TOP CMO: Melissa Grady Dias, Cadillac- 'Boldness in Branding'

Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  00:00

We use regression modeling, we use some other forms of modeling to figure out who are the most likely Cadillac prospects. Just go in and let the data speak to you and see what comes out of it. So from a targeting perspective, this drives all of our targeting. This is

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Ben Kaplan  00:15

the podcast where we go around the globe, marketing leaders from the world's biggest branDias, fastest growing companies and most disruptive startups, re ideas packaged a certain way want to spread they want to be told us someone else's simple, surprising and significant. Unlocking viral creativity is to make it rapidly scalable. This is TOP CMO with me, Ben Kaplan. Today I'm speaking with Melissa Grady Dias, Global CMO at Cadillac and iconic American luxury automobile brand.

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00:49

The famous Cadillac, Cadillac Cadillac Cadillac, Cadillac, Cadillac Cadillac.

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Ben Kaplan  00:57

Melissa has more than 25 years of experience in marketing and data analytics. She started her career at Gillette, before she moved to Jaguar Land Rover, where she got her first taste of the automotive industry. She has also held leadership positions in digital acquisition measurements, global analytics, ecommerce marketing, and CRM at Motorola MetLife. And Jackson Hewitt. At Cadillac, she was the head of media and performance marketing before stepping up a CMO. So how can you use demographic analytics to model out the market to find your likely prospects? And what role do boldness and color play in making Cadillac distinct? Let's find out with Melissa Grady Dias.

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Ben Kaplan  01:45

Melissa, we've chatted before about this. It's kind of a bold statement, I'm going to paraphrase you the idea that maybe demographics are dead, are demographics dead? Should we not be using demographics anymore for targeting? And what is the difference between how you use it for targeting versus reporting?

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  02:02

Yeah, so I think that's the perfect distinction right there. From a reporting perspective, demographics are really helpful, definitely not dead. And it really helps you to understand some basic differences between things from a targeting perspective, I'll be bold here. Cadillac is a very bold brand. And I'll be bold, I don't believe in using demographics for targeting. I think that there is too much variability within who people are as human beings. So if you look at 25 to 54 year olds with income over $100,000 a year just to vanilla, you can't pull anything out of that and you can't do anything with that. So what we've really done a Cadillac is we've we've flipped it on its head, and we've modelled out the whole entire us to find who are Cadillac likely prospects.

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Ben Kaplan  02:53

And just to pause it for a second when you say you've modeled out the entire US. What does that mean? Does that mean? Cadillac has a profile on like me, Ben Caplan, TOP CMO podcasts? I was like, literally, there's probably somewhere in a database somewhere. What does it mean that the entire US

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  03:07

so we're partnering with our agency we use Kara, which is part of Dentsu and Dentsu has the M one Mercury platform. And Mercury has the entire US just like a lot of other vendors do like axiom or, you know, anyone who has those types of files. And that's where it's what we activate our media off of. And that's where we've we've built our models is off these files that are privacy safes.

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Ben Kaplan  03:34

Got it. So you have as you're building modeling for the US, what are you doing, you're not looking then just at someone's age or income level, you're looking at how a bunch of factors go in to essentially an algorithm or regression analysis or something that takes into account the interplay between multiple variables. That's exactly

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  03:52

right. So we use regression modeling, we use some other forms of modeling, to figure out who are the most likely Cadillac prospects, and then we index them versus the entire US. And so what we see right now is with one of our main segments, they're 17 times more likely to buy a Cadillac than the general population. And it's really interesting when you let the data speak to you at something, I really believe that you've got to just go in and let the data speak to you and see what comes out of it. And what was so interesting, I think, for us is as a brand, Cadillac, one of the biggest predictors of being in our Cadillac audience when we went through this was job title, which when I first heard that seemed so strange. And as we dug into it, it was because we were way over indexing on President CEO or people with a similar title. And as we peel that back and understood it, it's because we have a lot of entrepreneurs who are Cadillac owners, and it was like a light bulb going off for me because if you think about Cadillacs, history, and the way that Cadillac has always been woven into the history of America, it is The story of someone who works really hard, who puts in the time who achieves something, and then rewards themselves with a Cadillac. And what we see is and what was so interesting is that spirit exists today. And we're still really resonating with entrepreneurs. That's

