Chaos, Creativity & Courage - how Tubi took on the streaming giants - Nicole Parlapiano

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. Now, in this episode, I'm talking to one of the most entrepreneurial CMOs in the US right now, Nicole from Tubi. She has an amazing background and track record, having worked in some fascinating businesses like WeWork and Tinder, and before that, even having her own startup in the dating space. I love Nicole. She has so much experience, so much wisdom, and there are lots of lessons from her journey that I think you'll find absolutely fascinating. Not least, what she's doing on Tubi right now. Here it is. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Oncensor CMO.

0:40And I'm delighted to be joined by Nicole from Tubi. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Very excited. Very excited to have you. And I must start with congratulations because you've recently just been nominated, or not nominated, given entrepreneurial CMO of Forbes, which is fantastic. It is. It was one of the ones I've, not that I'm not proud of them all, but I feel like entrepreneurial CMO is one of the better, one of the bigger things you want to be known for. Yeah, 100%. I'm dying to ask you then, what makes an entrepreneurial CMA? I think first and foremost, you're thinking with a board lens.

1:15You're thinking across the business. You are thinking about driving impact outside of marketing. You are bringing the voice of the consumer into the room for product, for content, for your CFO, for your CEO. You know, a lot of it can be uncomfortable because I think you have to be comfortable stepping out of your lane. And maybe stepping in on other people's toes. But if you see a business opportunity, maybe it's not necessarily something that marketing can solve and drive, but there's a bigger business opportunity. It doesn't mean you can't be spearheading an initiative that is product or content driven and championing people to get on board.

1:52So it's really, I think, thinking about the business from all angles and not just thinking about how marketing can drive the business, but how the business can move forward and taking a long-term lens on how we're going to win in an industry and a market. and sometimes that might not be a marketing initiative. I love that answer actually because like so much of marketing I think is beyond what people traditionally call marketing, don't they? Yes, it's not just creative campaigns. Yeah, I know. It's like we seem to kind of default that. But if I look at the big transformations I've had in my career, most of them aren't traditional marketing.

2:24It might be, you know, business organisation change or kind of sometimes I've had no budget and been able to do things on no budget or their ways of getting products into distribution that you know didn't happen before but i think it's so important isn't it as marketers to think think from a business first point of view rather than just going oh what's the marketing answers this question i've got yeah or you could say you know what a non-entrepreneur is like oh i don't have the money to do this or i can't compete because i don't have the things that other people have like you have to dig deep and you have to get that entrepreneurial spirit of like maybe there's a partnership maybe there's another brand or business and you are that person reaching out on LinkedIn, and it's a strategic partnership.

3:01So I think that it really has to do with what, you know, not looking at your, you know, your weaknesses, as reasons why you can't break through or do the job traditionally, you have to constantly challenge yourself. And, you know, marketers, whether it be no matter what you're marketing, we are at the forefront of technology and change, we have experienced so much disruption, technological and cultural, where every day, something can happen and the way that it's landing with consumers and how they're feeling is not how it was yesterday so i think that like you just have to be nimble and you have to be flexible and you can't be too like married to a creative campaign or promotional calendar you have to really be responsive so i think that all those elements come at play and and you know a lot of the businesses that i have worked for have been either sometimes very culture forward um like entertainment dating or not as culture forward office-based financial services but still you have to kind of know the sentiment of consumers and overall what's going on and what they need to hear and what your how your business plays a role in that moment yeah totally there's a lovely question from cory from elf who i had on the podcast last year and she said kind of success is defined by the distance between the c-suite and the consumer and from the time between insight to action yes i thought how what a brilliant summary of that exactly that isn't it you know we represent the customer don't we effectively in the organization we do and people would you know comparing it to a restaurant we're front of house yeah we are the the hostess and the and the we are we are talking to everyone making sure they're comfortable making sure they're happy dealing with complaints dealing with good things bad things timing and then you think about the rest of the organization you know you got you have your your chef who is like you know you're talking to the chef about what the consumers want what they like what they sent back you know so we play a really important role and i think just um you know i think that is our job is to make sure that the viewer the viewer the consumer never gets lost in everything that we're doing yeah i mean talking about staying in lane as well the other thing i i noticed is the entrepreneur of cmos rally entire organizations they're not just sticking to this is the you know this is the marketing plan but to create real change and have a vision you've got to get everybody on board and i think we've got roles internally probably as much as externally to communicate to the business about how we're going to achieve our goals.

