TOP CMO: Jenna Lebel, Liberty Mutual Insurance - 'From Emus to Impact'

Jenna Lebel  00:00

Well done humor, I would say shouldn't negatively impact your reputation. And in the best case, humor, I think can make your brand more relatable. So it's a risk worth taking in my mind.

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Ben Kaplan  00:09

This is the podcast where we go around the globe to interview marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, fastest growing companies and most disruptive startups.

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Ben Kaplan  00:24

This is TOP CMO with me, Ben Kaplan.

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Ben Kaplan  00:31

Today I'm speaking with Jenna Lebel, CMO of Liberty Mutual Insurance, a diversified global insurer that offers a wide range of services and is known for its creative and memorable ads.

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00:42

Liberty Mutual customized my car insurance and I saved hundreds I've been telling everyone Yeah. Did you hear that type of center first word? Can you say mama never get

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Ben Kaplan  00:53

it has more than 15 years of experience in brand strategy and digital marketing for both agencies and brands. To join Liberty Mutual as a program manager can climb through the ranks as director, Vice President and CMO. She previously served as Director of Strategy and social media strategy and global marketing at likeable. Jenna has spent more than 10 years at Liberty Mutual, and she knows the company like the back of her hand. So how does humor play a crucial role in making brands memorable and relatable, especially in industry is often considered serious by consumers? And how can companies leverage partnerships with iconic franchises without risking negative repercussions? Let's find out this agenda LeBron.

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Ben Kaplan  01:42

Jenna, you're in a category that is competing for a lot of consumer attention. It's a high spend category. Plus you have 100 plus year old brand that you want to make more relevant. But consumers don't really want to discuss insurance all day if we're being honest. So how does that factor into kind of a brand reinvention, a brand refresh, which is one of your directives as CMO.

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Jenna Lebel  02:07

Yeah, but thanks so much for having me, Ben. And great, great. First question. You know, insurance is a fun category, like you said, it's commoditized. It's cluttered one of the highest spend categories. So it's hard to watch anything these days without seeing an insurance ad. Price is the number one reason that consumers shop and purchase a policy. To your point no one wants to buy insurance or think about insurance, it's the only thing I can think of that you pay for, and you hope to never use. And you know, we don't entirely know the cost of goods sold at the point of sale. And so it's a really interesting category from a marketing perspective. Because of that, you know, we you know, we need to be top of mind with consumers. And so a prerequisite of success is that strong Top of Mind brand awareness. And we've grown our brand awareness faster than anyone in the category over the last 10 years. And it will continue to be a top priority. And I think what goes into that when you don't have a tangible product to hold in front of a consumer, the category along with us sort of rely on brand cues, whether that be branded mascots, or in our case, a spokes duo, or jingles, taglines, all of those things to really keep the brand top of mind. And then when it comes to being relevant with consumers, I think because insurance is such a serious business, and people don't want to think about the bad things that could potentially happen to them. We sort of rely on humor to distract them to break through to drive and recall and sort of entertain consumers, right. We know that we're disrupting whatever it is they're watching. And we're doing it at a high frequency. So how can we provide a little bit of entertainment and humor in our advertising, and one of

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Ben Kaplan  03:43

the signature campaigns and I think one of the ones that we've chatted about that that you're continuing to invest in is, I guess you'd call it Li, mu e mu, and Doug, which is an actual email and another person, you're in category where you're competing with geckos, a lot of mascots and a lot of entertainment and humor. How do you think about evaluating that when it's crossing your desk? And it's like, do we want to invest in emu and his friend? And is this worthy of our spend? You're putting aside this Gecko next to it and say, What do you think? How do you go about that to sort of say, like, we have ROI from this and in the competitive sets, we think we can break through. So believe

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Jenna Lebel  04:19

it or not leaving and Doug is is coming up on its fifth year in market and when we went down the path of developing a spokes character, we had dozens of characters, everything from singing bears, too. We had a dinosaur or we had a pigeon we had everything you could think of was on the table and I would

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Ben Kaplan  04:38

have loved to be in that meeting with like the pigeons here. It's like I think the pigeon is going to tap into a new demographic. I would have loved to see all the positioning work done on the pigeon. That was an interesting.