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Ben Kaplan  05:15

a great insight. By the way, I also do a podcast called TOP CEO. And there you go, there's some potential Cadillac future owners there. What do you do with that? So is that just like, general background to say like, Okay, let's do some campaigns that target those with an entrepreneurial mindset. Is it? Oh, let's do messaging that more aligns to this idea of like, you've worked hard. Now you're new, like, I know, you guys are launching electric. So your new electric prize vehicles here? How does it impact overall, just once you have that insight,

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  05:45

so it really goes two ways. And it's one of the things that, to me, is weirdly passionate about this intersection of sort of data and technology and insight. So from a targeting perspective, this drives all of our targeting, we have our audience, and we're activating that audience against, you know, indexing it against TV properties, using it for addressable OTT digital as as a direct targeting. But where the beauty really comes in, what you're talking about is, when we have that understanding, it's helped us to really drive our clarity as a brand. And so over the past year and a half, we've been going through, really a refresh of our entire brand, our visual identity is all new, we have a lot of color right now. Very bold, bold is one of our brand values, and you really see it come through. But we also were able to hone our brand purpose. And then you've probably seen our tagline be iconic. And the brand purposes we exist to champion big dreams and bold ambition. And how we got there was to understanding that this has been a truth about Cadillac really the entire time that Cadillac has been a brand since 1902, that we are helping people embody their dreams. And so how do we champion that? How does that play out for us as a brand, and that comes out in the stories that we tell the first time that you really saw this come to market was with the Oscars A couple years ago, partnering with Regina King, and we had just written a new brand manifesto. And we're digging into this. And Regina King said, wow, that's that's my story. And she articulated her story in it. And it really matched with the brand. That's been a journey that we've been on over the past year and a half. But having that pure insight and that way that creates a connection where someone says that's me. That's that's why I'm and you'll see that in the Escalade IQ campaign that we have coming up. I'll talk about that in a second. But we've been on that path. It's also how we got to be iconic as our brand idea which shows up as a tagline. And when you think about be iconic, I feel like it's a personal rallying cry. I think some days when I need a little motivation.

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Ben Kaplan  08:02

You need like a little pick me up or something. You're like, you're in front of the mirror, you're getting ready to go to work. You're like, I want to be iconic today. Exactly. Yes.

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  08:09

Because if you think about it, if you're having a bad day, and you say I need to be iconic, you're like, Okay, I gotta pick this

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Ben Kaplan  08:15

up. Yeah, we're not we're not just going for like a middle of the road day or maybe a day that doesn't suck. No, no, this is we're gonna be iconic today. And it's

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  08:22

like, it's amazing, right? Because we can say this now. And it really means something. And when I've thought about it, it's really about being your most inspirational, aspirational self. Like when you think about iconic, it's, it's never in this negative territory. And so that's where we live as a brand. And it's been working well over the past couple of years. And as I said, we're about to reveal the escalate IQ this week in New York City. And we have a campaign working with c mu. And it's very interesting, because he also has this renaissance type story. And again, it just matches with everything we're saying, as we were looking at how Cadillac as a brand was gonna move into evey, we were saying, you know, it's it's not a reinvention. It's really a reimagination. When we look at it, we have been in the middle of a product Renaissance, for you know, the past five to seven years, we've got all new products that are on the road, and we keep bringing good new products, amazing new products, they just happen to be easy now. And

