- Hi everyone, I am Sophia Woodhouse president of 212NYC. 212 NYC's mission is to build a better advertising industry. And we do that by providing the programming, the platform, the tools, and the access to thought leadership to help our members drive their careers forward. Tonight, we'll hear from an incredible group of industry leaders on the future of advertising and its impact on our lives, our careers, society, and so much more. We're also excited to announce that attendees will have a chance to win on a one-on-one with author Rishad Tobaccawala, one of the most provocative and inspirational leaders within our industry. The winner will be announced at the end of tonight's panel. Also 212 is a nonprofit organization and we would not exist without the support from our sponsors. A massive thank you to tonight's sponsor and USA Today Network. And with that, please join me in welcoming Estee Cross, vice president of sales to share a few words. - Thank you, Sophia. We're really happy to be here. And I thought I'd start with simply sharing a story, which starts last March when 2021 was beginning to reveal itself to the world, and what we're about to live through. My husband had to close the doors on his business, which was our local workspace. It didn't take long to realize that this was happening with our favorite restaurants, our local shops, other business owners. And while our business was closed for the time being other businesses had an opportunity stay afloat. We got together with our neighbors and our town. My husband built a website. We created an initiative that pulled our community together and kept our businesses open. The local news brand LowHud covered the story promoting it as a community wide effort. LowHud happens to be part of my company, the USA Today Network. We are the largest local to national media platform in the US. We're comprised of USA today, the national brand and 250 owned and operated newsrooms Across 46 States our 5,000 journalists, write relevant stories for and about the cities they live in. These are brands that you know, Detroit Free Press, Austin statesman, Arizona Republic, and yes New York own LowHud. Our editorial team strives for neutrality. We reach one and two adults in the US that we need to, we write content about the news of course, about sports, tech, money, entertainment, offering safe environment for our brand partners. One of the biggest trends that we felt this year were that many big national brands came out and supported journalism. Everybody on this call felt the importance of local journalism this year, the work that serves our country, our communities and ourselves. But while wanting to support local journalism is needed, we also need to be able to drive results for our partners. So because of the way we're set up, we understand what's happening in local communities. We understand the sentiment and the trends for those regions. The future of working with us will be to leverage that data, those insights, a targeting and technology. This will all inform our partners message to different communities or different regions. Our larger content initiatives provide opportunities to align with positive local stories and support stories that drive our cultural awareness forward. We will continue to report on our culture and the happenings of today as we continue to drive forward with our solutions. And with that, we are so honored to partner with 212 and support and sponsor today's discussion. Thanks for having us. - Thank you so much Estee. Without further ado, let's get started. I'd love to introduce our moderator and fellow board member, Helen Lin, who is the Chief Digital Officer who pluses to kick us off. - Awesome, thank you, and thank you to 212 for hosting and definitely for Estee for sponsoring this from the USA Today. Also very warm virtual welcome to all of our panelists and friends here. Thank you for joining us for the future of advertising. And Sophia for you mentioned, we're gonna talk about today and the topics of tomorrow through the lens of people and the impact that we can make. Since we actually do have an hour, it'd be wonderful if everybody can introduce themselves quickly, name, company role. We'll start with Grace. - Hi, my name is Grace Dolan. I'm the vice president of marketing at Samsung electronics for the home entertainment division. I forgot the third thing I was supposed to do. - I think that was it . - That was it all right I'm done. - Name, role and company. Feel free anybody Shenan, Jenny. - I'm Shenan Reed. I am the head of media for L'Oreal USA. - Hi guys I'm Jenny Gardener, and I oversee media for Unilever North America. And Rishad needs no introduction but... - Yeah, I'm Rishad Tobaccowala. I'm the author of a book called, "Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data," a speaker and an advisor, and prior to which I worked for 37 years at the Publicis Groupe. - Thank you guys all for joining us. So Rishad always actually gives really great advice, which is let's step back and take a macro view of things first, before we dig into the details. And so help me set the stage just in terms of like what's happening to us right now. You've talked about the fourth industrial revolution, right? Where the data, automation, technology, that's all driving a connected intelligence. And the thing is at this point, while that two years ago was so super exciting, we actually do have apprehension now about this. We do know that we can't just go charging forward, that there are unintended consequences, but yet when we talk about business transformation, that is exactly all we're pursuing. Can you explain why companies are still so doggedly pursuing this, but are you hopefully observing by advising companies on how companies are starting to think about the watch outs too, as we go pursue progress? - Absolutely. Again, thank you for having me. Thank you for USA Today for sponsoring this. What I will basically say is I'll start a little bit with technology and turn it around. And instead of talking about technology as data and technology, I talk about it as human beings. So one of the nice things of being around for a long time is I started working and creating the first interactive agencies 25 years ago. And what happened 25 years ago and online, and a whole bunch of technologies existed before that. But 25 years ago, we had the advent of the World Wide Web. It was 1994, 1995. And because of that, there were two human things that began to be served. We always wanted to discover things, and because of the World Wide Web, it gave birth to something called search. Search is really about the human need to discover. And at the same time, as we all know, people love to buy stuff, which is consumers love to or people love to transact. And it gave birth to connect to transaction, which in the US is Amazon. So Amazon and Google were born in the first connected age, but they were built because they satisfied a human need, a human need to discover and a human need to transact. In 2007, we had a second connected age. The first one still remained, but we had a second one. The second one was built around the fact that we had mobile phones Samsung, Apple, et cetera. This had this need for we always wanted to be connected all the time. And around then is where Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn also came to be, because we wanted to connect it to everybody. So that was the second connected age, which is again is a human thing. I wanna be connected all the time. I wanna be connected to everybody. I wanna connect to discover, and I wanna connect to transact. And they have clearly changed the world of marketing, the world of business and the world of society . Elections are driven by what happens on Facebook, right? Major companies, stock prices fall. Yesterday Amazon introduced Amazon Pharmacy and CVS and everybody stock price fell by 10% or six to 10%. So these are pretty dramatic. We're now entering the third connected age. And while the third connected age people talk about it in all kinds of terms, I'm gonna use human terms. And the human terms are A, data connecting to data, which is machine learning is really what AI is. AI has many flavors. But when Netflix figures out what movie you wanna watch better than you do, it's basically a data connecting to data. The second