5:23Yeah. And what role? Brand isn't just creative campaigns. Brand is a North Star. It's what we all operate from. It's who we believe we are in the marketplace. It's how we deploy products, content, services. It's everything. And everything has to be wrapped around that. And you have to really question organizations. If there's initiatives that fall outside of serving the brand and the difference and the role that we play in the market, should we be doing them right um it does it can drive a lot of energy and a lot of focus in an organization because ultimately we're the ones that are partnering with the ceo to what is our mission what do we mean in the world and then everything cascades you know from that there's a lovely little phrase you use i think in the write-up about the entrepreneurial 50 which you you talked about your career being chaotic i love chaos i know which doesn't surprise And you referred to being in some uncomfortable or pushing yourself yourself in some uncomfortable positions.

6:22So how important is that chaos been in terms of your learning and what have been the most kind of chaotic moments that you've had to? Yeah, I would say like, you know, I'm not I always haven't been as comfortable with it. I would say the pivot point for me was really in 2008. I was working in private equity. I was going back to school to get my MBA and we were dealing with extreme it was the recession I worked in financial services like it was chaos and I had to really I lost my job during that time I was in business school and I had to stay in LA so I had to really think about what am I going to do to make money full stop and that involved everything from nannying to selling Christmas trees to like I mean that's a humbling experience I'm someone that is getting a you know a master's degree in business, slinging Christmas trees on a lot, because that's what I needed to do.

7:14And in that time, I had to make a switch. There was no jobs in financial services, certainly not in LA at that time. And so I took a chance on taking a job at eHarmony, which was my first marketing job. And that was uncomfortable because I'd never worked in tech. I had never worked within a marketing organization. I started way at the bottom. And so I just absorb everything like a sponge and I'm a super curious person. And if I'm interested in a business model, I find it very energizing. And dating in 2009 was like, you know, it was before the iPhone. I mean, it was like this idea that technology could help connect people romantically was extremely interesting to me because it's not just a tech product.

7:57The psychology of how people are compatible and what makes them happy long-term is like, it's so interesting. So that's why I took the job. and that was my, you know, first cutting my teeth in tech and first cutting my teeth in in marketing and I was doing, you know, I was on the acquisition marketing team. So it was similar that you're thinking about capital deployment, how are we driving, you know, qualified registered registrants, which means like they had a real intent to meet somebody on the product. They took the time to fill out a great bio. It wasn't just measuring on how many overall regs we got.

8:31It was the quality of these people and what they do to an ecosystem and community that actually is what makes the product successful. So that's where I started. And then after that, I mean, when I graduated business school, I had two partners and we started our own dating company because we really felt like there was a gap in the market for younger people. I mean, you had Match, Any Harmony, which were the bigger players then, and they weren't really suited for younger people and dating. And being in a city like LA that's a little bit more isolating than New York, it's very hard to meet people.

9:03This was also pre-Uber. So, you know, it was a dating app that helped you plan your night out based on neighborhood and the guy type that you were interested in. So it would say on Thursday nights, if you want to meet that Hollywood agent, that Ari Gold type of person, go to this bar on this night and you're going to find that person. And it was very fun. So I had the experience of building a product, trying to raise money, pivoting product because investors at that time were telling us, well, it should be this or that. And of course, it was a lot of male investors that aren't single. And so you can get rattled and try to pivot your product or you can stay true.

9:43We struggled and ultimately we did get bought by Match Group and we didn't make our own app. Oh, no. Yeah. Despite them buying. yeah yeah we just we didn't hit we didn't you know that's how earnouts work and so um and then i went agency side during that time because i had to i could only do that for about nine months to 12 months before i ran out of money yeah and i had to work so i was then took a job on the agency side yeah i so resonate with that i did um i left a big corporate job maybe 10 years ago and put all my life savings into a management buyout of a small a small drinks business yeah so a bit similar to you actually despite smashing the targets they move the goalposts for the earn out so can they do that yeah well when you're a minority shareholder you realize they can do anything they want top tip read read the small print read the fine print right honestly i had a meeting with a lawyer and the the manual the not the manual sorry what is it called the investor agreement or something i can't remember the official term for it it was like a book and then you know the lawyer sort of said you know marked it all up and said right there are 15 things you need to pay attention to these are they and i don't remember anywhere in that conversation yeah that they could change the goalposts yeah and the one that really caught me out was um if they sold to another private equity company they could roll over my investment without me taking money out okay when i when i worked that out four years in i'm like hang on a minute so i could be i could be subject to a change in ownership have no control over who we sell to and my investment goes into that new company that i have no you know no influence over at all it was it was a tough tough lesson And it's why they kind of say you always make your money on your second deal, not your first deal.