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Jenna Lebel  04:47

Yeah, there were a lot of jobs that were dropped. That didn't talked. You know what we're because we're trying to break through and keep Liberty Mutual top of mind. Like we're really focused on two things when it comes to our Africa. thing it's does the brand come through? And do people remember the ad and on does the brand come through, that's why we loaded up that our ads with with logos with a jingle you know, Lena and Doug are wearing branded uniforms, we're really trying to get the branding to come through. And then you know, just remembering the ad like, it's hard to not remember a bird and a man telling people that they could save money by customizing their car insurance. And I think there's, there's something familiar about that trope, right? The buddy buddy duo trope, you've seen it in movies and TV shows over the years. And there's also something unexpected about it because you have a man and then a flightless bird who doesn't talk. And so we test all of our ads in front of 1000s of consumers before we ever go make them. And so we tested this in front of 18,000 consumers along with several other campaigns, including the talking pigeon, and, you know, it performed really well in terms of driving that brand. Recall driving that recall, likeability was pretty high, you know, we saw a lot of positive things, humor was high. And so we felt like this was the path we wanted to go down, and it could stand the test of time, that was another thing that was important to us, like, you know, we didn't want to introduce something that consumers would get sick of pretty quickly. And, and we keep a pulse on that. So we actually just did another round of qual and quant where we're, you know, checking with consumers to make sure that there really is longevity here, and we feel pretty confident there is

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Ben Kaplan  06:25

and how do you think about evolution and staying fresh, just creatively. I mean, I can give you an example. I mean, that we chatted also with with the the CMO at State Farm and they have a whole campaign that's about Jake from State Farm. And there's a kind of famous thing where he's he's like a khaki wearing person. And there was kind of a funny ad and it turned into a whole big thing. And then they had to change like from an IT was originally cast as an actual agent. And then they realized they needed an actor who was like more available and all this kind of stuff. So you're five years in listen to what people are saying evolve. You know, how much of it is expected the response like yep, and match to your testing, you knew exactly how it was gonna be and how much it was like, Oh, didn't realize that ad or that creative would spark something. Let's run with it. Let's be more flexible. How do you evolve?

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Jenna Lebel  07:12

Yeah, I mean, we're constantly listening, I would say like, we do a ton of research, we're constantly listening to what's happening in social, what's happening and pop culture. And we started, we sort of knew we were on to something where we started to see it pop up a lot more like we had celebrities talking about the campaign, you know, was on Jeopardy, New York Times crossword puzzle, we had multiple SNL appearances. And so we sort of knew we were on to something. And I think, you know, the team is really focused on like, instead of us just thinking about what is the future of LIMU. And Doug, let's listen to you know, what people want to see from the brand. And from this duo in particular, and so you're starting to see us introduce new characters. So we've introduced the wives. So Lee moves, wife, Doug's wife, we've introduced their sons, in a spot that's currently on air, we've introduced new setting, so you've seen them in the office, you've seen them out in the real world, you've seen them at their homes. And so we're starting to dimensionalize the characters a little bit more. And something you'll see from us in the very near future is that we're going to do a crossover of an ad from a different campaign and bring that into the new and Doug's world, just because similar to the example you just gave, you know, we saw we had an ad a few years ago, that really struck gold, and we want to figure out a way to, you know, bring that back. And we think we found a way, and I think consumers are really gonna like it.

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Ben Kaplan  08:33

You come originally from actually a digital marketing agency background. And obviously, this is a, we've talked about a competitive category, there's a lot of like, big budget TV spend, take us through the performance marketing side that goes with it. And I know you've spoken about we've chatted about the past about, you know, becoming a digital first brands. So what does it mean to be a digital first brand? A lot of digital first brands like, you know, can't spend on this kind of like TV, right? So how is it in that, you know, you've got a really big hammer that isn't digital first, but then you want to be maybe more precise in targeting, how does that all work together?