is much faster ways of connecting. You know, Samsung is a leader, Apple is coming on, which is 5G. And 5G is when it works is eight to 10 times faster than the fastest speed you currently have at home. So that's pretty interesting. The third one is new ways of connecting of which voice is the first big interface. And then the last one is we now all are connected to God-like power, which is called cloud computing. And that well basically change. So the first frame I try to get people to think about is stop thinking about technology and start thinking about people. If you satisfy a person, it's much more interesting that's number one. Moving to people the second one, which all of us are beginning to realize, and we see this, even in this particular audience, is there are demographic shifts. And demographic shifts and I'm again gonna keep it to the US because this is still 212NYC. In the United States, there are three big demographic shifts. And we are not necessarily paying attention to two of the three. We are paying attention to one. The one that we're paying a lot of attention to is that the United States is becoming multi-ethnic. And next year, under 21 years old, we'll be across the United States, Caucasian minority. But instead of calling it minority, majority, I basically say, we've gotta become truly multi-ethnic. And you see that in the people who are protesting over black lives matter, right? They were multi- ethnic but they were also particularly young. That's sort of one. But second shift, which I think people are paying less attention to, is the country is growing dramatically older. Every day 10,000 people turn 65 years. A turn 65 every single day. And someone who's healthy at 60 will live healthy past 80. Above 50 years old controlled 75% of all American wealth. So that's the second demographic shift that people aren't really paying attention to, which is this country is growing older in a pretty dramatic way. And the third one, which we have seen, but we don't pay as much attention to will be drive out. And it's sometimes very hard for people like yourselves and me who live in Chicago, or visit LA, is there is a really two Americas. There is a rural America, and there is a city America. And you saw that in the elections. And if we don't pay attention to those, it doesn't matter what technology you pay attention to. Because in effect, people choose with their hearts and they use numbers to justify what they just did. So that's one very big thing. The third one, besides technology change and demographic shifts. And again I'm not gonna speak globally, I'm gonna speak specifically at the United States, is the rise of the new ESG. And this became very clear during black lives matter. But I could see this coming for a long long time. And what do I mean by new ESG? It doesn't mean that the old ESG doesn't matter. So the old ESG, E stood for environment, S stood for social and G stood for governance. There is a new ESG where the E stands for employee. The S stands for society and the G stands for government. What do I mean by that? One of the driving forces at least I discovered, over black lives matter, because like many of you all on this panel and many people watching, you all were helping clients figure out what was going on, right? I, because of my age at state was basically figuring out working with boards on what was going on. And to a great extent, boards were surprised at the pressure they were basically facing from younger people in their organization. And it was amazing because they had no idea. In fact, one of the key things I've tell boards is why all of you all 50 and 60 year old people, right? Just fixing certain things like having enough women, having enough people of color may not be enough of a fix. You need generation. You can't have a board full of Nancy Pelosi's you need a Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the board. So that is, you know, one of the key things that is intergenerational, that is the E. The assets society, every company has a positive impact, and then also a negative impact of some sort. It might be because of the way they produce their product or whatever it is. Is an understanding and then fixing that. Because if you don't, you begin to have big issues. Some of the most dramatically, successful technology companies, and I will not name them are having a big big issue of recruiting engineers. One particular company basically used to be able to recruit 90% of all engineers. Today they can only recruit 50% of all engineers. Because many people say, why do we want to work for a company that Marc Benioff calls the new nicotine, right? So employees have a great amount of power, but why there is that particular impact is if you talk about purpose and values, but you don't look after your employees, I don't believe you. But more important from a marketing perspective, even more important than your consumers or employees, right? So employees in society, how you play with society, how do you play with employees? And the last one, which is not necessarily popular, especially when I speak to boards is something called government. We are beginning to realize that government actually matters. Good government versus bad government. If you look at what's going on in Taiwan, they're having massive festivals with hundreds of thousands of people without masks. Yes I understand it's an Island. Or New Zealand but what about Vietnam? How do you explain that? Right? And so, to a great extent we have always thought about governance, which is how do we govern ourselves, but are our companies actually helping government, whether it's local state or national? And one of those is, are you paying your taxes please? It makes no sense escaping taxes and then saying, I'm gonna do good for education. You just haven't funded schools. So those are the key things that I see. - You know, it has you, when you talk about the new ESG, it's actually such a relief. You had predicted a few years ago that truly that the big tech companies were actually going to be transformed in a good way. - Yes. Internally it was gonna be through the people that know the inner fabric of the company once they found their voice. And we see that that's happening. So as these big tech companies, so powerful, influencing, not only marketplaces, publishing ecosystem and obviously consumers and what they're thinking, but with over 10 million advertisers so the competition for the advertiser to have a voice with these big tech companies, do you think that that there's a chance for even the biggest brand advertisers to have a voice with these companies that don't necessarily rely on any one of them? For example, stop hate for profit this past year and in July you know, we had over a thousand marketers that signed on to pause advertising, and then yet companies still had their, the company still had its record breaking quarter year, quarter on quarter. You know, do you think that those types of brands voting with their pocket book or raising their hands and having a voice, do you think that that can matter despite how large their... - Yes, yes. So I believe at least from the perspective that I see the, the staff hit for profit, that part of it was extremely extremely impactful and has been more successful than anybody actually understands. Because everybody keeps looking at financial metrics. That is not the way to look at these things. The first thing is you don't need to well it, many of you all do. You all suddenly got hauled into helping your boards decide what to do. So what basically began to happen is boards began to understand what was going on. I advise a lot of boards and I basically said, hey listen, you have a one, two, three, you need to have a one year, three year and five-year plan. And your other simple problems you have. Number one, you have a problem that you have some questionable data leakage, and I explained that. Second is many of the boards did not understand how media was bought on this. Remember most of these board members have grown up when media companies bid against each other for their business. When I explained to them that they were bidding and giving away their margins against other companies, they couldn't understand what was going on. I said, this is completely the opposite. You are working hard to give as much margin as