11:22Definitely. Just fast track this little bit of learning, you know. But I think it's also like just what we've experienced in the past 10 years is everyone thinking going into startups, that it's a win-win all the time for everyone. We don't often talk about the failures or the difficulties. We just talk about the unicorns that were successful. and you know I happen to be tied to one of the biggest you know ramp ups and crashes and falls of in tech which is WeWork which you know I was there before the first round of SoftBank money came in we were on this incredible run you know 120 130 percent year-on-year revenue growth opening buildings in new markets globally adding 60 to 150 new buildings monthly monthly it was insane.

12:10And then having to shelve an IPO and then try to evade bankruptcy and that whole thing crashing, going from like a$4 billion valuation to barely, you know, 500 million is not an easy thing to experience. But I think it's a learning lesson. And that was a, you know, kind of a very visible one that it's not always going to win. It's not always a smash hit. Your first business isn't always the one that succeeds just constant repetition right how do you pick yourself up after that because i it's quite hard isn't it when you put a lot of your experience expertise your identity even you know into something like that and then it doesn't work so i would say because i have an mba and because i had worked in private equity um i had a very realistic view of the numbers and the valuation and i pulled money out every tender offer every time softbank gave us money, I cashed in.

13:07All my chips, I didn't take most of my comp in equity like other employees did. And every time that I said I was, you know, I'm going to take the tender offer, they're like, but they're only offering like$50 a share. I said, I think that's fair. I think that's a fair price. I'm going to, you can hold, but I'm not going to. Because this is a costly business to be in. There's not a lot of scale here. We haven't developed a lot of tech that's going to help us scale. Sub-leasing buildings, building them out as short-term rentals, it's a very capital-intensive business. And so while I thought it was a valuable company, I don't think the valuation ever matched what it was.

13:43And if there's a book on WeWork and I'm in one of the chapters, because one of my emails had gotten leaked during the crash, like when we shelved the IPO and everyone internally, when we released the documents was so excited. They were like, did you see it? It's a beautiful document. Did you see the pictures we put in it? And I was like, this is going to the financial community and we have pictures of massive festivals and concerts we've had with Adam on stage with celebrities and you put that into the S1 filing. And so I sent an email because I had to shut down all of my campaigns in search and in social because we were just getting dragged and people were clicking on WeWork because they were looking for information on the company, but they had no intent in buying the product.

14:29And I had sent an email asking corporate to kind of change some things on the core site. Executive bios, clients that we have, something other than elevating the world's consciousness because this is making us look worse. Someone leaked that email. And I think they said it was the first signs that someone internally had said, this is not a good thing for us and it's not going to go well and we're not going to make this IPO. and when we the IPO date was in September and I told them I said I'm gonna go to Italy for two weeks they're like you're gonna go away during the IPO and I was like this IPO isn't happening I'll be in Italy lo and behold I was in Italy and they're like it's not happening best place to be when something doesn't happen yeah so I just kind of I just think um while like you know most startups and most organizations like that it is so culture driven it is so mission driven but you you have to pay attention to the p and l but so much in what you said there i mean i mean weirdly i got a finance degree and i did finance and economics for university and then went into marketing after that which is a bit weird at the time but i actually am very grateful for that because as you were saying earlier you know marketing is about moving business forward and understanding the financial implications of what you do is critical so you had that you had that belief in the business but also a realism you know informed by your understanding of finances Yeah.

15:48But I'm intrigued that getting your email leaks in such a highly sensitive moment where there is so much money at stake for so many people. How do you respond to that? I mean, do you know how it happened or? You know, the people that are on the email and it's about, you know, somebody on the email. And, you know, Corp. Coms gets involved and, you know, there were so many things that were leaking at that time. this was like low on the totem pole. They were dealing with... There's another crisis worse than mine. I was so, it felt like such a violation because it's internal communications. Somebody clearly leaked it to the press.

