Secrets of breakthrough creativity

0:09Welcome to The Walk Podcast. My name's David Tiltman and this is the third and final episode in our series recorded live from the Insight to Impact event in Denver, Colorado. If you've missed our previous two episodes, be sure to scroll up the feed to hear from Mondelez, Reddit, Kraft Heinz and more. On today's episode, brought to you in partnership with Profound, we'll be digging into the core theme of the event, how you take insights and turn them into something that actually moves people. Now, a quick reminder, Insight to Impact is a new event the team at Lions have introduced this year. We've brought together the Market Research Get Together TMRE, an event called Content Marketing World, and we've thrown in some content from Lions brands, including Contagious, Effie and of course Walk.

0:56We were on the ground catching some of the speakers as they came off stage. First I'll be speaking to Alison Payne, Heineken's Chief Marketing Officer in the US, about the culture of effectiveness it has built and which helped Heineken receive the title of Creative Brand of the Year at Cannes Lions this year. Then I'll be speaking to Jeff McCrory, partner and chief strategy officer at creative agency Mischief, who will break down its innovative approach to making work that delivers results. Closing us out will be Talia Salem, who will discuss how she transforms the content strategy for Marriott Bomboy Traveller.

1:35But before we meet our first guest, here's a quick message from our sponsor. AI assistance like news are changing how people discover and purchase from brands. AI agents are your new customer and Profound is the AI marketing platform that helps you control how AI talks about your brand. To win an AI search, go to tryprofound.com.

2:04To kick us off, we caught up with Ali Payne, who's Chief Marketing Officer at Heineken USA. I had the privilege to interview Ali on stage as part of the event and she had some great perspectives on what needs to happen within a business to make creativity a recognized business lever. Let's get straight into the interview. Welcome back. So next we are talking about Heineken, the iconic beer brand which beat a very competitive field to take a creative brand of the year at Cannes Lions earlier this year one of the most prestigious awards at the festival and a reflection of 31 Lions overall this year it's been a huge couple of years for Heineken it's invested in experiences and fandom it's done a lot around sports and I want to dive into that with our guest who is Ali Payne Chief Marketing Officer for Heineken USA and Ali joined me on stage uh earlier to to talk about some of this in uh in a cmos in the spotlight session so ali welcome to the walk podcast hi david really great to be here thanks um so i mean let's just let's just talk about that creative brand of the year win i mean it as i said it's one of the most sort of prestigious awards uh that the festival gives out um i mean simple question what's your secret what how do you do it what's the secret sauce well uh i guess i would say it's not built overnight Right.

3:31Right. I think it is a reflection of a huge level of investment by Heineken globally in in creativity and how important it is. And obviously behind our flagship brand, which is which is Heineken. It was, you know, you know, across our major markets, you know, a big drive to up the creativity agenda. uh actually even at can we had over you know our top 20 market cmos present at the event that's a massive investment right so it just shows how important um creativity is for for heineken uh and i think that i think that that was really putting it really at the top of the agenda for all our chief marketing officers across the world and what sparked that decision what sparked that sort of decision to really go after uh creative creativity as a as a business growth lever yeah look wait you know i think uh you know as we've as we've mentioned in uh you know the the events today we know creativity drives brand growth um you know a a uh a distinctive asset uh you know something that really cuts through and grabs attention has you know four times to five times the marketing effectiveness of something that isn't.

4:47So we know that it leads to growth. And I think that's the important thing. And the data to prove it. And that really has been the impetus, which is to continue to invest in the brands, continue to invest in world-class creativity, because we know that it drives growth. What's your favorite sort of piece? Are you allowed to have favorites? Oh, favorites. It's a piece of work that you've done. From the Heineken brand? Well, look, the one that won the most, and I do think it is super clever, was it could have been a Heineken from our Brazilian business. It, you know, based on like a really true insight around, you know, in the world of so much, you know, people grabbing attention.

5:32There's so many ways to communicate and people recording. You know, there's a group of friends who sort of record their voice message and sometimes it really bugs you. and this idea that you could swap that long recorded voice message for a beer in real life so it could have been a Heineken. And the way they took that across almost every platform and, you know, interacted across, you know, like it was on subway stations. It was, you know, sort of everywhere where, you know, our consumer touch points would be. I think it was just a very clever way of bringing our brand, you know, our core brand to life.

6:10because we are about encouraging in real life experience, you know, and over a beer, right? There's many things you can do with AI. There's many things you can do, you know, on your own. But having a beer with a friend is one of those things that has to be done in real life. And that's what we stand for. So it was a perfect moment to lean in, you know. And it is a great example. It's available on the work platform if anyone wants to dig it out. But I think that point you make about sort of the emotional connection of kind of being together, that's something, as you say, that Heineken's leaned into.

6:48And it's done a lot. And you can see the natural sort of segue of that into the sporting world. Absolutely. Yes. Is it sort of, there's something called fans have more friends? Yes. Tell me about that. Yeah, so that again comes off a sort of pivotal insight and data that says those people who follow, you know, have a fandom. And it could be any fandom. It could be a fandom of chess, football, etc. Yeah, it doesn't have to be soccer. Yeah, it's fandom. It's your core, you know, core thing that you love and fandom. You actually have more friends. And I would cite my husband, who's a massive Arsenal supporter.