you possibly could. And because of my advanced degree in mathematics and auction bidding, I showed them how it work. And they said, Oh my God. I said, look I know how to work this metric I have a black box I could do whatever, right? But the most important thing is I said, the fact that you're not worrying about not being able to do the right thing is a really big problem. You'll have no strategic optionality. How did you become so reliant on these players? I said, hey, remember when I worked in the agency business, you kept me very very very much under control because you always had another holding company and then three other small companies, because you always said, I have options and you taught me options. How come you no longer have options? So the boards are paying attention to great extent. Young people are paying attention. People like yourselves are clearly very aware of what is going on. So I do believe there is a pressure. And here's what you're beginning to see. In a very simply in a different company, though it's more of a PR thing. If you notice Apple just got for some of its smaller folks, the fee that they charge for the apps from 30% to 15%. Most of these people are going to do something, which is very interesting, self amputation, okay? Because they're gonna basically, they realize the FTC is coming at them. The feds are coming up. The companies are coming at them. And by the way, these are great organizations with great people. I'm not against this, but what tends to basically happen is when you do not have competition, when you basically do not have transparency, you eventually hurt brands, you hurt marketers and you hurt ecosystems. Eventually this thing becomes very troublesome. But I think it's become a big big success, but people need to have a one, two, three and five-year plan. And don't hallucinate just thinking, just because their stock prices going up, that everything is okay. - Well, the transparency with the employees speaking up has helped a lot. And then with the brands, we have a lot of brands here that also have been able to be really influential. Now, what other ways there are everyone has opinions on how they could help a platform make better decisions, what are some of the ways that some of our brands here have been able to influence a platforms and offer constructive suggestions and policy changes? - I mean, I can take that first and then I'm sure everyone else has other things they can build on. So, first of all, I think it's not just the platforms, I think it's all media partners and you know, we've seen over time that our voice is powerful. And it's not just because of the dollars that we're spending, because if you do look at financial metrics only, right? Let's face it, you know, stopping spend in certain areas for a month is not going to make a financial difference, right? So you know, taking a bigger picture and looking at what it is we're trying to do, where we wanna be supporting things, you know, we're okay with freedom of speech, but freedom of speech does not mean freedom to monetize, because there's certain content that I don't wanna be around, whether it's a safety issue or a suitability issue, and being able to have the transparency to understand and decide that. We know we all know context matters, you know? And so the less I have the ability to understand the context that I'm in and around, the harder it is for me to make some of those decisions. And I think that's where you know, some of the conversations that we're having are very platform based and within the platforms, there's different feedback that we're giving whether it's showing up in stories versus showing up in newsfeed and there's you know, differences like that in terms of how to treat and how to think about these things. But let's not forget, It's still really important to talk about the content that's running and being placed in other areas and deciding for ourselves as companies and brands and marketers, if it is the right content that we want to be around. You know a lot of times I'll tell my marketing teams when they ask, what can I do? I say go be a consumer, right? Don't tell me how you're on all these platforms and you're watching branded content. Of course you are, because that's your job. But if you go on a consumer as a consumer, are you watching as much branded content or not? Have you been on a YouTube platform? Have you been on Tik ToK? Do you know what consumers are even doing? Forget about even figuring out first what we as marketers should be doing, what our messages should be, but how are consumers using those platforms and then figuring out, is it the right place for you to be? And how to get your message across because everyone can make messaging entertaining, right? There's no, if ands or buts about it, the question is are you doing it in the right way, in the right tone and in the right setting? You know as Unilever, we've been very active with sharing our voice and our point of view for years, you know, Louis DoCoMo, you know, started up the the Gam Group, which is you know, been relied on very tremendously over the last several months, even more than I probably think anybody imagined would happened so quickly. You know so we're also trying to make sure that we're bringing the industry forward in these conversations as well, because all boats rise and we have to look out for society and the consumer, because if we don't do it, we have a bigger problem because we're not gonna be able to reach them. - I think you make such a wonderful point Jennifer, it is really what Unilever has done in being very consistent around values, principles, and leaning into the industry. And not pointing out any one actor, but really talking about it holistically, and I think that that has been really influential because when people's ears are closed, right? They're not necessarily receptive to feedback. Speaking of content and talking about being a great marketer, because you're first a consumer, we've talked about it as marketers, and experience it as consumers during lockdown, we've consumed basically all the content that we care about. We've binged everything to death, right? I think Shenan you mentioned that we had to be really cognizant of you know, of boredom as marketers when we think about receptivity and when we put our messaging, and then you know Grace, you've talked about how there's exciting new consumer behaviors that are springing up to fill that content and experience void. You know what are some of the things that you're seeing and keep in mind that we have a lot of publishers and content producers that are joining in. So what are some pro tips for them to be thinking about in 21? - So I think there's some interesting things that I'm excited to watch. I mean, I think like everyone, I'm excited to watch what's gonna happen with the vaccines. And if I'm to pull out my crystal ball, which isn't nearly as big or as impressive as Rishad's, but my you know, little hint of a view into where I think things are going. And part of this is based on to Jen's point, like be the consumer, right? Like what is life like in my house? I've got a 13 year old daughter and a 17 year old son and my husband and a dog, and we've been locked out in an apartment. What does that mean to me when there's a vaccine and I can get back outside. I'm sure everyone who's watching this today, including all of the panelists can raise their hand if I ask them if they've got video and screen fatigue from being on zoom calls and engaging with people in this way, I'd be shocked if somebody didn't, if you don't please let us know 'cause I'm super curious to talk to you. But I think the opportunity that we're going to see is maybe a bit of a reset, right? When we look at the numbers that e-marketer put out earlier this year, they originally predicted I wanna say like I don't know, 30 minutes or so of additional, not even five or 10 minutes of additional time that people would be spending with media this year. And then in April, they restated it to 41 minutes. 