How to Measure Brand Marketing Success with Peter Giorgi, SVP, Creative Excellence and Brand Experience at Rocket | Ep. 445

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0:27Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials Podcast. Today I'm here, he is the SVP of Brand Marketing Partnerships and Creative at Rocket. I'm excited to chat. That's a lot of titles too. So you have a lot of things in the future. Yeah, it's like not just one thing. It's like a bunch of things under you. So it's crazy.

1:15Yeah. We can agree that it's too many. it's too many titles but it's very specific which is positive i guess i mean they all connect with each other so that's a good thing but it's a it's a that's a lot but it's good could you explain like who you are how do you get into marketing and we'll get into our conversation today i can definitely start with how i got into marketing um i went to the university of toronto up in Toronto, Ontario. And I was born and raised outside of there. And as university was wrapping up, I had no idea what I wanted to do at all. I did a double major in English and psychology.

1:56I thought I wanted to be a psychologist. It turns out I did not want to be a psychologist at all. And I like to think that I kind of came up during the golden age of brand marketing, the stuff that, you know, there was like all those amazing, uh, Nike campaigns and Pepsi campaigns and Coca-Cola and McDonald's. It was like marketing when I was a teenager felt like it was really shifting culture in a big way. And, uh, I was always fairly creative. And so I wanted to figure out what I could do that was around creative people, but was also, you know, kind of predictable and like, was a real, was a real job.

2:39Um, I think my mom was worried I was going to end up wanting to be like a journalist or a writer or something. And I would never be able to make a living. And, um, and so I sent, I sent a fax. That's how long ago this was. I sent a fax to somebody in an agency called Bozell that no longer exists. Um, just saying who I was and, and what I was interested in. And that turned into a meeting and that turned into an internship when none existed. And, you know, 25 or something years later, here I am. But I started agency side and eventually made my way to Crispin Porter Bogusky in Miami during the sort of golden age of that agency.

3:21And the rest is kind of history. So I sort of stumbled into it. It was like, oh, that looks interesting. I think I could be around cool people doing cool things, but it'll be you know it'll be stable if that's like a real job it's not going to be me like writing for a student newspaper until i'm 50 yeah but i would argue that those two majors are probably like the foundations of marketing except which you didn't know at the time but like knowing how to write and knowing like how people respond to things are uh pretty yeah i i like Like maybe coincidentally, I somehow, because in Canadian universities, there's not like a marketing specialty.

4:06It's still relatively traditional at that point. And yeah, I think somehow inadvertently ended up to creating my own, you know, marketing degree in some ways. It was like, here's what you need to understand about people and their motivations and their psychology. And then here's how you communicate effectively. you know, and I was always kind of told that, um, a degree like English literature was just not going to be valuable at all in the business world and nothing could have been further from the truth. It's been so valuable through my career to be able to communicate effectively and express myself effectively and, you know, understand an argument and consolidate information and spit it back out.

4:46Like that's kind of what I learned. Um, and it's worked out okay so far. yeah i want to just going into like your major and stuff like that not actually talking about it but i know like so you work for a brand that has been known for like mortgages for a long time um and you were trying and this is the question comes from because you had to change the perception of like and a different story of like home home ownership and you changed like the like what not I wouldn't say like perception but everybody in the industry were talking about just mortgages mortgages and you try to flip the the narrative to home ownership so like where did that idea come from like how did that um like what were you trying to achieve by like not talking about like rates and talking about like something that is like like every American probably like strives for or strive for like the old American dream of owning a house?

5:45Yeah, it's a great question. I think a lot of it for me is it's a relatively old idea, right? I think I love marketing and the history of it. And so I've got those awesome Tashin books that are like advertising in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. And you see this arc of where, you know, in the 50s, pre like Bill Birnbach and whatever. Every advertising campaign is just the fundamentals. It's just telling you about the product. It's just like, here's what the product is. And here's why you should trust the new Buick because it does these things, but it wasn't really, they were never telling you about the inner dialogue or the motivations or the deeper meaning behind what those things represented.

