Marketing success rests on better insights

0:09Douglas Healy: Hello and welcome to The Walk Podcast. My name is David Tiltman and today's episode is the first in a three-part series we recorded at the recent Insight to Impact event in Denver, Colorado, which we're bringing to you in partnership with Profound. Now, Insight to Impact is a new event the team at Lions have introduced this year. We brought together the Market Research Get Together TMRE, an event called Content Marketing World. Then we added some content from Lions brands, including Contagious, Effie and, of course, Walk. We recorded live at the conference and over the course of this series, we'll be bringing you exclusive interviews with CMOs, groundbreaking new research and much, much more.

0:54Douglas Healy: So be sure to tap follow on your favorite podcast platform to get new episodes as they drop. Now, on today's first episode, we'll be talking about all things insight, what that word even means in the current market and how to make them stick in an organization. First, I'll be speaking to Law Oxford from Reddit about the dangers of what she calls insight slop and what she's seen bubbling up in the subreddits. Later, I'll be catching up with Doug Healy, head of North America Insights at the Kraft Heinz Company, and Julio Franco, chief customer officer at Zappi, to hear about how Kraft Heinz got its marketers to love research again.

1:36Douglas Healy: And finally, I'll be joined by Delicia Cooney from Newall Brands, home to brands such as Rubbermaid, Mr. Coffee and Yankee Candle. we'll discuss how the company built a new insights framework that puts the human at the center and guides decision making in areas like innovation and portfolio strategy. But before we get into all that, here's a quick word from our sponsor.

2:00Delicia Cooney: Today's episode is brought to you by Profound, the AI marketing platform powering a third of the Fortune 100. See how sources like Reddit shape AI's perception of your brand, then use Profound's AI marketer to help control it. Learn more at tryprofound.com.

2:21Douglas Healy: My first conversation today centers around one of the most fascinating corners of the internet, and that's Reddit. Most of you will know Reddit as the home for every type of community and conversation imaginable. But as generative AI engines are also now pulling information and insights from the platform to answer prompts. Its influence is perhaps bigger than ever and this was reflected in the packed room for the talk of Law Oxford who is head of Insights product at Reddit. So we grabbed her afterwards and asked her to go into detail. Let's hear that interview now. Law, welcome to The Walk Podcast.

2:58Delicia Cooney: Hi, thanks for having me.

2:59Douglas Healy: So let's get straight into your presentation at TMRE today, you talked about insight slop, which is a great term. What is it? What is insight slop?

3:12Delicia Cooney: So the way that I define insight slop is research or collateral that curates data points, buzzwords, or tropes into outputs that seem quite interesting on the surface, but don't actually present anything novel or relevant or actionable for their audience. And so to give you a couple of examples where we're seeing this in the wild. Firstly, one of the biggest ones that we're all seeing probably is trends without context. So I think the term butter yellow is trending. I saw an article which literally said the houseplants trending. No, the trending houseplants shaping the next year.

3:51Douglas Healy: Trending houseplants?

3:52Delicia Cooney: Trending houseplants shaping the next year, importantly.

3:55Douglas Healy: everyone needs to know how 2027 is going to be shaped by literally house claims yeah exactly

4:01Delicia Cooney: and then not to mention obviously like the infinite aesthetics and cause and all of that all of those things and don't get me wrong i am a former tumblr user and so i'm as obsessed as the next wannabe gen z with all of those things but i do think that often the reporting kind of misses the the wider potential cultural or behavioral shift and focuses more on like the hook and like the immediate thing that's happening.

4:22Douglas Healy: So it's less about the actual big important thing that's moving and more about how the small things that turn up are visible.

4:31Delicia Cooney: Exactly. And it's just about attention, right? And about trying to like grasp immediate attention rather than actually saying something real. Another example of this that we see often is, for example, data that doesn't have any framing or discernment so conversations about house of dragon grew four times week over week in the premiere week versus the week before like yeah of course we've literally waited two years for that show to come out right like of course views have gone up but what does that mean what should hbo do about that um you know what were the actual conversations that were happening and you can say oh well that's just a data point not an insight but what we often see is data points framed as insights and again that is insight slop so so you talk about ways to adapt in in your

5:20Douglas Healy: presentation just just talk us through uh how brands marketers can can sort of protect themselves

5:27Delicia Cooney: some insight slop or look beyond it yeah and so the reason this is timely is because i think a lot of people are seeing a lot more of this kind of reporting on insights and trends and data um and there's a lot of blame going towards AI. And I think that unfortunate reality that we have to kind of sit with is that this kind of like bad insights was around long before AI was, right? Whether that's because of actual like bad research skills or whether it's to do with diminishing budgets or more work pressures or, you know, all of the other kind of challenges that people face. And so I think at this inflection point in technology and how we're thinking about the way that we construct methodologies and design research, we have an opportunity to sit back and be like, what is a good insight?

6:13Delicia Cooney: And how do we actually harness these new tools we have, not to create an even larger ocean of insight slop, but actually reduce it and make our insights better, more consistent, more targeted, and more focused.

6:25Douglas Healy: So you talk about three ways to adapt in the presentation. Just run through those for us.

6:30Delicia Cooney: Yeah, for sure. So I think the first thing that we're seeing is that we have access to more data than we ever have before in a very easily accessible interface right um everyone's got an mcp for all of their favorite third-party tools and sometimes their first-party data as well um and they can ask any question they want and query all of those data sets at the same time but actually more data often isn't better and actually um there's a term which was proliferating across engineering reddit for a while called context rot which is actually about the more data that you give an AI and the more you talk to it about that data, the less reliable the answers become.

