Rebuilding Media Without Silos - Lucy Markowitz

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host Steve Olenski. 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 Lucy Markowitz, SVP and General Manager of the U.S. Marketplace at Vistar Media. Lucy oversees it all. Sales, client services, analytics, DSP, and supply partnerships.

0:40Leading teams that power the connective tissue between agencies, brands, publishers, and DSPs. Her leadership is the reason Vistar's marketplace hums, ensuring every relationship and every impression delivers value. That's a lot of pressure. Before joining Vistar, Lucy led hedge fund and investment bank sales at DataMiner, giving her a front row seat to how information and timing move markets. Lucy holds a BS in international finance and marketing from the University of Miami and has been with Vistar since 2014 through the company's acquisition by T-Mobile earlier this year. Lucy Markowitz, welcome to the show.

1:22Thank you so much, Steve. It is my pleasure. We're going to jump in. We got a lot to cover. So let's go. Let's do it. I want to start with how we rethink how we view media channels. Now, we know marketers love to debate what works and what doesn't. My hand's raised. But in truth, no channel is inherently good or bad. What matters is the strategy, the goal, the creative, the execution. So my first question is, when you look across channels today, out of home, digital, CTV, social, blah, blah, blah, where do you see the biggest disconnect how marketers perceive them versus how they actually perform?

2:02Well, I think the first problem is often channels are not planned together. They're maybe start out that way where there's an allocation of budgets to different channels based on results from past performance. However, the cohesive strategy piece of making sure, okay, we have all these plans of what we're going to do often starts getting disconnected about halfway through the process. You often see that there's multiple agencies, which I actually think in a lot of ways is a positive thing. I think having different perspectives for a particular brand of different people, sort of different elements of what these different agencies are really good at.

2:40I think there's an importance that that can bring. However, at the end of the day, everyone is fighting to have a piece of the budget. So I think that innately means that people stop sharing because they want to have that special sauce and they're sort of trying to keep that under lock and key. So I feel like the process starts out where you're using past performance, which often is late, which is the first problem. Then you're reacting to information and allocating budgets. and then you essentially tell a bunch of people the equivalent of like, go do a group project and then let's combine this all at the end into a PowerPoint deck, which is not exactly what it looks like, but you're bringing this to life, but everything is happening in a very fragmented way.

3:26I think I would say in a perfect world, having also creative and strategy and investment and planning actually sitting together and crafting the entire story together and then coming back multiple times throughout the process and being able to create more checks and balances would be ideal. But I also think that we're living in a world where there's constraints on resources and just time is a huge problem because you are literally racing the clock to make sure that whatever you've put together is still gonna be relevant by the time it hits the market. So I think that that fragmentation often leads to things not coming together quite the way that they should and us leveraging these channels to the best of their ability.

4:10So what happened, and by the way, I love your use of the word fragment and fragmentation. It's a synonym for silo, right? Let's face it. But maybe it's a soft try because we know silo is literally and figuratively the four-letter word. Absolutely. It's the death knell. But I love how you're used to the word fragment and fragmentation. But it just kind of boggles my mind at the end of the day. And I'm curious, how do you guide brands or agency to think more holistically? And so not good or bad, but just getting the right channel to the right objectives or the right person. How do you do or is that just an impossibility?

4:42Well, I think it is impossible to do it 100 percent of the time. But I think that is literally our job to try. I think as media companies, our role and yes, in a lot of ways, my role is tied to revenue. But you're not going to see revenue if you're leading your story with buy me, pick me. It should be about how you're helping to drive someone's business. And in order to drive someone's business, you need to spend time with everyone throughout that entire funnel to not only educate them on their products, but invite vice versa. Like you want to be a partner. And I think this is like a hot topic of, I hate the word vendor because I don't want to be thought of someone that is looking at doing a very transactional sale.

