To Laura Desmond, social and commerce fit like peanut butter and jelly — a convergence of experiences many brands are realizing reflects a growing consumer trend.
“We connect brands to the consumers they seek, however they end up buying, however they end up engaging,” says the CEO of Smartly.
Using machine learning, Smartly can craft campaigns quickly through customized templates that vary based on a brand. A food delivery firm, for example, can mine updated restaurant details (such as a new hot spot) — and re-tailor its creative to launch within hours. Desmond says creative — not data — is the key to winning on social media with consumers. While people still want to be entertained on these channels, they’re also there to uncover something new.
You can hear more from Desmond and her conversation with John Battelle in the video below, or read our lightly edited transcript.
TRANSCRIPT
John Battelle
Welcome to another Signal Conversation. Today, my friend and colleague Laura Desmond is with us. She is the CEO of Smartly, an AI-powered advertising technology company, which is transforming advertising experiences for brands and their consumers. But before Smartly, Desmond was the Chief Revenue Officer of Publicis, and the CEO of Stardom Mediavest Group, which is where I met her. That’s the number one media and marketing services agency brand, globally for five years under Laura’s leadership, I might add, and she’s worked with some of the biggest and most successful marketers worldwide, including Amazon, Coke, Visa, and of course, P&G. Desmond is the past chair of the Advertising Council, serves on the boards of Adobe and DoubleVerify, as well as Smartly, and she’s a champion of the advancement of women’s sports, serving as an investor in Chicago’s women’s sports franchises, including the Chicago Sky and the Chicago Red Stars. Laura, it’s so good to have you here for this Signal Conversation. Welcome.
Laura Desmond
Thanks, John, great to be with you.
We’ve known each other a long time, and your career has spanned almost the history of the internet. You’re now the CEO of a relatively new entrant in the digital marketing world, it’s certainly grown a lot, and you’re taking it over at an interesting time. But before we get into all of that, can you just give us a quick description of what Smartly is what do you do?
Smartly is an AI-powered technology company. We power marketer productivity, and we also solve for the complexities of creating a better advertising experience for marketers and brands in a pretty cluttered and complex space. As you had said, we’re a relatively new entrant, but maybe not as apparently, as you might think. We got our start 10 years ago, as a Facebook marketing partner. We were originally solving for the complexities of campaign management with machine learning. We did that pretty well, we rose to be their number one partner. Since then, we’ve used that position to extend to a full funnel platform integrated across all the major social channels with Google and into the open web as well.
That is certainly one of the biggest complexities of being a marketer in this platform age, trying to make sense across these large data driven platforms. Now we add the complexity of AI on top of that. What do you see as today’s marketers biggest challenges?
It’s a very complex world out there. I think complexity is something that can be very overwhelming. We’re now going through a really big change. For the last two decades, the industry has operated essentially on media targeting, it can count on with third party cookies, media optimization, a real reliance on the open web, obviously, Google playing a huge part in that. It’s now changing with signal loss, and privacy regulation. I think there’s a period of disruption in that. Is the choice to make it even more complicated, or is the choice actually to try to think about what actually matters to consumers and to people. And I learned the from P&G, for sure. I think what technology and AI gives to a marketers, is yes to power productivity, and do things faster, simpler, get rid of all the manual tedious tasks that sometimes take hours and days just to set campaigns or creative asset generation up. So it gives marketers a different starting point. But I think also what’s happening here, as we enter into a new decade of change, is we go back to the big idea. We put creative back at the center. The internet has functioned very well, it’s been good to marketers. Data has been a real driver of that.
But it’s not just data now, it is data and creative, it is inspiration and imagination around what will pull the attention of a consumer as they’re scrolling through the newsfeed or looking at TikTok’s or spending time doing other things and that’s where we think Smartly comes in. We unify creative and media, we help make the ads experience a little bit better by putting creative at the center. I think we have the opportunity with our intelligence and data to actually help marketers look at creative as an intense signal, and to keep optimizing what’s working to enhance that adds experience. When you do that, then you’re going to get people to lean in, you’ll get people to shop, you’ll get people to buy. And brand love and action, at the end of the day, is what marketing is all about. I think this next decade, you know, there’s an opportunity to get back to creative at the center and, and use our creativity and our imagination again.
