13 (08:02):
When you think about commercialization of streaming versus traditional linear TV,
there is a really big role here that retail media
can be playing. The connectivity that retail media can bring
to streaming TV is there's a match made in heaven
(08:22):
there and the way in which we can work. So,
how do we layer on data and assets into the
streaming TV and addressable audiences to really drive more impact
for advertising that can sit across that channel. And I
see that continuing to grow and I'm sure we will
announce some partnerships on that during over the course of
(08:44):
the next twelve months.
Speaker 14 (08:45):
Another thing we're looking at is you know, really building
out our entertainment offerings in the center screen of the car.
So we just launched our new Ford Digital Experience software
and now you can download apps and watch you know,
Prime video or to be who I just earlier, or
Peacock or Max right on the center screen while parked,
(09:06):
not while driving, not while driving, only well parked.
Speaker 6 (09:09):
One of the important things for us as an experiential
team is to make sure that as we as we
have that act of perception shifting, or as we're encouraging
people to remember Canvas the brand that you use to
make your wedding, save the dates, save the dates, and
your birthday party invitations, but also think about Canvas this
tool that's empowering your workplace to collaborate, that's helping you
(09:31):
to create content at scale.
Speaker 9 (09:33):
What we're finding is we need to build the two
B brand versus just market a title or one thing
you can find on the service, and we need to
have that show up as something different. We need to
break through. Right You're in a kind of a sea
of sameness and screaming right now, and that means you
got to take creative risks and you have to the
way we think about it is like we want to
(09:53):
we want to embody the passion and ethos of our fans.
We want to find a way for that to show
up in our brand, and we want to is our
brand to reinforce a value proposition, which is free, frictionless entertainment.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
It's an age old question and the answer changes every day.
What do consumers really want? Here are some thoughts, starting
with Google Sean Downey, who talks about the YouTube shorts program,
Camilla Cabello on the community of music lovers, Spotify's Jess
Levinson on serving gen Z by staying out of their way,
(10:24):
and Warner Brothers Cameron Curtis gives us an inside look
at how the studio scored with a done to promotion
on TikTok by offering a smorgasboard of key art and
clips and encouraging fans to do their best. Curtis puts
it well when he says, delivering ready made clip art
and such to the vast expanse of TikTok users is
(10:45):
a sea change in mindset. Instead of zealously guarding every
stitch of material that gets out, efforts like the done
to promotion make fans the quote copilots of studio promotional campaigns.
Speaker 5 (10:58):
Curtis explains, if you look at consumer behavior, consumers are
more often than not doing a couple of things. They're
streaming and they're scrolling, and I think brands know that.
So we do a couple of things with brands. One
we like to put them in a multi format approach
because for them, audiences matter most, and they're finding that
(11:19):
they're getting more shorts in that multi format mix because
it's what the creators are building and it's what the
consumers are watching, and as long as that fits into
their business strategy, you're going to see them invests more
in those things because it drives the right outcomes when
mixed with everything else. And we have brands that love
thinking about doing shorts only because they're trying to drive
(11:39):
awareness and engagement and they're learning that the more quick
burst of awareness they can create, they can drive a
lot of engagement to their own sites to give them
better content and better fill and that's something that the
creators have learned themselves. If you actually look at how
creators use shorts, they're using it to drive interest to
their long form because they're trying to get engagement and
(12:01):
interest and then build that community somewhere else, as opposed
to maybe just looking for something that's trending.
Speaker 15 (12:08):
Music lovers are such a passionate community, and when people
get to just like gather in person, and now there's
so many new ways to do it. To do that,
it doesn't have to be like a standard concert. It
could be I don't know, like a small like acoustic set,
or it could be like I remember, I think you
guys did this with Doja Ket when she did like
(12:29):
the Spotify in person for I think it was I
don't remember, but I think you guys did like a
live album installation and I was like, WHOA, that's so sick.
So I think, yeah, creative ways for people to partner
to bring like a unique experience like a twenty twenty
four experience to fans is like so exciting and fun.
Speaker 16 (12:48):
We want fans to be able to access the content,
the playlists and the creators that they want without getting
in their way. So first and foremost, like the ad
experience is super non interruptive on Spotify. But then again,
like seventy one percent of gen z are telling us
that they viewed Spotify as the antidote to Doom scrolling.
Speaker 12 (13:10):
On TikTok, we worked with a new feature called their
Spotlight Unit, and essentially what that did was it took
all of these assets that we were creating and put
it into one location so that when fans searched or
wanted to learn more about Doom, they found all of
this incredible content. It also added attributes to all the
user generated content that was coming from the work we
were doing. And what that did was as you were searching,
(13:33):
you were encountering people that were, you know, doing cosplayers
or reacting to trailers or celebrating the movie. And so
when you think about when you think about money can't
buy opportunities, when you think about real heat, you know
a lot of times that shows up with user generated content.