41 minutes of additional time with media on a daily basis is a huge number of amount of time. Part of that we're taking out of the fact that we're not commuting as much, part of that we're taking out of just how we're moving around in our daily lives. And the fact that we're locked into our houses or were for a period of time. I don't think that trend is going to last if I'm to, to kind of give you a prediction on it, I think there's going to be a backlash against it. And we're gonna see people who want to get outside, want to see people face to face, want to put the screen down and actually spend a bit more time. I think we're gonna start seeing people pick up things like magazines. When I talked to my print partners and ask them how consumption is going, their advertising revenue is down because the advertisers aren't there, but their actual print subscriptions are climbing, because people are looking for that tactical engagement experience. It's different. And you see that in newspapers, especially because of the content like Rishad was speaking about before. But I think there's also just in content magazines that are interesting. I also think it's fascinating when we think about out of home. I don't know any of you who are in the New York city area, this is 212NYC so I'm hoping most of you in the New York city area, I was wondering around in Hudson yards, 'cause we're back in the office at 50%, I noticed more out of home ad units than I've ever noticed before because there's fewer people in the way to distract me. So I think the engagement I'm getting from out of home is probably higher than it's been in the past, which I think is really interesting. So I think we're gonna see this kind of interesting, this interesting shift in trend. I wanna say though Helen, just kind of going back to a little bit of what Jen was saying, you've heard me say this before. I firmly believe advertising when done well is a service to the consumer. And we need to get back to making it a service, and stop treating our customers and our consumers like users and numbers and dots and data points and start thinking about that consumer first experience. And we need to hold our platforms and our partners accountable to giving them a valuable experience, a healthy, valuable experience. - I think that's exactly spot on. And I, you know, I was thinking a lot about this content evolution and I was thinking back to when we used to watch cable as kids and even before cable, so we had like five channels. I remember I had five and I manually turn the dial. And then it was you know, 10, 20, a 100, a 1000 whatever. And everyone just shut down and it was just too much stuff and you couldn't go through it or make any sense of it and you cut the cord and then you said, I'm gonna go and subscribe to a couple you know, to Netflix, Disney, blah, blah, blah. And now what we're seeing is that there's a massive proliferation of TT options now. I think people are gonna get really overwhelmed. And to your point you know, Shenan about like moving to other channels, I think we're gonna see a mass proliferation in that, whatever it be, whether it's you know, growth in old channels or even just exploring new worlds. And within Samsung, I think you know, I'm really close to the content because it all comes out of my products. And one of the things that we're always looking to do is to introduce that benefit in a new way. So even very recently you know, we were talking about how we're gonna partner with the next gen gaming consoles that are coming out, right? So you know, what are we doing? And the traditional model would be to talk about how powerful our TVs are and how powerful these consoles are and have a TVC and you know do a three 60 campaign. And we just said, you know what, let's just celebrate gamers and give them a really fun experience. So we put together an ARG. Basically we drop clues all over the internet and had these hackers go at it for a chance to win the ultimate gaming package. And then we sponsored an event on Twitch that we streamed last night, after three weeks of people. I mean it was the craziest thing. There were over 11,000 people that just found it. We didn't put out an advertisement about it. We just dropped it on Reddit. And then all of a sudden there was a discord group, a Reddit group, an IG group, a Twitter group and they were all coming together, strangers in order to solve this puzzle. So we streamed it. We had like over 900,000 views. It was absolutely stunning. To me it was just a representation of how people feel right now. They just want something different and they want as much as they can to create that live event experience that they've lost. And they wanna recreate connections with people, and that socialization. And that's why they were organically creating these groups. We didn't have anything to do with it. We just dropped hints and then let people go and be people. I think it's just so clear that America and the world is just so hungry for that. And I think we're gonna see an evolution in content that gives people a new type of way to connect. - That's certainly is brand as a service, right? With fatigue right now, with being stir-crazy that clearly, I'm sure you had a lot of positive sentiment. I'm sure there were a lot of thank you's to Samsung for bringing that experience to people when they otherwise really are limited in choices now. - Yeah, future of advertising. - Okay, something a little bit less exciting as creating whole new virtual experiences and Insta hints all over the internet, but something that we cannot talk about the future without talking about cookie apocalypse, right? And this is one that's not societal, it wasn't a pandemic. This is an industry we would to deal with this no matter what, right? But we don't wanna talk about the technical because ultimately we're all zoomed out on that topic. I'm prepared for cookie-less future. Really though, there are business and societal impacts or at least potential we'll see, in 2021 and 2022 around the decisions or actually around the implications of what's gonna happen. For example, there's speculation of course, that more of the premium content is gonna have to move behind premium quality, accurate content will have to move behind a firewall, a paywall just because publishers are gonna be really struggling to make back that revenue because you know, programmatic revenues and finding audiences are going to be compromised during that time. Now how are brands thinking about this paywall pain? Well first, is it a pain? Is it a good thing as long as the premium publishers survive? You know, how do we think this is gonna affect viewers, consumers, readers, people. - So I can start a little bit. I think, I don't think consumers are gonna notice is the first challenge other than if there's a registration wall or a paywall ultimately to get to the content that they love. But if it's a registration wall and not a pay wall from a consumer perspective, if you're giving me something of value, then I might be willing to give you a registration information. And then that deterministic data becomes really valuable to me as an advertiser, right? I am fortunate and so lucky to now be inside an organization that has a really robust amount of first party data that we know about our consumers, right? We sit in a really beautiful space and I don't mean that just because of our products, but because of the value of the data that we have. But that doesn't mean that other people's first party data isn't interesting to me as well. And we have this tendency to talk about second party data as like this nebulous topic. It's just other people's first party data. It's her store, it's Meredith or it's the New York times. - It's the USA Today. - It's USA Today exactly. It is the USA Today's first party data that is interesting to me because they know something about this customer and even more so they know something about where they live, what local they're consuming, what they're interested in knowing more about. And there's a lot of really amazing value behind that. So I'm encouraging when I talk to our media partners, I'm encouraging all of them to really think about those registration walls, getting more of that database combined and collected. And I'm looking for ways that I can start to bring some of those databases together, to create interesting scale. Because I think there's a tremendous opportunity for all of us, if we can start to see some of those databases yeah have a little bit of interesting connectivity. - Yeah definitely the Oh sorry, go ahead Jenny. - I just think of myself, I agree with what