From McDonald’s to ADT: DeLu Jackson on Brand Transformation and Trust

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olensky. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist. I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to, of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest this week is Daylou Jackson, EVP and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at ADT. A seasoned executive with 25 plus years, Daylou has led marketing transformation at some of the world's most iconic brands, including McDonald's, Audi, Kellogg's, ConAgra, and now ADT.

0:46He's known for his data-driven customer-first approach and for helping redefine what protection and connection mean in the smart home and small business security space. with a Princeton undergrad and an MBA, excuse me, from NYU Stern. He brings both intellectual rigor and real world results to the table. He's also an independent board director and a recognized thought leader in marketing, growth and digital innovation. Daylu Jackson, my newfound friend, my newfound Philly based friend. Welcome to the show. Nice to be here, Steve, and great to see you this morning. It's my pleasure, my friend. I am really, really looking forward to this.

1:25We had a great off the air conversation and I want to continue that here. And I know we will. So I want to just jump right in. Right. You have worked with my gosh, iconic. Now, we're getting thrown around a lot, but I mean, McDonald's, Audi and Kellogg's, I would say they're iconic. Of course they are. So what does it take? Let's talk about moving from a brand from being known like those guys are in a much different category to a category like security and ADT. Yeah, I think it's great. I think one of the things I look across my career, I've touched different categories and different segments and different roles in those organizations.

2:04But I think what's really exciting is it's often the same consumer, right? When we look across those households. So what I've always enjoyed as a consumer marketer or a growth strategist is those different brands fit in the basket of goods in all those households. And each of them have gone through a transformation in terms of the role they play or what the consumer expects from them. And the common thread has been technology has transformed what people expect of those brands. And I'll go to McDonald's, a great example of the definition of convenience for so many years, for decades had been physical restaurants.

2:44How many I can get based on traffic patterns, right? Am I going home this way or home that way? So I put a store there. And then things like delivery and Uber Eats and things like that come along. And people said it's no longer how fast I can get through the drive through. It's how can I get food to my location? And so that company went through a massive digital transformation. And it's really great to see, you know, kiosks and stores and the app and delivery partnerships. And it really just shows an example of great businesses continuing to evolve. So moving on to a brand like ADT, how exciting.

3:24This year is 151 years as a business. And to think about the definition of security. Remember, it's American District Telegram. telegraph that was security. And now it's apps and smart cameras and not just how fast things we respond when things unfortunately don't go well. But now we want to be proactive. We don't have to, we don't want things to go wrong so we can see ahead of time. And we have great products and great solutions like our trusted neighbor product that gives you access so that, Hey, I have a, I have a way to manage my dog Walker and my house cleaning crew or my friends or family that need to visit.

4:09So it's moving from just again, the definition of security where it used to be about keeping people out. It might be about letting the right people in. Right. So amazing evolutions of brands. It's, it's fascinating. The just, I'm just trying to I think of the through line between these brands that you've worked for. And I'd love that you started off with like, it's a lot of the same customers, right? Whether it's McDonald's, Audi, Kellogg's and so on, just a different product. But here comes the cliche of cliches, but people are people. That's right. And they want value for, you know, they'll pay for it, but they want something in return.

4:45And your point about technology, it's so spot on, but so obvious and so overlooked sometimes about the world we're in. And we didn't even touch on, you know, there's two big letters, AI, and how much that's changing every single thing, everything we humans do to have that. It's not a luxury anymore, right? It's a given. Agreed? Absolutely. And I'll go back just a little bit in this. I always tell this little story about when I moved from auto for 16 years and moved from, you know, Audi to Nissan and then go to McDonald's. And people said, how hard is that transition? And remember, as marketers, we study what they do in their lives to determine what we put in the car.

5:25And I said, hey, we knew that people who went to McDonald's bought these big cups. So we put big cup holders in the cars. Right. And so that's that through line. You think about that consumer through line. Another good one is when I moved from you remember McDonald's did an all day breakfast. Oh, yeah. platform that they built. And I went to Kellogg's, another great brand, and we had a discussion about who's the biggest breakfast brand. And then what it created was a discussion about understanding that it wasn't about share of category or share of shelf. It was share of stomach. If you understand those consumers eat so much.

6:05And what we saw was a shift from people eating at home to people eating out of home. And so, but when we thought about breakfast, right, depending on the perspective, you thought, oh, I'm the category leader in breakfast as I define it. But when you think about how the consumer defined it, they thought, what can I get in my stomach to get the calories? And right, if there's 2 ,200 calories on average, you consume a day once they eat out or an egg McMuffin or any other thing, a breakfast bar, the definition of breakfast involved with the consumer and with their behavior, which is I'm on the go more than I was before.