6:33and mortgage is one of those, it's one of those categories where I think we fool ourselves into believing all people care about is rates and terms and speed. But the reality of that is that the, you know, your mortgage lender doesn't set the rates, the rates are set somewhere else. They're all sort of within a margin of error, you know, give or take, they're kind of the same ish. Um, and there's nothing exciting to me about rates. You know, if you, you think about, uh, what Jonathan Mildenhall and I did at Airbnb, the Airbnb started out as just a cheap place to stay in a city. That's a great positioning for a product.

7:18If you're staying on somebody's couch or, you know, on their kitchen floor, which was the original ones, like a cheap place to stay in a city is awesome, but that's not the same as telling the entire world. You can feel like you belong anywhere that you travel. That's really cool. But that's the deeper meaning that somebody's looking for in travel. It's not just to see a place, it's to feel that place and absorb that place. Um, you know, I think it's similar to what Nike did for running or basketball. Uh, It was much more about the feeling of victory and athleticism. So I think it's the same for this category where what it's done forever is just talk about things that are the sort of cost of entry.

8:04And so you can compete on, you know, our rates are a little bit better. We can do it a little bit faster. Our people are a little bit more trained. But if you asked me what a mortgage rate was, I'm not sure I could tell you. and if you ask me why I love this house, I could talk about that for an hour. You know, if you, if you ask me what this place means to me to be able to raise my son here and, you know, host Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners here, I could talk about that for a really long time. And I think the category just has ignored, like, what's more important to the American dream than home and what means more to adults as a sign of stability and building equity than being a homeowner like nothing and we just ignored that and so it was kind of just sitting there yeah i love that and also it's because i think the narrative for a long time too was like and still in the markets like oh it's cheaper to rent and all that stuff and that's only just like talking about like one monetary thing that happens i but i like i i would argue that there's some there's roi of so many different things of owning a house and like renting can't give you where like there's like the community roi it's like having like memories with that like your family roi and those things like like you can't really put a dollar amount on those things but the ROI is so much more than if you look at fixed costs obviously maybe renting might outweigh or does outweigh in some markets but the ability to have be in a community, have something stability, have predictability have memories created, I think so many people forget about that and that's the emotional side you're trying to tap in with talking about Home Orange.

10:02When you mentioned your kids and Thanksgiving. I think that's like super important. And I think people forget that even when they like renting, like until they buy a house, you don't like understand like what you're missing out. Have you just been renting your whole life? Yeah. I mean, I think we all, most people move through renting at some point in their adult life, right? Like you're probably going to rent for a period of time at first, you're going to be, You know, there's an upside to that. There's a ton of flexibility. There's not as much responsibility involved as far as, you know, something breaks you.

10:39You call somebody and they fix it. That has some comfort to it. But it's pretty proven that over time, homeownership is the single greatest wealth builder that you can think of. And you get to live in it, right? I mean, you're building equity at the same time as you're living in a place and investing in the community. And, you know, I also think being a homeowner teaches you things. I know how to install ceiling fans now, and I didn't when I was renting. I know how to replace toilets because I decided I'd teach myself that. I learned a lot about lawn care here because I decided that I wanted to do that.

11:18So I think your home also teaches you things. You become more capable. You invest in the community and in the place around you. And, you know, I think it is different. I look at this street that I live on here differently than I did, you know, the places that I rented. Yeah, I also want to go into, you made a big splash at the Super Bowl. And I want to know, like, for how that, like, the ideation to, like, execution. And I know like part of the execution didn't like come together until like two weeks before the execution happened, which is crazy in marketing to have, especially by Superbowl ad to have two weeks of the intent to know yes or no, is this going to work or not?

12:06But could you talk a little bit about like how you got this message out to the market in a big way with the Superbowl and how that came about? Yeah. And you're talking about year one with above the dream with the sing-along, right? Yeah. Yeah. Now that was, you know, it was the launch of our new core creative idea, which is own the dream. Um, and we put so much into developing those, those three words and to defining, you know, what is it? we're talking about a company and a business and a brand with a 40-year legacy, you know, of helping homeowners across the country. And what that brand was lacking was a really simple sort of persistent, rich articulation of what it meant.