7:25We live here in the U.S. I'm sorry to hear that. He's followed Arsenal since he was five. I've obviously they won, you know, the EPL this year. And, you know, it doesn't matter where we've moved to. We've lived in many countries. He will always find friends because he's an Arsenal supporter. He can wander down to the local bar that is, you know, an Arsenal bar. There's an Arsenal bar in New York City and he will find friends. And it doesn't matter if he's never known them before. And it's that sort of fact that like getting together over your fandom brings more friends. and what better way to do it than over a beer.

8:01And yes, so we have leveraged that across our sporting platforms. We are the official beer of soccer through our Champions League sponsorship, obviously Formula One. We also have US Open in the US. So yeah, it's been a great, I guess, unlock for us in terms of, you know, driving creativity around fandom and getting people together over a beer. And there was something interesting at the World Cup this year. It's obviously right on your patch here in the uh in the states um because you weren't an official sponsor there were you but you you did quite a lot of work around that that event so tell us a little bit about about how yes it's it's hard when you're not the official sponsor because uh abi is official sponsor and we knew they'd come out hard with you know michael or bolter and some of their big brands here uh in the u.s um but i do think that uh restrictions uh make you more creative right so i said to the team every beer in the ABI portfolio is going to be shouting louder than us.

9:02How do we be cleverer? And yes, we had the unique thing that we were able to say that we're official beer of soccer, which we do, yes. And I've had a 40-plus year history with the sport. And in the U.S., we use that as a way of educating because the U.S. consumers aren't as necessarily into football as their own football, American football. So, but obviously World Cup, the biggest, you know, sporting event in the world, actually the biggest eyeballs ever across any event was in the US. So it was our way of educating the US consumer on what football equals soccer and doing some translations around that.

9:46You had a lot of fun with it. We had a lot of fun with it. You know, we lined the route to the stadiums with a lot of, you know, translating from football to soccer. And, yeah, look, we jumped in in terms of, you know, all the way through the line from what you saw on TV through to our activation. Like, we even had a moment where the Tartan Army in Boston, the Scottish fans drank Boston dry. We, of course, responded with an emergency beer delivery up to an emergency delivery of Heineken up to the Boston pubs. it's those sort of things you know so because we weren't like going to let the fans the tartan army go without beer um so so yeah it was a great platform for us and yeah we were just super creative around how we lent into that uh that whole part knowing that we weren't sponsors so we had to be scrappy we had to you know do it in a clever way unusual for a brand the size of heineken it's it must be sort of unusual to adopt the role of challenger almost yes yeah but we are very much a challenger brand in the u.s we're quite whilst we're huge worldwide we're quite small share here.

10:52So we try and do adopt that challenger mindset. You know, how do we, how do we do things really differently? You know, be clever. So yeah, we had this other, other thing we did, which was called volunteer time off. Cause we knew that a lot of the, you know, a lot of the reason, you know, like the English Premier League is not watched as much in the U.S. is because it's very early in the morning. So we were, you know, you're able to watch, say, the Champions League final, we found a loophole, which is consumers are allowed volunteer time off in the US to go and do work at a food bank or help the elderly.

11:30And so we partnered with a lot of NGOs and said, can we have a volunteer time off opportunity that then also enables at the end for someone to get together with their friends and actually watch a game and we would provide the beers so our volunteer time off was it was hugely a way of getting people to be able to do good meet with friends and then close it with a beer and watch the game yeah nice yeah nice um now was it a event called insight to impact um just talk to me a little bit about how you measure the impact of that kind of um activity because sports sponsorships on ship i mean people the very good reasons to do it but one of the issues with it is it has not had the sort of effectiveness infrastructure around it that the more traditional forms of advertising have so this is a little bit about how you draw a through line from that kind of work you're doing to uh to an actual commercial outcome yeah so you know we we have been known for almost a decade uh we have like commercial effectiveness modeling of all elements and sponsorship has been one of those ones that's a little trickier because what are all the elements that go into sponsorship?

12:43You know, it's the fee you pay, right, which can be, you know, increasingly getting more and more. There's then the activation dollars that go in. And, you know, the rule of thumb is, you know, anything between for every fee dollar you pay, two dollars in activation, sometimes four dollars, you know. We actually have a squad. We set up a team to do, you know, a real deep dive understanding of how we better measure our sponsorships. And it is before, during and after. And we make sure we amplify our sponsorships. It's not just about the event itself, because that can be one weekend, like Formula One in Miami is one weekend.

13:21But how we engage with influencers and creators in the lead up, what they actually do and post for us in the event itself, attendance at the event, you know, beers sold at the event and all those sort of things, right through to then, you know, the media, the paid, earned, earned that you get after the event as well is really important. So we do have a system to measure before, during and after to really understand the payback on our sponsorships. Because, yeah, if you're just in the trap of measuring the fee, you would look very closely at them, I think, yeah. And so how do you see that sort of sponsorship impact?