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Ben Kaplan  09:29

it's interesting to think about because the way you've described thus far, I mean, you've put a lot of effort in modeling your future buyer. And it's interesting, your background and your background is in digital performance marketing, which is an interesting choice for Cadillac, which would be historically a very kind of like a brand forward entity, right? That would you know, if there's a bit of a divide on the show, we talk a lot about maybe there's not such a big divide between brand marketing and performance marketing, but I'd say historically, probably a brand that lands more on the brand marketing side given given where you are on the market. Now you have a background with performance marketing, you're doing a lot of modeling, which is interesting. But how do you deal with this challenge? It relates to what you just said, moving into the era of electric vehicles, you have a big customer database, you go and model it after like very sensible would be, who are the big, you know, high dollar value customers of Cadillac, you've probably bought multiple Cadillacs. What do they look like? Maybe it's the CEO, maybe it's the president, like you said, but that doesn't necessarily mean, they're an electric car buyer, or their electric car buyer right now, maybe five years from now. So how do you think about modeling, given everything that you have this great database, but you're actually going into new territory, it

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  10:37

was a new exercise for us. So as we were moving into Eevee, we looked at a new segmentation that wasn't based on our current owners, although we did map them back to that to make sure that it was still working. But we looked at moving forward in the marketplace, who is, you know, the change makers, and they're gonna be the first to Evie, who are sort of the second and third tier to Evie, and who's probably not going to move for a while. So we got that understanding. And then within that, we started to look at this persona of who would be this Cadillac, Maverick, iconic type person within that. And so that was the the going endpoint that we had for the modeling. And now we're just refining it as we get more information and data, as vehicle sales and interest comes in.

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Ben Kaplan  11:29

In my days, as an economist, I perform daily regression analysis. At its core regression analysis is a way of mathematically sorting out which factors have the greatest impact on your intended results, in this case, selling Cadillacs. With regression, you can answer questions like which factors matter most? Which ones can we ignore? How do those factors interact with one another? And how certain are we about all of these factors? In regression analysis, those factors are called variables. You have your dependent variable, the main factor like likelihood to buy a Cadillac that you're trying to understand or predict. And then you have your independent variables. The factors you suspect have an impact on your ultimate result, such as the profession of the customer in question. But what Melissa points out is that sometimes correlation rather than causation, is enough for marketers, the fact that someone has a culinary interest might not cause them to buy a Cadillac. But if it's correlated, we can leverage that insight to get them to engage with our product in ways that really resonates. Typically, the car space, automobile space, you see some celebrity partnerships that are really meant to embody the brand values, right, you see a particular person, one that comes up with a bunch of things that you think of like Matthew McConaughey, or something like that it's meant to embody, there's competitors, picking him as a spokesperson. So how do you think about embodying those values? I know you have a launch coming up this week, you're going to do a take over Time Square for an hour. But how do you start embodying the values and thinking about that when it's difficult to communicate a new twist on something that to your point is iconic has been around for a while, but it's got to mean something and kind of a new way? Do you think about partnerships, celebrities, other things like that, to try to embody those values?

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  13:28

Definitely. And I love the way that you framed it ask that question, because, as I alluded to before, for the Escalade IQ campaign that we have coming, we're partnering with c mu. And the reason that we chose him is, as we were looking at this, we were like this is not a reinvention. The Escalade doesn't need to be reinvented, the Escalade is being reimagined as an electric vehicle. And it was very interesting. Before we actually started that partnership. Last year, when we were kicking off this campaign, we started looking at trends. And we use Google data to say, what are some of the trends that are happening right now, one of them that was really fascinating was personal Renaissance. I personally have been thinking about this too, as we're all kind of coming into this next phase of moving out of the pandemic. I think we've all changed quite a bit, right. We're still who we are. But we've changed quite a bit. And there's a whole trend going on now around personal Renaissance, and who am I reimagined? What do I want to keep from the pandemic? What do I want to change? What do I want to go back to? And so tapping into that we looked at this is what we're doing with the Escalade. It's the Escalade reimagined. And what is that Renaissance look like? And I love the story. I didn't know this until we were going through this campaign, but Seema Lu actually used to be an accountant at Deloitte and he got laid

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Ben Kaplan  14:51

off just as context for see me Lou Canadian actor kind of in the Marvel Universe, I think was recently in the Barbie movie I want to say As background, I had no idea that he was an accountant. I had

