>>voice Please welcome Allan Thygesen
You've heard our vision for the future and our product team
just laid out the roadmap to get us there. And that's a map to what's next,
and we're very excited to build that future with you, but i'm here to talk about what works now. So
you've been building the marketing organizations of tomorrow since before the pandemic. In the last
few years have been a roller coaster, thinking in quarter-to-quarter or even week to week increments
and we want to help set you up to be ready for years to come the pandemic likely broke some
organizational inertia but the challenge now is keeping that spirit of accelerated learning and
agility going this is about continuing the digital transformation process not starting over now if we
learned anything from the last two years it's that being ready is not a feeling it's a choice because
the most digitally mature marketers who were ready are reporting big gains the media's reported
a five percentage point increase in market share during the pandemic versus their peers
and we see a few common themes among those leading brands. The brands that are ready created marketing
agile and responsive enough to capture short-term opportunities while building long-term resilience.
Like The Ordinary, the skin care line made by the Abnormal Beauty Company DECIEM
They were ready for the COVID-driven direct-to-consumer and self-care trends,
but they began as a scrappy Canadian startup looking for a global audience in the crowded
beauty space. They broke through by breaking down their marketing in a few simple steps.
First, they set clear objectives which, for their business, focused on brand
awareness and customer loyalty. Then The Ordinary studied regional search trends to identify the
top markets where they could turn searches into sales using Google shopping campaigns.
Then finally, they used our automated tools seeded with data from those pilots to
scale globally and the results have been a five to one return on their ad spend. Now the brands that
are ready also adopt a test-and-learn mindset and they saw a 3x return on their digital initiatives
versus those less digitally mature. Let's look at Monday.com, which is the work operating system.
Their product evolution has been supported by marketing to match
in terms of agility and growth they just scaled globally they IPO'd last year
and they used a data-driven approach to test and optimize messages on platforms like YouTube
and as a B2B player, they've adapted their messaging for different audiences. When they
were first trying to connect with marketing and creative teams, they realized they could better
optimize their messaging. So they pivoted and in less than a week they were testing new campaigns
showcasing the benefits for marketers driving a 25 percent increase in qualified signups. They've
incorporated an always-on testing mindset in their planning and budgets dedicating 30 percent
of their spending to experiments to identify new audiences, new creative, and new bidding strategies .
And finally, brands that are ready overcome organizational
silos to make digital transformation a company-wide initiative. Let's look at Kia.
So Kia has gone through a brand relaunch to become a more customer-centric mobile solution provider.
Like many automakers, Kia used to see dealers as their customers, and they had limited interactions
with the drivers who ultimately buy their cars. But they recognized the potential drivers searching
online wanted an integrated experience when they walked into the showroom - and hopefully
drove off the lot - so they did something new: they started working with regional dealers to build
standardized web templates and data policies to provide a consistent customer experience and give
Kia a better picture of their end users. And as they built their first-party data strategy,
Kia is focused on providing a real value exchange to their customers who love tricking out their ride
in Kia's car customization tool and appreciate the ease of booking a test drive online.
So in one test, Kia connected their website with the dealer's CRM and they saw a 4x boost
in conversion rates on their marketing. Now those are just a few examples but you don't have to take
my word for it. Digital transformation is happening across every industry. But media and entertainment
has perhaps been on this journey longer than most, so i'm honored to have here Sarah Harden
who is the CEO of Hello Sunshine, the media brand anchored in storytelling with a mission to change
the narrative for women with her co-founder Reese Witherspoon, Hello Sunshine produces shows
like Big Little Lies, The Morning Show, films like Gone Girl and Wild but they also do unscripted
series, animation, podcasts, and the popular Reese's Book Club. And they have found success across every
major streaming platform including HBO, Netflix, Apple, Hulu, and more. Please welcome Sarah Harden
[applause and music]
>>Allan: Hello. So great to see you >>Sarah Harden You too. And i love the yellow chair
it's very on brand for Hello Sunshine, thank you. >>Allan: Well, there you go!
i don't know that we thought of that but i'll take it. [laughter]
So what an incredible journey you've been on for the last couple years.
