With just days to go, Signal ’24 is set to deliver insights from leaders and innovators on how to drive market growth and value creation for the coming year ahead. Signal 360’s Stan Joosten chats with John Battelle about the people he’ll be interviewing on the Signal stage in Cincinnati on July 17 — plus other surprises popping up throughout the hall throughout the day.
You can hear more from business thinkers, including Walmart EVP and Chief Revenue Officer Seth Dallaire and Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy at the 13th annual P&G Signal Summit.
Glean more highlights scheduled for the day in the video below, or read our lightly edited transcript.
TRANSCRIPT
Stan Joosten
You just saw the recap of last year’s Signal, which was one of the best ones we’ve ever had. But this year promises to be even better. So the next 30 minutes, we will spend on a little bit behind the scenes, a little bit about the theme. And we’ll take your questions in the last few minutes as well. You can use the chat for that. Please do so. We can pick up the questions that come in. We’d also love to know where you’re from, and what you’re excited about with this year Signal. With that, I want to introduce my co-host today, my partner in crime, John Battelle.
We’ve done this Signal Event now for 13 years. It was actually an outgrowth of an event that John did years ago. Now it seems still like yesterday, we started this at Web 2.0, which was one of the premier events in the world when the internet really started to take off, and many memorable moments. We’ve copied many pages out of John’s book, to apply to Signal to make it a great event that it is today. So let’s get started.
Every year, John, we collect our thoughts under a theme, that’s basically the coat rack, as I always say for the program that we organized. Can you give a good little bit of background and how we got to the theme this year and why this is important now?
John Battelle
Absolutely. Stan, it’s good to see you again and everybody out there. Thank you for joining us. It’s always fun to get this close to a big event that we’ve been working on for 12 months. So next week is the week we hope you join us online at least. I know that the in-person is pretty much sold out but we hope we see you online.
We do have this theme every year.This was an interesting year to work our theme up because there’s so much uncertainty and that’s really where we started. Remember we started thinking about this seven or eight months prior, and the world was a pretty uncertain place back then. I think it remains so. Uncertainty is not necessarily the friend of good strategy and planning. Although I think from our program, there are lots of lessons on how it could be.
In uncertain times, you want to maybe go a little bit back to the fundamentals. That’s what our theme really does hit on. It is driving market growth, and value creation. These are phrases that are very near and dear to those of you who might be joining us from Procter and Gamble. P&G has been a leader in defining what market growth and value creation really means. The idea is with a theme like that, can we ladder the speakers and the insights and the case studies that we present to that theme? I think this year, we really managed to do that in a very tangible way. We should get into some content.
Stan, actually, I wanted to ask you, tell us two of your favorite speakers and sessions or maybe some themes that are coming out of our lineup.
Stan
You know who my favorite is, of course. What makes me excited, this is very serious business team, as the driving market growth and value creation should be in the banner for every company. But who says you can have some fun with it? It’s on Wednesday next week, but it will feel a little bit like a Sunday afternoon because we have beer, pizza and football in one event. For those of you in the US, you know that is in the fall line up.
They’re all market growth stories, and start with the NFL, which has expanded in many ways, and not just because of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, although we will hear those names in some of the talks as well. But also because the NFL has expanded the playing field. I just saw this morning that they had an ad running for flag football. Who knew that the NFL was big into fly football. I remember that as a high school game that you played with some friends in the afternoon.
Beer. This is now a trivia question that I started to ask to people. What is the fastest growing beer brand in the United States? By the way, it’s non-alcoholic, and everybody gets it wrong. It’s Athletic Brewing. They just announced yesterday that they are going to open a second brewery on the West Coast. They got a just a whole capital infusion of $50 million from General Atlantic. The company is now worth I believe, $800 million dollars, which is astounding for a company that started in 2017. The CEO is coming. For those on site, we will have some samples as well.
We’ll add to that is Domino’s Pizza, we will actually have Kate Trumbull, who’s the Chief Brand Officer of Domino’s Pizza, and a P&G alumna. She will talk about how Domino’s has actually out delivered the return on investments that you would have done if you would have invested in Google in 2008, you probably would have made less money than if you had invested in Domino’s. That is just another of those trivia questions like, how did they do that? That this something very surprising. Those three make for a non traditional set of partners to talk about market growth and value creation. I bet there’s going to be a lot of inspiration from those three alone, for what people could go think about how it changes their mindset, and have some fun with it.