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  15:03

no idea either. And so he took that moment in his life and said, Who am I going to be moving forward? Like, what does my future look like? And now here, we know him as a Marvel actor, and not at all as as his previous life. So I think that was like quite a reimagination. And so in the film that we have for Escalade SEMO tells his story. And then we talk about the reimagination of the Escalade. So I think just to to answer that, it's that inner connection, where we really see that embodiment of the brand and where we are. And I love the beauty of people telling their stories that aligns with where the Cadillac story is,

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Ben Kaplan  15:41

it's interesting to think about this idea of sort of reimagination as the hook right now, just because you're sort of like, trying to go from like, where you are to where you want to go. And it's a transitional time. And it sort of makes sense to embrace that, because you're sort of neither here nor there. And brands sometimes have difficulty because you're like, particularly iconic brands have to honor the legacy can't just do anything crazy. But we clearly need to evolve, right world is evolving, we need to do it. So that's an interesting one on just sort of like embracing moments of transition as the creative underpinning of this.

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  16:19

Yeah, I love the way you put that, again, it's been really interesting as we go through our brand, whatever we want to call it evolution into Evie, what's been so interesting to me is the DNA that exists in Cadillac, and the fact that we don't have to completely change, or transform. And what's actually really helped me guide us through this is to lean into our history and to understand where we came from. This is something I've talked about before, it's one of my favorite things as we were going through this, this process of figuring out what was the brand going to be moving forward, we stopped and asked ourselves the question, if Cadillac disappeared from the world, what would be missing? It's so simple, and so powerful? And the answer when you say it is very obvious. It's an American icon. And it's a symbol of the American dream. And I think that plays into this whole conversation we've just had about, who does Cadillac appeal to? And what is it and so to understand that that's where we've always lived in the in the fabric of American history. And as a brand. It's just really interesting. And I think that it helps that, that we, as a brand are just leaning into who we are. And I think just as you said, in this process, we're transitioning, and it's, you know, it's not a like full stop turnaround. It's not a revolution, it's not any of those things, it's really a transition into our next phase, but being true to who we are

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Ben Kaplan  17:47

interesting things about pre pandemic area, how Cadillac would market tell me if these type of things that that was, I think, unique to the brand you still do or would do. Like, for instance, I remember seeing, you know, Cadillac had a program, and I would see it show up in places where you just have like a fleet of Cadillacs that would show up at like, festivals or events or things would offer rides, I remember like, you know, seeing that, like show up at Art Basel or seeing that show up in other places. And you sort of seemed present at a lot of places where trends were forming and influencers were and things like that. And I hadn't seen another car company do that in the same kind of way that Cadillac was doing it, do those kind of programs still have a place where Cadillac is doing? Or have you, as part of the reimagining reimagined some of those things that we had seen it maybe for for a few years before the pandemic?

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  18:32

I feel like, I'm going to answer that two ways. But first of all, I love that you notice that? That was exactly what the strategy was. And I'm really glad that that came through to you. Obviously, during the pandemic, all of that stopped. And right now, I think we still love that strategy. And we're looking at where and how we can be in places. And also, I think, struggling with exactly what the medium mix is going to be and where we're going to, you know, as we're trying to move into Eevee. And we don't yet have fleets of EVs. So where are we going to show up? And how and so you know, like, for instance, you'll see that at the US Open, and we're looking at where are the other places where we can really do that. And it makes sense right now talk

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Ben Kaplan  19:15

about the genesis of the Time Square takeover for an hour that's happening now about to happen. Where does that sort of come from? And because you have this sort of ethos of being bold? How does that kind of fit into the kinds of activations and you must have a lot of opportunities, and people probably come to you with a lot, a lot of ideas. How do you choose what's going to be sort of a Cadillac moments particular launch moment and what's not