14:02uh you know how does that sort of stack up against other other forms of advertising or communications does it does it i mean does it pay back i'm assuming you wouldn't be doing it if it didn't pay back but where do you see the biggest impact into is it is it a sort of brand play or is it about how many cases of beer you're selling or we actually have a a classification of our sponsorships, um, where we, we bucket them into literally short-term sales driver, like how many people had it got a beer in hand at a certain event or a certain stadium. Um, and we, we, we put it in that bucket. Um, and then we have like our big flagship tentpole sponsorships where we do a lot more in the lead up during, you know, during the event and after, which we would classify as more equity building.

14:55I would say something like Coachella, which we sponsor, is an equity driving. We've had a partnership for over 30 years. The lead up to Coachella is all about who's on the list, who's appearing. We have a worldwide influencer program. Over 20 of our countries send influencers all the way from India to Brazil to Argentina all come to an event we host there. So we would consider that a lot more equity driving. And we measure both. You know, what's the long-term association with Coachella? Is there a positive sentiment about the brand? Are we seen as, you know, with our finger on the cultural pulse?

15:39Does those measures, and not just the fact that, you know, at Coachella we do get 120 ,000 consumers through the gates trying Heineken. um so it's a bit of both that that event but yeah i think we we take a look at what how we would classify them and if they if they're a pure volume driving activity they've got to pay back in in the year if it's an equity driving it's a longer term play yeah now inevitably it's a marketing conference there's been a lot of discussion about ai yes yeah already so and but as we're increasingly seeing with ai the the applications are uh pop up in many different ways so so it's not just that ai is used for one thing i mean so but i guess one of two of the big themes are sort of ai in the insight space you know how people are using it to get better insights faster those sorts of things uh and then there's ai in terms of how it's helping sort of creative development and getting to execution faster that that sort of thing i'm interested in how uh a big company like heineken sees this you know you i'm assuming you have multiple different experiments going on at any one time but where are you finding uh the biggest impact yeah so actually we have a big uh we have big initiative a big platform called freddie ai named after freddie heineken which um is our sort of uh global platform um and i think we look at it in a couple of ways first of all uh you know I think it was, was it Unilever said Unilever doesn't know what Unilever doesn't know.

17:17We're pretty bad as marketeers archiving our stuff, where it all is, our intelligence platform. So there was a big drive across the globe to have it as a repository of all our documentation, so our digital asset management system, because then we could pull the collective, right? because effectively creating our own internal large learning model to LLM, sorry, to, you know, use our own internal data. So that has been huge because I can now literally go in and say, hey, you know, what's the learning from, you know, that campaign in Brazil? And it will give me, you know, our own internal data. you know we load all our documents up and say actually you know this is all our business performance over the last five years you know with from every measure brand health measure etc tell us what are the top five things that we should be looking at in terms of you know uh of of brand growth uh what what things should we be looking out for so it's helped us become more intelligent in a very faster way yeah um so that's that piece and that's interesting because a lot of that is information that's already locked exactly your organization yes sort of unlock for the teams.

18:30And then also in a crazy way, help us serve it up to the organization in a simplified way. You can immediately create a PowerPoint deck that just summarizes it all. Now we would have had, you know, junior brand managers building charts and like that. So automating the, you know, what can be automated, I think, and getting us to a deeper understanding of even our own data quickly is, I think, a really critical one, which should give us more time. I I keep saying that to the marketing, my marketing team, give us more time to spend time on what really matters, which is creativity. And, you know, I love more than anything seeing like our creative development process and sitting with our agencies of record and talking about ideas.

19:12You know, the marketing job had become so fragmented, you know, buried in data, you know, so much information that, you know, maybe 30 to 40 % of their time was doing that versus focusing on, you know, the fun marketing stuff, you know. Or the actual stuff that hates the consumer. Yes, yeah. I say the science versus the magic. And if the science can be more automated, quicker to your fingertips, it'll enable you to spend more time on the magic, which is where the real breakthrough happens, you know. And so I think we use it for that. So that's that piece. Content creation. So, you know, we have to be careful.

19:47You know, I always said we promote, you know, in real life experiences. So, you know, we are wary of creating a completely AI world, you know, with what we show up with because we want real people in real bars drinking real beer, you know. But can we automate certain things? What we've used it for, you know, in a very fast process in the creative development process is sort of get to what I would call a minimal viable product to show to a consumer before we go out and actually make the thing for real, you know. So it's helped in the creative development process, make it very quick with quick feedback loops.

20:27On that sort of creative development and what the consumer actually sees, obviously there is a significant, you might as well call it a backlash against AI among consumers. And all the things you're talking about, about people want to be meeting up in person and not feel like, you know, they're slaves to an algorithm. um is that something that that's sort of top of mind for you that that there's almost a sort of tightrope there between using the tools to their best advantage but at the same time i don't know maintaining a degree of humanity or something yeah no way i agree in terms of the way you not to make it obvious that something is generated by ai yeah we call it you know everyone calls it ai slop i think consumers are more and more aware of it and you see you know in the comments on a feed, something's AI generated, you know, people like there's a bit of a backlash, like, oh, that's just AI dismiss immediately, you know?