7:06Delicia Cooney: And so I think, yeah, it's something that I think a number of like AI companies have done research on as well. So it's like an established thing. And so I think as insights professionals, expertly curating the data that we're engaging with is going to be one of our superpowers and one of the things that requires like real literacy with data. so if you think about to use reddit as an example say for example lululemon comes to us and wants to understand opportunities to show up on the platform i could look at all of the conversations about lululemon or about fashion in general on the platform but that's too broad so i could narrow it down just to the most commonly asked questions in r slash lululemon not even all the conversations just the questions and i'm much more likely to start shaping an understanding of what audiences want to know about their brand.

7:58Delicia Cooney: To use another example, if we want to understand the most recommended baking brands on the platform. Again, I could look at all conversations around baking, or I could look at the most upvoted comments that mention baking brands. And already I have a data scope that is much narrower and much more relevant to the question that's being asked. So that's the first one. I think we need to be thinking really hard about about data and about not just also for relevance, but frankly, to check that everything's real and rigorous, because I'm not going to go down the hallucinations rabbit hole, but that's a whole other shenanigan that we need to be paying attention to, right?

8:35Delicia Cooney: So that's the first one. Secondly, and it's kind of the other side of the coin for this, is as we have more data, we can also do analysis, especially qualitative analysis, at scale and a speed that we have never had before, which is incredible, but is also, So, and again, something that is proven is that LLMs like to cherry pick just as much as people do because they're trained on human data and they can't look at literally everything. And so here, one of the things that I've been exercising is building very rigorous analysis frameworks that are fit for purpose for what we need to create. so say for example a brand activating on reddit for the first time just wants a basic understanding of the conversation themes that exist on the platform some of the principles i will build into the framework is after i've given it a curated data set is how is the themes that it's finding growing other themes happening in one subreddits or in many many subreddits because we obviously want it to have breadth not just depth um is it is the sentiment positive every brand's a little bit scared of reddit so we've got to make sure that the the conversation theme is something that is positive and that they would want to be a part of um is it specific to reddit and unique to the platform in a way where redditors or people on reddit will feel seen and then the best thing about these principles is that not only do they direct the llm in terms of what to build but you can also then turn that into a rubric where it then scores all the themes it finds and then prioritizes the themes that you should present to the client based on really tangible outcomes right and so thinking about we need to scale our workflows and we can do analysis much more quickly but we can only do that if we had spend time again expertly curating and designing these frameworks that we need to build.

10:29Douglas Healy: Great. You've been at Reddit for a really interesting point in its development. It's obviously becoming much more visible. There's a lot of interest from advertisers. I mean, what in your view is driving that? Is it the sort of human side of Reddit?

10:50Delicia Cooney: Yeah, for sure. I think that's absolutely what it is. I think the last, I've been there for four years and it's been a real ride. So much has changed in that time, especially on the commercial side of the business, which is where I sit. And I think what we are seeing is, you know, the internet was already, the last five, 10 years, not a 100 % trustworthy space. We saw the rise of influencer culture. We also saw the rise of distrust in influencer culture. We saw even, you know, we started to see a decline in trust in search. And in this context, Reddit became a counterpoint to that, right? It became somewhere where, you know, if you saw a brand that you liked on another platform, you'd come to Reddit to validate it.

11:31Delicia Cooney: And what is really interesting is a lot of people are very interested in the platform now because it's showing up in LLMs. And I do think it's worth noting that LLMs trust what people trust. So because they're trained on human data. So it makes sense that, of course, it's showing up.

11:47Douglas Healy: And it's looking for those sort of sources of authority and context.

11:52Delicia Cooney: Exactly. Yeah. the most interesting thing is after someone gets a recommendation from an llm or an ai chatbot they come to reddit to validate what they found so the human is being kept in the loop in a much more active way than just a citation right uh we ran a study with 14 000 people across four markets earlier this year uh with redditors and non-redditors um and it showed that uh about half of people validate like recommendations that they get from llms on our platform and it also showed that human perspectives were twice as trustworthy no four times as trustworthy as ai summaries and twice as trustworthy as influencer content so it kind of makes sense people have always trusted people more remember word of mouth remember that yeah it's still alive and kicking yeah um so what's

12:43Douglas Healy: your advice then to to brands wanting to do more on reddit because obviously this is quite a tight

12:49Delicia Cooney: rope you have to to walk here yeah a hundred percent and i think there's a lot of like caution around how to show up and like now that reddit is more um or perceived as more important i think there's even more anxiety about getting it right right there's a lot of kind of risk aversion there um i think the first step to take for any brand is just to see how you're being talked about on the platform because honestly um people are going to talk about you whether you're there or not. There are like whether it's your category, if you're a small business or whether it's your brand, if you're a mid market or you're a larger business, understanding what people are saying about you, if it's good or if it's bad, if it's good and bad, what are the things they love?

13:30Delicia Cooney: What are the things they're frustrated about? If they are frustrated by something, sometimes of course, it's things like the telecoms industry is always going to have people being frustrated when there's an outage or whatever but sometimes there's really constructive feedback right and so it's important to listen and understand um and also to understand where you're being talked about i remember a few years ago a smartphone was launched and it had like satellite uh technology attached to it and it blew up in our camping communities there's so many of these like interesting spaces where you're like oh wait i didn't even know i was being talked about by this in those very specific uh areas yeah Yeah.