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  19:39

for this one, I think, because we were doing the reveal in New York, we wanted something that felt bespoke to New York and was a very New York moment. And we really wanted to make an impact that was scalable, so you know, you don't want to do something that's going to just live in one place. And so we've done a total Take over the digital billboards within Time Square, and you'll be able to see it on our social, we're gonna have a lot of video, so you'll be able to receive this within social channels. But there will be a moment where Time Square will, the billboards will go dark. It'll be right at dusk. And then we'll have a video that starts in the video starts in black and white. And it's talking about what we've been talking about reinvention versus reimagination. And it says you can't reinvent the wheel. But you can reimagine it. And then we start moving into the color world of escalate IQ. So you'll go from this gray scale video into like, color. And it'll really be a moment and wherever you'll new look, you'll be seeing Escalade IQ, and then that's something that we're filming. And then we can reuse that in a lot of places. So it gave us the opportunity to really be present in New York, but then also to share that moment in, in wherever and whatever ways that either our customers are advocates or we want to what

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Ben Kaplan  21:05

it sounds like just hearing you describe that, that color is going to play an important role. How are you kind of marking with color? And I'm sort of picturing because when you think of an Escalade, as it's often a black Escalade, you think of the fleet of black Escalades and I don't know if this started with the product team, and like, hey, we can change up the colors a bit here, we can do something. Or if that's a collaboration of product and marketing, in some senses, you can say, Okay, what signifies reimagination? Like, oh, let's reimagine something that we thought was only looks a certain way, and it doesn't. How does that start? And how does color and marketing with color play a role?

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  21:39

Again, as we look at the journey that we've been on for a year and a half, one of the key things was redoing our visual identity. And another kind of an interesting moment for me was, I thought that we were leaning into color and using color vehicles, in our marketing, and when we put everything up on a board, and we put it versus the competition and, and looked at everything, we were not color, we weren't standing out, we were kind of in the sea of sameness. And one of Cadillacs, core values is bold. So as you were saying, like it goes, engineering, design, marketing, everything about the brand, the people who are advocates of the brand bold is just a key tenant for them. One of my favorite examples of this is, if you're driving down the road at night, and there's a Cadillac that is driving that will come up next to you, you immediately know with those vertical headlights in the stance of that car, it's a Cadillac. It's just this bold presence on the road. And so yes, we did when we were looking at redoing the visual identity, we work very closely with design. And we said what is the mood and feeling and boldness of Cadillac, and it's really about color. And we're just leaning into what color is and does. And so if you look at the evolution of our advertising, and especially, I think, right in the name of it, we had the colors of emotion campaign that we did with labyrinth for the lyric. And so there was the red spot, and the gold spot. And so if as you look at what the color looks like, as we're moving through and with Escalade, you'll see the color as well. And I think when you think about Time Square, it's so important, right? Because as you look around, and all the stimulation that you get from Time Square, it's really about color.

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Ben Kaplan  23:26

And it's also interesting to think about campaigns, would that involve product and marketing, we're really color was important, I think one that I think of as a lot of what is interesting thinking about what Apple did, and really whether it was the iMac later on the iPhone, where Apple has a certain sort of minimalist kind of Zen like grayscale black quality to it. And yet, for a brand like that actually, color becomes these flagpole moments that signify something else. And is there a way of reimagining a device that stands out? I don't know if if there was any inspiration from there are others but the brands were color became really important in launching a line or a product. I think Apple is a great example.

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  24:08

Yeah, I think there wasn't one an apple wasn't one specifically that we were looking at. But I think we did look at a lot of brands to see the personas that they were projecting and how they were using color or not. And I have a ton of respect for Apple's branding is like just, it's incredible, right? What they've been able to do and how you just know when something is Apple is you go through Cadillacs history, especially early on when most of the vehicles were coachbuilt through the history of just having a lot of bold color. It's another thing that just is really about our brand. And if you know if you're going to be bold colors, a very good way to put that forward. So

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Ben Kaplan  24:47

what is distinctive about Cadillacs, marketing, what have you seen in in your career that is different about how are unique and how Cadillac approaches marketing aside from some of the modeling work you're doing? Yeah,

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  24:59

I think The biggest thing right now is that we are working on it. And hopefully it's coming through being recognizable as Cadillac. So when you see a Cadillac ad when you see the rising steps on the crest, and hear the music coming through, and then you know, it goes from the black and white of the crest into this colorful world that that you feel Cadillac. And so I think that's really the thing that we're trying to set apart as a brand into make be Cadillac.