John
Absolutely. The Domino’s story was really fascinating. We do pre-production calls with all of our speakers, and you really learn the personal journeys of each of them. The Domino’s story was kind of mind blowing, I had no idea how they basically turned their business around in the last seven or eight years, and became one of the fastest growing stocks in the on the US stock market. And of course, Athletic. All of us were very excited to meet them because we all use their product. They’ve grown not just the non-alcoholic beer market where they now have a third of the market and growing rapidly, but they’ve grown the entire adult beverage market. That’s really core to P&G’ business strategy and market growth. It’s not just about growing your share of market it’s about growing the overall market. That’s exactly what Athletic has done. That’s also what Domino’s has done with their delivery and their apps and so on.There’s just a great stories to be told there.
Signal started at its core, about how can we leverage digital, particularly when it comes to going to market. We’ve always had a strong theme throughout the past 13 years. And that is again true this year. There’s a little bit of a thread of football through it now as well in that we will have the Chief Business Officer of YouTube, which has the Sunday Ticket business. We have the head of advertising for Amazon, which also has leaned heavily into sports. And we have the Chief Revenue Officer of Walmart and their advertising business, which has become a major player in one of the biggest and fastest growing portions of the advertising market, which of course, is retail media. All of this is driven by that infrastructure of data and consumer insights. Of course, all three of those are very large partners of Procter and Gamble.
Stan
Talking about technology, John, the letters AI will be spoken many times on stage. Last year in the conversation it was, “Wow, this is great.” It was a surprise and then some of the fears that go with it, like the large jobs go away. I think we’re starting to see a moment of reality setting in and we’ll talk about that with many of our guests as well. For example, we have another P&G alumna who left the company a while ago and started a very utilitarian AI company that helps with calendar scheduling, and some remarkable results to report. But she also has a great vision of what’s coming. Maddie Bell is well known within P&G circles, she is a fireball, and she’s the right person to lead that future and can tell us many things and relate to a P&G audience very closely.
We also will have another unique element in the program. Aside from AI, another thing that is coming up very closely is robotics. You might be familiar with robotics is like the pictures of these arms in car plants that move. But more and more robots are becoming humanoid. That’s not just to have the not to have help in the household. It’s industrial. Humanoid robots could live significantly longer than human beings, and they’re helping out. That said, combined with AI, you have a very powerful mix. We have the CEO of Apptronik, a company out of Austin, I believe that’s working on humanoid robots. The CEO, Jeff Cardenas will come in and tell us a little bit about what that will mean for our future in business and how that could drive market growth and value creation as well.
Inside of P&G, we have many innovators as well. We will feature about six of them, several of them are focused on AI. First of all, P&G has built a tremendous platform for internal experimentation that’s used by 1000s of people today without the risk of losing a proprietary data, which is quite a feat in the industry already. But then there’s many people who have wonderful examples of how to make use good use of AI with great outcomes, because it’s a tool to lead to business outcomes. So we’ll hear from those people as well.
John
We also have the CEO of Snowflake which has a significant AI presence and it’s building its future business and current business on providing a safe and secure data platform for leveraging AI. But beyond that, you mentioned before football but we have kind of a sports theme running throughout the day. You hinted at somebody coming related to the Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift narrative. The man behind Travis, he’s actually one of two brothers who started a sports agency, is based in Cincinnati. He and his brother built an agency around identifying regional talent and building them into national talent. Little did they know when they built their business that Travis Kelce, one of their earliest clients, would become one of the centerpiece stories of the NFL. But he will be coming to tell us about his journey in building his agency and being ready for the earthquake that was the relationship between Travis and Taylor.
Beyond on just the NFL we have also a strong story to be told from Ally Financial and Andrea Brimmer, who is the CMO. She made the decision to align her brand, which was a very fast growing startup financial services business, which came out of kind of the wreckage of the 2008 meltdown, particularly in the automobile financing sector. She built it into one of the leading brands in finance over the past 10 years, in large part by aligning the brand with women’s sports, which she did five or six years ago, well before women’s sports broke into the mainstream in the last couple of years. We’re going to talk about that story, which is super exciting, and sports is part of the larger entertainment sector. We have YouTube coming and Amazon will be talking about Prime Video.