14:08Delicia Cooney: And so we have a lot of free tools. There's one called Reddit Pro, which any brand can get hold of. So we always recommend that every brand just...

14:15Douglas Healy: That uses that as a starting point. Exactly.

14:17Delicia Cooney: Just a starting point. If you have an agency, they may have access to some of our more sophisticated proprietary insights tools where you can get a little bit more insight into exactly where you're being talked about and how you're being talked about. But I do think that's a great place to start.

14:32Douglas Healy: And once you've understood that, how do you then go and activate?

14:37Delicia Cooney: Yeah, I think there are a few things that have come up recently, which I just think is so fascinating and so of the moment and of the things that we've just been talking about. So we always say as a kind of straight rule, you should be adding value for Redditors, right? So that could be educating them. It could be entertaining them. It could be giving them access to something they didn't otherwise have access to. um but one of the biggest things that you can do for redditors as well is like give them a platform these are people who love to come and share their opinion to help their community and so when their opinions are actually elevated even further that's like something that they makes them feel celebrated and makes them feel excited um and so recently dove obviously has a really um incredible platform

15:19Douglas Healy: for real beauty the beauty filter skincare brands yeah yeah yeah exactly and real beauty has been

15:25Delicia Cooney: their gambit for you know forever um and so they had noticed also that uh real beauty doesn't always look like real beauty on the internet and people don't feel like real reviews are always real reviews and so they came to reddit and they put they used an engagement prompt which is where you ask a question and it's an organic play but then you can put money behind it so you're not just asking one community but you can boost it so it goes to many communities across the platform and they said hey we've got this new hair mask if you go out and buy it we're not going to pay you we're not going to send you the products but if you go out and buy this hair mask and post your review here regardless of what the reviews say we will put the top 50 in our campaign and so they ended up getting at the last time I looked at it had like 350 comments they used it they actually used it for a massive out of home campaign across New York City where they had the real reviews there some of them were positive some of them were a little less so some of them were mixed where it was like oh my hair looks amazing but I hate the smell you know these kind of things and then they also used it for a promoted campaign across other platforms so it was just a really incredible example of paying attention to what's actually happening in culture giving redditors a platform it's just a great way to do it

16:43Douglas Healy: So just to finish off, what are you seeing in the subreddits that are sort of interesting or fun or just quirky?

16:53Delicia Cooney: I think what I am seeing, which kind of, again, relates to the humanity of the internet, is there are three subreddits that come to mind. The first one is r slash what is it? And it's where, like, a worried mother has found like a tiny scrap of fabric in her son's room, and she doesn't know what it is. And so, and obviously, AI can't tell her and the internet can't tell her. And so there's still a place for like human questions where only another person might know the answer. So that's a big one. And that's a whole genre of subreddits, which is really kind of blowing up. How is living there is another one of my personal favorites, which is trending up.

17:33Douglas Healy: Is that sort of about people wanting to know what it's actually like to live somewhere?

17:38Delicia Cooney: Yeah. And it's always like some weird little peninsula in like a really bizarre place or like a tiny island off of Scotland or, you know, like somewhere that looks super obscure or like the one house that shows up on the map near Area 51 on Google Maps. and someone will share a screenshot and be like what's it like living there and it's it's funny because it's always people just talking about like their commute and like how hard it is when you have to take like two ferries or whatever um but again it's really human it's really connected it's something that chat GPT can't tell you right um and then my last favorite which I think actually is probably one of our most trending up subreddits right now is um r slash uh girl dinner diaries where people who are having a rough time, predominantly women, go and share a picture of their meal as the dinner diary and then actually just share how vulnerable they've been feeling because of something that's happened to them or something that's going on with work or with a partner.

18:36Delicia Cooney: And then the community just comes together to be like, you've got this, this happened to me too. Again, incredibly human. And a good reminder that the loneliness epidemic is still very much with us and the internet actually can be a really positive force within that.

18:50Douglas Healy: That's a fascinating place to leave it. Laura, thank you so much for joining us on The Walk Podcast.

18:55Delicia Cooney: Thanks for having me.

19:01Delicia Cooney: This episode is brought to you by Profound, the AI marketing platform that comes with an AI marketer. A third of the Fortune 500 and brands like Figma, Wrapp and Cursor use Profound to control how they show up in the AI search. Go to tryprofound.com.

19:26Douglas Healy: now Kraft Heinz knows its customers it's home to all sorts of iconic food brands built up over years but even an organization with such a rich history of gathering and activating insights needs to make sure it's learning and adapting as times change so I caught up with Doug Healy head of North America Insights at the Kraft Heinz Company and his partner Julio Franco, chief customer officer at Zappi. Let's hear from them now.

19:58Douglas Healy: Doug and Julio, welcome to the Walk Podcast.

20:01David Tiltman: Thank you. Incredible to be here.

20:02Douglas Healy: So we're going to talk a lot about the session you both did together yesterday, which was about the sort of transformation of Kraft Heinz's approach to advertising research. So, Doc, why don't you just kick us off? What was it you guys were talking about? Just give us the kind of big picture here of your session yesterday.

20:26David Tiltman: Yeah, 100%. And so I started Kraft Heinz a little over two years ago. And what I was stepping into was when we were doing, we have a lot of brands in a lot of categories. And throughout all of that, we weren't bringing the consumer into any of our creative work. And the reason was a few years before I started, there was this culture of over-testing. They were testing everything and they were creating like, well, before you launch it, you have to hit this number. And when you do that, not only is it uninspire the creative teams, it also creates ways. Look, there's ways to cheat on a test. There's ways you just start churning out work that is uninspiring and honestly not as effective, right?