16:26I don't know what the intent was. So you're thinking like, who can I trust? But that was an organization that it was very, it was like the Hunger Games of Jobs. You really couldn't trust many people. But I just remember it being a time where every day we were in the office, it was very hectic. It was very stressful. It took a massive toll on me. And even though I was a part of the retention team after the crash and incentivized to stay through it, I physically and mentally was so exhausted. And, you know, you're letting go. We let go 2 ,000, 3 ,000 people one day in New York. You know, it was when you're there after something like that, the teams that are left behind, you know, I think everyone was like, oh, all these people that got laid off.

17:11They're mostly, they're most spared. The people that are left behind to pick up those jobs and kind of move it forward is really hard. And I just, you know, didn't, I love the business, but I didn't have the heart to stay in it. And I had, Tinder had been recruiting me for a few months. And I said to my husband, I think it's, and it wasn't just a moving to Tinder. We moved back to LA. I was like, get me far, far away from here. And you know, sometimes it is okay in life to run from your problems. people i think um you know say you need to stay somewhere and stick it out and wait until it gets better but like sometimes it's okay you have to call it sometimes you have to call it you have to say you know i the athletic term i left everything on the field yeah i didn't have anything really more to give in the in the sense that i could have you know i think that's a really good judgment isn't it because like you you understood the business you've made your contribution you you knew the business inside out and what could and couldn't happen so to have that judgment to go do you know what staying won't actually benefit me or the business yeah and i had the opportunity to go work for a company and a product that i intimately know because that's where i started my career and i i vividly remember the first time i opened tinder product and this is when we had our dating startup and i opened it up and i was like oh my god this is incredible like it just changed the game for dating it brought a whole new generation of daters forward and so it was an interesting opportunity and it felt like a welcome change and it ended up being the gangster of all gangster moves because i left we work in january of 2020 started uh tinder in february 2020 and nothing could have been worse for we were than the pandemic and office space no longer of course so they only they got that team so you had the ipo failed and then you had covid next and then covid next so everyone that stayed deserves a gold medal and if anyone can recruit people from we work marketing they should because that is a ton of resilience and a ton of grit of just who goes through things like that i mean talk about just absolute disruption right yeah it's amazing how do you like you know how do you kind of deal with the i guess the perception of like being on a tee i know i know i know everyone listening to this will be bored of me saying how I got fired twice in the year.

19:28I make so many jokes about it. But, you know, it's hard sometimes, isn't it, to kind of tell the story and explain how these, you know, how these things happen. So how do you approach kind of leaving there and starting a new job? I probably didn't take off enough time to decompress. And I'll say that. I think when you're in an organization for so long and you're going through such stressful situations, I do think there is a sense of needing to decompress. and I think in retrospect when I started at Tinder, I had that WeWork mentality of like kill or be killed, let's move forward. I came from a hyper growth organization.

20:06Tinder was at a different stage at a different time and so I learned and I think so much of what we do is reading the room and understanding the organization you're in and what's the culture and what's the operating model versus being kind of a bullet in a China shop and it was very different. um we work was an open combative environment executives would yell at each other in boardrooms and that was fine and everyone was okay after not everywhere is like that so i think um i i should have decompressed more i think maybe initially came in a little hot on some things because i was just hungry and wanted to move things forward all i saw was opportunity to change and kind of continue for Tinder to chart this, you know, just incredible course.

20:52And I think you need to have a little bit more tact and sometimes a little bit more grace in those situations. So that's how I reflect on it. So I think my advice to anyone would be is just to take a beat and listen. And I think there's so much pressure for leaders in marketing and CMOs to come in and make immediate impact, right because our tenure is short right um tends to be and the things we do can be immediate but a lot of the things we do do take time so you're constantly trying to balance the short-term improving yourself to building something long-term that is sustainable and so i think we have a lot of pressure um and sometimes that pressure can make you want to move too fast and and break things and you know that's not always the best approach yeah you're so true aren't you about balancing that like that there's a theoretical right things to do as a cmo isn't there in terms of growing the business and then there's a how you get things done in an organization given the culture and how decisions are made i remember chatting to a cmo recently and she said i think for the first maybe 90 days but she went and interviewed everybody and just said what would be what does success look like and what would you advise me to be successful in this organization how decisions get made and what's your perception of marketing and i just thought it's a really good thing to do you should do that in the interview phase not when you start yeah true i wouldn't take the job if we can't answer those questions right like with all of the c-suite you should be meeting with everyone and understanding do they all agree yes on what this role is do they all agree on the scope yeah if they're not aligned how do you get alignment and how do you get clarity because sometimes we don't know what we're walking into and a lot of organizations have very different perspectives on marketing.