21:21So I feel it, you know, that the pendulum is swinging. It used to be, oh, you know, people would like uncertain about like, you know, what they saw. And some of it was, you know, there's some things that AI is very clever with, which can create funny memes. And I feel like it might live on more in the social world around memes and jokes, but the brand players that turn up using it i feel like you know people are going a bit questioning authenticity and integrity and they'll assume they'll assume you've used it even if you yes if there's any sign that it might yeah so we we have very clear guard like guard rails on on how it could be used in our content creation yeah um so final question obviously we're in um sort of deep in planning season for 2027 what what's kind of top of mind for you for next year what are your priorities yeah so you know um as i said keeping creativity the long and the short of it i i was like we're going to focus on the long of it as well so how do we you know um continue to you know drive our creative idea um i was interested to see all your things around distinctive brand assets i drive i keep pushing consistency we've been a bit of a victim in the US of switching our messaging, especially as we go across more platforms, try and go from upper to lower funnel in the way we show up.

22:49I'm really driving consistency and marketeers always like to do new things and I'm like, is anything really worn out? Can we repeat, repeat, repeat, but how so we use our distinctive branded assets? So that is really a big focus for the next year, which is how do we link it all together through the line in a much more consistent way, you know, and then place a few big bets. We always put about 10%. You know, we work with the publicists who are the agency of record that come with sparks of ideas, you know, inserting ourselves in at the speed of culture. So having the bandwidth to be able to do that and respond in a quick way is super important as well.

23:33So as I said, using the science to preserve the magic, I think is what I'm trying to do. Fantastic. Ali, thank you so much for joining us on the World Podcast. Yeah, thank you.

23:48This 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, rep and cursor use profound to control how they show up in the AI search. Go to tryprofound.com.

24:09Next up we have Jeff McCrory from creative agency Mischief and sticking with the beer theme he was on stage talking about some of the agency's work for cause. We wanted to get an agency side for you. So we asked him about how to turn an insight into a great idea and indeed whether you even need an insight in the first place. Let's hear from him now. Welcome to the podcast, Jeff. Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here. So you've just been on a session as part of the FE track talking about your work with Molson Coors. I mean, let's just let's just kick off with that. What was the actual work you were talking about?

24:46Sure. We were kind of going through the Coors Light Super Bowl case from last year, all the work we did around kind of introducing the case of the Mondays. That was kind of the theme of that case in terms of like Mondays suck, but the Monday after the Super Bowl is maybe the suckiest of the sucky Mondays. so we took advantage of that um for course like we literally made a case of the mondays and then did a whole 360 campaign around it in the run-up to the super bowl and it was uh it was really fun uh and it sold a lot of beer and it was really really successful and a lot of the the sort of session the focus of the session was on getting to that insight that that that then allowed all that amazing creativity to to happen um what for you is the sort of difference between you know just having having an insight and then actually being able to to kind of exploit it in all the ways that that case study shows uh i mean it's a great question i think um and it's funny when we talk about an insight specifically i i would maybe expand it to say a strategy because i think a strategy is a narrative around a problem.

25:59And yes, there's an insight in there normally, but it's not just an insight. There's context, there's a problem definition. So I don't know that it's just we have an insight and then we make an idea. I think it's we develop a strategy, like again, a whole narrative around this that the creators can understand and get excited about. And then we kind of cut them loose to find out what is the right way to bring those strategies to life that makes sense i know it's a fine difference but it's important it's an important one because i'm well i'm going to talk about in a few moments about the the role of the strategist and i think the thing that that comes into this i guess before we before we get on to that do you think it's necessary for good creative for there to be an insight that did you need to build from an insight or i mean this is gonna get me in trouble with all the planners with my colleagues but uh but but no but it helps immeasurably if there is right like so i and i i think at mischief i'll just brag about the agency a little bit for a sec because because when you asked about how do you ensure that an insight or a strategy can lead to great work it it always baffles me and us that like the way a normal strategic process works is the client briefs the agency and then the strat team goes away for, I don't know, pick your weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, and they come back and they've crafted this brilliant strategy that everybody signed off on and then you show it to creatives.

27:25And what normally happens is the creatives spend the first week going, well, what the hell is this? So it's just an odd way to do business, quite frankly. So we've built the process just differently. So the, the, the creatives are involved in the strategic process as we're going through it. So there's, we just, and we've done that really just to, and the clients are involved in as well. It's very collaborative and it's very iterative. And we've done it to try to ensure that there isn't a disconnect between where we land strategically and its ability to lead to great work. We've just tried to build the process so that we can check for that so that we feel really very confident by the time we've signed off on a strategy, it will absolutely lead to great work just because we've involved the people that are going to do the creative work in the process yeah there's less about sort of baton passing 100 it's a little more fluid um and sometimes that's that's weird but we we just found it's it's absolutely the right way to do particularly in like 2026 soon to be 2027 it just feels like the complexity of the way ideas need to come to life now to to somehow not involve the full team in that process it just it's just the way we've built it and it seems like it's working and where did that that cause like uh let's use that as a case study where did that uh insight come from that that then allowed you to to build everything around it i mean it's uh like if you back up coors light for years and years and years has been kind of centered around cold right like the can turns blue and they're from Colorado like shout out go Broncos um so born of the Rockies so they were they've kind of been about cold and people like cold beer shocker um and then relatively recently they they shifted from cold to this thought of chill just to try to move from something that's a little more functional to a little more emotional and so chill is like it's a little more relaxed a little more genuine a little more present doesn't have to be like crazy party party party um which all makes sense and i think people can relate to that hard to do in a breakthrough way sometimes right like it's hard to have that not kind of be boring because and also to find a sort of space in a category where that's uh you know that it's not the first it's not the first brand to to make that association it doesn't it doesn't appear immediately ownable when you think about it but again from cold to chill like Coors Light absolutely has permission to play in that space and then a lot of the work that we do on the brand is about the kind of contextual relevance of that thought so for the Super Bowl in particular there's not a lot chill about the Super Bowl it's maybe the most un-chill moment in sports or it's giant it's a stage everything is larger than life.