21:12David Tiltman: You're thinking of it as a hurdle I need to hit versus a way of making things better, right? So they knew that wasn't good, so they stopped. The pendulum swung all the way to we weren't bringing consumers in to throughout the creative process, so we were doing some great creative work. We were winning awards, right? We were so strong there, but there wasn't accountability. We weren't knowing how much impact we were having and we weren't seeing the impact in the market. And so when I came on board, we talked about, well, how do we bring consumers into this process and how do we create a process that avoids the pitfalls of those previous two sessions that we were talking about?

21:53David Tiltman: And what we really built out is a contextual, I almost said model, but it isn't a model. It's a philosophy. It's a it's it's how we think about the work. Right. Because what we don't want to start with is some rigid way of doing things. It's what do we want to do? What do we want to achieve and how do we want to achieve it? And what we ultimately wanted to do, the metaphor that we'd like to use is, you know, before Phil Jackson, I don't know if you all are basketball fans out in the UK, but everybody knows Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. Right. And so before Phil Jackson came to the Chicago Bulls, Michael Jordan was already the best player in the world.

22:32David Tiltman: He was already destroying the competition. He had won the NCAA championship. He was scoring leader multiple seasons in a row. But he wasn't a champion. And that's what we had, right? We had a creative output team that was the best in the world. But we weren't champions yet. And so this philosophy we're creating, Phil Jackson shows up to coach Michael Jackson or Michael Jordan in the Bulls. That would have been a very different outcome. And so he comes in and you don't come in if you're Phil Jackson and start telling Michael Jordan about all the things he should stop doing. And you want to make Michael Jordan an even better version to support his team.

23:14David Tiltman: And that's what we wanted to do. We wanted to come in and help help it thrive. And then they become the greatest team of the 90s. Right. And so our whole philosophy, we wanted to build around a culture of learning. This isn't about hitting a number. This isn't about red light, green light. This is about every step along the process, we're going to be learning to make it better. We are going to use the brief as the guiding light. And each brief is unique. That makes every campaign unique. That makes every process unique. So we don't start with, here's the blueprint of how we do creative testing every time.

23:49David Tiltman: There is no blueprint. There are some best practices.

23:53Douglas Healy: Fantastic. I want to delve into some of that thinking and what that actually looks like in real life in a moment. But Julio, when you hear Doug talking there, is this a common kind of problem that your team at Zappi sort of deal with?

24:09Lore Oxford: It is a common problem, but what is uncommon is how the Kraft Heinz team has approached it. So when we started, they did a very rigorous process around who were they going to select for this. And candidly, we're very excited about it because we built the Zappi platform exactly for that. We built the Zappi platform to be able to amplify creativity. and the fact that we made it quick and inexpensive was so that brands like, you know, the ones that Doug supports within Kraft Heinz would take the voice of consumers and like make adjustments and make the things better, not as like a hurdle that your organizations needed to go through.

24:50Douglas Healy: And for people that don't know exactly what you're talking about, the Zappi platform is a sort of insights and it brings together lots of inputs essentially and makes it very accessible.

25:00Lore Oxford: So it's a quantitative platform that enables organizations to get consumer feedback around their development process from early stage to late stage of advertising, innovation, and brand health. And I'm assuming you're going to talk a little bit more about this, Doug, but what they have done is created a process that it's very rigorous in the best possible way, but also very flexible. so it enables them to like utilize it in ways that like really supports the team to be more

25:31Douglas Healy: creative yeah that's that's what i want to get to because i love that sort of sense of there being a pendulum where you either over test or uh or don't test at all it's fine finding the bit in the middle um the term that you used in the presentation was uh like a lot of advertising research feels like a report card can you just sort of dive into what you meant by that yeah so

25:55David Tiltman: So a lot of times when you get the results back, when you get the numbers, there can be a report out. Hey, this is what we saw. This is what we found. You hit a green, you hit 80 percent on purchase intent, which is the goal. Right. And so you're sort of checking boxes, but you're not. First of all, you're not understanding the whys behind it necessarily. And also it really stymies creativity. One of the things I'm passionate about is insights and creatives oftentimes have a natural tension. and a lot of it has to do with insights doesn't have a lot of empathy when we present the work. We have to understand that when creative teams are presenting work to us, they're presenting their children.

26:36David Tiltman: There's so much passion into it and there can be a lot of, well, look, here's what the numbers set, black and white, boom, oh, you didn't do this, you didn't do this, and that's so disheartening to them and it can be, and it just doesn't inspire. And again, in the end, what we're not trying to do if something scores again a red and it has a 30 it might still be a nugget of greatness there might be something in there that just didn't work that really turned people off and you take that out and it's the best work that you have and so but when you set it up like a report card you get it you mean like on a pass fail exactly and you failed move on to the ones that passed.

27:16David Tiltman: You test five different ads, one passed, four failed, move on. We don't use words like that. We don't use the word testing. We say learning. We don't say winners and losers. We just talk about how are we achieving to the objectives laid out in the brief and what do we need to improve to get there. Throughout the process, now in the end, things will achieve to the brief better than other things, right? But language matters and tonality matters. And when you're not just delivering a report card, you create a better relationship with creative teams, which allows this to really prosper. And for all of the learnings, just not to get stuck in a report out, move on.

28:00David Tiltman: But we're invited into more rooms with creative teams. We're helping to shape the future of the creative that's being developed. And consumers are helping us do it. So it's really a win across the board.