12:58And landing on that tagline or that core creative idea was the biggest, you know, strategically and creatively, it was the biggest accomplishment we had leading into the Super Bowl. It was like, what, what is this about? And that was something that we, we shared with our internal team members to help understand if it reflected what they did every day. And that was honestly, as great as the Super Bowl was, the most gratifying experience was to hear the internal response from team members who said, yes, that's what I do every day. And what we learned was the work that we had done in the past, where we were talking about rates in a humorous way, or talking about ease in a way that was sort of gimmicky, and all that certainly served a purpose.

13:45There was this disconnect between the public facing expression of a brand and what we felt internally. If you talk to our bankers, our service team members, they'll tell you that Own the Dream is what they do every day. They help people become homeowners. They help them stay in their home. They help them find a solution to getting their equity out. So like that actually reflected what they did and they believed in it. And then, you know, we landed on the spot itself. So we landed on the Own the Dream Super Bowl 60. And, you know, there are all these lovely vignettes of homeownership and what it means and people sort of struggling, but then overcoming and then achieving this thing, which is, it's obviously hugely emotional, but we weren't really satisfied with that.

14:33We knew that we had to do something else to make it memorable. And honestly, the idea was just something somebody threw out. I don't remember who, but it was part of, I think the first presentation by our agency Miramar to rocket. And somebody said, well, you know, what if we came back to the game and people in the stadium are singing the song and it's like, yeah, that'd be cool. And then you go on and think about other things. Cause that sounds impossible, but I think because that's crazy because nobody's ever done that before, because you can't buy that. You can't execute it. You can't plan it.

15:13There's no, um, there's no operating model on how to pull that off, right? It doesn't exist. That's never happened. And, you know, Jonathan, I've worked together a really long time and we have a great degree of trust with our agency. And I think that idea, as much as it was maybe a bit of a throwaway, like, yeah, wouldn't it be nuts if that idea just hung out, it just persisted. And then we really started to think, well, how would we pull this off? and and you're right it was about two weeks before the game that we figured out okay we're going to be able to do this in the way that we want to with the degree of um you know planning and foresight that we feel comfortable with but then candidly like also knowing maybe we do everything right and we cut back to the broadcast and no one in the stadium is singing the song that's a possibility, right?

16:14Like that could happen. There's no way to predict whether or not it's going to work and whether or not you'll see people in the stadium singing. But we worked really, really closely with, with Fox and with the NFL. And it took a lot of, and obviously our partners at Zenith, it took a lot of back and forth and a lot of ironing out of details. And then candidly, it took a huge leap of faith that we were going to try to make this work. And if we did everything right, and nobody was singing in the stadium and it fell flat, we were going to live with that, which is just like a massive risk. But it turns out that Take Me Home Country Roads, it's impossible to stop people from singing it as the truth.

17:01You actually don't have to try that hard. We all, if I started singing it now, you'd, you'd start singing it too. I'm singing it. I'm singing it in my head as you're already singing it. It's just one of those things, but, uh, you know, it, it, it was, it was one of the most gratifying things we did. And, you know, we got a gold lion out of it, which is, which was wonderful. Um, but it was a really, really simple idea. What if we cut back and people are singing the song from the commercial? Um, yeah, I don't know. What if that sounds crazy? How do you do that? Nobody knows. Okay. And I love things like that when nobody's done it and nobody knows how to do it.

17:40It means the people you're talking to already know the most about that thing in the world. It's like, well, we're the, you know, when we're sitting in the meeting, it's like, we're the foremost experts on how to do this. Cause no one else has ever even thought about it. So, Hey, let's figure it out. And it took a lot of back and forth. I mean, there were some options presented that we seriously considered, but then rejected because it wouldn't have been the expression of that idea, the purity that I, that idea that we wanted to bring to life. So it was a remarkably simple idea that was really, really hard to pull off.

18:15And then there was still some risk that maybe it wasn't going to work. And this is, I mean, this is the reason why I've been thinking so hardly and I've been saying to people that why AI won't disrupt marketers because like this is something that AI would think is very illogical and very risky and really not something you should probably do. You should probably lean towards just putting a spot up and like marketers, like good marketing is risky. Like the ones that stand out is like, there's some risk involved on it. If you're either going to go, you're either going to take the logical route, do a spot, film a commercial like everybody else, or you're going to try to do something slightly different and maybe everybody will love it and everybody hate it, but you don't really know because nobody's done it before.