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Jenna Lebel  09:08

We're advertising and marketing across all tactics, both on the brand side, as well as the acquisition side. And when we think about being digital, first, it's truly about like making sure that we are available to consumers, to customers, to our agents through all touchpoints. So I would say, We're never gonna like not answer the phone, of course. But we want to make sure that we're providing digital tools digital service for our customers, our agents, our partners. When we think about marketing, I would say, you know, we're really looking at driving two main objectives. It's building that brand awareness. So that's all of the branded tactics like TV like radio, like social. And then obviously, we have some pretty lofty growth goals for us as well. And so all of our acquisition tactics are really focused on bringing the most profitable new business and so we spend across The normal places you'd think paid search, and we're heavily invested there. You know, we're doing a lot of direct mail email where it's like more precise targeting, looking at LTV and making sure that we're bringing in profitable new business growth. And it's sort of a balance between those two budgets, in terms of where we want to continue to invest, because there are a lot of places that we could spend, but we want to make sure that we're maximizing that spend and getting the most out of every dollar.

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Tom Cain  10:25

Okay, so here's what I'm thinking. It's a Western with a sci fi twist. But there's also a film noir plot running in the background. And dinosaurs because why not right? Take the dinosaurs down a little bit. Okay, no dinosaurs. But a little bit of romance is always welcome.

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Tom Cain  11:01

And zombies? Yeah, we just heard from zombies in there. Your vision, our craft? topthoughtleader.com? I don't know. Can I listen to the first draft again, back to the show?

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Ben Kaplan  11:18

And, Jenna, how do you think about certain niche audiences, niche communities, if we put on our official marketing hat will say personas, you know, in terms of marketing campaigns, that is still in the news a ton. And I'll give you an example, the Bud Light campaign that created a huge uproar from a lot of more conservative groups. They were appealing to a LGBTQ plus audience, and they had like a transgender influencer as part of that. And it's an interesting case study for others, because Bud Light was ubiquitous, right? Like lots of people drink Bud Light, it was the number one beer in sales overall. And also the number one beer in sales for the LGBTQ plus community. And you could probably imagine people being marketing me and say, Hey, we got to ramp this up, we got to do it. But then worlds collided and created, obviously a huge loss of value for Bud Light. So how do you think about balancing niche audiences you want to reach out, but then you have a mass market product? And you've got to do that? And how do you make this all kind of work together?

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Jenna Lebel  12:19

Yeah, it's a good question. You know, like you said, we are a mass market ensure, you know, everyone who owns a car or home or at or rented apartment is in the market for insurance. So we're always taking a combination to both the general population audience as well as more targeted audiences in spaces like, especially on the on the acquisition side where you know, we have more adjustable audiences, we're very cognizant of the fact that if we grow across consumer segments, we need to create ads that are able to resonate with groups, where they are, from a media standpoint, we're constantly evolving to test learn pivoted to new tactics, targets and mediums. But within each space, you know, we're agile enough to know like where we want to optimize across the ever changing media landscape, but for the most part, we are we are mass market, and we'll test and see if our ads are resonating with different audiences. But we're not doing sort of niche marketing at this time, just because it makes more economic sense for us to be more broad base with our marketing.

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Ben Kaplan  13:19

And what's your advice for testing, I mean, there's multiple ways to test quick and dirty in social media kind of in the wild, really small spin, we could do that. We can do more focus groups more in depth, more traditional kind of testing of creative, we could do more like monitor brainwaves in people's mind and see what's activated. And I don't know, if you do some of those things. They like watching our commercial and the EMU comes on and boom, we activated this part of their brain, and we're really happy so we can get real scientific, what have you found to be most effective that might be instructive to someone else that, you know, maybe hasn't done as much testing? Because they're not dealing with the kind of ad dollars you are, but you are definitely doing it? Because you're trying to protect your spend before you spend it. Yeah,