you're saying when I put my marketer or media hat on, but when I also put my consumer hat on, I think like how many more passwords am I gonna have to remember? Every time I wanna click on something, am I really gonna have to enter that or verify something? And it's just you know, the promise of content available to everybody or some level of content available to everybody, changes very dramatically. And when we look at, we talked a little bit before about subscription fatigue. I mean, everyone's talking about these things. As a consumer, it's getting very overwhelming and it you know, it's not to say that that data doesn't have power, but at what point do we know enough about a consumer? And how much data do we really need on consumers? Because if you think, like I think of my own, everybody has this example where you know, you've looked something up and it is following you around on the internet forever. Like to the point that it's you off, right? Because it's just the technology that happens. And there's no human overlay to say okay, hang on, we told Jenny enough about that, and she didn't or did take an action so we wanna tell her more, or we're gonna stop talking to her. Or we're gonna remind her in a couple months from now. And that's I think where you know, the data we taught you know, Rishad opened with it like data and machines only goes so far and there needs to be a human overlay on top of it to figure out how much data do we have to know about people? What is that data informing? And then making sure that we're not doing things to annoy people, because otherwise we are not actually creating a really good advertising experience for anybody. - You know Jen, I think you make a great point. Like at the end of the day, there is a value, like we keep talking about like with this first party cookie drop, right? Eventually we're gonna see context is king again, right? Did we get back to that place where context really matters? And I do think there's a place for, there's a very big place left open for serendipity. We have this tendency to over target and over-focus, and it's really easy to do as marketers. And I know I'm contradicting myself in some ways by saying this but like... - Its the world we live in. - So it is the world we live in, right? Like it's, I love having data and I love being able to target, target, target, target, target. But once I get to that place, have I just over targeted living daylights out of what I'm trying to accomplish, annoyed the consumer at the end of the day, because I don't wanna follow you around with the same lip gloss. If you're not gonna buy that lip gloss, I should move those dollars somewhere else. But you may not be part of my target and you may see my ad if I show it to you contextually and there may be an aha moment for you. And I do think sometimes we miss the opportunity to give those aha moments. - Well, I think that overused overlay on it, right? I mean like just because we can should we, right? I mean that's like I say to my kids all the time and they hate it, but even you know, I say it all the time at work and especially now with data and targeting, and you hear about all this, the ways you can target people whatever and it's like Ooh, some of that when you actually did, like in theory to go after that approach, it sounds great. But when you actually ask them basic questions, it kind of gets really creepy really fast. - Yeah. - I think the almost overused term of last year was personalization at scale. And you know, we have talked about that it's really relevant and at different places and receptivity and in touch points and environments, relevance might be really broad based. You know and so I think somebody, I think Jenny you had mentioned common sense check what we're doing here and talking about tech, the cost, is it worth the squeeze, that kind of thing. So thank you so much for sharing the good and the bad and the ugly personalization. But I'm gonna put grades on the spot here because yes, maybe one-to-one just because it's possible. Maybe it's not for every single impression doesn't need to necessarily be that. But, when you think about first party customer ecosystems, there is a reality where some companies that are extremely data rich and have lots of services , you can actually personalize an entire journey. And at Samsung you could eventually get to that place within the home. So tell us how scared should we be or is it such a service and a system, that's gonna be the best thing, Grace sell us on Samsung today. - Okay, so I'm gonna do my best here . And I'm gonna do my best to do it in a way that's aspirational not creepy. So there's a lot of personalization already happening. Like you know, Rishad talked about AI and Netflix. We have that in our Samsung TVs today, right? So, and it's actually that Netflix times a thousand because we aggregate the whole world of content, OTT broadcast everything. And then we'll give you a recommendation. You see that personalization working day to day in your mobile device. You see it now in refrigerators, like they can tell you based on the food that's in your refrigerator, what meal you can make for dinner, that's what our Samsung refrigerators do. I think that's kind of like the first layer of individual device personalization. What we are working on now is greater and greater seamlessness within the ecosystem, so that my fridge is talking to my mobile device and say I wanna have X, Y, Z for dinner, I'm at the store, I can one look at the camera that's in my Samsung refrigerator to say I'm missing eggs. And my device can send me a note or indicate that I need to buy eggs, right? So that's what we had today and we're working on making that experience smoother. I think the next level of that will be where we start borrowing second party data. Like, so you have an Amazon device in your home, like an Alexa and you have a cold, or you're in a bad mood, like can through voice control there be a hint of how you're feeling? What your mood is, or whether you might have a cold that might indicate, you know, a change to your shopping list, or a change to the content that your TV is recommending based on your mood. You know, Helen is in a jovial mood, let's give her rom com recommendation. - No, no, no . - Like to somebody, to some people that's fantastic to other people that's just a horrific violation of your privacy. And I think this is where we just have to be really really mindful as manufacturers and people that we're giving the right people what they want, right? That it is a benefit to others and that it is a great violation to others. And just acknowledging that that is the case, and creating the right blocks and safe measures in the experience, in order to do that. - So, all of the examples you gave were brand as a service, right? They weren't trying to cross sell something that made no sense. And obviously privacy preserving mostly in your first party ecosystem, but I'm sure you're going to do it in a privacy preserving compliant way when you do your second party data partnerships. - Of course. - So thank you for sharing with us that actually... What we used to write up five years ago and see as write-ups is actually a reality already today. - It's coming, yeah, it's coming. And the stuff that I said about Alexa is not a real thing, but it could that be, there's a lot of stuff like that, that we envision every day as possibilities for greater personalization in the home. But, it's just all done with, you know with you know, with great care and consideration for the consumer. - The main thing is that the brands have so much power and influence, and I love that every brand is talking about brand influence in a good way not just in service of your brand, but also in society as clearly what you important brand leaders are thinking about. So thank you for sharing those. I do wanna, I would love to hear this past year, despite all the challenges and given that you're thinking about D and I being so important at the forefront that in your influential roles, if you could leave us with a story of what you've done this past year, where a decision you have made has actually created systemic change in this area with your brand dollars, I'd love if we all took that away and in 2021, we remember that we can all make a huge difference. - Should I start? I can