22:35Almost most of the CMOs I know, our remit is different underneath us. The things we do every day can be different. I oversee communications. That's not the case for other CMOs. So what is the CMO scope? What are we going to be judged on? On what timeframe? And you need that from your CRO, your CEO, your CFO, your CPTO, and understanding the relationships they've had with marketing in the past and what needs to be improved. And even just talking to the marketing team about where do they think they could be doing better? What are the tense relationships they're having with other organizations? Or you can do more of that work when you get there to help the marketing team kind of be more evangelized with the rest of the C-suite.

23:16But I think you have to ask those things before you take the job. Because how many people take these jobs and it seems sexy and you're working on this big brand and you have this big budget and then you go in and you go, uh-oh. And I like to see a three-year plan. I don't want to know just what the first like where does this business want to be in three to five years what are we gunning towards what is the big moment for the ceo is it a sale is it getting acquired is it ipo is it a certain revenue target and ibida target it is it a global ambition what does that look like long term that we're building and then you can work back for how do we build towards that but you have to you also can't take too long you have to have short-term wins because you got to build trust yeah right yeah no it's a classic nice day thing isn't it like get strategic wins under your belt really really early yeah to make an impact i'd say in about half the jobs i've had i'd even go as far as to say i don't think the organization even knew what marketing was or the or the extent that the marketing can impact because like you say in some companies it's it is comms quote unquote yeah other companies it's like turning up at events and building a stand and like giving brochures out you know what i mean yeah so i think part part of the challenge of our job compared to say a CFO or something like that is it's much less clearly defined and varies depending on the sector you're in and the context you're in as well.

24:33100%. It's not the same. You could walk into any CMO job and it can be completely different. And also life cycle as well. I mean, whenever I worked to kind of start, like going back to my private equity point, I was the first marketer the organization that ever employed. And I would say 90 % of my job was not what people call marketing. It was, you know, going out and convincing customers to stock our products or sorting out industrial disputes on the production line and stuff like that because I was a part owner as well. On the private equity side I'm curious as to how that was for you like because I often thought when I worked in private equity they didn't pay enough attention to the marketing and how that plays a role in their success.

25:10You're operationally and financially ripping the company apart and thinking about supply chain and those types of things but you're not necessarily thinking about your marketing budget, how you market where your customer is how to move it forward i i didn't see that in my time there i found it super fascinating it's one of those things where two things can be true at the same time i think so again just my experience in the private equity business i was in but they had a real respect for brand as in as in their view would be we are buying an asset which is undervalued because it hasn't established the brand so they would their advice is threefold number one employ the best design team you possibly can in the world and nail your proposition from day one and be very clear about who you are where you're going and your vision and your brand and how it communicates right number two invest in capacity to forex the business in the next like three years yeah so that we can we sell future capacity and all that sort of thing number three was hire a team they called it two levels above so basically they say hire expertise in every key position identify which positions are get people ranked to two levels above in terms of experience and all that kind of things so i was the the marketing uh 2x higher right you know but so having said that so they've and then the fourth thing they did is they wrote the exit memorandum on day one okay which i thought was really good yeah i love that we do that too and i actually am a big believer of putting something like that on paper does manifest it into existence i know and it was so simple it was one page and it was like financially what is the story going to tell brand what is the story are going to tell um not um people what's we're going to tell and i think the other one was might be markets expansion or innovation or something like that anyway it was so super clear and you're like we kind of work back from well if that's for that to be true this must take place within three years yeah for that to take place what has to happen so on the one side in terms of two things being true they were definitely brand led they definitely respected marketing however when it came to investing in marketing people love the word brand until you ask for money for brand i find that also very interesting they're like our brand our brand not investing in your brand your brand exists in your mind and internally but like yeah the brand has to be present for people people have to feel it they have to touch it they have to understand it if you're not investing in it exactly so i know so i turned up on day one i do not have a budget so i'm like what am i doing you know how does this thing work and so everything i did was either for free or created with a budget of zero or i had to build a business case which usually involved earning it before i spent it so yeah so i had to uh reduce the cost of production per unit by x amount so that i could then argue that three pence in every pound would get reinvested into marketing and then when we got to a certain point i could spend it yeah um so i was forever negotiating yeah so what So what I did is I did the positioning, the branding and all that sort of thing first.