Can you talk a little about what attracted you to this work and specifically
Sunshine's mission to change the narrative for women? >>Sarah: You know, like a lot of good companies
when Reese founded the company and we came together to talk about the company we wanted to
build, it was born of frustration, and i think frustration at the status quo, and what we saw
in media. And the equal side of that was the opportunity, and i think what we saw was audiences
that were over-indexing on social, that were consuming content, women people of color
otherwise voices that had been structurally excluded from storytelling for decades and
as a result of that people weren't seeing the full range of their lived experiences in their
media and that just seemed like a wide open space and a gap. I think the other thing we saw in, you
know, Reese's decades as an actress and a producer and I've been building direct-to-consumer media
brands as well was that the business has been very siloed ,right, you had these
film and tv production companies and you had social storytelling and digital companies often
sort of off to the left and this was an integrated world the content was launching into a cultural
conversation and uh we thought there's an opportunity to build an integrated media company
that not only made premium storytelling that better reflected the audiences that everyone's
looking to connect with, but then take responsibility as a company for helping audiences
show up to that media whether that's a YouTube series whether that's a streaming film whether its a podcast.
>>Allan: well and i think there's so many analogies for all the marketers in the room
integrated... an integrated approach to the market is not just for media companies it's for everyone
who's trying to reach an audience . >>Sarah: Yeah, I think... look, the fight for attention is very real
i think we all, you know, we all live that and I think it's the bar is just getting higher and higher
and higher so i mean it's something we spend a lot of time thinking about every day especially in a
post-pandemic world right >>Allan: Yeah yeah i know exactly.
Well so i mentioned in my intro that you've been
incredibly successful across literally every major streaming service. Can you talk a little about
that consumer move and what are the most recent changes you're seeing and that you think
people should keep an eye on? >>Sarah: Well I think, if i come back to the fight for attention,
i think the quality of attention and i think one of the things we talk about and we see is that
you know obviously people are consuming more content than than ever before
but but the intentional viewer i think is very thoughtful about how they're spending their time
and so we think a lot about that viewer and and somewhat paradoxically they're also everywhere
right on every platform so how do you show up to the intentional viewer across all platforms in a
way that feels consistent to your brand that um meets that expectations but whether that's in a
six second short or in a a feature film um that there's a consistency to that and um so i think
that's one thing we see i think you know we always talk about the right story at the right time
um i i think there's something else that's happening today which is you have to do that
and that means on the right platform in the right format it's one of the reasons we built
to be able to tell stories whether in short form in audio or in or in feature film but i think the
other thing we really have to think about for a consumer right now is why right now what's the
urgency for me to look at this right now and that means understanding we talked about that
cultural conversation understanding where people are in their lives like where women are in may
is very different than where they are in july i mean may i am right may is the worst month of the
year for parents dads as well but we do a lot of our social listening for women it's horrific so
for someone to be seen like who you are the opportunity to connect to someone and say i
know where you are in your life right now you're trying to make 27 school events and it's a big
may as a big you know month for working for work as well and so i think we we think a lot about um
the intentional viewer the right story the right time the right platform and that means we have
built independently right because we mean that we try and find the right dream team the right
partners um to stack the decks on how we author our content to give it the best chance of making
a bid for connection with a viewer. >>Allan: Well I think, again, to make an analogy to marketing
you think about how to connect your viewers across the funnel and you have a variety of platforms
and that then gives you the opportunity and the permission and of course the the data to
uh to find them at the right time. >>Sarah: Look it's true and i think that was one of the things you see
everything you do is launching into an existing cultural conversation and if you're lucky and
you have the intention to it you can add to that conversation you can start new ones you can extend
it but if you're not um in that conversation right from the start especially missing a big
opportunity you know whatever that thing that used to be old-fashioned called word of mouth um
but you will also be shaped by that conversation too and i think we i think about in this fight for
attention i think the other thing is you know i believe that fortune favors the distinctive
and the brave you will be rewarded for it if you get it right and if it's authentically stacked to
who you are as a brand like that's coming through very clearly that you you understand your why and
what are we doing that's additive to someone's life because that's their bar right i think we all see that.
>>Allan: Totally agree. It's not about whiz-bang effects it's about authenticity and
storytelling and you exemplify that. Talk to us a little about your process for green lighting
a project how do you decide what to back and launch? >>Sarah: You know we built the company with a lot
of intention we have a convening mission about putting women at the center of the story,
and all of our narratives and so that provides a very clear filter for us which is helpful we then
we've spent a lot of time focusing on authentic authorship and that means the stories we choose
to tell who's in our writers rooms who's on our cruise and you know that there's a driving belief
that we have that intentional office authorship will be seen and felt by the intentional viewer
and and that really so that's where we start um and then we try and set things up in the
marketplace uh and again that is right platform right story right time and um and so that's one
of the reasons we work independently and it's um it's also you know some stories it's it was one of
reese's first um things we talked about she said i want to be able to sit with a creator and hear a
story and whether that is best told as a podcast a tv series a short form series uh a social campaign
a documentary we have to have the the mission control in our company to bring that to life and
so we've already thought about that then and then it's going and finding the dream partners
to put together and you know it's we're working with brands like this too and i think sometimes
we talk about you know we have five years of brand equity Reese has obviously decades
of brand equity we work with partners who have decades of brand equity what are the things that
only we can uniquely do as partners and we really spend a lot of time finding stacking the deck on
authorship is what we what we call it, yeah. >>Allan: It is striking, I think...you think about the number
of perceived rules that you broke right at the time when you got started everyone thought that you
needed to be a vertically integrated company with a streaming service and then studios to
produce content for that service and you said no no we're going to be an independent producer
everyone thought you could be a single media format no no we're going to be across all media
and so uh i think there's some lessons there i think for marketers in the room
that you've got to think holistically about distribution everywhere the fact that you are
unaffiliated and are able to pick the the best path to market for each of your products is an
i think an incredible strength of the company >>Sarah: yeah, i mean i think i always talk about we're really
lucky to be able to start with a clean sheet of paper, but not really because i had Reese and...
