Next In Marketing: How The Pandemic Paved The Way For A More Sophisticated Generation of CMOs
Mike Shields is the host of the podcast Next In Marketing and the founder of Shields Strategic Consulting. Shields covered the ad business for over 15 years at top publications including The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Adweek and Digiday. In this episode, he speaks with Known President & Chief Experience Officer Ross Martin on how the pandemic paved the way for a more sophisticated generation of CMOs.
Mike Shields: When I met you, you were at Viacom. You had a really big, interesting job there. Tell the story of your leaving Viacom for Blackbird and then Known.
Ross Martin: I’d been there for about 13 years, full Bar Mitzvah. I’d lost my father. My mentor had left the company. And I felt I’d done so much more than what I set out to do there.
MS: You could have taken another senior job at another media company.
RM: I suppose. The day I left, I walked across the street to my new office in Bryant Park and I opened Blackbird, a brand strategy and business innovation agency. It was a dream to be able to start again from scratch. I only took one person with me from Viacom — Jillian Dooley.
MS: Was there an insight that the industry is missing x and I want to try and go after it?
RM: Brands and businesses were being asked to answer existential questions about who they are, what they stand for, what they stand against. Questions most CMOs, CEOs, and boards were completely unprepared to make. Like, if you’re a soap company or a rental car business, why do you have to have a position on gun safety? You couldn’t hide under your desk and pretend this wasn’t happening. Not only were consumers asking you these tough questions, your investors were, too. And then, the greatest force for change in business, employees themselves, began exerting their will. I started Blackbird because I felt like we could help brands answer these questions with a methodology for engineering systems of belief. And it worked.
MS: Clearly, the need that you bet on was real and people responded. The story progresses really fast here from Blackbird to Known.
RM: Schireson Associates (a data science, engineering and research company) and Stun Creative (a production company and creative agency) were the two investors in Blackbird. Schireson has been like a rocket ship, growing so fast, and this enabled its acquisition of Stun and Blackbird. We became Known on February 5th, 2020.
Known was not born out of opposition to anything. We saw an opportunity to represent a new breed entirely.
MS: You’re not replicating. The foundational pieces of your company are different from a holding company, by nature.
RM: We’re an evidence-based marketing firm — we test and learn, along with relentless experimentation. The scientific method is pulled through every single thing we do; it’s the foundation of our company. We are, by definition, a full service, end-to-end agency. As you know, over the last 30 years, all of the marketing and advertising capabilities that were once unified have been pulled apart. Brands suffer when fidelity is lost between all these capabilities, when they don’t work together as they should. That’s been a disaster for our industry. Known represents a Pangaea, where all of those continents of capabilities are reunited and aligned in service of a client’s business objectives.
Known was not born out of opposition to anything. We saw an opportunity to represent a new breed entirely.
MS: I like the Pangaea reference. You and your partners decide to launch this huge new venture in February of 2020. What happened? That had to be terrifying that you’re building this thing, you’re ready to take off, you’re hiring. And then, the world changes radically the next month. What was that like trying to do this on the fly with sending people home and having to figure out where the world is going and businesses are pausing? What happens?
RM: It was a test of our people and of us as leaders, and it was a test of the vision itself. We started with less than 200 people. Today, 16 months later, we are double that…400 and growing. We’ve added almost three dozen clients since then to the roster we already had. It’s working. Not just because we had the right idea at the right time, but also because this industry has been ailing for so long for a fully integrated agency you can actually trust, that’s transparent, whose business goals are aligned with the objectives of its clients, and who actually does what they say they’re going to do.
MS: For the past year, everything has accelerated in terms of going e-commerce and streaming. Everyone’s getting everything delivered, brands need to change, and media habits are totally upended overnight. It feels really different all of a sudden. There’s a lot of optimism. What is going on? Do you think we’re going to snap back to the way things were in a lot of respects in our industry? We talked about the new normal for so long. Is it sticking? Where are your clients right now?
RM: If you’re a marketer coming to us, you already know that you’re not going back to the old way. You’re ready for a different relationship with your agency. It’s exciting because the commercial momentum we’re seeing is proof that the next generation of CMOs is not going to make the same mistakes or accept a lower standard. There’s a new level of sophistication in this generation of CMOs.
Known represents a Pangaea, where all of those continents of capabilities are reunited and aligned in service of a client’s business objectives.
MS: These days it feels like some brands will go right back to the way they used to do things, which is crazy considering everyone’s media habits have changed. Do you scratch your head at that?
RM: They’ll get there. And those who don’t, the world will pass them by. When Apple makes the privacy changes that they’re making, for example, lots of marketers get really, really scared, and lots of agencies who’ve built their entire model on lazy ways of marketing, of course they’re shaky. They’re freaking out. But that’s not us. That’s never been the way that we believe marketing should be done.
MS: Do marketers and partners come to you with concerns about the changes this industry is facing? What do you usually say to them?
RM: We’re excited about these changes. This is an opportunity to take more control of your advertising intelligence. If before, you were really happy and comfortable to allow your agency to operate on your behalf in a black box, this is the time for you to go, “No, not anymore. I need to understand this stuff better. I’m going to put in place a true test and learn a framework where I can really see what’s working and what’s not, on all platforms for my business.”
MS: I think there is a fear that all these changes mean you’re going to understand less or you’re going to have to compromise and go with targeting out of the path because you’re not going to be able to be precise like we all dreamed of. You’re not seeing that. I guess a data science company, you’re not like, “Oh, my God. I can’t do what we promised anymore because we lost cookies and IDFA and whatever.”
RM: This is an amazing moment to regain the trust of clients and consumers. The value exchange is so broken and we’re fixing it. Yes, you need to have a robust first-party data strategy. And yes, you need to use third-party data to allow you to act on advanced segmentation and be able to reach the people you want to reach and make predictions and then permutations of your campaign. But none of that works without science. I’m talking about real science, PhD data scientists and engineers, who don’t come from this industry but are here to radically evolve it. As you talk about what’s next in marketing, it’s actually real science alongside the best creative and technology in the world.
For more, listen to the full Next In Marketing episode with Ross Martin here.