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Jenna Lebel  14:00

I have a lot to say on this topic. I mean, you're spot on. Like we're a data driven company. We're an insurance company. Of course, we love data. And so we are doing a tremendous amount of testing, especially because we do have bigger budgets. And you know, in the category, we are very much a challenger brand. We are outspent by a lot of our competitors. And so we have to really punch above our weight and make sure that everything we're doing is going to add a ton of incremental value. And so we do do a lot of testing I think, you know, the best advice I could give is like don't over engineer it. Like you don't have to over engineer it. Like if you really think about what is the question I'm trying to answer. Oftentimes there's a you know, low effort, scrappier way to get at that answer than doing the brain waves and all the complicated research studies and methodologies but you know, we do use those when I would say the risks are in the stakes are a little bit higher. But for things like if we're testing within, you know, YouTube or social like it's often And just like put it out there, see what happens? Like, let's continue to optimize, versus doing a more formal research setting where we're putting it in front of 1000s of consumers, which we might do on the TV side where we're spending bigger dollars. So I think it depends, you know what your objective is, but oftentimes, you can get to the answer of your research question and in a much lower effort way, and

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Ben Kaplan  15:22

what is your recommendations on using humor, I think humor is something that is exciting to people, right? They kind of want to do it, particularly you get in the sort of, like Superbowl ad category or something like that. You're like, let's do something. But it's also daunting because being funny, everyone thinks they're funny, but everyone can't be funny, right? Like, we can't all be funny, someone has to be not funny. And it's a sense of taste. And it's also a sense of in the in sort of the cultural landscape. And you can also misfire with something you didn't intend to communicate. So people were like, want to use humor humor when I talked to marketers, but they're also wary of it a little bit of just like the danger of sort of trying too hard to be funny. What is your advice there for a brand that utilizes hair,

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Jenna Lebel  16:01

I think it's a very real concern for someone in the insurance category, like in a commoditized category, where we need to drive that top of mind awareness like humor is not, it's not a question of whether we use humor, it's a requirement, you know, because we know it's effective at breaking through that clutter and keeping the brand top of mind, you know, we as you can see from our ads, we leverage memorable moments through humor, like scenarios and characters. But we're often going back to making it memorable in a way that draws on something that is relatable to folks, whether it be a certain scenario, or some nostalgia, like you've seen us play in that space of like, it's funny, because it's true, because I've lived it because I know that experience, that's worked pretty well for us. But you know, the reality is humor is super subjective. And what's funny to some isn't funny to all. So it's important to kind of diversify how humor comes across and comes to life through your campaigns and you're in your brand. Well done humor, I would say shouldn't negatively impact your reputation. And in the best case, humor, I think can make your brand more relatable. So it's a risk worth taking. In my mind, I think, you know, that relatable humor has been effective for us. But I think there's a variety of ways you can deliver humor in the marketplace.

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Ben Kaplan  17:12

One of the tasks we had as an agency was we were tasked with bringing back Morris the cat, the original celebrity, spokes, cat, and refreshing Morris. And our mantra was, you know, in the end, using humor, and using, you know, cat things, things that cats do, it was like, simple, surprising, and significant, like simple, you got to get it fast. To your point about short attention span, surprising, you got to do something to break through something that is different, particularly in a category where other people were maybe doing other things with pet category, in this case, and significant, you got to say something and what we learned and I don't know if you've learned that was that, you know, we would do a lot of things with cats that would be you know, a cat would knock something over or a cat would like sleep for a long time. They're they're funny cat things. But the key for us was, what's the human insight that comes from that? So we had a cat knock something over. And the message was, you know what, it's okay. You can make mistakes, things happen, don't beat yourself up, things fall over. And that was like a human insight that resonated, even delivered through a cat photo and meme. I don't know if you've thought about that. But it's like, I'm interested what you said about being memorable. It's not just funny. And maybe it doesn't have to be like a 10. On the funny scale, it could be a six, but if it's memorable, that might be better than a 10 that you're gonna forget.

