Q&A with Jake Bronstein, Head of Partner Innovation @ BuzzFeed
This week, The Idea caught up with Jake Bronstein to learn more about BuzzFeed’s Partner Innovation team. Subscribe here to our newsletter on the business of media for more interviews and weekly news and analysis.
Tell me about yourself and your role at BuzzFeed.
I am a serial entrepreneur who has started businesses in a number of different categories. I came to BuzzFeed a little over a year ago to lead the Partner Innovation team and help BuzzFeed innovate in different spaces. At the time, there wasn’t a lot of clear direction for what that could and should mean.
But, we eventually found an opportunity to apply my entrepreneurial background and BuzzFeed’s internal innovation work towards helping clients. Some of our functions include helping clients with creating campaign touchpoints that are beyond just content and media, launching products in new and innovative ways, and figuring out better marketing strategies.
Could you tell me a bit more about the work your team does.
Our goal is to bring BuzzFeed expertise to partner brands in whatever way and help them bring ideas to life. We do this in a couple of different ways. One is in the form of product design processes called “Sprints.” This is when we pull experts from across BuzzFeed, find people with different insights and skills specific to the challenges that a brand might be facing, and partner with stakeholders from that brand. We lock ourselves in a room for about a week, and eventually what starts off as a clearly worded sentence of the challenge at hand becomes working prototypes, online and offline marketing campaigns, and a game plan by the end of the week.
We also create advertising campaigns that span touchpoints. Both the experiential and connected retail disciplines are part of my team. Sometimes, we’ll pull RFPs that come through BuzzFeed if we think we have a solution that goes beyond content. For instance, this solution may include shopper marketing, some sort of experiential, a sampling moment, demo, etc.
What sets apart your team’s creative problem solving approach?
If you look at what most innovation projects look like, there’s normally one champion inside of an organization who feels like they’ve found an impactful solution to a real problem. But, if they try to push it through all of the different departments that are required to bring it to market, each one of those layers is more incentivized to say no than to say yes because it’s not their solution. Since it’s not something that they helped shape, they can only really see the risk involved.
On our team, we say that anytime anybody runs something up the flagpole, it dies. It never gets to the top. So, instead of giving somebody something to take to the flagpole, we try to bring the flagpole to that something, so that we’re all sitting around the table. Even when somebody brings up a concern, we’re able to push back and offer new solutions right there and then. And because we’re all greeting it at the same time and can all feel the same excitement, we see a much higher rate of things getting to market.
Where does the Partner Innovation team sit?
It’s part of the business side of the organization. At the start, we were part of the marketing team. Once we found our sweet spot, however, we shifted more towards being an advertising and sales organization. We actually just unified our businesses at BuzzFeed. Historically, our marketing organization, which housed our commerce operations, was separate from the sales and media organization.
What are the guiding principles for the work your team does?
When we’re doing sprints and consulting, we want to make sure that we’re solving the right problem. Often the project begins with somebody throwing out an idea. But, we want to make sure both the challenge and idea are properly defined.
I also think that you have to approach anything innovative with the understanding that expertise is historic. It’s important then to shake off that historic knowledge, apply a different lens, and distinguish what happened yesterday from what you want to happen tomorrow.
As part of that, the third thing then is that the first idea, the most obvious one, might not be the best. If anything else, you should talk about a hundred other ideas, just to be sure that the first one is worth pursuing one. We also find that anytime we work with cross-discipline teams, oftentimes, the break-through comes from the person with a different set of expertise.
Could you tell me about the sprint process behind the Lunarly subscription box?
In all the sprints we do, we always want to start with a meaningful challenge to that brand. In the case of Scott’s Miracle-Gro, they were wondering how to get millennials more engaged with gardening. On the first day, we came together and threw hundreds of ideas against the wall. We invited adjacent experts with unique perspectives that sit outside of BuzzFeed and Miracle Gro. By day two, we were able to hone in on areas that we believed to be most impactful and meaningful. Days three, four, and five were spent exploring the idea.
This project in particular, is one of my favorites because Scotts came to us with an important, yet novel question. We went from problem to solution to product in market in five months. It became a multi-million dollar business in under a year.
Multi-million dollars in a multi-billion dollar company isn’t earth shattering. Though drawing in millennials is impactful to their business, it is still ancillary to their core business of selling fertilizer and plant food. In the end, our solution touched on disciplines that Scotts lacked in-house like learning how to move quickly, thinking about social media, and building community. They were able to learn those disciplines and off-board them back into Scotts.
What’s a recent project that you’ve been working on?
We do a lot of consultancy work with Chase Bank. In conversation, they recently brought up that as the sponsor of the Knicks they saw some opportunity to rally around the new team. We invited them to pop into BuzzFeed along with other stakeholders like the Knicks, MSG, Spotify, Twitter, etc. for a meeting that was similar to a sprint, but done mostly over lunch. It started with a conversation of how to bring together New York’s legacy, history, culture, and sports. And so the question came up, what would it look like if Run DMC opened a pizza joint to celebrate their own history and the Knicks. Everybody rallied behind this and in a month’s time, we managed to partner with a restaurant, take out all of the signage, set-dress it from head to toe, and curate a list of events featuring Run DMC, the Knicks, and Chase for more than two weeks.
Do you collaborate often with BuzzFeed’s editorial team?
Yeah, we like to pull in anybody that we think could bring a useful point of view to a project, so this includes editors and writers. In the case of Lunarly, a lot of decision-making was based on data insights. But, the actual branded product came from a market editor suggesting that plant care is kind of like self-care, and that when people are talking about one they’re talking about the other. This is an idea that I don’t think would’ve been necessarily borne out of numbers.
What is the most interesting thing you’ve seen from a media organization other than your own?
There’s a podcast about Dolly Parton, called Dolly Parton’s America. It’s a nine-part series brought to you by the creative force that is Radio Lab. I think what I love about it is that it creates this sort of cultural aha moment when you don’t expect it. I’m not necessarily a Dolly Parton fan, but as soon as I heard about this podcast I suddenly remembered how awesome she is. The podcast hosts bring a lot of depth to the story that really taps into a truth and joy that BuzzFeed is constantly pushing. It especially feels great in a landscape where media can sometimes feel divisive and like an echo-chamber.
Rapid Fire
What is your first read in the morning?
The New York Post.
What is the last book or podcast you consumed?
Radiolab’s Dolly Parton’s America.
What can you talk about for hours?
The TWA Hotel.
This Q&A was originally published in the November 11th edition of The Idea, and has been edited for length and clarity. For more Q&As with media movers and shakers, subscribe to The Idea, Atlantic Media’s weekly newsletter covering the latest trends and innovations in media.