30:20And so, but that, that kind of polar opposites sometimes leads to really interesting opportunities. So how we can inject the right amount of chill into that very un-chill moment, that was kind of the brief, right, for Coors Light. And then we, we tripped in to this data that revealed how much productivity is lost, like the day after the Super Bowl. Again, Mondays aren't chill and that monday in particular is not at all chill so again that just gave us permission to try to step in and take advantage of that in a way that is right for course light it feels like it's somehow right for the brand even though it's a little obvious at the outset i like that idea there actually that there are moments of tension that and then sometimes great things can come from uh the tension between a brand and a moment rather than trying to find something with perfect sort of strategic fit because i guess the obvious the obvious choice would be let's find the most chilled moment rather than the least chilled moment well and there's also like with if you're in the beer business super bowl is really important well yes the run-up to through the nfl playoffs to that day in particular is a massive beer selling moment so you and especially for a brand of the scale of course like you really need to find ways to take advantage of that like the business it's a business imperative but to your point yeah it's something like we talk about mischief of like what if we did the exact opposite we're huge fans of like doing the thing that seems irrational but doing it in a way that makes sense but only after you've seen it and do you think that that particularly as you said earlier in this sort of the modern communications landscape that sort of sense of well i don't know this is tension or it just gives you some a hook or something interesting or something that just feels slightly out of view ordinary?

32:09I think so. I mean, I would say that you can't force it. Like sometimes I've been on projects where I can feel us forcing attention into this thing that doesn't matter, but because we feel we need it to get to great work and you don't always need it, but if you can find them, they really are powerful, right? Like these either a cultural moment that you can take advantage of in the right way or some element of the brand that's underutilized. like tension can and is often really really good i know it's sometimes scary but again if you embrace it the right way i think it could be really really really powerful i want to talk a little bit about um the way strategy works at mischief you've already sort of talked a little bit about how uh you try and create more more of a sort of fluid process rather than the the kind of baton passing um we've just recently launched a future strategy report which we do every year we look at the sort of status strategy around the world and i think what we found this year was some what i hope is some kind of sort of green shoots we call them sort of reasons for optimism after a yeah a reasonably a reasonably torrid few years um talk to me about the sort of the role of the strategy team within mischief because mischief's absolutely been on an absolute tear for the the the last few years i'm sure uh knock on wood thank you uh but the what's the how does strategy fit into the to the agency structure and and and what is the role of the strategist within a uh a sort of new model agency like mischief that might look a little bit different to uh what people have seen and more people may have experienced in one of the more traditional sort of whole coastal agencies Sure.

33:51I mean, it's funny. I think it's interesting. I think strategy has never been more important than it is right now. And it's nice to see it kind of stepping on stage in a big way, not to diminish the value of creatives. They're obviously awesome, but it does feel like we're emerging into a world where the relative value of strategy, I would argue, has never been higher. um and i think at mischief what we try to do is ensure that it's it's very practical in its implementation because i i think where strategy gets a bad rap right rightfully so is that it's a lot of eggheads uh super complicating something to show everybody how smart they are so it's like they take a 400 page deck to explain why people eat cornflakes for instance and it's like i don't I don't know that you need 400 pages to explain that, but it's just this kind of like an intellectual exercise that's somewhat devoid of what we produce as an agency, which is ideas.

34:56So we try to be really practical in terms of, yes, the team has to be smart. And I think for me, I base it on two things. One is, can they define problems in an interesting way? It's funny because the strategists obsess over insights, and I think they're important. Again, my experience has just been the reframing of a problem in a really interesting way is often more valuable than an insight. Again, it's not like it's a zero-sum game. They can both be great. I'm just going to repeat that because I really like that. The reframing of a problem in an interesting way can actually be more powerful than a sort of original insight.