28:13Douglas Healy: And was there an appetite for this internally? Did you have to sort of really make the case to introduce more testing? Or did people feel that something was missing?

28:25David Tiltman: Yeah, so people knew that we needed to bring something in. But I really had to make the case. We had spent a few months building the case with the team, like I said. But we did an RFP. we brought our creative teams in to say, we do want to have a consistent quantitative partner because the other thing, one of my passion points is to help creative teams learn that quantitative is actually a creative tool. Many of them just see it as an end point when really like, no, it's something that can help. So we brought them into the RFP phase, help us choose the right partner. Let's get comfortable with these things.

29:02David Tiltman: And so it was a few months. And even then, as we started, you have to you have to prove yourself like as with anything so we just didn't jump in and you know hey everybody you're doing this we did it with a few of our biggest brands we saw a huge success and i'll be honest with you we spent our year's budget in the first four months after we launched the program because as soon as everyone saw success everybody wanted to

29:28Douglas Healy: do it everybody was into it so talk to me about what it what this new system actually looks like on the ground. I mean, it taught me through how you go through a creative development process and when you are bringing that voice of the customer in. So I'll kick off and then I'm interested to hear from you, Julio, about how that works from a zappy perspective.

29:51David Tiltman: Yeah. So one of the things we talk about within our philosophy is from the very beginning. So insights can only be a critical partner and the consumer can only be a critical partner to the learning development of our work if it's in the beginning. So pre-brief phase, the consumer insights team owns the development of the insight that goes into the brief, right? It's a crucial element of a brief. Now they're not just writing it and saying, here's your insight. We're all working together, but saying that the insights team owns it brings the insights team along. But one of the things I will say after that, what we don't have is a blueprint.

30:26David Tiltman: The idea is if you want to do quantitative testing, we're going to partner with Zappy because we vetted them. We believe in them. They support our philosophy and we need consistency. We don't want to show five different versions of reports to, you know, different teams going on across the business. Again, we have so many, many brands. But the idea here is what does the creative need? So sometimes it looks like we start with qualitative. We move to board-o-matics and those board-o-matics tell us something and we might have to go back to qualitative because we need richer learning. And then we move on to, you know, animatic testing and then we move the finished film process.

31:07David Tiltman: Sometimes it goes right to finished film. If you have a brand like Heinz, we know so much about Heinz and we know how to improve those ads. We've done it so much. There's actually less that we have to do to get it to a great place. So the key is how it comes to life is however the campaign needs it. It's not one-size-fits-all, basically.

31:30Douglas Healy: It's not a sort of we test everything through this platform and we have a sort of traffic light system beyond that.

31:38David Tiltman: Absolutely not. We will put things on air if they don't. We don't have a number that we have to hit before it goes on air. Again, we optimize to the brief. the the only thing that we mandate is if we have a finished film piece of creative that goes on air we want to test it so it's it's in the system we want to have a record up but we've been testing it throughout the process anyway so you're you're 100 correct it is whatever the the business needs

32:07Douglas Healy: we will build to it so what does that look like from zappi's side julio are you are you are you sort of constantly, your team constantly working with Doug's team or, or is it something that's more, uh, you know, Doug, Doug can just take whatever he needs whenever he needs it.

32:24Lore Oxford: Um, I think it's a mixture of both, but one of the things that is really important about this program that we have in place is the partnership aspect of it. And that's a really important part because he has built partnerships internally with agencies. And that makes a dramatic difference because again, it's, it's a, it's all about learning. And from day one, he's also built a partnership with us, which you often don't see. I have the benefit of working with three to 400 global brands. And what these folks are doing is actually remarkable in that they have a philosophy and they partner strongly with all the stakeholders that they have, which enables them the flexibility, but also the rigor to be able to do the things that they have to do.

33:06Lore Oxford: So how does it work with us? And I think that that's what it's different. They had a philosophy and they build a system. Our solution allows you to build a system and that's not a problem. The problem is how the system is used. And they have developed a way to operate that gives them enough flexibility. But the example he was giving, everything goes into the system so they can generate additional learnings and they can go back to the team on what works, what doesn't work. So every single cycle is an improvement. It's not just like a linear pass-fail situation that ultimately is set for failure within an organization because there's no trust.

33:43Lore Oxford: You don't actually bring learning and you go back to market research just being, you know, a scorecard and a grading of homework.

33:51David Tiltman: And if I can yes and to what Julio is saying, because I think he's soft playing is the benefit of the work that they actually do. The reason, so we went through the whole process and the reason we chose Zappi, it allowed the flexibility that we needed. There's so many different options at a great price point that still delivered the high quality sample and output that we needed, right? It was the whole package that we didn't have to compromise at any phase of the game that allows us to do whatever it is we wanted to do throughout the process. And so that was the real key. And there are some great quantitative partners out there and I don't want to dismiss any of them.

34:35David Tiltman: It's whatever is right for you. For our business at that time where we were coming from, we needed a system that provided the exact flexibility that Zappi offered. And that's to us the real benefit of the system.

34:50Douglas Healy: Presumably the goal here is ultimately more effective work. It's work that is going to resonate more in the market and presumably drive greater, ultimately drive greater commercial outcomes, whatever those outcomes you're aiming for. Are you able to measure that? Are you able to measure that the stuff that you have been testing through this process delivers those enhanced outcomes?