5:24You want to be there for the longterm. You want to be a partner, not just for one campaign, but you want to be there as they're evolving their business and helping to actually move results and outcomes. And part of that is starting at the top of understanding at the very macro level, like what does this brand stand for? What do they care about? What are they trying to do? Is this a product launch? Is this a brand launch? Is this looking to do something really fun and playful in the market? Is this actually a really serious topic? Did something happen at the brand where they're trying to revitalize what they're doing.

6:01And so I think like that is just the foundation is actually understanding that piece and then working your way down the funnel of educating digital teams, analytics teams of some of the misconceptions that exist, especially around out of home and how we can help to solve their problems in a, in a way that is prescriptive and not a one size fits all. Is there a, um, a channel or tactic that you think is even misunderstood or heaven forbid underrated? Well, I think out of home in general, what's really interesting to me about it is for the most part, if you talk to marketers, typically marketers will tell you that they love out of home.

6:40Then the second question would be, well, how much of your budget goes to out of home? And that's when typically you see someone smirk and they'll say, well, I guess it's a lot less than it should be. And then they'll kind of go through some of the things that are challenging or you can't really measure it. Oh, we want to use our first party data. We can't really do that. It's really expensive to buy billboards or it's really expensive to do cool creatives that are actually aligned with some sort of trigger or 3D or DCO. So, and I think when you pull back the curtain, all of these things are part of the foundation that programmatic out of home was built on was how do we actually make campaigns better, not just help to automate the process.

7:29So I think you're seeing a lot more measurement companies coming into out of home and finding solutions that allow for you to use the same partners across all of your channels and include out of home in that mix. I think that there's a lot of discussion around making it more clear what formats are digitized and what you can buy. I think that there is also a much better understanding that data absolutely should power campaigns. And that data can be a mix of things. It could be data that is informing your boundaries of you're running a campaign that maybe it's for a telecom provider and they only have service and specific zip codes.

8:07why would you want to necessarily show your ads elsewhere unless it's that it's coming? Or maybe it's trigger-based. You're talking about sunscreen and you want to only show when the UV is over a certain number. Then you have the other side of things, which is just data that now every holding company has spent billions of dollars on. They want to use that data. Brands like Pepsi have their cDNA data. They want to use the data that they own. But I also think this is where things are getting really interesting with us working more closely within the T-Mobile walls and trying to say, hey, what is even more data that we can help bring into this space that can be additive versus replacing the data that these customers really believe in and helping to power something that's going to be more accountable to reach the right people as well as to understand the outcomes of your media.

8:58Yeah. And again, I'm going to be a captain obvious here, but you hear so much data and data and data, but you and I both know, and everybody listening, at least they better know, not all data is good data. No, and it's not the more data, the better. And I think that kind of goes with everything, which is you have to be really scrupulous to what are you trying to do with this data? And also, what kind of campaign are you running? So I think that that's going to help to inform how you use that data. I think the other piece too is the data that can be used that isn't necessarily powering like the targeting, but it's also how are you fielding information as a marketer from the market for your brand to better understand what people are saying and how the messaging that you pull into the creative that runs in your campaigns, whether that's out of home or any channel, should really be about relating to your audience.

9:56And there's no better way to relate to your audience than to get to know them and see what they're actually saying about your brand, good, bad, or in between, so that what you're doing is going to be building on the story that's already out there and hoping to either amplify it or shift perspectives. I'm laughing only because so many of my guests say this and I go, why is this so hard? When you said, you basically said, just the consumer will tell you what they want. They always do. Don't make it more complicated. I kind of want to ask you why, but then we can spend the next hour. Yeah. Because it doesn't make any sense to me.

10:41But for people like you and me to come in and go, no, no, no. And all of a sudden we look like these, you know, magicians going, if you just listen to what they tell you to do, it's that easy. Well, and I think it's also a matter of long-term, you want to give customers what they need. But short term, you actually need to give customers what they want, which is answering to what their needs are now and how they want to be messaged and how your product or service is going to meet what they need today. But long term, if you're trying to change a behavior or you believe that there's a better way to do it, you're going to have to ease your way into that because that is something that's going to take a long time to shift that perspective unless you really control the entire market, which there are certain products that are like that.