35:33that uh yeah or it's just one of those like because what it does is for me i always think of it as it's a it's a game to unlock creatives ability to understand what we're trying to ask them to bring to life and the state like a really well crafted problem like here's what we're trying to address here's what we're trying to fix here's what we want people to do more of or less of it's really compelling like really compelling for creatives because they tend to be problem solvers by their nature because i guess that's what whether it's whatever whatever it is the input is that's what you want is that it's the that spark that can then that can then feed into the creative process yeah they're they're the audience and the clients are the audience as well but again again we we build these things collectively but for me at least i i've always just thought of creatives as the ultimate audience for our strategies and if they can understand it and get excited by it and immediately you can see their wheels start to spin it's like okay like we're on to something because i i said another thing a strat like nobody sees your brief they see the output of your brief so remembering that i think is really important so i so yeah and we've just built the product i'd say the other thing we do a little bit differently is we we run fast like the speed at which mr strategy team works is might be a little too fast if i'm honest sometimes but it's but but but hopefully we do it in a context where strategists sometimes feel they have to find the absolute one perfect answer above all like the one ring above them all and uh i just think that's a terrible burden and it's really hard so i would rather us move really fast get to like shallow holes that these seem interesting and viable and true and relevant and then let's talk about them as a team quickly, right?

37:26So don't spend three months researching the hell out of this one thought. Let's move really quick. Let's get to things that feel like they're directionally correct. And then let's bring everybody in around us to debate them, to workshop them and help us collectively get them to greatness versus it falling on the shoulders of any poor planner on their own. And the future strategy report I mentioned, There's a lot of interest in, we call it kind of more upstream planning, but I guess it's closer to the business problem and how that might be solved in multiple different ways. It might not be a creative, a sort of creative act.

38:11It might be a pricing change or a product idea or whatever it might be. um are you is your team sort of working in those sorts of spaces or have you found that actually there's still plenty of runway in uh developing a spark for a creative team to then produce some form of communication i think that will that will for the immediate future be most of what we do is we will be in the communications but i'm okay for us to be an ad agency i know everybody does there's a wind now it's like you can't be an ad agency we're a really good ad agency and we're really successful at it so i'm okay for us to be an ad agency um i do think we can swim up streams but i think you need to be really honest and careful about what you pick like we can't beat mckinsey at factor analysis on pricing strategy there's no way that we can swim in those lakes nor should we try but in terms of like brand architecture and how brands are defined or the role in researching the real reasons behind why consumers are buying you are not buying your perceptions yes i want us to play absolutely in those spaces and i think we're i would argue we are better than the consultants at that because again we are tied to the way those problems will probably be kind of manifested in the market more than they are they jump the report and leave whereas we are still tied to the execution of it no offense to all the consultants out there i i'm sure they can take it yeah it helps that the paycheck helps with that i guess um but yeah but i i would say i i think as an industry we sometimes underestimate how hard it is to launch a new product or how hard it is to do the factor analysis and some of that deep stuff so again i i'm okay if we are still world-class at kind of creative ideas and then i think we have permission to swim upstream in the right lanes.

40:13Fantastic. Final question. As I said earlier, we're very keen to find sort of reasons for optimism for strategy. What are you most optimistic about looking at the next year or two? It's funny, and this is going to make me maybe sound like a crazy person, but I don't know that there's ever been a better time to work in advertising. I think AI is made average free. So great. then that means the only thing that is now of value is exceptionalism and i think we're built to try to do the exceptional so i think that we're entering an era where the real power of an idea and creativity will never be more important and then again the breadth and depth in which we can bring ideas to life has never been kind of more interesting i i think all of the drudgery around like everything's being tested and stuff.

41:09It's like, sure, in other news, sun also rises. Like it's always been that case. But I think that I'm okay to have average being eaten by AI. And then the only thing left being the really exceptional creativity that people will end up paying for. I'm excited by that. We'll see. AI might kill us all in the future at some point. But I really do think we're entering an era where if you're really, really good at strategy and you're really, really surrounded by creative people, I don't know, I think we can do great things. It's a great place to leave it. Jeff, thank you for joining us on The War Podcast.

41:47Cheers. Our final guest of the series takes us back to the client side and in this case, an opportunity to look under the hood at a brand's content strategy. Talia Salem is the editorial strategist for Marriott Bonvoy Traveller and her Insight to Impact presentation took us on the journey of how the brand resets its content strategy so it was more focused, more impactful, and could also be adapted at the regional level. Talia, welcome to The Walk Podcast. Thank you so much for having me today. Happy to be here. Now, you've just been presenting as part of the content marketing world. You were talking about the transformation of what's called Marriott Bonvoy Traveller.

42:32Now, just to set the scene, because I think most people will be familiar with Marriott, the hotel brand. What is Marriott Bonvoy Traveler? Marriott Bonvoy Traveler is Marriott Bonvoy's online editorial platform. We tell the stories of the hotels, the destinations, the travel tips, and all the things you want to know about travel where we are all over the world. um so what role does that play in terms of uh the overall marketing uh picture for marriott or marit bonvoy yeah so travel actually serves a lot of different functions within the company so we the upper funnel content aims to reach new net new audiences around the globe we are a global publication so we do reach people as far as china and as close to home as maryland where we're based we also try to build more loyalty within the company so we do have people we could actually target our content by membership levels and so we do look at that every month so we could look at sort of a basic member which might not be quite as engaged with our company but they might be a little bit engaged and we're hoping our content will drive more engagement and excitement about the brand whether it be through travel tips about how to leverage your Marriott Bonvoy membership or whether about some of our amazing resorts, our resort content tends to perform well.