35:18David Tiltman: Absolutely. So first of all, we have marketing mix modeling that we check our market. So every time we share out our marketing mix modeling, we also have a slide well hey here is this happy creative performance and making sure some every once in a while there's things that aren't 100 aligned and we dig into it and we understand the reasons why but absolutely as much as i'm talking about context in the end we got to make money 100 the biggest outcome is we have to sell more stuff and that's one of the things i will emphasize with this process and i think it's a fundamental consumer insights philosophy that i have is ironically enough, it is that upfront foundational work that really like that's the stuff everyone wants to skip, but then it makes the output so much better.

36:04David Tiltman: And we find that we're making more money by spending more time in that upfront. And again, that's what this process allows us to do because it's more focused on the creativity and it's more focused on building. We're able to do that. The other thing I will say is now that we have a lot of work that we put into the system, we can partner with Zappi, and we're talking about this, and I'm not giving anything away, of actually combining our models with our marketing mix to make those direct connections, not implications, but direct connections. And so that's the next phase in our relationship that we're building.

36:40Douglas Healy: That's really interesting. I guess when people hear about things like, or hear the words ad testing or advertising research, they're thinking of metrics like uh recall or persuasion or uh some form of like consideration score or something like that does any of this still hold up in this kind of system or are you just do you have sort of consistent um measures you're trying to look for or is it as you say completely i mean the other extreme completely free form based on whatever whatever it is the brief is trying to achieve

37:19David Tiltman: It's a great question. And I think it gets to the nuance of the conversation that we have with, you have to have structure. I told you before we were talking, I'm a big metaphor person. One of the metaphors we talk about at Insights, our Insights team is, we're architects. We build blueprints and we have to know everything about a building. We have to know exactly which walls are load-bearing and why they're load-bearing and what you can move and what you cannot. But when someone enters the building, they want to know how to get to the elevator without thinking about it. Right. And so when we talk about all this world, that doesn't mean that there isn't a blueprint behind it.

37:55David Tiltman: And that doesn't mean that there isn't solid data behind it driving it. So we do still look at sales metrics. Right. But we do look, we ask consumers, will this make you buy more? And one of the things, Julio and I were just talking about this last night. when we have that conversation with creative teams i think one of the ways that we help influence them to trust the system is the the algorithm that creates the sales impact metric isn't just one question asking whether or not they're going to buy again am i selling secret data no go go go secret information no you can go because i won't give the exact percentage but the number one factor in whether or not our sales score is high is emotion It's emotion.

38:38David Tiltman: And then that's like, so a lot of creative teams, oh, you have a sales metric. You're just asking purchase intent. It's a very cold thing. It's like, absolutely not. We are well aware that we're not just creating work trying to get consumers in a very, you know, specific situation to say they'll buy it again. We know if it doesn't hit them emotionally, it doesn't matter. And all those things. And so when we talk with creative teams, we are open about that. And so we have to ride that balance to, I think, what your original question was of There does have to be fundamental foundations that actually create the flexibility necessary for us to do what we need to do.

39:15Douglas Healy: I just want to finish off by asking you both what you've kind of learned from this process, because it feels like it's, I mean, certainly Doug, it feels like it's been a big part of your life for the year. So I want to sort of find out what you've learned, but also what you would advise to other companies that might hear this, say, oh, actually, we need something like this. So, Julio, why don't you kick us off?

39:38Lore Oxford: I think that the most important thing is not the solutions that you utilize, but rather how you take those solutions and make them right for what your organization needs. The things that craft science have done is the intentionality about how they went through this is remarkable. I sell a consumer insights platform but my real job is change management I am basically trying to replicate what Kraft Heinz have done with all sorts of organizations and the fact that they have actually gone in that same process has made our life a lot easier because as he said it he's like on day one we didn't just like throw it to everybody we're like we took a few brands we showed them success and then everybody wanted to go through it that intentionality and that strategic thinking in addition to the partnership is what makes the whole difference.

40:25Lore Oxford: So identify the solution. That's fine. That's the easy part. The technology is there. Of course, I love Zappi. There's other great technology out there. Just understand what it is that you need and shape that tool to what your organization is able to absorb at a point in time.

40:41David Tiltman: Yeah, what I'll say to this is, I do think it has to be philosophical driven. You can't just show up and say, here's our platform, go. and the important thing in all that is as with any philosophical path that one may follow you have to continue the practice and you have to live what you say and the reason i say that is we can talk about inspiring creative our system that we call it internally is consumer powered creative right we're we're not you know we we want to bring the consumer into it i talked earlier before of we don't want to have win-loss language. We don't want to make creatives defensive.

41:21David Tiltman: And it takes one bad meeting for all of that to go away with our team. And so that's to say you have to stay on top of it and you have to make sure that people don't, it can be really easy to get in the groove. It's like, okay, yeah, we got this testing and now we move on to this. It can be really easy when you get a good score to be like, look, we got a high score. And it's like, stop, we're not talking that way, right? Because then when you get a bad score, now you've set an agenda, now you set the tone for what that really means. And I just did it. I called it a bad score. What would theoretically be a lower score, right?

41:57David Tiltman: And so you have to be on yourselves and you have to be on each other and you have to really live it every day if it's going to come through. Fantastic. Doug, Julio, thank you so much for joining us today.

42:10Douglas Healy: Thank you all. This is great. Thank you, folks. So bringing this episode home is Delicia Cooney, who is Newall Brands Senior Director, Consumer and Shopper Insights. Delicia gave a fascinating presentation on stage here in Denver and also offered us an extremely timely reminder, and so much of the conversation is around AI, of the value of an actual human. We can hear from her right now. Delicia, welcome to The Walk Podcast.