11:35But otherwise, especially if you're talking about a product that potentially is at a lower price point, like they have other options that they do. too. And then when you're dealing with more expensive products and services, then even more so like you need to talk to them the way that they want to be spoken to and make sure it's very clear that they're giving you a wishlist and you need to deliver on that, not to change the things that are on their wishlist today, because they're not going to do that. And you're probably not going to get an opportunity to really have that like direct conversation with each and every customer.

12:10So you have to figure out how you leverage media to do that, to say, okay, this is how I check all your boxes. But long-term, we're building solutions that you're going to care about. And we want that to sort of be like the whisper campaign that's happening, like underneath whatever you're doing that's addressing how you can get people to buy today. I want to repeat that because what you just said was very profound, whether you realize it or not. But I'm going to say it. You said give consumers long-term what they want and then the short-term what they need. So I think it was actually the opposite.

12:44Was it? Long-term what they need. Okay. But short-term, like you need to address what they want. I got a little dyslexic. Yeah. Thank you for correcting me. So long-term what they need. Correct. Short-term what they want. Yes. Got it. It's very profound. I love that. And that's the balance from the consumer side. Now let's talk about the long-term, short-term balance between when you're a marketer. So you have the long-term brand building on one side and the short-term performance goals on the other. Yep. How do you strike that balance? I mean, it's a little bit of like the doom cycle and how do you stop that?

13:18But I think these two things need to live together in the same world. I think that for a brand new brand that is launching, when you think about something such as we're trying to gain new users and we're also trying to make money, Those things are intertwined, but they also are mutually exclusive, which is a very confusing element, which is how do you get more people involved and aware of your brand, potentially testing it? But at the same time, you can't exist as a business for the most part unless you make money. And typically the way that you make money is by providing goods and services that are targeted at a particular people that can benefit from them.

14:02and are going to be willing to spend a dollar on your product versus anything else that is in the market. So I think with that, there's a balance of how do you get people to one, know you exist, two, to know what you stand for, and then three, to see the value that your product is going to bring so that it's clear that this is worth them spending their money on and how it's going to fit into their lives and the things that they're looking for and where they want to spend. I think at the same time, you need people to actually transact and not just be aware of all of these things about your brand.

14:43So you need to somehow connect all of these things that help your potential consumer base be aware of what you're doing with how do you get them to say, okay, I'm ready. I want to make a purchase. And so with that, you need to find ways, one, to make it easy for people to buy your product. So I think there's the e-com element of how do you make a checkout as easy as possible that when someone sees your product and they think they're in the market and they click on it, that it's going to be as quick a cycle as possible and easy so that they're not leaving that page. At the same time, there's a lot of transactions that still take place in the physical world.

15:23so it's how do you like literally lead a horse to water how do you get to go into your store and then depending on the size of your store maybe you are the retailer itself or maybe you are a product that sits at a big box retailer and so it's a mix of understanding what that path to purchase looks like not just around the store but even sometimes physically in the store or within the website itself where you have to navigate someone to that product so that they're actually checking out and making an actual purchase. And at the same time, you don't want this to be a one-time purchase. You're trying to make them a loyalist, which is why you need to then balance that with continuing to listen to your consumer and how you need to build your product, the things that you should have in market.

16:11Maybe it's even as basic as like your packaging. You might need to think about certain features that you either need to build in or change and do that over time. But marketing plays a huge part in that of the messaging that you can have before someone actually makes that purchase and how you choose to use whatever channel it is. They're all kind of like empty vessels in a way. And it's your opportunity with the creative to fill that void with something that is going to get people to understand more and then actually to buy. You mentioned something, I think, earlier or offline about brand maintenance and how it should never stop.