start. So first of all, this has been such a fantastic year in many ways, despite everything horrible that's happened with COVID. I think the social justice movement really growing I mean, it's been a slow trickling movement. It's been an evolution. And then it really came to a head this year. What I love about our industry is that we finally got some swagger as brands to say, hey you know the same way that you know, people are voting for leaders in government, people are voting for brands with their wallets, right? And so we need to do, we need to be a voice with all the power of our brands to make those changes, right? I think we as individuals can also make big changes that ladder up to these bigger things. And one of the things that I did this year, that I was really excited about was in the world of gaming. And it is so male dominated today. It's gaming is amazing. It's this wonderful wonderful community of really smart, savvy, fun, imaginative, immersive folks, but it has been dominated by men. And so a lot of the titles, when you think about performance games are really really revolve around male titles. We sponsored the league of legends championship series this year, and one of the speed titles was called King of speed. And the main reaction from my team was, Nicole Mokomi was the one who was leading that initiative on my team. And she she's fabulous. Was why King of speed? And they're like well, it's only guys in the league right now. They're like why would it be a friendly place for a woman to try to enter this league? Like, why would a woman wanna enter this league when the title that she would win is King of speed, you know? And so we changed it. We as a brand said, we would like for it to be more gender agnostic. And now the title in the game is Champions of Speed, And that's such a small change, but these are little microaggressions that keep women out of gaming. I think it's little changes like that we're seeing every day to big changes like what we saw with the Washington football team right? It was finally FedEx that said, okay, we're gonna pull our naming rights. And then all of a sudden boom, that was a couple of folks. There were a few individuals that made that decision. And then all of a sudden, something as controversial as the does Redskins, which we've been talking about for decades is now the Washington football team, brands. - You think Jack Dorsey will say that, how you know, if he knew what he knew now and starting Twitter he would have done things differently. Well, you're making a decision in a very emerging area that is going to be crushed with dollars very soon, but you foundationally changed what a label for a winner is defined as, to something broader and totally inclusive. So that's exactly the kind of inspiration I always hoping that we leave our viewers with. Any more stories like that to share? - I can share a little something that I did when I, so I only started here in August and obviously lot had happened before I got here, but I'm not gonna take any credit for any of that. But when I first got here either much to the chagrin or much to the happiness of our media partners, I got here just in time to start all of our media negotiations for 2021. Some of them are thrilled, some of them were tortured. It's fine, it's all good is all still done with love. The thing that I have asked for and included in all of our RFPs is an understanding of their diversity inside their organization, either by their creators, depending on the partners that we're working with, their leadership, their team, that's working on our business, but also the team who represents them or owns them as a business and even their board of directors. Because I don't think these things change consistently until we started at least asking the question. So no, I'm not holding them to any accountability or threshold, I'm not asking them to meet a certain threshold, or I won't put my dollars there, but I want them to know that I'm holding them... - That you're watching. - Accountable. I wanna hear the information back and I wanna know what it is. And I think it just gives us the opportunity to keep tabs on things. And then the question will start to push for the answer. - Yeah and improve what you're not measuring, right? I mean, little thing here on says that is to help brands with media selection. We've also compiled the questionnaire and it's not to be the end all be all, but it certainly is to make it easier for brands to decide whether they wanna over-index with companies that share similar values and watch that change over time for sure. So Rishad, as we start to wrap up before we go into Q&A, so we promised our viewers career advice, and I mentioned that we have viewers from all different stages of their career. If you can draw from your best insights and advice on what people should do as they go into 21, and at the end of any year, you think about reinventing ourselves. What are the things that we should always be holding and thinking about so that we don't fall behind? - So in the chat, the first thing you may want to do is it's free, so there's no cost to this and your data is not used anywhere. Is I have a email newsletter that comes out every Sunday. It's seven to 10 minutes of a read, and you never know what you're going to get. But one of the things I recently wrote about were 12 career lessons, which I will also send specifically, but you find can find it on rishadtobaccowala.com. And they're in the 12 career lessons, I basically talked about early career, middle career and later career. Because often we don't realize that we have these different stages in the careers. And the key thing, when it comes down to the early career for the people who are early in their career, and the way I define it, by the way, and this may shock most of you all, someone who comes out of school is gonna probably work between 40 and 50 years, because you'll be out around in the early twenties. And you're likely to work into your late sixties. Even if you decide that you have enough money, but you'll do something of some sort, because otherwise your partner at home or yourself will get agitated without you know something to do. So think about these as the first 12 years or 15 years, the next 12 to 15 years and the third 12 to 15 years. And I'm just gonna give you a two or three from each of those, but you can go to rishadsubstack.com, I'll give you the exact link to look at it. So in the early thing, please recognize that early on you get the least sucky jobs. So don't think about vision and mission and purpose. Just get the best job you can that sucks the least. Because the reality of it is the bottom of the bottom gets the terrible stuff. You should see the first five years, what I had to do, it's disparaging but that's what happens. It's just at the bottom. So that's the least sucky job. But more importantly is trying to join a company or an industry, which has a longterm future because you're thinking about the next decade or two. So the trend is your friend, make sure you go with the trend. And because you're planning over 45 years, please don't make decisions on what was, what went wrong in the last three four meetings. Think about trying to if you can stay in an organization for three to five years or two to five years versus thinking about six months or one year or two years. Because every job including the best job you possibly will have, will be really good 70% of the time and we'll be very difficult about 30% of the time. That's why they pay you. If you basically have a job that's a hundred percent good, you're either hallucinating or you're not really doing a very job that you're growing. So you have to think about that. So the early career, that's what you do. In the middle of your career, what you wanna basically do is decide on who your boss is. More important than anything else is who you work for. Because your boss will not only teach you, but if your boss she succeeds you can follow her. And you know, she can help you find a great thing. And the other thing that you do is you build your brand. So in these 12 career lessons, I talk about why it's very important to build a brand. Because all of us at some particular stage, are companies have one. And how do you build a brand because, and your brand isn't just about what you say, but it's how