6:40Therefore, I'm eating out more than I was before. So anyway, so that's the through line I've tried to always follow through the customer is that what's their job to be done or what are they solving? And then it allowed those brands to say, okay, how do I approach that differently given that behavior? And obviously all those great brands, the reason they're still great brands is they adjust to that. Exactly. Exactly. Communities. I know it's very big for you and building communities. So how do you, how do you go about building authentic communities around a brand like ADT that's it's rooted in trust and safety, right?

7:13As opposed to flash trend, if you will. So talk to us about, you know, why communities are important, how you're doing that with ADT. Yeah, I think, uh, again, we talked about how, how great this brand, what I'm so privileged to be stewarding this brand because when we do our jobs well, we make the world safer. We are a safety business. And we will look at a lot of what we do is door by door, block by block, street by street, making communities safer. We touched on a little bit of small business is such a big part and a big... We do a lot there. If you think about the roles that small businesses play in communities, they are typically the pillars of communities.

7:54They hire our teenagers and our kids and all those things. And so we work a lot with them. As a matter of fact, just last week, we completed a co-sponsored conference on advancing the future of business in Philadelphia. And it was focused on all the things that we can do collectively to help small businesses succeed. We covered things like organized retail crime and financing and government programs available because we believe that if businesses are strong, communities are strong. And then we play an active role in that, obviously, from a protection and connection perspective is really a big part of it.

8:36But collectively, we make strong businesses, we make strong communities. And so that's a big part of what we do. And the same thing is true in our residential business. You know, our advisors, we have, you know, thousands of advisors that are live and work in the communities that we serve. and they're active in helping customers solve, you know, how they protect what matters most. So all of those things collectively create an amazing footprint for positive impact. Right. And then the last thing I'd say is we have a safe places, our foundation where we work with organizations, you know, Fuller Center and Boca.

9:12We work with the local municipalities. We support about 150 different organizations through the foundation that are really about youth safety, first responders and helping those organizations achieve goals and be successful. It's part of our commitment to building strong communities. It's something that's so, gosh, I preach communities and just especially now as we go more AI, the need for that human interaction. Anyway, I could talk for hours on that. Well, it's funny. AI is interesting. We talked about the definition of community changing and it's changing because community used to be my neighbor next door.

9:53And I knew my neighbor and I saw them all the time and I talked to them. And I think we all experience it now. We're more likely to see our neighbor on a Zoom sometimes than we're likely to see him next door. But we know they're there. And not only that, we rely on each other. Yep. When we move into a neighborhood, we rely on our neighbors. And so we think about what AI and technology have done. In some cases, it's created a little bit of distance. Sometimes it's created the ability to extend that network beyond our immediate geography. But that definition of community has definitely expanded.

10:27I mean, my brother lives in Atlanta, but he's still part of my community. And, you know, we have technology now that allows us to still connect. So it's interesting as we think about what it means to be community physically and then community, as you said, digitally and in a world of AI. It's just it's just transforming sports marketing. And I'm just kind of tabling this because I'm well, one, I'm a big sports fan and two, I'm a marketer. So I know when you were at McDonald's, Audi, they're both big players in sports marketing. And I'm curious, first question is, what lessons from those worlds, if any, are you applying to ADT when it comes to sports marketing?

11:09Yeah, it's a great question. And yeah, we're proud of what we do. And we do a little bit in golf. We have a great partnership with the Miami Marlins, being a South Florida business. And by the way, that's tied to community as well. Being a big brand in South Florida, really making sure we work together on having community impact. But what I learned along those working with those big brands who spend big budgets in those areas was, you know, we were always challenged as marketers to talk about ROI, how we measure it and how we measure impact. And in that world, we used to think of performance marketing over here and brand marketing over here.

11:48So we'd say that fits in the brand marketing and it was a little harder to measure. So what I took to ADT is we worked with our partners to create more of a combined view so that we could understand the impact. We built a media equivalent measurement model to understand the impact. And because by doing that, and this was from learning across those different brands, we've been able to find great ways to activate and accelerate that. And I'll give you an example. Remember when, so we have a patch partnership with the Miami Marlins. So the ADT logo is there. And I love the context of it. When we did the partnership on the field, we put safe at home.

12:27So every time someone passes the logo, they see safe at home and it lights up in the stadium. And I heard people saying, I get it. So the context work. But also early on, I think there was an estimate that the patch would be visible about 13 minutes in any game because of where it was on the on the uniform. But we worked with that partner to put it on opposite arms so that when a pitcher is throwing from a right-handed pitcher from the outfield, it's visible. Left-handed pitcher is visible. Batters, right? So it increased the visibility by 5X, by just realizing where the brand was positioned on the uniform, which is really interesting, right?