16:50And we know that, look, we're all consumers, first of all, and we choose brands that we know and trust and remember and all that. But we also know in our world, in our business world, that there are brands that drift and lose equity, right? And I'm curious to know, is there a way a leader of a given brand can kind of cut that off before it even gets to that point? Or how do you know how to how does that happen and what can be done once a brand starts to lose its way yeah well i think a lot of times when that happens it's because you're not going back to those basics that we talked about earlier of listening to the market and using consumer feedback of what they want to see or it's not just that feedback about your product it's about your competitive set like why are they looking elsewhere why are they cheating on you and buying a product that is like you, but different.

17:37And so I've talked to a lot of marketers that, that speak to this idea of expanding to new audiences is not just that you choose an audience that you think has a larger share of the wallet and say, I'm going to start speaking to them. Unless you're speaking their language, you're going to be throwing money into like a dark hole. So part of it is you need to figure out one, is there another consumer base that could have interest in your product and why and figure out how to speak to them. Also look at where are the people that are part of your core audience and don't ignore them. Get a better understanding of why they love your product and see if there's an opportunity to learn from them to build it out.

18:20I also think that nostalgia is very much alive. And so I think one of the things we've seen with some brands that have been around for a really long time are these logo changes that the market is extremely resistant to. And I think brands have even been able to like make fun of themselves a little bit. You look at an HBO, HBO Max, Max, HBO. You have Cracker Barrel that changed their logo and then changed it back. But then you have other brands that have been able to subtly change their brand and then others that have not touched the brand and it looks exactly the same. and they're doing that on purpose because it's a brand that people know and recognize.

19:04Sometimes you don't even need to include the words. It's just like the shape of the logo and people can recognize that. And it's funny, the first letter that I ever learned was M for McDonald's because I would see like the golden arches on the side of the road. And so I think that actually McDonald's is a great example of a brand that has continued to revitalize and add new products to the mix, but they're not all of a sudden trying to become like a healthy one-stop shop because what people love about them also are their French fries and their Big Mac. So I think it's a little bit of that balancing of innovation, but also staying like staying true to your core.

19:49Yeah. And it's kind of like when performance and trust work together to drive growth, right? Yes. It sounds like that's like a good example, in your opinion, of McDonald's who gets that balance right. Yeah. And I think another really good example in using McDonald's is they'll have certain promotions that don't run year round. I do think that this idea of supply and demand, that it isn't just something everyone can have. Lundry brands do this a lot too, where they want to be slightly untouchable so that when you have a big moment in your life, you think Rolex, you think LVMH, you think about Hermes and that clout around it, they actually don't want to be accessible to everyone.

20:33And they want you to think about, it is worth me spending more money on this, but therefore they need to market very differently than someone that's selling something that has a lower price point. Therefore, loyalty can switch much faster based on convenience. And so I think just being aware of what are the factors that go into decision-making around your brand. And then obviously from a marketing perspective, what channels and creative do you have at your disposal to help influence that decision in a way that feels organic? Yeah. And we've, we've also seen examples where brands who basically prioritize performance over trust, right?

21:16Yep. And the, the ramifications they're in and they're not pretty. And it's, as I said, you may have the same perspective. I do kind of look back on why would you do that? Why? Like we all get it. I mean, when I say we now, I'm speaking as a consumer, which by the way, I think so many brands and marketers don't give consumers enough credit to realize brands and businesses are in business to make money. We get that. Why would you not just come clean? Or why would you just overwhelm me with so much information and try to sell me all these things. And then you're going to break that trust. I mean, I think that's a huge problem, which is if you're doing something that is counter to what your brand stands for, number one, you need to be well aware of that and be willing to stand behind that decision.

22:04So I actually think that it is okay for brands to do something that is slightly outside their wheelhouse if they've done the research to understand the ramifications that it might have. and strongly stand by it. I think the Super Bowl is a really good example of that. And the CMO of the NFL, he's not going back. And they believe very strongly in, you know, who they're choosing to perform at the halftime show. They know that it's going to have a world divided a bit, but the NFL is also looking for new viewership. And part of that viewership is not just in America. And so I think that even though they are still going to stay core to a lot of things that they do that fulfills what their core audience wants, they also are willing to step outside the box.