42:37Julio Franco: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

42:38Douglas Healy: So before we get into the sort of session you were delivering earlier, just tell us a little bit about Newell Brands and your role there.

42:48Julio Franco: Absolutely. So Newell Brands is probably not a name a lot of people know about, but it is a multi-billion dollar brand. We have several household brands that are global in scope. So I am the Senior Director of Insights for the Kitchen and Home Fragrance brands. That's a total of 13 brands that I directly support. and so there's some household names in there like Rubbermaid, Oster, Ball Mason Jars, Food Saver, Mr. Coffee. Do you want me to name all 13?

43:16Douglas Healy: No, that's I think we get the idea. But quite well-known brands, but they're sort of wrapped up in a bigger organization. Now, you were talking about a sort of different approach to Insights and how insights drove all sorts of different things within the organization that you've been really so pioneering. So just talk to us a little bit about where, I guess, the situation you started with. What was the kind of problem you had that you felt that we need to do something about this?

43:52Julio Franco: Yeah, the way I positioned it earlier today was really around the fact that we didn't necessarily have an insights program or insights problem. It was more about that they weren't being used or there was more utility in what we had. So a few years ago, I'll say three years ago, Newell Brands really embarked on a transformation journey. We really wanted to transform and just reimagine how the consumer insights function worked. And so we started with just the fundamentals. So that was around, you know, do we have the right tracking in place, brand health tracking? We have global household brands, but how are they really perceived in the hearts and minds of consumers?

44:33Julio Franco: Did we have the right consumer segmentation? Did we know our consumers well enough? How they thought, how they lived their lives and how they interacted with our products. So I had all of that really good, rich kind of foundation. But I just felt like, man, we invested so much in some of those protocols and studies that I wanted to juice a little bit more out of it.

44:57Douglas Healy: Did you have that sort of classic problem where there was great work being done, but it kind of never really left the insights team or stayed on the proverbial shelf?

45:06Julio Franco: So I'll say that it did leave because I'm all about commercialization. I feel as though, you know, we're in, you know, researchers first, I'll say. But I think our job is to kind of provoke thought in action. And the way that you do that is by sharing that passion, sharing those insights out with your stakeholders. So we had done our part fragmentally. I don't know if that's a word, y 'all, but I'll use it.

45:30Douglas Healy: We'll run with it.

45:32Julio Franco: Let's run with it. So segmentation. Yes, we brought it to life. We had several training sessions and things like that. But if you really take a step back and look at the raw data, I can turn that data on its head and say, OK, we have our target segments, but now let's talk about a needs based framework. Let's talk about how consumers and what problems consumers are really solving for. So it was a matter of we have all these great pieces of work, but are they talking to each other? So that's where we got to.

46:02Douglas Healy: So they didn't really tell a sort of joined up story around the actual customer?

46:06Julio Franco: Around the consumer. Like what really, like what is that need? What are they trying to solve for or what are they trying to achieve in their lives? We know that there might be one or two people, depending if you have a partner or you're in a single person household. Like there's one person in the kitchen, but you're probably interacting with several of our brands or several of our categories. How do we better understand that? Are we meeting their needs in a way that are really delighting them? Or are we just trying to make a blender more powerful? Are we trying to make, you know, an air fryer get quicker?

46:42Julio Franco: instead of starting with that product in mind I wanted to start with well what are you trying to solve there are you trying to like put dinner on the table for your two boys that I have at home and we have 20 minutes before we get to the football field or you know what am I trying to

46:58Douglas Healy: solve in that instant so it was really about the sort of consuming it was reframing into consuming these and so what did that actually look like what did that transformation actually look like What did you have to do to get to that point?

47:10Julio Franco: Well, I'll tell you, it was a lot of data. So if you're a researcher, it's wonderful. But it's, again, using all of those different data sets, taking a step back and really reorienting ourselves on the actual consumer, the human problem. So when I say data sets, it's anywhere from the Foresight's data. So we've heard a lot from some Foresight partners where we have macro trends. We have what's new, you know, in the kitchen market or the things that we're experiencing out in the world. Like GLP-1 is like the buzzword of the century, right? There's 50 % of consumers right now that are either on a GLP-1 or considering a GLP-1.

47:50Julio Franco: How has that turned the needs of the kitchen around or upside down? So we took macro trends such as that. Then I also took raw data from segmentation. I took data from actual in-homes and other ethnographies, digital ethnographies, and I said, okay, what is this saying to me? There's a lot of data here. And what I did was I really created a framework, which is really a decision-making tool. I wanted the data to sink. I know that sounds probably a little corny for people that are not in Insights, but I really wanted to orient the team on solving for human problems as opposed to just making our products better.

48:31Julio Franco: Because there's only so much, there's only so much power you can put in a blender. So how do we get past that?

48:37Douglas Healy: So how does that look now internally? Is there a new process that people follow or a new sort of form of output that your team deliver? What is it actually, how does it manifest in real?

48:50Julio Franco: well, I don't want to like, you're going to have to enter my brain a little bit because it really is me sitting down with the data, knowing everything that I know about the category in the market and seeing if I see new patterns and themes. So it really started with me, the person itself, what we call now human intelligence. But it's not to say that I didn't also use AI as well, right? So I had myself look at the data and say, okay, what are some themes? What is a straw man of how I see some of these things themes playing out. And then I also put the data into some AI tools and I had them to do the same.

49:27Julio Franco: Now, this is earlier in the year. So, you know, so much has changed in the AI world. I'm saying nine months ago.