And if you're an audience member wondering about a movie,
(13:53):
what better way than to find out more about it
than to see creators and influencers and cast talking about
it directly to you. I was really excited that we
had cast responding to user comments on TikTok. So we
had one example where Austin Butler had commented back to
a fan and later encountered that fan in real life
and so what we had was a major star of
(14:16):
a movie seeing a fan and recognizing the fan before
the fan had a chance to recognize the star. And
I think about the way TikTok forms connections in that
way and how powerful that is, And to me, that's
a lot about the future of what we're doing, is
making audiences the co pilots of our campaigns and not
the passengers.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
That's a really great way to say it. We couldn't
talk to people about the future of their business without
those two little letters cropping up AI here with thoughts
about how to manage the introduction of this life changing technology.
Is IBM's Jonathan Adishek, Google's Sean Downey, Warner Brothers Discoveries,
(14:56):
Bruce Campbell, and Ford's Kelly Edwards.
Speaker 17 (14:59):
The way I look at A and we look at
it in many ways and inside of IBM is there's
a big iceberg. The top twenty percent of that iceberg,
that's the consumer facing applications of AI. We're really focused
on the eighty percent of the iceberg down below, where
the enterprise changes are going to happen and where the
changes to the business are going to happen.
Speaker 5 (15:20):
Well, the biggest myth is that AI is going to
remove their job or it's going to do the job
for you. In reality, AI is going to be next
to everyone to help them do their job better. And
if you start thinking about transformation of skills in workforce,
it's using AI to power insights, or power media buying
at scale, or power creativity in production. And then you
(15:44):
let the humans next to it do the hard strategic work,
interpret data, build better creative ideas, use those insights to
build better planning tools, and really learning how to sit
next to AI and have it do the work that
produces growth while you do the work that has the
strategy that tells them how to grow. And getting people
to see that and build their functions and their businesses
(16:04):
to take advantage of that is the big work.
Speaker 18 (16:06):
Right now, even beyond the sort of legal issues. Look,
we particularly those of us like myself who don't come
from the creative side, we recognize and appreciate our single
most important asset as a company is our content engine
and our relationships with great creators, the creative geniuses who
produce things like the Last of Us and Game of Thrones.
Speaker 19 (16:29):
And we won't do anything to alienate that community when
it comes to AI. On the other hand, when you
look at areas like you know, visual effects again, languaging
things that might be able to be done with our
video games business and our animation business. At the very least,
we have to be aware of everything that's out there,
and that I would say that's kind of the stage
(16:50):
we're in right now, careful experimentation implementation, where we all
feel very comfortable with what we're doing.
Speaker 14 (16:57):
For me, thinking about AI, it's a ton of striving
and what that future could be and how you really
usher people into that because that is a very different
leap from chat.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
GPT wow. AI is already a game changer for companies
that know how to harness the tools. Here's Canva's Frank
Cortesi and IBM's Jonathan Adischek with real world results.
Speaker 20 (17:19):
At Canva, we kind of really employed this attitude of
AI everywhere, so we're always constantly looking to see what
areas of the business we can kind of help supercharge
with AI or make things go faster and more efficient,
more effective. So that comes from everything from thinking about
first draft ideas that are going to be leveraged against
campaigns or certain times of the year thinking about how
we use AI for media targeting, measurement and things like
(17:41):
that with our media agencies and our partners, and I
think you know, when it comes to using AI, you
can really help do a lot of them mundane things
a lot quicker.
Speaker 11 (17:50):
Right.
Speaker 20 (17:51):
You can create an ad once in Canva and then
you can kind of tell a exactly how you want
it to be changed for various different places, for localization,
different times of the year.
Speaker 17 (18:00):
For us, we're using AI to get so much more
relevant and personalized journeys for our clients. We're using it
to understand where we should show up. Today, we do
half the number of events that we did two years ago.
We're getting five percent more client interests because we're so
(18:20):
much more focused in where we're showing up, and we're
getting those client interests at thirty to forty percent less
per client interest than we did in the past. AI
is helping us get much more targeted. You mean the cost,
the cost is coming down.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
When the subject is AI and what it can do
and should do in the future. Nobody has more knowledge
than the folks at Nvidia who have been doing it
for more than thirty years. In Nvidia makes the cutting
edge microchips that deliver the enormous computing power required by
AI programs. Jamie Allen, director of AD Tech and Digital
(18:56):
Marketing Industries for Nvidia, spoke about where he sees AI
making a big difference in media and how what's.
Speaker 8 (19:05):
Really exciting in the space at the moment. Broadly in
media entertainment, the evolution of what we can do with
three D in video with the intersection of artificial intelligence, graphics,
video three D processing is going to really evolve how
we can create content, interact with content from a consumer
(19:26):
point of view as well as a creative point of view.