28:10But my thought process was, how do I make this brand design so good that the top 10 customers in the UK will ask me to list it so that then we generate whatever millions of pounds turnover that will then release a budget later on? Or I had to go to those customers and go, here's what we will be doing if you agree to stock us. You know, those sort of things. You play a bit of that game. But actually, I have to say, in all honesty, it forced a level of creativity. Probably the best creative things I've done in my entire career were in those moments where I had no choice but to push the boundaries of creativity in terms of my thinking and think to myself, who can I partner with that I can bring value to that they will give me media for free?

28:54Yes, yes. You know what I mean? That's what I was doing, right? Yeah, yeah. So I remember partnering with this, they don't exist anymore, but this augmented reality business called Blippa, where you put your phone over a pack or a bit of print or something, and it would just come to life in front of you sort of thing. Now, this is 2013, right? So the technology was just nascent, just literally at the beginning. They were one of the pioneers. so i went in and i pitched them and i said look i can get you on the pack of every bottle of coca cola in the world right and they were like and i worked for a little juice brand that no one ever heard yeah yeah they're like how you're gonna do that i said because if you partner with me and prove the technology on my brand and i end up in store next to coke you're gonna get a call at one point from the coke team going we want what he's done right yep 18 months later that happened now Not in every pack of Coke in the world, but they launched this music thing where basically you put your phone over it.

29:49You know, augmented reality brings it to life. You can choose this music and do all this stuff, right? Yeah. So they gave me all the technology for free and all the media around it and all the press and all that kind of thing, simply because I went to them and said, look, if you do this for me, I think it's going to lead to good things happening for you. I mean, creative deal making. It is deal making. It was the hustle. This is the thing, isn't it? I think this is what marketers forget is the amount of hustle involved when you're working on a startup and scale up. Yeah. And even like many organizations still have zero-based budgeting, you had a business case for everything.

30:17And be really accountable, even though you don't know yet what exactly that is. But the creative is the biggest variable. It is the biggest variable in everything. And so we pay a lot of attention to that. And it really depends on, again, different organizations have a different creative tolerability. And I think most CMOs want to do breakthrough work. It's just internally there is a lot of challenges to that. and you um i think something i work a lot on is like how do i get people to embrace the creativity and not be afraid that maybe you know aren't in the marketing organization how do you get your ceo to want to take this swing with you um above above that person too and you can be in places where i don't know creative has to go through five people that aren't marketers to get over the line i mean that's like crazy.

31:05And again, they're not operating with the consumer lens. So I think it's a difficult job and how we all navigate getting bold things over the line. Because, you know, and I've worked on the agency side, every client wants something bold. But then when you bring them something bold, they get scared or they can't do it, you know. So I just kind of have spent so much time thinking about how do I get people behind an idea and how do I lock them into the strategy and really get them to understand the consumer before we even go through creative. Like, do we align that this is the business problem? Do we align that these consumer insights are driving this initiative?

31:43Do we align that the message should be this, and this is what we're going to overcome, and this is how we're going to measure it? Once there's understanding there, then the creative should make sense no matter how wild it is, right? But that's why I spend a lot of time on the strategy and bringing everyone in versus if you go into that room and you're just going to show them the commercial you want to shoot you're going to be dead upon arrival everyone's opinions come into the room people don't know what context to take it they're often not the consumer of the product yeah and i think that's where things go wrong yeah i think everyone listening will resonate with that right yeah because you know as marketers we love the creative part of the role don't we yes that's the bit that gets excited and then and the amount of times i've had this amazing session with the agency and got super excited by the time i get to a cold industrial estate in the middle of nowhere on a damp monday morning and i'm sat in front of the grown-ups you know what i mean so here's my idea that it's like tumbleweed yeah and the room goes dark and the room goes thunder starts clapping because why wouldn't we just do this can we just do a half price promotion john and yeah when the room starts creatively brainstorming like they're creative directors you know you've you're losing something went wrong abort you know um that's what you want to avoid and you want to give people input you want to make them feel heard but you also want to go in with passion and with conviction yeah and most times what i've found is like that is infectious if people can tell that you have conviction that you are willing to put your neck on the line for this work that you are ultimately going to be accountable they'll bet on you yeah yeah they'll bet on you yeah but if you're coming in they can smell fear yeah 100 yeah you just got to really mentally get ready for that when you're You're fine for a job.