49:33Douglas Healy: It's like 10 years ago in AI terms.

49:35Julio Franco: So I did that. And I just, I was still trying to understand how well AI would be able to process as much as a human brain would process. What did you find? Man, it's pretty good. I would say I saw about 80, 85 % overlap in the themes that I kind of drew out of the data and what we saw in AI, which I thought was remarkable. I also used AI to say, what was I missing? Because there may be something that I can add on in that nature as well. The other couple of things that we added on there, we did some competitive landscaping. So, okay, I have these themes and how we look at human problems. Who else already got there?

50:21Julio Franco: What other competitors are already competing there? What are the existing solutions that they had? What are the price tiers? How are they perceived? And so it ended up being this kind of full holistic framework that laddered from jobs to be done to pain points and tensions to opportunity spaces. And right now we're all in activation. So I am leading several innovation workshops right now to bring that to life to say what's going to be our portfolio and our roadmap for the future across Kitchen.

50:53Douglas Healy: So there's a sort of three phases. I think you could understand, translate, activate. Yes, you're on it. And activate is where it actually comes to life then. So there's actual new products or new campaigns or what's being driven by this? Yes.

51:15Julio Franco: So right now I am really in the innovation kind of phase. So in Activate, that's where the opportunity spaces are generated and then ultimately new ideas. When I say new ideas, that's product ideas for us. But it's not to say that the framework couldn't produce other types of innovation ideas. You know, innovation can be anything. It can be a product, a service, an experience, a promotion, an activation, an in-store, you know, bundle, in-cap. But we're really focused on continuing to drive growth at Newell. So we are really wanting to build out our innovation pipeline and continue to bring breakthrough products that are meeting needs across the categories that we serve.

51:58Douglas Healy: There's a couple of, just looking at the kind of session, there were a couple of phrases that stood out to me. So I just want to sort of throw them at you and get what you mean by them. So the first one was this. The unlock wasn't new data. It was reframing. Tell me about that because that's interesting.

52:17Julio Franco: Okay. So often in research, we want to produce new research and new insight. And that means going out and capturing new learning. That's not always where the unlock is. And so what I'm saying is I looked at all the insight and learning that we already had about our consumer, our marketplace, our competition. And I was like, I can make some more of this. and so the unlock was trying to set aside the work that had already been done the frameworks or the mental models we already had and said hey what else do I see coming out of this data and it's a little bit of creativity I know often you know researchers were into data a lot they call data nerds but this is my creativity bone that came out here and said okay I think I can come up with something different and new out of this data.

53:11Julio Franco: We're not done yet. And so I want to say, I know we're strapped, especially in this given marketplace. Lots of researchers right now are trying to contend with, okay, AI is going to make it more efficient, less money. You know, do I have more resources to create new insight and learning? And I'm going to challenge us to say we can. We can look at what we already have and turn it on its head and reframe what we have already invested in. And so that unlock was just sitting down and just rethinking.

53:44Douglas Healy: That's a great message. It's a great message. And I guess linked to that is the second phrase I sort of pulled out, which is, I really like this, clarity beats completeness.

53:54Julio Franco: Goodness, yes. So in my session, I probably shouldn't admit this, but I am. I stated that I was a recovering perfectionist. And so I always want to, you know, you always want to put your best foot forward. You always want to dig into your data and make sure, you know, your T's are crossed. I've been through this model. I've like, you know, made sure everything ties out. And I feel like sometimes when we wait that long to see that everything is perfect, we miss the opportunity to bring in our stakeholders and to really collaborate and shape it. And so that's why I say clarity over completeness is get your leaders involved up front.

54:36Julio Franco: Share with them your work plan before I've built out the model. Hear what questions that they have up front. And that's a little scary for me because I want it to be complete. You know, I want to make sure like I want to bedazzle you. but that sometimes you lose that window of when it's really relevant and when you can really have that impact and so that's why i say like it's more about clarity and getting their business questions and shaping what the output's going to be more than providing this perfect output

55:07Douglas Healy: waiting till you've got the perfect the perfect output great um so final question just looking your head kind of 12 months or so what what would success look like for you what what would you if you if you wanted to look back and go yeah we really made a difference there what what would

55:24Julio Franco: what would that look like what it would look like for me is like out seating my competitor having them say oh my goodness newles on the news on the rise i probably need to turn like turn to the right and see who's next to me. It is products on the shelf. It is delight. It is looking at ratings and reviews and seeing a product that came out of this process as we reframed a category, seeing that it's on the rise and viral and people are loving it. And we're continuing to see our products in the hands of consumers. So that's what I'd love to see, like a whole portfolio of products that came out of this needs framework.

56:12Julio Franco: And we're working on it.

56:13Douglas Healy: Any tips you can give us, hints you can give us what we might see?

56:18Julio Franco: No, because my competitor is listening. No, just be on the rise. I really hope, honestly, that they see that we are sincerely trying to understand how they're interacting with our brands and with our products. And it's intuitive for them. So more to come.

56:37Douglas Healy: we'll see we'll leave it there thank you delicia uh thank you for your time absolutely thank you for having me so that's all we have time for on this episode of the walk podcast recorded live at the insight to impact event in denver thanks again to our sponsor profound for anyone who's currently in planning mode for next year insight to impact 2027 will be taking place from november second to fourth in nashville tennessee so mark your calendars for that in the meantime the walk podcast we'll be back over the next two weeks with two more episodes from this year's event so be sure to tap follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts thanks for listening