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Ben Kaplan  25:34

If we have eight seconds to keep the attention of our desired audience, how can we communicate complex messages in such a short amount of time? One answer is with the use of symbols for Cadillac. If you want to communicate that the brand is for the bold, you can use bold colors to make that crystal clear at a glance. For one of top agencies one clients for instance, we use the fact that a vineyard was horse plowed, instead of machine plowed to symbolize the brand's attention to detail and historic roots. So if symbolism is a shortcut to more complex messages, how can you be more symbolic in your own marketing? Simply put, think, visually, If a picture is worth 1000 words, finding the right picture can distill your message in ways that words alone cannot be. What's next? Are there other channels you're exploring? Are you playing around in the metaverse? Are you trying other channels? What are you trying? And maybe how much of your budget is like, Let's experiment versus how much of it is tried and true. This is what moves the needle for us.

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  26:49

I do the budget percent fluctuates a little bit, but we do try to do a lot ourselves. I will say that I'm always someone who likes to be looking at where are the trends going? What are the new things and how can we sort of play in that space? A few years ago, it was about VR. And what would happen if we put headsets and dealers and could we pull people into the Cadillac world? I think what we've seen is that VR is really going to be AR Right? Like it's not this this like interruptive experience isn't going to be at and so and tying into that same thing that Metaverse both we Cadillac and we GM have done a few things within the metaverse where I think we'll end up with the metaverse is taking the technology that creates these immersive experiences and pulling that into something that's not the meta versus we think about it today. So how do I give someone a more immersive, interesting shopping experience? How can I layer AI into that to have a personal experience with someone that feels more real? We also have something called Cadillac Live, which is actually one way video chat with a person in a studio with Cadillac vehicles. And you could ask them anything, it's sort of like a personal auto show over zoom. And that's just right off our website. So we're always looking at what the trends are, I think the big one we're all talking about right now is AI, and what is that going to mean? And there's so many different places in automotive that that can go all the way from how a search gonna fundamentally change to what is by shopping experience. If I have an AI virtual assistant to how does the car predict more of our needs, we call it pre response. So when the car becomes more intuitive when the car is not responding to you, but anticipating you, we call it pre response. And AI really kind of helps that. So I think that's one that's very fascinating to us. And we're really looking into across a lot of channels. Because

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Ben Kaplan  28:53

the ethos is sort of being bold. Is that fun? As a CMO? Does that give you more like license to then try stuff do stuff? We're just we're just being bold. That's what we're supposed to be doing?

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  29:04

Do you want to funny? I've never thought of it that way. But I'm totally stealing that from you, Ben.

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Ben Kaplan  29:09

Please, please do I

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  29:11

have to do you do things? We are both Cadillac. I love that. No, I think I personally love to be in that new space. I think it's the way that you learn is the way you grab people's attention. Right? If you'd like I always like love thinking back. And I'll take myself here. But like remember the first banner ads and how exciting it was that you could click on something and go somewhere. And now we have banner blindness, right? And if you think about the first Facebook infeed ads, and like that was such a new transformative thing. As you get into all this new things. It allows you to engage with people in a different way before they've sort of you know, gotten whatever, you know, from banner blindness to whatever else it is. It gives you a unique moment to connect with people. And we're going to be bold because we're Cadillac. I'd

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Ben Kaplan  29:58

love to kind of learn more prizes are interesting things about Cadillac cuz it's a brand a lot people know, we talked about very much would expect, like you said the job title like the CEO or the entrepreneur would maybe like a Cadillac, is there a surprising insight and they're just something you don't expect that some kind of interesting target that you've played around with, or some kind of quality that we wouldn't immediately associate that you've leaned into a little bit?