43:48So it kind of pulls people into the travel planning funnel. And then for people who are more experienced with our content, then it could get more specific or on the ground or geolocated, depending on what they're looking for. Now, in the presentation, you talked about the need to reimagine this service. So just talk to me a little bit about that. Why did it need to be reimagined? And what conclusions did you draw? Definitely. So our product is over 10 years old. And at the time, it was extremely innovative to be launching a strategy on sort of gaps in SEO search terms. And I think over time, as we've learned a lot at this conference, there's been a lot of talk about the disruption of the search model, content discoverability, AI search.

44:30That model just doesn't really work anymore. So we were producing quite a lot of content at scale, sometimes up to 20 articles a month. And then recently, we are going through a platform migration, which is oh so fun if anyone's ever done that. I've done it several times and let's just not talk about it anymore because it will bring back trauma memories Yes, it does have that But I think the good thing about doing a platform migration is it gives you a time to say, okay What have we done? What are we doing? What should we be doing better? And we actually ran the numbers on all of our content And it helped us think, okay, some of these things do cut through the clutter But some of these more branded pieces, for example, just aren't getting any traffic Some other things are just so specific that other people are filling that niche.

45:12Like there's no reason for us to be talking about very, very specific on the ground recommendations in a city when we cover 150 countries and territories all over the world. It's just not sustainable for us to work that way. And then also we wanted to talk more about some of our offerings that other people are actually talking about. So in this age of AI search, for example, other people are talking about our loyalty program and we're not talking about our loyalty program. Why aren't we talking about our loyalty program? And we have done that to a little bit of an extent, but we're really trying to look at where should we be kind of owning our own credibility, where we can focus some of our storytelling and how can we evolve with the times that are evolving?

45:51And we never really took a big step to revamp things. We just sort of took little steps here and there. And so I think it was time for us with the platform migration and resetting our content strategies to just take a step back and figure out how to make things work better for us and also continue to evaluate it as well. Were you specifically looking at the needs of AI, well, LLMs, AI search, AI recommendations? Was that quite top of mind when you were looking at this? It was that, but it was actually a lot of things. So it was AI search. It was also actually bringing our regional teams more into the fold.

46:25And so I think, as you can imagine, for a lot of companies that are global, but that are based out of the U.S., sometimes we get a little bit stuck in our U.S. mindset. And we produced a lot of things out of headquarters office without always working very closely with the regional teams. And I consider the regional teams sort of like the keepers of knowledge. And I always want to tap into whoever the keepers of knowledge are. And so in my brain, I'm like, we need to come up with a better process to ask, you know, the team in greater China. Like, they know all the cool hotel openings in China. They know like the Michelin star restaurants or the stories that we need to tell.

46:59It's impossible for me to know in my little home office, you know, what that is. And but we didn't have like the mechanism for getting that insight from them and also till I bring them along the journey. And so that was actually one of my other big goals is to really increase the quality of information that we were providing to our audience and really get that information that no one else can get. Because, you know, a random journalist doesn't have access to the people I have access to. So I wanted to also pull in that quality of information so that stories we're telling are better and more credible, which does, of course, support AI search and LLMs.

47:33And then lastly, I wanted to just cut back on the amount of content we were producing. It was way too high volume. It was like a grind to get through everything. And I felt like we were sort of creating content for content's sake. And so we really wanted to make sure that every piece of content was doing multiple things for us instead of just saying, oh, this is a cool story. I'm going to make it. And of course, as like a former journalist and editorial strategist, I love content and I think it's great. But I also want to make sure that we're laddering up to our organizational KPIs, building up the brand and things like that as well.

48:03So it talks about the sort of objectives and what you were trying to achieve. What actually has come out the other side? Yeah, so we did four things to reset our strategy. So the first thing that we did is update our content pillars. and we had five new content pillars. The first one being focusing our content on the places that you wanna be. So all the places that we have hotels and telling the stories of those destinations. Then we were focusing on how you wanna travel. And so this is really kind of a psychographic part of our storytelling. So making sure that we're building content for specific audiences that we've identified with our consumer insights team.

48:39And this allows us to tell the story of our over 30 brands and different parts of the portfolio. So we could talk about homes and villas even or like service hotels that have, you know, more of a functional need as well as luxury resorts and things like that. Secondly, we really wanted to tap into what's trending and what people are talking about to reach different audiences through things like astrology tourism or wellness tourism. We did a series of content on set jetting. So really testing out what resonates. I would say that this third category is a little bit more experimental because we don't know how it's going to resonate.

49:11But we will produce at least a few stories. we'll do some a b testing and then see how it how it goes the fourth category is really communicating that we are much more than a hotel brand and we've grown a lot over the years so we have an amazing portfolio of credit cards and people are very keen especially with the llms to learn about which credit cards to sign up for and things like that we also have a boutiques experience you can buy like the candles and the scents and things like that the beds the beds are very popular as well. And so we talk about that as it makes sense in an editorial way.