Stan
Wait, we have more. The fun part of Signal is always signaled to deliver a great program. Yes, there is a bit of entertainment, but it’s all about inspiration and education to go do something with it. What I’m most proud of is that every year we have an opportunity to bring people to the stage from P&G themselves. The P&G innovators, I alluded to that already, who are doing tremendous work around the world, to lead the company in new spaces and be an example for others inside and outside the company. Some of them have to do with supply chain management, one of the most complex things around. We all assumed that when we go to a store, and there’s products on the shelf that that just automatically happen. The machine behind that is tremendously complex. To make that work is amazing. One of the innovators will talk about that. We have one of the innovators talking about a whole brand relaunch of a very staid brand and Mexico, Ariel, and how she masterfully found the consumer insights because for P&G has always the consumers is at the center that really unlock to rebirth of the brand in Mexico, which is another phenomenal story of how you bring innovation to life with real business results and market growth attached.
We also are focused somewhat on sustainability. We know with e-commerce with digital commerce, that packaging is sometimes the bane of this. I’m embarrassed with all the cardboard that every week, I get to put it in a recycle bin. But creating new packaging, “Fit to Win” in a digital commerce environment reduces cost and makes the world more sustainable, is also a lot of work. We have a leading person from P&G also presenting on that one. It’s an amazing lineup of people that I’m very proud of to work with in the company, and how we can learn from each other and how everybody can learn from them as well. It is not just the outside in. It’s a little bit of also a little bit look inside of P&G as well for everybody, all our partners online.
So I’m excited about this program, John, I think every year we ask ourselves, gosh, how do we pull another program off like last year, and somehow magic happens? People say yes to our invitations, we find the stories, then of course, it’s up to you, the master of hosting to ask them some really good questions to fill that out. But I’m excited. I can’t wait till next Wednesday, when everybody’s there. We will have a full auditorium in Cincinnati. I think right now we have like 3000 people or more registered for virtual participation. So we’ll have a good crew.
John
I want to remind everyone who’s out there, please put your questions about Signal into the comments, and we’ll try to get to them as many as we can. I wanted to mention a couple of other speakers, Stan, if you don’t mind, please, just because I really love this program. It’s remarkable in that almost every single one of them, actually all of them, have a very direct relationship to the theme of market growth and value creation.
I don’t know about anyone else out there listening but I and my family have become somewhat addicted to The New York Times. It’s not because of the news. I’ve been a journalist and involved with and reading The New York Times for decades. But their growth story around games, recipes, and things besides news is really extraordinary. The woman behind it is coming to tell that story. Of course, it’s one of the hardest businesses in the world, news, to turn into an actual business and The New York Times 15 years ago, began a journey to create as its core a subscriber base, as opposed to only advertising. It was very successful at that. But then it had the question of how do we grow the market? That question was answered with its extremely successful cooking and games offerings, which I would say that it’s possible our family spends more time in those sections with the news itself. I’m really excited that she is coming.
Stan’s mentioned logistics a couple of times, the fastest growing and largest logistics e-commerce logistics company in the world is a subsidiary or spin out of Alibaba Cainiao. The CEO of that company will be with us. We’ll be having a conversation about the extraordinary things that company is doing with logistics across and around the world, in terms of changing the game in significant ways, and really significantly growing the market, because it’s found ways to do things at a much more efficient cost, and much quicker. That’s going to be exciting as well, because that has implications for business models up and down the supply chain.
Stan
That story in the pre-conversation that we had like that those are mind-blowing numbers that they say, they already ship to any place in China within 24 hours. They want to be able to ship anything around the world in 72 for basically half the price it is done today or less. How are you going to do that? It’ll be very interesting.
One of the ingredients of that one might actually be, we always have a local component to have logistics nearby. I assume that not all of you have landed at Cincinnati airport, which actually is not in Cincinnati. Don’t look for it in Ohio. It’s in Kentucky. It’s Northern Kentucky airport, actually. But it’s called CVG. The CEO of that airport is also visiting us. They have had a remarkable turnaround story. It used to be one of Delta’s main hubs for passengers for a long time, until Delta merged with Northwest. That could have been the demise of the airport. But they totally reinvented it and it’s now one of the largest freight airports in the world. There you go with logistics. Candice McCraw who’s the CEO. This view is not just limited to that little piece of land that they have, actually a big piece of land in Northern Kentucky. But the whole transportation corridor between Dayton and Lexington, she wants to make it home for this region. And she’s well on their way. And she will share that story with the audience as well. So that’s our local Cincinnati components.