33:29You know, your passion is as much as what people are buying, isn't it? Yes. As your skills. Do I believe this person believes what they say? Do I believe they want it enough to do the job? And it's the same when you pitch an idea into a business. People are looking for what's your level of confidence here? Yeah. Now, you're working with, I think, one of the most creative agencies in the US, probably in the world at the moment, with Mischief. In fact, a slight side note, I love Greg's quote about what would you do if you weren't afraid? which I think is in the situation you're talked about yeah it's a really good undermining kind of not under sorry undermining revealing tactic isn't it to say to say to the audience okay well what would you do if we weren't afraid about the consequences just to open our minds up to kind of creative ideas yeah I you know Greg should find out what is the response to people what would be everyone say because I think what we would say and what we do are two different things I met Mischief at my time at Tinder, and we never got to do, we were too afraid to do probably the type of work that I was wanting to do that I thought we needed to do at that time.

34:32And so when I had this opportunity at Tubi, and I had a CEO that was wanting, he wasn't afraid. We're talking about an entrepreneur who started a business who everyone told him wasn't going to work in streaming, was never going to work for a very long time. and so I loved that underdog spirit and I loved that he wanted to go there and so when I brought them in it was a completely different relationship because we didn't operate with a ton of fear and I think sometimes when I've said that it gets misconstrued that I don't care about losing my job or do I come from a trust fund or something which I definitely do not, how could you not be afraid but I find that in this business we'll get fired for the things we don't do and the risks we don't take as much as we'll get fired for the risks we do take, you might as well go out swinging.

35:22Yeah. Yeah. You know, like, I mean, if you think about it, like much can be lost on the other side too. And how would you, what are you comfortable with doing? And I just, I, it was my first CMO job and, you know, I had an executive tell me probably two years prior that the reason why I was getting passed up for a CMO role was because I hadn't done big brand creative in like Super Bowl on the on the client side that I was a good growth marketer good TikTok marketer understood the kids but like I didn't have that pedigree and I thought well I just had never have never had the opportunity and so I'm kind of can be spiteful and I always love to like kind of on the that stuff really motivates me so I'm like I'm gonna do my first Super Bowl and I'm gonna show everybody like let's let's I'm really gonna lock into this and it ended up being like beyond my wildest expectations about what I what I thought I could do what people thought to be could do on that night it was incredible now which one was your first one was it the rabbit hole it was rabbit holes and the interruption spot yeah and so you know thinking about you know you're you could talk you know you have to give the context on to be and what we're up against um this is 2023 this is after Netflix just delivered their worst quarter ever.

36:42LA is shaking. Everyone is thinking, you know, we're talking about the streaming wars and who's going to win and is it profitable and how is it going to shake out? And when I got the call about this job, I wasn't familiar with Tubi and I thought that's weird because I hold a marketing budget. So if this was a place that I could be putting money, why don't I know about it? And I thought, do I want to enter the streaming wars with a player that I've never heard before when I know how big the competition is and how much they spend? Initially, I asked the recruiter, you can throw a rock on Pico Boulevard and hit an entertainment marketer.

37:15Why are you calling me? Why are you calling me? There's so many good people in market. I'm not the right one. And she was like, they don't want anyone with an entertainment background. Just meet the founder. Just hear what he has to say. And I've made a lot of decisions based on people. And I really liked him and I liked his perspective and I thought the business was in this very unique place to win. Not only because it's free and accessible, because the way that they approach streaming and the product and the content was very unique. This idea that we all have individualized viewing experiences and things we want to watch, and it's not really about what Hollywood is telling you to watch.

37:54This idea of prestige and IP and being so content forward is not necessarily what is a good business model, and that people are actually watching very different things than we would think they do. I thought that it was really interesting. And so when we were starting, I brought Mischief in, we knew we had to do a Super Bowl ad. And you're looking at the cultural context of where media is going and the fragmentation. But not only the fragmentation, like younger audiences and younger viewers sort of identify, you know, in these micro cultures, and they kind of take pride in the things that are different.