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Jenna Lebel  18:27

Yeah, agreed. And actually, like we, you know, we talked a lot about LIMU. And Doug, but one of our other campaigns that we're not running currently, but you know, may come back, we did a campaign around home insurance. And it was all that the whole concept was, you know, research says you can, this certain advertising trope helps make ads more more memorable. And one of the spots that we ran was a typical Christmas morning, you know, the dads recording the opening up presents, and one kid gets a bike and the other one gets a box of Liberty Mutual Insurance. And the kid with the bike is mad that his brother got this great gift. And we sort of worked our brand into that message, but the that setting that like if you have siblings, and you remember Christmas morning, like your kid, you certainly remember comparing gifts, right? Like you got something better than I did, or I want what he has, or she has. And so, you know, I think we've found success when we deliver humor that is super relatable that people have lived or know someone who's lived or have seen or heard that experience before. And that's just one example of a recent one. We've done, what

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Ben Kaplan  19:29

you said, there's interesting because I think in terms of memory, and the way we are all wired, it's that we connect what we don't know, to things that we know. So that context is helpful. So you talked about this, you know, Christmas morning, something that we can relate to that we know so that's going to help us remember something maybe about Liberty Mutual that we don't know. A example would be if I had to describe to you a pump Hello, what is a pump? Hello, I'm half Thai, so we were using some Asian cookie but I might say oh, it's like a great fruit, but it's bigger. or, and it's like a sweet grapefruit. And then you can get it oh up a mellow. It's like, okay, because you know what a great fruit is. So that's interesting to think about, like, how do you relate it for recall to things that you know, to help an audience understand something they don't know. Exactly.

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Jenna Lebel  20:15

And that frame of reference is critical for us. I mean, Lemo dog is based on that, right? It's like we know, you know, the buddy duo, right? It's in tons and tons of movies over the years. And the difference is, there's something unexpected about this duo in that you have a human and then you have a Birgit as a talk. So that's been pretty successful. For us, we go back to that often this idea of familiar but slightly unexpected. If you

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Ben Kaplan  20:40

enjoy this show, you'll love TOP CEO. TOP CEO is a business school case study, telling the story behind the story, and what you can learn from it from those who have faced the fire and come out the other side.

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Anne-Marie  20:55

That was the challenge the team was faced 25% of it was gone. I found myself $282,000 in debt, how would

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Ben Kaplan  21:02

you navigate through these trials and transform them into opportunities for growth and success? How do you build back up the business and get out of debt

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Anne-Marie  21:09

and get anything in? Nobody can come to work right in any of our factory in any of the factory?

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Ben Kaplan  21:17

This is TOP CEO available wherever you get your podcast. Jenna, I know you've done a lot with partnerships, I'm talking about spider man talking about minions is that part of that strategy is like relate to something that people know and might be passionate or excited about and use that to Halo off to your brand. And how do you pick Spider Man and minions versus something other partnership that you might choose to do? Yeah,

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Jenna Lebel  21:46

so that's exactly right. Like, right, like, you know, these, these partnerships we've had to date have been these huge, you know, movie franchises that if you haven't seen them all, you've at least seen one or you've you know of the minions or you know of spider man. And so, you know, that's been pretty successful for us that the way the partnership works is, you know, we get access to that IP and using that in in our ad in exchange for promoting the film for three seconds at the back end of our spot. So it's sort of a win win for both the movie studio as well as us because we're using that iconic IP. And then yeah, that's the part that's familiar. And then you have LIMU. And Doug, you know, in the case of the Spider Man, I like dub wanting to be Spider Man and getting bit by a spider and then having a reaction. And so that's sort of the unexpected part of it all. And then in terms of like, how we select those movie partnerships, like we're putting it through, like a brand FIT test, if you will, you know, making sure that you know, our objectives are aligned, our brand reputation is healthy, like we're not going to be exposed to any sort of, you know, negative press or anything like that. And so we're keeping that in mind. And we feel strongly about movie franchises, just because they have so much history. And so many people know those those iconic characters, and

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Ben Kaplan  23:00

what is your advice for other brands, maybe thinking about going down that route? I can tell you from our from our experience, we worked a lot on partnerships for The Secret Life of Pets movies, as part of our work with pet brands. And I can tell you working on that it's exciting, but also a little challenging, at least for us. Because when you have valuable IP people like to protect the valuable IP and there's a ton of stuff we thought were good ideas that ultimately we could not do, because it crossed some line that honestly felt a little arbitrary, but it's like no, this is how it's done. We can't do it. So what is your advice? Was that your experience? What is your advice for others who are gonna go down that partnerships with like, IP that is highly protected by committees of people and lawyers?