you work with people, how you help people and how you build your reputation. And those are some of your middle career. The latter part of your career are the most difficult. And what it is basically happened is some of us are in that position. And those are very difficult because we have, if we've been successful, we've become relatively powerful, relatively that we have people who listen to us, but we get to a particular place where either the people who are talking to us have become our mirrors, they reflect what we think we want. So they don't actually speak up. And sometimes you find yourself beginning to believe that your flatulence smells like Chanel five, okay? This is really really, I see so much senior management in fact I go to them and say, stop this God damn nonsense. You're full of shit . Who told you that you actually know what you're talking about. They of course remind me that I'm full of diarrhea shit , but that's okay. But at least I can talk to them. But so in that area, you have to unlearn, transform and reinvent. You have to learn new skillsets. You know, what's really interesting is Twitter and companies like this came around when I was in my late forties, early fifties. But I was an early adopter. My Twitter handle is @Rishad. My Gmail address is rishad@gmail.com. And I was in my late forties, early fifties. I didn't say I'm gonna retire and I don't need to learn this stuff. I learned this stuff. That's the reason I'm now learning how to work on sub stack because it's important. So you have to keep learning and unlearning, which is important. And also start thinking in your latter part of career, how do you help people, how you do things like that? So that is a big big part of it. I'm gonna basically end by saying a couple of things. Which is one, do not get yourself down, especially in the current circumstances that we are in, because it's really very difficult. Everybody's having a very difficult time. It's difficult because we are not really working at home. We are living at the office, okay? Think about it that way. The other is, many of us are anxious. We are anxious about our health. We are often, we are fearful about our own careers and futures. And of course, we're uncertain. Now to a certain extent there is a hint of certainty because of these vaccines, that things might get start getting better by next summer, but we've been doing this and we are sort of worn out. And so I wrote something about how to use the next six months to rebuild yourself versus being down on yourself, or just which is human and which is sort of natural, which I'll also put in, which is what are the six things to do over the next six months. So you can look forward positively and I'll put both of those in my chat and then hand it back to you. - So I took it as, by the least lucky job I learn a lot, make sure you're, you're exposed to a ton. Second phase is to find that person you're gonna really be able to learn from and get closer to and get some coaching and guidance. And the third one is pick up some new skills, which probably means get humble. And then look back at that, those early people coming into probably reporting into you, and try to actually tag onto them and learn what they're learning. Thank you for that. - Absolutely. So I've just sent the exact link to the 12 career lessons for those of people who don't wanna subscribe, they just want that, so they can just get that, if that's what they want. And then the last thing I'm just gonna do is the six stores for the next six months of how to build your life. And you will hopefully find those useful. And that when I've had some creative help so it looks like a Tik Tok street. - So before we launch into the Q&A, I wanna make sure that Estee our sponsor has the first chance at asking our panelists anything of her choice. And by the way that the viewer questions are hard. You can't wait to get to them. - A lot of really good questions and what a really great conversation, thank you. We're curious about your individual brands and the businesses that you work with. What lessons have you learned this year that help your brand move forward? What are you taking into your strategies next year? I can start us Estee. I think for us, and I know we're not alone in this being nimble has been a really big lesson. We, I think every business I've worked on in the past 20 years of being in this industry has had joint business plans and contracts and things that lock us into dollars and where we're going. And if this lesson has taught, and they're all built for upside, right? All of those agreements are built for like, but if we spend another million dollars, then we'll get all of these other things we unlock. And then the truth of the matter is in a year like this, when brands needed to pull back, they needed to hold back. They needed to see what it was gonna mean for their business. They needed to make sure that the message and the creative that they had in market was making sense and wasn't deaf to the tone that needed to be in the market several times this year, by the way. Not just about one thing, but about multiple things this year, we had to take that moment to make sure that the message was right. I think there's been a lot of lessons about the need for flexibility and the need for speed. Really being able to be more like capitalist used to say this all the time, and I kind of picked it up nimble and opportunistic. Still one of my favorite like catch phrases. Like just how do you have planned spontaneity and be nimble and opportunistic? - Thank you. - I think one of my big learnings from 2020 has been that the consumer doesn't care only about your product. So just the same way as you know, you don't wanna buy a product from you know, a used car salesman, right? Or someone that you think is shady. It's just as important as for a marketer to communicate the benefit of the product and who I am as a brand, that's selling the product to you. There didn't use to be the same ratio of importance to the end consumer. And I think now we're at a place where they are equally important 'cause there are so much commoditization and in actual products and we all know the power of the brand and all of that, but who the brand is your value sets like who I am as a persona is so so important. So it's changing the way that I see what my job is on top of changing the world, right? Like which we all decided that's our job, right? - Champions of speed. - Champions of speed and. - The only bill that I would have without being repetitive would also be and I think the stands for us as people and consumers, and not just as brands, but especially as brands, you can't just say you have to do. - Absolutely. Being on the other side of brands, working with so many brands, I just admire the brand markers. I mentioned during, actually I think this was when we were preparing, but during stop it pay for profit, the struggles that brands had in making decisions, it was so inspiring to see not cultural crisis first making sure like does everybody know the company mission statement and our selections, our media selections and our messaging choices, laddering up to the music, like all of these very very quick in terms of nimble decision-making just putting together the information and making, brands putting themselves on check you know. And what I loved was brands were asking themselves, it wasn't just about the consumer and what the impact was on sales. It was about their employees, about the talent that represents them you know. It was about their representatives in QSR, in their actual location. So brands have really had, not that the whole world hasn't had a very tough year, but brands have really really stepped up. You've really seen the growth in brands almost like as people. So there's some really hard zingers in here, but Shenan someone is gonna hold you accountable to something. So Shannon spoke about treating consumers more like people and less like data points. How do you do that when every single metric is designed against advertising being a service. So I suppose that that means more about scale and efficiencies. - Yeah, honestly you have to find ways to change the metrics. I honestly like we've been preaching for a long time that click through rate is dead, right? And I think we finally killed it, I hope as an industry