That sounds very promising, because a lot of the industry dialogue seems to be about how the world is essentially driven by performance metrics. Now I think what you’re arguing is one of those performance metrics should well be the performance of creative, if I’m understanding you. But can you unpack this idea of the big idea?
Absolutely. I’m a big believer in the big idea. In some ways the last couple decades have, and you know, John, I built a career running, the world’s largest media services company. In so many ways, the last two decades have been about targeting and data and right place, and right target and audience, maybe more so than the right message. Like I said, it was a very good two decades, as related to the advancement of having a better sense of what was working and marketing science. But at the same time, that we should be saying goodbye, and maybe mourning this two decades of stability, we should also be really excited about this decade to come. Because I think it’s going to make the job of a marketer and a creator more interesting, again. It’s going to focus on what our consumers need, and unmet needs. It’s going to focus us on what is the kind of ads experience that will draw people in when they have the choice to choice to scroll right by. That means we have to focus on the big idea.
I think marketing has been in some ways siloed, between brand and performance. So much so that if you look at the average G2000, marketer, you’ll see a brand team that’s usually separated from a performance team. Driving performance marketing has been essential to the growth of the industry. But it’s all performance, and the job of a marketer is still brand love, and it’s still to drive growth, and to do it as efficiently and effectively as possible. One of the things that we believe is the convergence of brand and performance is possible. You can follow consumers into the funnel, and better address their needs by understanding the creative that they’re paying attention to. So in many ways, we’re going from that ad serving moment of the last two decades to actually serving creative and then following the intent, following what happens, and then getting smarter and optimizing real time. So the big idea is essential there, across all parts of the funnel, you can’t separate it.
I see that. I guess I’m a proxy for, for maybe some members of our audience who think, well, with all this signal loss, and with the deprecation of the cookie, and as you pointed out the rise of a new framework for privacy, How do you follow a consumer? What replaces the marketers ability to know who they’re talking to? Is that all now outsource to the platform’s? Or how important is it for, particularly when you’re prospecting, so you don’t have that data about the customer yet, how does that work? Whereas before you could target the segment, and sort of do lookalike audiences and do all the things that people are used to doing? What’s the next normal look like?
Obviously, first party data becomes really important. And that’s data that any platform, any company, a brand collects based on the data that a consumer enters in. Zero party data is also going to become important. That’s a more proactive approach where consumer says, “I see a real value exchange, and I’m going to give you some information because I’m going to get something back.” I think what connects those two things is actually something that the world of social will show the way which is authenticated data. You actually have to authenticate yourself in order to use the platform, use the app, so the data will be there. But you’ve got to cross it with what people are actually doing when they’re engaging with advertising, when they’re stopping the scroll, which might drive more awareness and brand love, or they’re actually discovering, shopping, and buying. If you can connect those two things, like we talked about, that’s ultimate user segment data that you can then match to the right creative the next time they’re in your neighborhood, so to speak, right. So the data and the creative and the storytelling, I think converge, they come together.
Now in terms of control and insight, because that you asked a really important question. This is something that we think about a lot of Smartly. The platform companies have been tremendously successful at building their own tools. They’re good tools. They’re mostly built, though, for the mid-market. For the 10 million advertisers that Facebook has on its platform, or that Google has on its platform. What Smartly is trying to do is sit on top of the platform players and offer marketers more control and insight, so that you actually have the opportunity to have enhanced tooling, whether it be campaign management tools like cross channel, or predictive budget allocation, or creative tooling that allows you to do a lot more with the creative at scale or personalization at scale. I think, as P&G thinks about its next moves, it doesn’t have to be all one or the other, it actually can have control and insight. But partnering and building for the fragmentation that has occurred as audiences have shifted, is really important. So going point to point might feel like the advantage is on the other side of a marketer. Working with partners that can provide an aggregated approach, and give control and insight might be, in fact, where the industry is going, and that’s something that smartly is building for.