By the way, trivia question to you. Where did Travis Kelce get his diploma from which university?
John
I have no idea.
Stan
He got it this year at the University of Cincinnati.
John
What?
Stan
Yeah, he did. It was a big event. So that’s where they met.
John
I had no idea. Wow. I think we do have a question. I’m seeing one in the chat. It’s an easy one for us to answer, which is, will the sessions next week be recorded? And the answer is absolutely. And all of you are invited to sign up for our ongoing Signal 360 publication, which we produce every month, with a fresh crop of stories around strategy and innovation related to the signal themes. You can get that at PGSignal.com. And that’s where you’ll see a lot of next week’s videos start to appear once they’re all produced and ready for consumption. So stay tuned, go to PGSignal.com and sign up for our newsletter. We’ll join 20,000 or so other folks who read our work, and we’re busy keeping the Signal theme alive all year long.
Stan
John, a question for you. We will open actually with the CEO of P&G, Jon Moeller. What are you going to ask him?
John
No fair. It’s always a fun job to interview the CEO of the company, bright and early first thing in the morning, I’m going to ask him how he thinks the year went. It was a very tumultuous year. Conflict around the globe. Continued disruptions in supply chain, political acrimony on the rise, a difficult time for a global company to navigate, a 100 plus different sets of political realities and regulatory realities. We’ll get into that. I’m going to ask him to explain what the theme means to him. He’s incredibly cogent when it comes to business strategy. He’s very clear on what that strategy is. So I want to unpack that with him. And given that it’s the beginning of the day, I’m going to ask him what I asked you, which is who’s he looking forward to hearing from? Also, how do you think about taking in all of this information over the next 10 hours? It’s a really fast-paced, very dense program that we put together. So ask him for some tips on that as well.
Stan
Make a strong pot of coffee. If you’re watching virtually, you will need it, especially people who are not in the timezone. I’m always surprised about how long people stay with us from Europe, and sometimes even Asia, and follow along with the program. So I’m very grateful for the people who are watching. That always makes us feel good that we have a broad audience who gets something out of it and goes on to do something with it. I think we have a brilliant theme this year, it is generally applicable, highly inspirational, and there’s so much to learn, that people can put into action right away, whether it’s a P&G or elsewhere. I’m excited
One of the people who will also be coming in is Rebecca Homkes, who is professor at the London Business School, and we had a great conversation with her. Her tenet is times of uncertainty are actually the best opportunities for market growth. The natural reaction is to go hide. The best reaction from a business perspective is see the big silver lining around the dark cloud that might be at the horizon and go do something with it. She will actually cap it at the end of the day with a couple of things that you can do to make the most from uncertain times to drive market growth and value creation. So I’m excited about that one too.
John
One more question that we just got in that we have time for. It was are these are the 1000s of registered participants, the customers of P&G, and the answer to that is yes, and. The majority of the folks who registered and come, are in one way or another directly affiliated with with P&G. They’re either employees of P&G, or they’re in what I call the P&G ecosystem, which is vast, they would be partners or vendors or customers. But there are probably 15% of the folks who are just interested in business strategy and innovation, and who are sort of following along at their office or at home. But it is really a pretty diverse group. If I recall, Stan, was it 60 or 70 different countries where I think last year?
Stan
Last year was 67 countries around the world. So even some in Africa that people were tuning in, and I wanted to call those people and see what they thought of the program. I think the theme is globally applicable. We are a global company. We operate in many countries around the world, over 5 billion people are touched by P&G products every year in some way, lots of people make that happen together. Signal’s organized in the spirit of together, we can do it and market growth, what John Moeller will explain is, it will lift all boats. This is in that spirit that we bring to Signal. We want to lift all boats in our ecosystem, so that we all get to live in a better world.
John
Stan, get some get some rest. You got a big week coming up. Thank you to everybody who joined us, and those who might be watching later. And remember to go to PGSignal.com, where you can sign up for the Signal 360 newsletter and you can find links to register for the event in one week.
Stan
Thanks, everyone. See you next Wednesday.
John
Take care.