although I still see it show up in reports on occasion and I cringe when it does. I really think it's a matter of retraining your organizations, to understand what success looks like and what is that measure for success. So that could be brand favorability, that could be brand lift, it could be designing your own metric to come up with what does brand love mean? And are we creating brand love? Are we creating a relationship with the consumer? Are we creating an and ultimately let's be honest. It all falls out and sell out and sell in, right? So at the end of the day, if the products are moving off the shelf, then you've done your job as a marketer. But I would argue that that click through rate, maybe isn't quite as important as that engagement rate in doing that ultimate job. It's just the two are not as easily connected. - Well with you marketers at the helm, I know that the engagement and sentiment and value giving back society is going to make it into some kind of scorecard. And we will hope to measure against that. I'll call the MRC by the way, right after this and let them know to get on it. - Could you? - So hard born but it was asked , what are the panelists think will happen to holding companies? So I guess this is an, give me some advice folks. The evolution of holding companies, what do you want from your agency and holding company? Oh, come on I'm sure. - Everybody wants a talented team that's passionate about the business that we're all working in together and can make meaningful change and have fun while doing it. At the same time you know, and I'm sure if anybody disagrees let me know, but I'm sure we'll all agree, we want to be challenged. We want thought leadership. And so I don't want to just be you know, the captain of the ship saying, this is the way we're going. And somebody says, hang on there's a storm coming, we should just go that way and then come back around. So we want to be challenged. We want thought leadership that comes to the table, regardless of if it's coming from a holding company or a junior level versus senior level person who's working on our business. - Yeah I think that the holding company is I mean look, I admit I'm probably slightly biased having been in two major holding companies in my career and having just come out of one, right? But I do think the holding companies have, in some ways an advantage over the brands in that our job is to be the thoroughbred racehorse that has blinders on and is focused on the goal, right? That's our job. Our holding company's job is to not have those blinders on and to see the entire field. And what I'm hoping for similar to what Jen was saying was that my holding companies ultimately ended up bringing that really full and robust point of view back to the business and help us understand things that are outside of our obvious competitive set, outside of what we might naturally see as best in class. We can't be every consumer and we can't be and see every advertiser, so help us understand kind of the bigger picture. And then I'm gonna just harp on this point once again, flexibility. I need those partners to work with me to be able to flex in and flex out, it's not typical holding company models. It's harder, I think for holding to do, but we've all seen a year where we've needed to flex up and flex down. And whether it was like pharmaceutical companies that needed all of the talent, you could possibly give them or travel companies who needed none of the talent at the moment, I needed as much relief as possible. These things happened and they were real. How do you connect your talent in house to make it easy for them to move from one place to another, without creating a bunch of hoops that your, clients have to jump through to get there. - Building on what Shenan's answer is I've just also put in the chat, something I wrote many years ago, which I repeat every year to everyone, which is other six things that clients want. So after observing them for decades which is, they want insights, they want inspiration, they want ideas. They want collaboration and flexibility. They want continuous improvement and iteration, and they want operating discipline, and they want all sex. And I described what those are. - But I think the only thing I would add to that, so I completely agree with you, Rishad. I think a holding company is only as good as its strongest player and its weakest link, right? - Yeah. - And so your earlier comment about self amputation, I think there's gotta be a recognition that in certain instances, this group of leaders is not fully equipped to handle the challenge of this business. And this is where we need to flex and be nimble. I think that's the only piece where it's hard to have that conversation because for the most part, it offers a tremendous diversity of you know, brilliance and expertise, and we rely on our holding companies for you know, to be smarter than us in everything, to have expertise in everything, to be the thought leaders, to be our cabinet, right? - In response I love what I'm hearing because Jenny, you're talking about partnership, right? It's not one person pays the other person. And therefore the answer is always yes, right? You're paying to have a partner to go through really hard things together, and it's not gonna always be pretty and you're gonna make bets together. Some are gonna be right, some of them are wrong, you're gonna learn and you'll do better next time. So that is very reassuring to hear marketers talk like that because that will then give agencies the courage to really step up and be that partner and not the yes person, I think that's extremely important. Shenan, absolutely look at what brands have had to do to transform so you're allowing an order on mobile and suddenly you have to create a mobile app and pick up and store that same way I'm positive you're gonna see from every holding company, certainly a publicist that we've slice and dice our people now, and so that we are able to flex up flex down as our client's industries move beyond a broadcast year and then black Friday and you know like new year new, whatever that is. - New year new you. - Thank you, thank you. And Grace what is really important is that trust and hearing that honestly, an earnest, not at the end when the relationship has just gone beyond a pair. So again this set of marketers, probably not representative of every market, but I sure hope it is the majority is the kind of market that's gonna drive more with every dollar impacting society and not just your brands. I know that there was a big contest. So I'm gonna pass it back to Sophia, to announce a winner and describe the prize a little bit more too. - And so before I do that, I just wanna thank you all for this like incredible discussions. I'm like the biggest takeaways is just the emphasis on the consumer and not getting so caught up in being a marketer. At the end of the day, it's about people, which is what we're shot at stated in all of you and stated. Also the new ESG, employee, society, government, and the power of brands and marketers to really have a positive change for good. That leaves me very optimistic about this industry, about my career in this industry. So I thank you all for your thoughtful responses. Helen you did a fantastic job. Now, without further ado, the winner of the one-on-one with Rishad Tobaccowala is Hunter Sparks from Vibel. To schedule time with Rishad and ask him all of this questions, but thank you Rishad for offering your time. We were joking earlier how the panelists wanted to win that, but we did not repeat it. It chosen at random. - I've now retired so I'm sitting at home, so just reach out and I will help people because that's all I doubt basically do. But for others as I reminded people, just subscribe to rishadsubstack.com. And if you read the last 12, I've only done it for about 13 weeks, it was particularly interesting as I've got 4,000 subscribers, including 32 CEOs of companies. So it's a very strange thing that I write. So you should hopefully enjoy that. But meanwhile, for all of you all and for anybody just reach out, I'd love to help. - Thank you again for joining us and to Estee and the USA Today Network for sponsoring and wishing everybody a really happy and safe holiday in the week to come. - Thank you. - Bye everybody. - Thank you all. - Thank you.