19:05So that's, I mean, AI is without a doubt, the most transformational technology we've ever experienced. And yet I still think there's something special. I know there's something special about human creativity, about like being able to take a bunch of information and find something that's a complete non sequitur or totally unrelated that no one's ever thought of before. I just, I still think we're uniquely positioned to do that. And yeah, you're right. If you asked AI, does it make sense to do this? It's, it's probably not going to say yes. It's probably not going to say it's easy. yeah i don't think the air would come up with it because it's i think they're gonna i don't think they have felt singing in a crowd ai's felt singing in a crowd country would take me home like i don't think they've felt that that emotion like it's just they probably if you asked what it would be a super bowl idea it probably would that wouldn't have come up because it's pulling from past six past things that have been done before and and that's never been done before so it's not going to come up.

20:10Yeah, I think that's right. I want to ask, as a someone who runs brand creative, like what, what are you looking at as like success? Like what is success of this campaign? What does it look like metric wise, but it look like just so people understand like what success looks like. Yeah. I think marketing is like, it's a service business, right? It exists to serve the brand and to serve the business and to change people's opinions of the product. Um, and I don't think that you can say that a brand was successful if it's just creative, but the creative doesn't, it doesn't meaningfully move, you know, the business in a positive way.

20:52Um, for us, it's all about, you know, awareness, affinity, um, action and advocacy. Those are the the four things that we think about, which is do more people know about the brand now than they did before? Do they feel differently about it? Are they willing to tell their friends? And then are they going to actually take some meaningful action because of it? That's different for us than if we sold, I don't know, if we sold moisturizer or sunscreen, that would be a whole different thing. We sell mortgages and you don't get a mortgage at the drop of a hat. So you have to think about endearing yourself to the audience in a way that makes them, you know, want to actually transact with you.

21:39It's like the biggest financial decision anybody ever makes. So you want to appear trustworthy. You want to appear human. You want to appear, you know, innovative. But the brand health measures are really important to us. and then um you know also we're we're thinking about leads um and what kind of you know what kind of business is this going to generate in the future and having said all that i really feel like the work needs to be it needs to be just relentlessly crafted and i really think that people prefer to watch and engage with something that's beautiful than something that's thrown together.

22:20Um, and so I, I always, you know, there's, there's no decision that we ever make that is solely driven by, um, creativity in a way that is indulgent. It's like, it's all for a reason. It's all for a specific purpose of like translating this idea to viewers in a way that is the most compelling, you know, viewers are smart. They'll pay attention to things that, that are emotional, that are clear, that are singular, that are beautiful. So we get into the details of, of the execution as well too, because I think it matters, you know, that, that spot, the media costs the same, whether your ad is, is beautifully crafted and memorable or the opposite, whatever that might be.

23:10But so it's up to us to make sure that it's as good as we can make it. And I'll first say it's never good enough. I would change so many things about everything I've ever done, but there's always that point where you have to let it go. Yeah. I think, I think for like every advertising, especially like the last probably five years before, like I think we are in a more of a brand revolution now than we were then before. But I think even if you think about like meta and like meta and Instagram I think people spend such a little portion of their budget putting together great creative and they just spend more of their budget of like putting it out into the world and it's like you're like you got to boost something that is great that people will care about you can't just boost creative that you're just blowing money if you're boosting things that aren't that good or like that aren't put together greatly or have like Like psychology, good copywriting, because good ad doesn't have to always be like, the copy and the creative have been like thought through in a way that is supposed to make emotion.

24:23I think that matters. And a lot of people don't think about those things. They just put like, I'm just going to spend money on ads and see what happens. Well, right. And then it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?

24:41If you buy brand advertising or you put together a whole brand media campaign, but then you don't invest in the creative, you don't think about it enough, you don't have strategic clarity, you don't understand consumer insights, and you put something out into the world that could be better, let's say that isn't as good as it could be, you won't get great results. And then you'll say to yourself, well, I told you brand marketing doesn't really work. We should just do a bunch more performance. Performance marketing does work. Social media marketing does work. And like, we also know from 150 years of it that brand marketing works.

