The Effective CMO: Instacart's Laura Jones returns

0:09Ann Marie Kerwin: Welcome to the Warp podcast. This is the Effective CMO series. I'm your host, Ann Marie Kerwin, America's editor. And today we are talking with Laura Jones, CMO of Instacart. Instacart has undergone a marketing transformation under Laura, establishing a brand practice and unifying its brand and performance budgets. And here at Wark, we've been following Instacart's changes and we're eager to check in to see how it's been going. Today, we're going to dive into how Laura and her team have made their own weather and how Instacart's brand strategy was embraced across the entire C-suite. Laura now oversees all Instacart communication functions under one unified team, which handles corporate, policy, product, consumer B2B, and internal comms.

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1:33Welcome, Laura. Thank you so much for having me.

1:36Ann Marie Kerwin: So when you first joined Instacart, I guess this brand strategy was maybe sporadic, you would say, not consistent. And so you look for moments that could unify all the folks who are working across all the marketing communications teams, and you called it making your own weather. So tell us about how that journey went to create that brand building team and how it brought together the two brand and performance budgets and what that did for the company and any lessons that maybe someone else could take from that. So I just crossed my five-year mark at Instacart. So I've definitely been reflecting on the journey.

2:15I think, you know, when I go back to 2021, when I joined Instacart, We had a great product that was meeting a huge demand during the pandemic for online grocery, but we didn't really have a brand. We had a logo. I think we had somebody who was working part time on brand, a single human. And a big part of my mandate was to build that brand. And what I did was really start with the fundamentals. What is our strategy? What is our brand identity? And get those in place. The next step was to really move beyond thinking of brand as separate from performance and realizing and showing the company that by pooling resources and really instigating a full funnel strategy that we could make the impact of that brand felt and that ultimately going out with the brand message would improve our performance.

3:10So that was kind of a next really large job to be done. And once we got through that, once we had some data and some proof points, we were able to take ever bigger swings like Super Bowl. Our first Super Bowl was 2025 and we were back again this year, 2026. and then really starting to think about how do we make our own weather, meaning not just rely on moments like Super Bowl, but find other ways to go big that are really authentic to our brand, moments that are authentic to our users, and to make sure that our brand presence is felt any place we have an authentic role to play.

3:47Ann Marie Kerwin: And so I'm interested in, we've done such a good job of having emotional aspects to your ads, but also like really tying it back to like what Instacart can do to make your life better. So when you're looking at creative, like how do you evaluate that it's going to do both jobs and how have you and your team work to like make sure that happens? I love that question because that's very much what we are trying to do. We are trying always to meet a functional and an emotional need, whether it's with any part of the user journey, with the product, with our advertising. we always want to speak to both because groceries are both.

4:25They fill a functional need at the very base of Maslow's hierarchy to nourish yourself and your family. But they also fill an emotional need of, you know, memory, self-care, indulgence, healing. And so we always want to think about, you know, whenever we're communicating, having that functional message, but also tapping into emotion. And so when we're looking at the work, we're asking ourselves, is this clear? Will people understand what we're doing and why Instacart is relevant for this moment functionally? But then also like the ad should make you feel something. It should make you laugh. It should make you remember something.

5:04And so that's really when we're looking at the work, you know, we're kind of asking ourselves those questions. Is it clear? Is it going to communicate what it needs to communicate? But also, is it memorable? Because if you make something that's incredibly functional and clear, but fundamentally pretty boring, no one is going to remember it. No one's going to pay attention and you might as well save your money.

5:24Ann Marie Kerwin: That's very, very true. Yeah. So to get to showing that this approach is effective, you've had to build like a new measurement program at Instacart. Can you talk a little bit about what you've done to change how like the when you came in, it was mostly performance metrics that you had at your disposal, right? Yes. Measurement, I would say, is an ongoing journey for all of us in this industry. It's definitely the topic when I get together with other CMOs that I'm most interested in going deep on because the landscape is constantly changing. People are testing new techniques and it's hard. Honestly, if it were easy to measure a full funnel, I think half the people at Cannes would not have a job.