her influence and everything she bought, you know, and her history and already working as
a premium producer too but we didn't have legacy and so we really looked and said how do we build
a company that's architected for the next five to ten years of media and not the one just that
we just left and so in the early the last five years that we i feel like we've been slightly
ahead of the curve but we're continually having to reconceptualize what that means right and
how are we innovating the connection between and this is where digital is so good
you know innovating the connection between between content, whether it's on a streaming platform
or on a, you know, on a digitally native platform, or wherever that is and connect that with
community and and other engagement experience whether that's commerce or live events or
or asking people to take action as a result of that content. >>Allan: So, you have such a forward-looking
perspective on the entertainment business and all the marketers here you know need to understand
how can you reach the consumer over the next five to ten years what are some of the trends
for entertainment that you think are particularly important for marketers to understand?
>>Sarah: Well, there's a couple i'm paying a lot of attention to now, I mean, it's interesting. And look we feel this
Reese is the best person at this, right? We have a worthy mission that we live and breathe we have
really strong brand values and i know like all of you do in this room i think sometimes we can fall
victim to like thinking about our storytelling with all this meaning and earnestness and
and we certainly um and and i don't want to dismiss that but when you really look
i think in a post-pandemic world tooth or living with the pandemic forever world i don't know
which world we're in but um the importance and and not forgetting the importance of joy
bringing joy to people's lives we are over indexed on meaning and under indexed on joy and simplicity
you know the power of curation we you know reese's book club it books sit at the center of
our advantage um and rhys picks a book every month it's a huge utility to a consumer to say in a sea
of everything to read here's one thing that's worthy of your time and attention that book and
then we option a lot of those books and turn them into film and tv shows so the power of curative
voices and so i think the paradox of choice is something we all live with i do i don't think and
i say this every few years but i really believe it now i don't think there's ever been a better
time when you look ahead the next five years for brands when you look at where we've come with the
dual the media model of subscription and ads right in a cable world it used to be the programming was
additive and the ads were interruptive right and disruptive you look at a digital model in
a streaming world and and the marketplace is it's with with the latest decision by netflix this is
the model and the competitive frontier is how do we connect with more additive um purposeful
marketing content experiences they're much more integrated and you can do that on digital in a
way that you couldn't do on the traditional cable model so i think two big opportunities
brands as long form you you you are and can be the entertainers you know we are working with
brands to create these what we call these cultural storytelling franchises it's a small part of the
media mix but it's a it's a new type of bid for connection with an audience on platforms where
you've you know you've in traditionally you're only there in a disruptive way right and i think
there's so much happening here there's so much innovation um to go around that and i think it's
a huge opportunity and i also think brands as curatorial voices yes helping consumers find
their way in the brand equity of the emotional real estate your brand has with a consumer it's
a huge service to help simplify their lives simplify their choices in ways that you signal
i understand you you get me you know where i am in my life and um i mean it's difficult like some of
our programming we're planning two years out and three years out in in the case of film and but
but others and i think that's why we experimenting and testing and learning on a lot of our digital
storytelling formats too to really signal to people i i know where you are right place right
time with purposeful marketing additive to their lives and i i think it's i'm very excited about
um about the next two or three years because i think the innovation around um around storytelling
across longer longer formats is only just it's just starting to happen in quality ways
>>Allan: Yeah i totally agree with you and i i think associating yourself with authentic storytelling
whether it's a YouTube creator or the very high quality storytelling from Hello Sunshine I
think that's the future i think that's where brand loyalty we've built yeah i agree 100 percent with you.
Well, Sarah thank you so much for coming. >>Sarah: Thank you so much for having me, it was a delight.
>>Allan: it was a thrill. >>Sarah: Thank you. Thanks Allan
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