22:55And they understand that it's probably going to alienate some people, but they believe that it's worth the risk. So I think that in those cases, it's okay. The problem are the companies that lean into something that might feel a little bit off base. and then as soon as they get a backlash, immediately pull back and start apologizing for decisions that they made. And I think that shows a lack of, they didn't do their homework going into these decisions. Right. And I think that it says a lot about a brand that chooses to stick with what they're doing and not apologize for it. And it's okay to acknowledge, hey, we made this decision and why?

23:36Or in some cases to say, we actually don't care what certain consumers think because we believe that this aligns with our brand. But anyone that's going to renege is going to face backlash from both camps of who they were trying to reach. That was a new audience as well as the original one that's already mad at you for going off of your core. Exactly. I got to pivot here. I saw this stat about Gen Z by 2030. They're going to hold an estimated 12 trillion in global spending. That's insane. I mean, maybe they're all investing in Nvidia, I don't know. But it seems like Gen Z has a plan that I would love to be on board with.

24:16But unfortunately, I don't quite fall into that camp anymore. I think it's super interesting that this is an audience that their spending power is X today, but it's going to be exponentially growing. So part of it is, and this goes back to this idea of that long term brand building of how do you get in front of this audience, not just so that they're transacting on your product today, But you're building this long-term relationship with a particular group of people so that as their share of wallet grows, they're actually growing with a brand and can evolve and buy different products within that portfolio.

24:53But I think that one of the things that at least I'm seeing through some of the creatives that we'll see that are talking to Gen Z is like they think if they just show up in front of these audiences that they can just influence them immediately. And I think what they're forgetting is actually Gen Z is leveraging new ways to research information and products and finding out about things in real time where in order to capture their attention, it's becoming harder and harder. And so it is both a dilemma of marketers, but it's also a huge opportunity of thinking about how do we innovate, how we get in front of audiences that are no longer in the seats that they used to be.

25:36Like you can't just reach them on TV and that could be your one stop shop and maybe do some digital. Like you're really going to need to think about how you're going to capture their attention because it's becoming harder and harder to play within that space. Is there one brand or multiple that you think does a really good job in connecting with Gen Z? I think there are a number of beauty brands that have done a really good job of doing that. And I think they're also a brand that I think stands for something. So I'll use Elf Beauty. I think they're a great example. They've created this like virality with their brand.

26:12Then they went out and bought Rode, which was a celebrity backed brand, but a brand that was good. People love it. People love their packaging. They are, you know, a mix of someone that's a very large investor and part owner of the brand, having Haley Bieber be a part of that, but also having her carry through and for road to remain part of that flagship elf brand, but still have almost like its own personality. And so it's actually created like more buzz around even the core brand of Elf as opposed to it almost like pulling from its core base. I think that Elf has a really good understanding of who buys their products.

26:55They're very inclusive and they lean into that heavily for all the things that they stand for. And by that, I don't just mean how they're marketing, but everything from how every single employee has equity in the company, how they believe heavily that females are a huge part of their fan base. Therefore, their board and their C-suite needs to be reflective of that. So I think a company that wears their core values all the way through to how they show up in the market, but are doing that all the way through. They're speaking about the way that they're innovating and implementing AI within their products and services internally and talking about how that's helping them to almost create something that is innate to Elf.

27:42Like it's not something that's using products that are readily available in the market to augment their processes like they're building it themselves. I think shows up a lot in the way that they market and they're very deliberate in how they show up, where they have certain products that speak to more of this 40 plus audience. But they've been able to really capture Gen Z through some of the channels that they're marketing on, the celebrity influencers that are a part of their ecosystem. And then, you know, going through and looking at the companies that they're buying and creating as part of their portfolio that they're adding into the mix to expand organically to other audiences that they can grow with those people over time, you know, as they grow up and start making more money and can think about how they potentially can invest in other parts of what the product offers.