25:19It's that you have to care about it. You know, you have to, um, I, because I think because I come from an agency background, all the aspects of creative development and then execution really matter. and our team stays really close to those from, you know, casting the simonographer to, you know, who's going to direct it? Where are we shooting? What are the locations? All that stuff makes a difference. Um, and I think all that stuff makes a difference in a way that's really noticeable that you, that you see in the, in the results. Um, but I, but I, uh, But I also don't think, by the way, that that means it has to be expensive.

26:03Brand marketers and agencies do themselves a disservice when they relate quality or craftsmanship to the budget. The thing that I always think about this year is how much it costs to make Obsession and how many people love that movie. It was$750 ,000. and it made a half a billion dollars or something. The movie was awesome. You know, budget's no predictor of impact. That movie worked because it was beautifully written and because it was new and because the performances worked. And like, so there's no reason you can't do the same thing with advertising. I want to ask you, like, take one step back because I know we said it, but I know you have three different things in your title.

26:51What does a day-to-day look like someone who is managing partnerships, brand, and creative excellence? What does a day-to-day look like for you? Packed. Jam-packed is the real answer. But it varies. I stay really close to creative development. So our internal team, which we call the Dream Factory, we do most of our work in-house. And so we stay close to the teams who are developing that work, spend a lot of time there. Obviously, a bunch of time, especially right now with our external partners thinking about, you know, currently we're already working on Super Bowl 27. We briefed that into the agency in May.

27:41um and so you know in some ways like super bowl 26 had just ended in february and by may we already developed our brief and had that sent in and so there's you know working with our external partners evaluating um creative concepts dialing them into the strategy a lot of it is also thinking about budgets so there's a real sense of um flexibility of being able to context switch from using the most creative side of my brain, which is a little bit more natural to thinking more empirically and digging into budgets and timing. And that's a little bit more work for me mentally. A lot of my day is providing feedback and direction on campaigns so that team members can continue working and refining things.

28:32If I'm lucky, some of it is devoted to just kind of understanding what's out in the world, what's trending, what's going on. I'm a man of a certain age with a 12 year old son. And so I'm probably not as deep into culture as I, as I used to be. So I try to, but I also think it's our responsibility to understand it. Um, so there's definitely a little bit of that is just kind of, you know, research, reading that kind of thing, but it's a, it's a metric ton of meetings, um, that are usually feedback or cascading to team members or informing, you know, Jonathan and other folks of what the plans are.

29:12And then a lot of working with my peers on what they've got going on so that we're all informed and working together. I'm not going to lie. It's pretty intense. It sounds intense. It sounds like it's also a lot of like, like you said, like context switching, Cause if you're thinking about budget one minute and then creative the next minute, and then trying to like get free time to do culture, like learn about culture and what's going on. It's a lot of culture. I also wanted to ask, cause I, you said something that I, you said you already briefed your agency and I know you've been on the agency side.

29:49Like, and I know you probably know what, like, but I want to know for people who are briefing outside sources or even inside sources to get the result that they're trying to achieve in the motion or they're trying to get out of the campaign. What are some key elements that you would put in a good brief that make sure that the agency is on the same page as you? I know there's obviously a lot of back and forth, but what is the key elements to make sure that the outcome is at least close to what you were imagining in your head? Yeah. I'm such a, I don't know what the right word is. Stickler is not strong enough.

30:33I don't know what's stronger than that. But I really think if you expect, it's probably the result of being on the agency side for a long time, where I was subject to some pretty subpar briefs. You know, the bad briefs are sort of like your marketing partners just taking whatever their business partner sent to them and then just flipped it over to you. And then on the agency side, we'd have to figure out how that business problem fit into culture and the category and the client beliefs, right? I've been on this side of the fence long enough that I get really worked up about the idea that if we expect the agency to bring us something that's creative, that's unique, that's dialed into the business, um, that is like relentlessly crafted, we better provide them the same thing to start from.