13:06So just this insights and intelligence in a media equivalent model says, how do I make sure we maximize value? Yeah. So it's really interesting, though, like those types of learnings that I've learned across businesses on where you what the definition of a partnership is, how the brand shows up, create context so you don't have to explain it. So it's not a pure awareness play. It actually delivers core messaging for us, which is safe at home. And now when every second counts. And so the context. So it's really interesting. And the last thing I would say is when we first started the partnership, we were on the road actually here in Philly.

13:42I was at a game and I heard some fans behind us saying they must need extra protection down there in Miami. And I said, they get it. And I turned around and I was like, hey, great. Like I was engaging with the fans. So cool because they understood what our brand means, the value of the brand and why we were participating. So did you tell them who you were? I had a jersey on, my name on it, right? But I loved it, right? Because one is just that engagement is so cool, right? When you know that one, we don't have to explain it, right? As marketers, we work really hard to try and deliver our messaging and connect with consumers and say, do you understand why my brand's there?

14:26That's as organic as it gets. That is... That to me, I was so excited. As a marketer, I'm like, yes. Right? The trifecta. You saw it, you understood it, and you knew why we were there. And that is so important as marketers. And I just... Again, like you said, it could be sports marketing. It could be sponsorships. But it's a great reminder that we always have the potential to create value and context to make it easy for consumers to connect. our brand to what matters to them. So I'm pretty excited. I can hear it in your voice. You're still reveling it at exchange. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts in this next one.

15:07And it's such a topic that gets beaten up or argued, debated. Brand versus performance. And I have very specific thoughts on it, which I'm not going to share right now because no one really cares about my thoughts per se. But where do you fall brand versus performance? And I'm purposely leaving it that high and you can take it anywhere you want. I think I'm honest about this with everyone is I'd love to eliminate that distinction because I think all marketing is performance marketing. Assuming we want to achieve a goal of growth, profitability, or even if we're not for profit, we want to raise funds or help communities, whatever it is.

15:45When we do marketing, there's a performance element to it. And just as I described, you know, what we do in sports marketing and what we do in customer acquisition, we're all it's all part of the same mix that drives the performance of my organization. And so I even talk about a lot, a lot of things. So when I when I came here again from Learn Lessons, I combined those functions because they were they were separated. And then there was the whole sometimes that, well, these dollars are for these metrics and these dollars are for these metrics. When we put it together, these dollars, these investments are for the same metrics.

16:23They may manifest themselves differently. We may have some different leading and lagging indicators of their impact. But when we measure them collectively, we actually understand their collective impact, not just their discrete impact. Right. That's where we've always struggled with that. Right. Is measurement. How do I measure that one versus this one? And I've always said, how about we measure them together and then we understand the true impact. Right. And so what we see is what we would call historically brand marketing, upper funnel or the messaging we talked about in partnerships. We see the difference when we have it and when we don't have it.

16:59Some of these we have seasonality, which is just the nature of the events. This is visible for six months. And when it's not visible, do I see similar results? And so we measure the entire performance of our investments over time rather than by activity. Does it make sense? So we look at by day and by week, are we seeing performance improve? Even if it's marginal improvement, we know what's in the mix. And it adds more value to things like the mix modeling rather than the individual discrete activity. It just it it always boggles my mind when I hear and I see, oh, my gosh, research brand versus performance.

17:40And you have to pick one over the other. And like they just give me a wall so I can bang my head because and I knew just having spoken to you so briefly, I knew we were going to be aligned that. No, just it's one and roll it together and stop overthinking this. That's right. If we don't know, that's where we overthink it. And I think it's actually, I think it's frees us up to do more. We always talk about the relationship with the CFO and finance. I wouldn't call him my best friend, but he's close. And, you know, and I've always appreciated that in that when I joined ADT, we worked together on things like this.

18:22We had an effective performance model and we worked together and with our teams to figure out how we brought them together. And it's interesting. We don't know where the teams start and stop sometimes because our performance measurement and our performance cadence and the way we talk about the business impact of our investments is so aligned. Yeah. It's so aligned. Yeah. And it's just so it's so I think it's so refreshing, but also it frees us up. We literally work together and say, what do we do next? Hey, we're spending we're investing here and this is working for us. And we tried this, that didn't work.

18:58We have a, it allows us to test more and the speed at which we can get alignment on trying new things. Again, it's just, it's really refreshing to know we have great partnership like that, but it's because of what you just described is that we work together to say, let's put it together. Yep. And, and, and that makes us great partners and allows us to be, uh, again, allows our team to do even more than we would have done. I could not agree more. I would scream from the highest mountaintop. Just get out of our own way. It is. And you know, what is also a last thing I say, what it's allowed us to do is we even don't talk about marketing inside of our organization.