49:43And then lastly, we're really trying to lean more into travel tips. And this is what I was talking about. There's a lot of publications out there that talk about our loyalty program or all the different benefits that we offer. And we haven't really been doing that much storytelling around that. So we do want to focus more on that in 2027 and work really closely with our loyalty team. And what is this concept? Is this content all on your own channels or are you working with creators to push stuff through kind of third-party channels? Right now it's all on our own channels but we will be working more closely with the social team as well so we're all in the same sort of department and we do collaborate with them but right now it's our own channels and then our newsletter that goes out to over 13 million people every month.

50:24And you mentioned earlier the importance of the regional markets and getting sort of consistency I mean that's always a challenge for a global organization. I think we, you know, anyone who's worked in a international firm will feel that. How did you handle that challenge? Yeah, I think that was kind of like a fun challenge. You know, we're trying to think about, okay, we have all these people that I call the keepers of knowledge. How are we going to tap into their knowledge and their expertise and also know what they're doing? And so we did a couple of different things. The first thing we did was actually be quiet and listen to them.

50:56So we set up calls with every regional office. And then we also sent them a detailed written survey. I think when you're talking, when you're trying to communicate with people with different communication styles and languages, offering them multiple forums for expressing their needs is helpful. And so sometimes people are better in conversation and sometimes people are better on like a survey. And so we took the product of those two listening tours and we looked at all the detailed results and then came up with the plan to say, OK, we need to vet our annual strategy with them just to get a high level pulse of, you know, do you like where this is going?

51:32Is this relevant to your market? Because that's really important. And then once we kind of got their opinion on that and we sort of flushed out the plan, then we went back to them again four times a year with what we called like a quarterly intake form. And so we took the annual strategy and we pulled it down into a quarterly strategy. And it was literally at the article level or at the topic level, asking about insights on specific topics. You know, what trends are there? What's the best places to eat? What resorts have special offerings? What are your most popular and exceptional beach hotels?

52:06Things like that. So it was a mix of different things. We also asked them for things like hot or trending destinations that they see as like an uptick in their markets. And I would say that actually took us a couple of times to get right because they weren't really used to giving us that level of detail. And then they also had to kind of figure out within their teams who the right keepers of knowledge are for that information. So the first time we did it, we did sort of a form and they actually didn't like that because they couldn't see all the questions. And so we tried a couple of different ways and then requests started coming through on teams and other ways.

52:38And I was like, well, I can't keep track of all that. So then the thing that worked for us initially was actually just like an open Excel and then they could share it with whoever they wanted and see what everyone else responded. And then right now as part of the build out for this transformation, we're working on a work front intake form through the software work front planning. And I'm working with our operations team on that. And they could see that they will now be able to see the request and they'll be able to see what I took from that request, how that request turned into a story, and then it will communicate back what that story was.

53:08so the part of the problem with the old process is that I never had the capacity to go back and tell them what we used and so now they'll be able to say to their leadership I worked with the content team at global here's what we did together and here's the hotels that we supported and so we were kind of missing that like full circle production loop loop that's really essential for such a big company because we all kind of work in our own little silos so just I guess wrapping up just keen to know what you've sort of learned through this process um i guess firstly about the types of content and what what a sort of modern content strategy should look like uh and then i guess more broadly about what it takes to drive that kind of change through uh through a sort of as you say a sort of global team that's matrixed in many different ways yeah so I think the thing that I learned about content is that we constantly have to be evolving so even though I thought like at the beginning of 2025 when we really started this process there were certain things that I thought would work really well and I didn't necessarily resonate with our audience and so to be flexible because you might think oh I read every trend report I talked to everyone this has to go game bucks or it's like set jetting for example I thought that was going to perform like crazy.

54:25And it did fine. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as I thought. And I think some of those stories are hard to like pull down into a story because people might have been especially inspired by, you know, White Lotus or something like that. But then to pull that into one story that's repeatable might not work. And so I learned to be flexible. I learned to be open to feedback. You know, you just need to hear from people like this didn't work for me and you can just change it. I mean, it's just working with people to make sure that they have the solution. I'm always about trying to be as inclusive as possible to make sure that everyone in the room understands what's going on.

54:56And I also want my audience to understand what's going on because I think a lot of the travel content that is produced generally is sort of like in the know. And I think if we want to be, you know, the world's best hotel company, we need to bring people along. We need to make them feel welcome. And I think creating inclusive content is a way to make people feel welcome. And so I try to also bring that through our content strategy. Oh, yeah. And I think the last thing I would say about change is actually people wanted the change. I think they were looking for they were looking to work more closely with us, but they didn't really initiate it themselves.

55:30And so we initiated it because we realized it was time to make a change. And so when we reached out, people were like, oh, yeah, that would be great to work more closely together. So just because no one's coming to you doesn't mean that the change isn't needed. And don't be afraid to make changes. And people welcomed the change, but it's just sometimes hard to find a clear path when you're in a big organization like ours. But it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. All right. It's a great place to leave it. Talia, thank you for joining us on The Walk Podcast. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

55:58That's all we have time for today on The Walk Podcast. This has been our third and final episode of Insight to Impact here in Denver, Colorado. Next year's event will be heading east to Nashville, Tennessee, and will be held from November 2nd to 4th, 2027 so please do mark that in your calendars and if you've enjoyed this episode be sure to follow wherever you get your podcasts thanks for listening