6:06But, you know, over the years, we've made some shifts that have made us feel ever more confident in our measurement. So, you know, obviously, most of these programs start with kind of incrementality adjusted attribution. But I think the trap there is that you can become hyper focused at the channel level, and also kind of over rotate on last touch. So a lot of what we've been trying to move towards is more of a portfolio level view. So saying, okay, what are the goals we need to hit? and how can we use the entire portfolio to achieve those goals so that we're not over-optimizing for lower funnel, which again is kind of the easy trap to fall into if you're just staring at ROAS through a last-touch lens.

6:51So really looking at how do we take into account the impact of the entire investment? How do we have that trust so that we can say, we'll hit a quarterly goal, we'll hit a monthly goal, but the way we do that, you know, that we can retain some flexibility and that enables us to both lean into our kind of workhorse channels that we know will deliver but also start layering on and other kinds of media and we now have, you know, a library of case studies whether they're at a channel level or a geographic level that actually show that when we add that upper funnel into the mix and we balance it correctly and the message is right that we get way more efficiency and value out of it.

7:31But the journey's not done. It is, you know, every year I feel like we undergo some kind of almost like refurbishment of some piece of the measurement stack because there's always something new that's available. So, you know, we're continuing to look at, you know, how do we do better multi-touch, better causal, how do we leverage models more effectively? and really, you know, especially now with AI on the scene, what is possible now that might not have been possible in the past.

8:03Ann Marie Kerwin: Yeah, and then how do you communicate that up to the C-suite? Like which measurements you're using and the changes to the measurements? Is that a hard conversation to have? I think because we have built so much trust and we're very transparent, we share the numbers when they're good, we share them when they're not good, always with a plan to make them good. But I think that level of transparency and bringing them along on the journey. So if we're going to change something about the way we're measuring, we tell them we're going to do it. We do it and tell them. And then we tell them that we did it and we already told them.

8:38So it's very comprehensive because what you don't want to do is show up with your CEO or show up to a board meeting with a new measurement technique and no explanation as to why. because then I think the question is, well, you're trying to cover something up. For us, it's actually about we always want to find those optimization opportunities. So if some part of the portfolio isn't working well or the measurement isn't accurately capturing it, then we're kind of leaving value on the table. And so the promise of measurement for me is just like every dollar will work harder and that's going to have a better outcome for everyone.

9:11And I think you build trust with your fellow execs that that's our shared goal And we're always going to be marching towards that and be transparent when we make progress and when we're shawed out.

9:25Ann Marie Kerwin: So I wanted to ask about your in-house creative agency, which Ad Age just deemed as the in-house creative agency for the year. So congratulations on that. Thank you so much. So how did it come about that you decided to have an in-house creative agency? And how have you found it working? And why do you think it works for what you're doing? That was one of the things that I was really invested in from day one. So going back to when I joined in 2021, one of the criteria I set when I took the job is that we needed to have a creative team as part of the marketing organization. And there were a few marketing creatives nested in a product design organization, and we brought them over.

10:06I think at the time the team was like 25 people or something. It's almost 200 now. So a really different order of magnitude. But we knew from the beginning that if we wanted to really shape a brand that was authentic to us and to be able to evolve and iterate at the pace of the business, that we needed to have a world-class in-house creative team. And it has been a journey to build it because there's so many things you have to be great at. It can't just be brand design or copywriting. It's storytelling across every type of media, brand and performance. And so it has been a real journey to bring this team together, grow the team, bring in the right kinds of talent, and then really empower them to make the best work of their life.

10:53And, you know, it's funny, a few years ago at one of my leadership meetings, I got all my leaders together and had everyone write out a future vision statement. And our ECD, her statement was that we would need to build a shelf for all the awards that they were going to win and that this was kind of her vision, what she was going to manifest. And I feel we've been joking all year that it's time to build the shelf because this team has won pretty much every award. Winning specifically in-house agency of the year had been something we had all been hoping for, for, you know, really since we started this journey.

11:32And so the fact that we were able to accomplish that this year just truly feels like a dream come true. The last outstanding award that we've yet to win is a Lion. So we're all really hoping that we can cap off the shelf with the Lions.