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  30:19

Actually, I do have one that was super interesting. We found out like, you know, golf tennis index really high. That all makes perfect sense, right? One thing that we found out that index really high for Cadillac is culinary interests. That was a big surprise for me. Like, why would? Why would that specifically have anything, the Cadillac, and it was an interesting one. And I love the thinking that comes out of things. So when we were launching lyric, the team came to me and said, well, culinary is indexing really high up. So it's one of the highest things. And I said, that's great. I just don't know what you do with that with a car. Because we're out, we always need to talk like things need to make sense, you need to give people a reason to engage. Well, we actually did something called the electric kitchen with lyric. And we worked with two Michelin chefs, had them take inspiration from the Lyric, and create this whole bespoke meal and experience it was in, in LA at vespertine. And it was a very cool experience where you went through and had the food now that again, if like we're talking about with Time Square, but to a much smaller thing. There's only so many people you can get through that. So we actually partnered with and we've done a few of these, we partnered with 62nd Doc's and created two mini documentaries that talked about the food and the car and why they took inspiration from these things. And they went viral they like they did, they did really well. So that was when I think that was Timmy. Such a surprise that not only did that exist, but that we found a way to create a connection with millions of people. Through that

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Ben Kaplan  32:01

it's interesting when those happen. And it's interesting that I sometimes feel that like market research and like being on the front lines of it ought to be a little bit more closely connected with like, It's closer than it with marketing in terms of like you get you you build your personas, you build your use cases, it's kind of the foundation, right, and you go do stuff. But sometimes you get an insight that just like leads you straight to campaign or something else. That's just interesting. I'll give an example we did. We've done a lot of work for Budweiser. And one of the things that came out for some of the market research, we did that, like if you're drinking a Budweiser versus you're drinking a Heineken, the Budweiser person is going to be chatted up more at the bar. There's some advantages, like you're approachable. And this is important because Budweiser is genuine and authentic is important for their brand position. So in Budweiser is mind it's a que you're drinking a Heineken, you're trying a little bit too hard to be cool. Maybe people won't chat with you quite as much. But if you drinking a bud, people are going to come up to you, you're down to earth, you can chat. So that led itself to a whole campaign that was about like, what does your drink, say about you? What are you communicating based on what you do? That was a successful campaign that we did, but it was like, we sort of skipped all the steps. It wasn't just Market Research Foundation, let's just like jump to a campaign. And sometimes you get those insights. And it sounds like that's what you had around the culinarian. Site.

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  33:16

Yeah. And I love that example that you just gave. And if I think back to like my college days of drinking Budweiser that was very true, open and chatty, but I love that example. That's a great look.

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Ben Kaplan  33:30

And is there any skills or capabilities as a marketer, as a marketing department that you hope to have moving forward? I mean, one of the challenges like making data communicate with each other, you're like, Oh, we can we have the potential to almost do this with the data. We can't quite yet we're missing a few pieces to make this where you had an either either on the data side, or other marketing skills and tools that you hope to be there in one, two or three years able to do something that you can't do now. I think

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Melissa Grady Dias - Cadillac  33:58

something that we're struggling with, that everyone's struggling with right now is as and I think that it's a really good thing. And I think we're moving into a better era of marketing. There's a lot of smart people thinking about this. But as we're moving from cookies to identity, and then trying to figure out, how do we better measure, one of the things that I think will be an output of this and something I'm very excited about is as we start to really understand our target, and we start to really understand who we're reaching, we can redefine reach and frequency. And so instead of to me where I want reach and frequency to be as instead of, you know, we've reached 80% of the people, on average three times to say, here are the people that we've reached, here's where we have a gap in our reach. And so here's the ways that we're going to engage with people. And I think that the tools that we're developing and the way that we're looking at things are going to really help us so that we have better more real connections across the ecosystem, so I'm really excited about it.

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Ben Kaplan  35:12

According to Melissa Grady Dias when it comes to iconic brands, the best strategy is to reimagine them, rather than reinvent them during times of transition. to embark on this reimagination start with the data, how well do you know the preferences, interests and even hobbies of your customers? Next, find the hidden truth was in your brand. While Cadillac's roots were once a symbol of success and goal attainment, how has that evolved into an entrepreneurial vision in modern times? Finally, make your marketing not only address your customer questions, but anticipate them. There's great power in answering questions, but even more power in knowing the questions without your customer even having to ask for TOP CMO. I'm Ben Kaplan.

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