I guess the ultimate goal and things are coming together, the previously siloed performance, brand, conversion, commerce. I think commerce feels like one of those things that here in the United States, everybody wants to happen as they watched somewhat jealously other markets have already really turned to commerce and social commerce. What’s holding it back here? And do you think that’s on the horizon? Or is it still a bit off?
It’s interesting, John, I don’t know if it’s been held back here. I actually think there are large brands that have been built primarily using social. Uber is a client of ours, and social has powered their Uber Eats line of business, both in terms of content, velocity, and volume, to cover 900 metro areas in the country efficiently, and 8000 worldwide. Uber would tell you, social has been critical to that. engaging customers, getting them to lean in, the power of visualization as you as you stop somebody thinking, “Oh, I am hungry, I want to want to get something. I’m going to Uber Eats it.” So Uber is a great example. FanDuel, another client of ours, a great example, the number one sports gaming company in the US socialize their top performing channel. They in fact, de-invested in search, because that intense signal wasn’t really driving their business, the way that it was in social. So I think it’s actually here. I don’t think it’s talked about as much. The reason I think is not talked about as much is to some extent, the industry hasn’t realized that social sort of shifted. It’s not just for connection and community, although it is. But it’s not just for that anymore. It is where people are going to be entertained, whether it be you know, live entertainment or shopping videos. TikTok has shown that. It’s where people are going to discover brands, they see that the ads on this as content, and to consider shopping and buy. So social and commerce, I talked about this a little bit as peanut butter and jelly. It fits very well, the convergence there is really quite effective for marketers. But you have to start, really, to some extent along the lines of how am I going to drive creative volume and velocity to gain people’s attention so that they do lean in, as opposed to some of the way the open web or programmatic has been developed, where it’s really been about audience segmentation. That’s why I think the big idea is going to be so critical, again, because you have to start with creative at the center, and how am I going to grab people’s attention?
This raises a question that I know you’re very well positioned to answer both from experience and with your, the clients that you just cited. Companies like Uber, and FanDuel, are really native to the digital world, and their products are kind of native digital products, I guess you could say. Institutional, large institutional companies that are still very much reliant on business models of distribution of physical goods through wholesale and retail channels, for example, may not be as sophisticated in fulfillment, distribution, marketing. Their DNA isn’t kind of directly in the environment. What advice do you have to companies like that, that are concerned about channel conflict, and also concerned about the pace of their ability to innovate?
It’s a great question, John. Large companies have so many things going for them. I’ve certainly experienced that and learn from that. Scale institutional knowledge, experience, and really knowing consumers. There’s a lot going on there. I think what the big shift that has occurred with direct to consumer versus, traditional brands that are essentially working through retailers or working through a physical outlet or distribution is that for direct to consumer brands, marketing is really seen as a driver of growth in volume. The expectation is marketing delivers a core set of metrics that contribute to that day in day out always on growth. That same expectation is true for P&G, or for any large CPG or multinational brand in a more traditional sense. The use of digital has tended to be more around optimization, media efficiency, and TV replacement. Cheaper reach. That is a good thing. That is a great thing. It’s powered a lot of advertising and a lot of effectiveness.
But I think the opportunity for more traditional companies now is to use what they’ve learned empowering efficiency and optimization. And now directly tie that to brand love and consumer action, whether you’re a DTC brand or a portion of your business is a DTC brand, these are things that you can directly tie back to, and learn more from how people are engaging. So I think this notion of can a large business be innovative? The answer is absolutely, yes. But you’re not innovative because you’re focused on innovation. You’re following people, you’re seeing what they’re leaning into and what they care about, and hopefully, you use technology to help you connect to those people. That’s sort of how I think about it. What Smartly is ultimately is we connect brands to the consumers they seek, however, they end up buying, however, they end up engaging.
That’s a very good point to end on. We are so appreciative of your time, Laura, and I know we’ll be hearing from you again. And congratulations on this role, and I know you’ve been in it a little while but it’s a different kind of company than then your last big role. And I would bet on Smartly with you at the helm. So thanks so much for being here.
Thank you, John. Really appreciate it.