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12:30Ann Marie Kerwin: Well, let's talk about your Super Bowl ad for this year, which was Bananas, which was actually titled Bananas, but it was also a little Bananas. Yeah, and it had Ben Stiller and Benson Boone as like a Euro pop duo singing about bananas. And the outcome was that a lot of people online suddenly started responding with how right they like their bananas. And so this was all around a new product that you were introducing. Is that right? Yeah, that's exactly right. So last year, in 2025, that was our Super Bowl debut. And we went out with a message of we're here. And it was really about kind of all the different brands on our platform as represented through this kind of merry band of mascots making an epic delivery.

13:17So year two, we wanted to move from just awareness to consideration and really giving people a reason to choose Instacart and frankly to trust us. because one barrier we know in online grocery is just people feeling like, well, I need to pick it myself. How could someone possibly know the right marvel of steak or the right ripeness of a banana or of an avocado? And so we really wanted to tackle that head on and show that we stand for quality and care. So we looked at the shopper notes, which is how people are expressing preference in our current UX. And we saw that bananas had the most shopper notes of any item.

13:53and we sold over a billion bananas and had tens of millions of orders with shopper notes about exactly how right people wanted them so we said okay this is the perfect place to start and to build that trust so we built preference picker which and allows you to indicate the ripeness of your bananas avocados and now for the summer peaches and stone fruits and things like that but bananas felt like a really great anchor item and honestly just had some inherent humor to it, we thought, what if we made a Super Bowl ad entirely about bananas? That would be, in a word, bananas. And once we had made that choice, then creatively it kind of cracked the whole thing wide open.

14:33And we felt we could be as unhinged as we wanted, because in a word, you know, that would be bananas. So from there, all the pieces kind of fell into place. We had, as you said, Ben Stiller, Benson Boone, and then Spike Jones as our director. and the three of them together just envisioned and created this world that I think just defined the very essence of the word bananas. And hopefully, you know, I think that that really did kind of breakthrough capture people's attention. And what we did see is massive adoption of the preference picker. Almost half of our orders for those items like bananas and avocados have now a preference indicated.

15:13So I think it really validates that that was an unmet need. And so the functional need we met was getting the perfect ripeness of banana and the emotional need we met was making you have a good laugh, hopefully.

15:24Ann Marie Kerwin: You're extending that campaign into summer this year. Is that right? How is it going to tie back to the Super Bowl effort? Yes. So Preference Picker, because it has been such a hit, we really wanted to extend the coverage of it for, you know, stone fruit season. And just we know that summer is the time of year that it's kind of most delightful to enjoy the perfect ripeness of whatever fruit it is that is your favorite. So we followed up Super Bowl with a new campaign that we launched, I think that was just last week, about peaches and kind of lovingly call it the Peach Patrol. And it's a bunch of septuagenarian kind of wise nonas that are just, you know, sharing their wisdom about picking the perfect peach.

16:11And our idea is that if, you know, somebody who has eaten more peaches than any of us in their life feel that Instacart can pick the right peach for them, then who are we to protest? So we had a lot of fun with that. And again, created some, I think, fun contrast between the scene and the music. We love our 90s hip hop. So we really went for something kind of unexpected that is grabbing attention. And so far, we're really excited about how it's performing.

16:41Ann Marie Kerwin: And so you've introduced several partnerships since you've been there with the NFL, the WNBA and Feeding America. So what have you found works with partnership deals? Yeah, I think partnerships really have to be authentic to the brand. So I'll quickly touch on both the WNBA and Feeding America because they represent different polarities. So the WNBA, new partnership with the Toronto Tempo, it's the new women's team out of Toronto. And we were excited. It's our first ever sports partnership. And we were really interested in partnering with the women's team because our customer base, our shopper base, all skew female.

17:22And so we thought, you know, what better sport to get in on than WNBA, which has captured the attention of really everyone and speaks to those women that are really doing it all. And Toronto is kind of especially close to our heart. Our CEO happens to be based there. We're actually a Canadian founded company. Our actual corporate entity name is Maple Bear. fun fact. So we love that it kind of tapped into some of those Canadian roots. It's a market that we are excited to keep growing in. So that has been a really fun one and a really great way to kind of dip a toe into sports. And then on the flip side, I think the partnerships that do mean the most to me personally are definitely those like what we have with Feeding America, where we're able to take our platform and our customer base and leverage it to help people.