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Jenna Lebel  23:38

Yeah, you know, it's funny you say that, I mean, obviously they they want to be super protective of their IP it's like you know, the amount of consumers that know it the reach it's had the significance attached and pop culture like it makes perfect sense. You know, we found success in it kind of goes back to a conversation we were having earlier, which is because we do so much testing, we actually were able to work with you know, the studios to develop multiple different ways in of creating assets and then we would test them in front of consumers and so we were never signing up to do anything they weren't comfortable with of course, but we had that extra data point to say well consumers like this or they found that offensive or you know, whatever it might be and so that worked really well and then you know we actually on the on the SpiderMan partnership we did a extra activation with them that we sort of kind of like CO briefed like we briefed it together where it was like we want to do some kind of like out of home activation leveraging the Spider Man IP and so we kind of briefed their creatives on like, what could that look like and the activation we came up with was leveraging the the Daily Bugle and creating a newsstand in New York and a special Liberty Mutual sponsor Daily Bugle you know edition of the paper and we seeded it out influencers and we got a lot of foot traffic and I What made that work is that they were invested in doing something together and there was co creation there. And we relied heavily on them knowing their IP and knowing what was right for Spider Man to be doing or not doing. And they respected us having protection over our brand and LIMU and Doug, and what they should or should not be doing. And so it was a pretty good partnership, I totally get why they would be extra protective of that IP. But testing definitely won them over. And I would say cocreation was a was a big help. Your store is

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Ben Kaplan  25:30

a great example of anything, when anyone pushes back on anything, if you have more data, it kind of gives you something in your arsenal said like, well, actually, let's look at the data. Here's what it shows. And usually, if you have the data and the other side doesn't, you kind of win, right? Because it's hard to get the data, they're not gonna go out and like do this whole research study. So if you have it, and you want to get something through, when you say that really helps, like, look, here, I'm not making this up. This is true

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Jenna Lebel  25:55

100%, my team would say that one of my biggest phrases is win with data. So yeah, we are constantly winning with data, both internally and externally. To

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Ben Kaplan  26:03

wrap up, talk about the leadership side of being a CMO. We've talked a lot about the creative side, we've talked about some of the marketing strategies. But the leadership side, particularly in a time now where there's uncertainty in a number of facets, there's uncertainty in terms of where the economy is, and just how business is doing. There's uncertainty in terms of this post pandemic period. There's also this uncertainty I think, which is, which is interesting now, which is just as like, work from office or work from home, and is my employer going to make me do one day, two day, three days, three and a half days, four days, all days, no days at work, and different levels of sort of happiness with that? How do you manage that? And what's changed about your role as a leader?

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Jenna Lebel  26:43

Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I, I've been in leadership roles for, you know, almost my entire career. And I would say the last few years have been the most challenging of the mall. And I think you sort of go back to, you know, the roots, right of what makes an effective leader. And I think it holds true in normal times. And it holds true even more in unprecedented times. And that's setting a clear vision, right? Like, to me, that's the most important step. If people know what they should be focused on. I think if you give them a sort of a mission, everyone will, will get excited about that. And rally behind that. I think Seth Godin said it like, and I think it's true for both leadership and marketing. But like, language only works when other people know what you're saying. And so I think having that clear vision of what you're focused on is critically important. Aligning on priorities and pursuing them with radical focus, I think we need radical focus now more than ever, given the economic environment and the pressure, it's putting on our business and almost every business out there, and then just empowering and enabling the team to tackle those priorities, whether it be sort of removing roadblocks or providing air cover, I feel like that's, that's my primary job is just enabling and empowering the team to tackle the priorities that we've set forth. And I think that that's important. In normal times, like I said, I think it's critically important now. And, you know, something I go back to often, but I think, you know, anytime there's any kind of change, and you mentioned a few of things that are happening right now, like just, it's really important that folks feel like they're part of something, and that they have a mission and a purpose. And so whether that be focusing on, you know, building the brand, or focusing on reducing expenses, because we have to in this economic environment, whatever it might be, as long as they're clear on what the mission is, I think, you know, it's easy to create a really engaged team is