I think that the analytics space across all media industries
is going to be really supercharged with the new types
of computing and generative AI that's coming. There's some amazing
companies that we're working with at the moment who are
doing really groundbreaking like mathematics, like physics based maths to
(19:50):
solve problems, especially in advertising and areas like causality to
link work and creative to actual sales, which is really
really exciting. The advertising industry is one of the biggest
data flywheels of any sector. Really. You can also look
at financial services and healthcare as similar volumes of cyclical
(20:10):
data information. As we increase the efficiency in the speed
of processing data, you can create more intelligence from that
data faster, and this is where we come into the
world of generative AI and the tools that we're building
to enable enterprises both the end users of advertising, so
the CMO groups in the industry as well as the
(20:33):
agencies and the ad tech companies, to be able to
derive huge amounts of value from that data faster. That
will then enable the ability to create things like fine
tuned language models much much quicker with high levels of
accuracy that can then drive faster recommendation, really good consumer interaction.
We took in Video's long history of making things very
(20:56):
efficient and bundled it up essentially into container service, so
you can go and take a model from whether it's
Lama or whether it's a Mistral model, or any of
the models the partners that we have and run them
as efficiently and fastly as possible with the support from Nvidia.
So while we don't need to go and make proprietary
(21:18):
tools for everyone, they can take those off the shelf
models and work with our toolkits to make them specific
to them through fine tuning and rag and augmentation models.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
We started off each interview with a lightning round of
questions to warm up our guests and bring out a
bit of personality. Here you'll hear from CBS's Parbender, Dariwall,
Google's Sean Downey, t Mobile Cmo, Viana Hegd, NBC Universals
Jennifer Storms, Disney's Danielle Brown, Warner Brothers Cameron Curtis, NBC
(21:52):
Universal's Jamie Cuthbert, Canvas Frank Cortesi, and IBM's Jonathan Adischek
on Wisconsin white.
Speaker 17 (22:01):
Border, mood board.
Speaker 13 (22:04):
Definitely the white board, whiteboard or mood board.
Speaker 5 (22:08):
I'm definitely a mood board person.
Speaker 10 (22:10):
Ah cool.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
So I kind of do this exercise.
Speaker 10 (22:13):
It kind of count how many negative energy meetings I
have and how many positive energy meetings I have. So
I'm always trying to offload what I call the negative
energy meetings.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
Opening ceremonies or closing ceremonies.
Speaker 11 (22:25):
Oh, that's like choosing a favorite child. That's not fair.
It's it's going to be opening ceremonies.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Danielle Team Picnic, team.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
Bowling, Bowling. I'm competitive bowling. Favorite Warner brother Jack, Harry
sam or Abe.
Speaker 20 (22:42):
Jack favorite font Hewlettica's pretty clear times.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Are really I'm an aerial girl. Myself team picnic or
team bowling, Bowling.
Speaker 17 (22:53):
I'm from Wisconsin. We love boling.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
We close with the dose of gratitude. Terry Crews made
us all misty with his heartfelt observation about how he
hopes his life story can prove to others that with
hard work, just about anything is possible. And finally, Canvas
Jimmy Knowles and Pinterests Judy Lee shared their enthusiasm for
(23:20):
their like minded brands. It's infectious.
Speaker 10 (23:24):
When I was a kid in Flint, Michigan, working in
Hollywood was a kin to flying to Mars, and they
were like, dude, you can't go to Mars. You die
in Mars, you know. But I'm on Mars. I did
it and people were like this, dude made it to Mars,
you know what I mean? Like, everyone was like I could.
He said it, and there were a lot of things
(23:45):
I said and people remember. And I think that is
the best part, because the best part of being me
is showing that everyone else can do it too.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
It's amazing, so well said.
Speaker 6 (23:58):
I feel very lucky to work at a company with
leadership that is so supportive of taking those big swings.
It's not afraid to fail, it's not afraid to make mistakes.
And it's been an incredible learning process getting to build
and work with the amazing team that I do over
the past few years.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
And it just sounds like so much fun.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
So it is.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
It is.
Speaker 17 (24:15):
That's why we do it.
Speaker 4 (24:16):
Yep, and I feel like we should do something together.
Speaker 10 (24:18):
I don't know the vibes.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
The vibes are.
Speaker 6 (24:20):
There, your lips, the God's yours, Judi's rock and roll.
Speaker 13 (24:23):
I'm ready.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Thanks for listening. Be sure to leave us a review
at Apple Podcasts or Amazon Music. We love to hear
from listeners. Please go to Variety dot com and sign
up for the free weekly Strictly Business newsletter, and don't
forget to tune in next week for another episode of
Strictly Business.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Marketing budgets for big movies often exceed the production budgets.
That's because promotion is super important. Promote your film or
TV project with the help of Canva. Canva has promotional
templates like press kits, film posters, and social media assets,
so you'll never begin from a blank page. They also
(25:16):
make it super easy to design a website for your
project too. Go from your screen to the big screen
at canva dot com. Slash Entertainment
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