18:12So right now, another campaign that we recently launched that I'm incredibly proud of is addressing summer hunger and so 21 million American kids when school ends don't have a place to get lunch and it's just a really tragic reality and so we are partnering with Feeding America this summer so that everyone can donate to local food banks and and that those food banks can actually say exactly what it is that they need and and get and get those ingredients so that they can help kids have healthy lunches. So I have kids. I actually, every time we do a community carts activation, I do it with them to show them that it doesn't have to be hard to help people.

18:53So we just made a cart before I left and donated that to our local food bank and have also taken them to do actual physical packing there as well. And I think it's just a, it's, it's, we're so lucky and privilege to have, you know, the lives and the businesses that we've built and to be able to leverage these platforms and the technology and, you know, abundance that's available to help people, whether it's with the LA fires or summer hunger. I think those are the moments when I feel the most proud of what we're doing.

19:27Ann Marie Kerwin: So let's talk a bit about the C-suite and how you've handled your relationship with the C-suite. One of the major organizational achievements is that the new brand strategy was not siloed within the marketing department. It's actually spread out to the rest of the company, like product and communications and HR. So how did you secure buy-in from your other departments within the company and any tips for people who are looking to do that? I think you have to bring everyone along on a journey. A brand doesn't just live in marketing. It lives in every touch point throughout the product, throughout the user journey and frankly throughout the kind of experience of working in a company.

20:08And so I think the more that us as marketing leaders can bring other people in and make sure that they understand that while we are the ones that bring the brand to life in advertising, we're all stewards of the brand. I mean, customer care, I think, is actually one of the most prominent and most important stewards of the brand. Because if you build a brand, you know, our brand is really centered around the idea that we take care of the groceries so you can take care of life. Now, if something goes wrong and we don't help you in a timely manner, then we're not actually delivering on that promise.

20:40So I really think it has to be imbued throughout the organization. And I think the other piece is that a brand is a living, breathing thing. It's not a set it and forget it. So while we did do this kind of significant rebrand five years ago, even right now, we're We're going through a process of tuning and taking the learnings that we have and tightening a few things up and tweaking things. And we're doing that in deep partnership with design and with product because, again, most of the way people experience our brand is through the product. So if we can go in partnership and make decisions that scale across every touch plane, it's going to be much more impactful and ultimately build much more equity in our distinctive assets.

21:22Ann Marie Kerwin: After your five years at Instacart, I'm just wondering, do you have a new definition of what marketing effectiveness is? Has it changed at all? I don't know if it's changed. I think I've just realized how hard it is. I think we can all, you know, espouse the theories of full funnel marketing and brand building. This was my first job where it's been all on me. I was at Uber previously and Google before that. And, you know, in some ways I was really lucky to join brands that were already iconic. This has been my first opportunity to build something really from scratch. And I think it's just a lesson in humility of how much work goes into making a brand, keeping it relevant, reinventing it five years in to still make it feel like something you're excited to work on every day really takes, you know, I think a strong group of people around you and a strong kind of internal, grit to come back every day and say, we've built something awesome, but how do we raise the bar again?

22:29And that's what I love about Cannes. Maybe I'll close with a story. Last year, we were shortlisted for the first time, and we found out the day of that we were not going to win. But a group of us, myself, my head of brand, and my ECD, had been planning to go to the show, and we said, oh, okay, we're not going to win. And I said, I think we still have to go. And we went and we sat through and we watched the work that was better than ours. And it lit a fire in our belly. And we had the FOMO. And we are all very kind of competitive, ambitious people. And the next morning we woke up and we all went and kind of put our feet into the Mediterranean Ocean and tried to manifest a lion for the future.

23:13And I think it's that spirit of just always challenging and always thinking, yes, we've done something that we're proud of, but what can we do next year that we'll be even more proud of that really, I think, has to be at the heart of it all. Because ultimately, what's effective today may not be effective tomorrow. And if you're not learning and challenging yourself and staying on the bleeding edge, then you're not going to win. And for us, it's really about harnessing that energy, doing what's right for the customer, and hopefully making work that will really delight people and drive impact.

23:45Ann Marie Kerwin: Well, thanks so much for joining us here at Cannes Lions Ad Festival. It was great seeing you again. And thanks so much for joining us. Be sure to subscribe to the Wark Podcast so you don't miss any of our episodes. And thanks for listening.