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Ben Kaplan  28:38

for some of those, you said, removing roadblocks providing air cover, are there examples of that, that go beyond the where the value goes beyond just the thing you unstuck. What I mean by that is like, yes, you do some things and move past it. We've solved it that provides value. But are there any examples where the act of doing that builds trust among the team builds confidence among the team builds a sense that I don't know if it's, my cmo has my back or it's okay to make a mistake, as long as we learn from it or other things that we might associate with a high performing marketing team that has a high degree of trust and a strong culture? Are there examples of just doing that, where it's worth more than just the immediate benefit? And maybe why you did it? Yeah,

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Jenna Lebel  29:19

I would say like, a recent example is, you know, we have a lot of lines of business, of course, auto and home being the key ones, but we you know, we're, we sell pet insurance, we sell business lines, we sell all kinds of different insurance products. And a few years ago, we made the decision to exit one of those and you know, I had folks working on that exact line of business. And so it was a tough decision, of course, but like we were able to bring the folks along on the journey of the in provide the why in the context of, you know, the decision making and they felt competent, and I gave them this confidence that there's no shortage of work to do and in our marketing team, and we're constantly prioritizing and just because we're deeper I organizing this line of business right now doesn't mean that the work they were doing wasn't valuable. It absolutely was. And it doesn't mean that they can't go add value somewhere else. And so I think a lot of it is, yeah, removing barriers, removing roadblocks. But I think it's also being able to make the tough decisions, bring the team along, make sure they have the context and the why. And I think you'll continue to build trust with them. And they'll know that you have their back. And that was just one example of recently. You

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Ben Kaplan  30:27

mentioned, setting a clear vision, you mentioned feeling like you're a part of something having a purpose. Are there any examples, advice of things you've done that maybe someone else might be able to learn from we'd love actionable advice for CMOS, I, it could be anything from a happy hour, this that actually was a great thing to totally, you know, unrelated, something else or an off site you did to I don't know, a message you sent or something else and maybe not even you, maybe it was someone else on your team that did something. Any other final tip and final thoughts, like feel like you're a part of something? What can we as CMOS or marketing leaders do or try as a tactic?

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Jenna Lebel  31:04

Yeah, I'll give you two examples. One is for every single new hire, and we've done this for the last since we launched li Moondog actually, I send a welcome package to every single new hire with a handwritten note from me. And we have LIMU and Doug swag. And there's notebooks and Alina plushie, and a couple other items. And that's been hugely popular with folks, especially when we were hiring people in a virtual environment. And they had no connectivity to the department in which they were working. The second thing is, every other week, I have what's called a flash briefing. It's a 15 minute meeting. It's meant for cascading information in a really timely manner. I usually have seven or so minutes of content, and then have it open for q&a. And so it's an opportunity for me to see the entire department every other week. And it's an opportunity for them to get information firsthand ask questions. And it's been a really good, like culture builder for us in terms of like bringing the entire team together and and you know, we do icebreakers to kick it off. And then you know, we're giving the timely information and then allowing for q&a. And it's been interesting to see how the questions have evolved, where I think when we first introduced it, people were a little nervous to ask questions, and you could see their questions. Were a little bit more generic, I would say. And now I mean, I get you know, I get grilled sometimes, and I'm happy about that. I think that speaks volumes like if people are comfortable enough to ask questions that make me uncomfortable, and that's what we've been seeing lately, which is awesome. So I'm going to continue that forum

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Tom Cain  32:44

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