19:35We talk about go to market and how we effectively work across our old peas, right? Like, Hey, this isn't about marketing and the thing we call marketing. It's about how we as a collective, so we product marketing, sales ops, we're together every week talking about our go-to market, right? How did our collective investments drive our performance? And it's, again, really learned across the different organizations when we had those things separated over our careers. Having it together has been, it just allows us to move and move the business in meaningful ways. Another topic, again, there's so many things I want to pick your brain on.

20:17And we definitely got to do a part two. We're not even done part one. Leadership. I have a two-part question on leadership for you. What makes a great leader? Again, I'm keeping it very high level because I want you to take it where you want. And I'll borrow this from one of my favorite leaders, mentors, people that I've worked with who've been in the business a long time. I was stepping in a new category in CPG and I borrowed this and said humanity and humility. He said you have a lot of people that are all working hard to do the best they can. And they count on us as leaders to be human, but also realize with humility is they may know more than us.

20:54And so what they what it does is guide us as leaders and says what they're not looking for us, looking to us for the answer all the time. What they're looking for is clarity. Yep. Right. Can I give you a vision, even if it's a one month, one week, three months? Can I give them clarity so that they can be effective at what they're good at? And so, again, those two H's for me are always top of mind for me. Am I leading with humanity and humility? Love it. Second part is you've been at this long enough. What are some shifts you've noticed when it comes to leadership over the years? Yeah, I would say that the styles of leadership have been required to change.

21:36You use that two-letter word, AI. And as the people who are involved and engaged, going back to is, it used to be the leaders gave the answers. We told people what to do, go do this, and this is the thing, and everyone do it. But as the pace of change and the size of organizations has changed is we have to empower people to go do things and execute. We've had to share more authority maybe than we had historically. And we had to pass that down to the teams. I mean, you're aware of that team of teams concept, right? Let the teams go run. And then we became more coordinators and orchestrators than executors and sort of directors.

22:19And I've seen that change dramatically. And by the way, it's changing every day. Oh, every day, every hour. In this, are you kidding? Yeah. Even the time we're recording this thing. It is going to be changed. And, you know, the other thing I learned, you know, the pandemic accelerated this and all these things we've talked about is, and again, this great leader that I won't say his name, but he'll know I'm talking about him. But he told me that things that we used to do monthly, we have to do weekly. Things we had to do weekly, we had to do daily. And things you used to do daily, we do hourly.

22:58Those are the shifts that we've changed is how we allocate our time and how much time we dedicate to leading versus doing. And I learned that and I do it daily with my teams. I like that. 30 minutes check in with my directs. And it's the thing I look forward to the most in my workday is just seeing them together and getting to talk. And I think those are shifts that I made in my leadership. I didn't do that before. But, you know, the distributed workforce and all those things and technology have given us the opportunity, but also the need to bring people together. It's also availability. You're making yourself available.

23:37Yeah. And I look forward to it. I have to tell you, it's my favorite part of the day. And it's all my directs. We bring guests there. Yesterday, we had some guests come in. Hey, this is a topic that I think would be relevant for everyone. Why don't you just share it with the team, 20 minutes, and then it saves us so much great time. But it allows us to use their collective intelligence to say, hey, maybe that would typically fall into his or her area. But now you I want I want your perspective on this. And it's amazing what people want they're capable of. But their their their feeling of engagement they have by being included.

24:22Yes. More processes rather than less. They actually can lead way better than they ever would have otherwise. And I would I would even extrapolate more on processes, even decision making. If show them they have a role in that. That's right. And the competence it gives everybody, typically when you're trying a lot of new stuff, hey, I'm trying a new thing. I'm trying a new partner. I want to test something different. When you have partnership and support that says, yeah, I heard the same thing you heard. That's a good idea. Doesn't it give you a little more confidence to say, okay, I know I have someone backing me up.

24:56Oh my God. Yeah. On doing this and why we do it. And again, back to speed of decision-making, confidence in decision-making. It just makes people feel like, okay, I've got partners in this. I'm not alone and we're going to win together. So it's pretty easy. Okay. We're coming. I'm looking at the time. And if you listen to my show, you know, I do that at the end of every episode, I call the random five. It's five very random. And I mean, random. I pull them out of a database of questions and it's to help the listener to get to know you better. Okay. All right. And if you're game, here we go. Okay.

25:31Number one, who do you turn to for inspiration or advice when you're feeling stuck? My Aunt Pat. Why? Because she has been this constant voice of professionalism and success and support for my entire life since high school. And she's a very experienced seasoned executive, worked with executives all over the world. She's just been a great, great partner for me. I love it. It's great to have someone like that in your life. Number two, if your life had a theme song, what would it be? It would be Together We Made It. I would ask why, but I think we already know. Yeah, because I've had all these great partners, mentors, my spouse, my partner in life, my kids, my parents have all just been, you know, nothing I've achieved would have happened without a tremendous amount of support and mentorship and, you know, all those things.