NOTABLE SPEAKER QUOTES:
Byron Allen, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Allen Media Group. Chairman and CEO, Buzzfeed.
In conversation with DPAA President & CEO Barry Frey.
On a question about owning late night: There are six shows in late night, and they’re all excellent. And you have Jimmy Fallon, the Tonight Show, which gave birth to me. I was the youngest comedian to do the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I was 18 years old. And yeah … that was four years ago. And so you have Jimmy Fallon, and after him, we have Seth Meyers. They are very talented. And on ABC, you have Jimmy Kimmel. And then you have Saturday Night Live. There are six shows and I have two of the six shows. I have Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen, my favorite comedian. That’s 11:35 on CBS, 11:35 to 12:35. And then after that a comedy game show that I created called Funny You Should Ask. For every question, there’s a funny answer. And that’s 12:35 to 1:35. So there are six shows in late night. I need all six shows to do well so advertisers see it as a viable time period. I am rooting for all of them. I don’t want any of them to hurt, diminish, go away, because our strength is in our unity and all of us doing well. If I’m only, you know, if I’m the only two shows there, ad dollars will evaporate and go to out out-of-home, which is great for all of you. [Laughter]
On Gladys Knight, 2Pac, Suge Knight and the importance of competition: Let me tell you something, that is the absolute truth, because as a comedian … I was opening for Gladys Knight … and I’m walking through the front of the show, right? Because I like to see the audience before I go on … and I see 2Pac Shakur and Suge Knight standing there, and they were really upset. And I walked up to them and I said, “Hey, what’s going on? Let me introduce myself.” And they said, “We’re here with our moms. We’re trying to take our mothers to see Gladys Night for Mother’s Day.” And I said, “You’re in luck.” I said, “I have a booth, it’s front, I’m opening for her, and as a comedian, I have a booth, it’s front and center, and I’m not using it. And you bring your mothers, you sit in my booth, you get drinks on me, and after the show, I’ll take you backstage to meet Gladys.” And they were like, “Whoa!” And I go, “Yeah, whoa!” And they’re like, “What’s your angle?” “No angle, have a booth, come on.”
So I put them in my booth, we’re walking backstage, I take them backstage, I take them uh to go see Gladys … and 2Pac’s mom and Suge’s mom and Suge were in front of me, and 2Pac was behind me, and he tapped me on the shoulder, and he said to me, “Byron, is Gladys going to be cool with me?” I go, “Cool with you? What do you mean?” She goes, “You know, my stuff is all b****s and hos …” I go, “Yeah, she’s going to be all right. She’s not going to judge you like that.” And he said to me, “Yeah, my audience likes being tough,” because he had gotten into a fight. And I said, “You know what, man, I love you, you know, I don’t want you to get into a fight, and you don’t want other rappers to go away. You want all the rappers to succeed, because if they all succeed here in industry, if it’s just you, you’re a freak show. You don’t want to be a freak show. You want to love and support them all.”
And I remember saying that to him, and then shortly after that, he was unfortunately taken away. I think it’s important that we work together and we build the platform. That’s so, yes. [Applause] You know, I’m really blessed. I’m beyond blessed.
On his origin story: You know what, look, I’m a 65-year-old overnight sensation. [Laughter] I started doing stand-up comedy when I was 14 … Jimmy Walker was the hottest, biggest comedian on the planet. He was on Good Times, number one show, blah blah blah, and he goes, “You know, do you want to come over here and write with my boys?” And I and I go, “Let me ask my mom.” [Laughter] And so Jimmy goes, “Oh, my god, he has to ask his mom!” And then I hear this guy in the background, he goes, “Tell his mom not to worry, we will have cookies and milk for him.” [Laughter] And so Dave said, and Jimmy goes, “Dave, be nice, be nice, you’re going to scare the kid.” So, my mom says yes. I go to Jimmy’s apartment, I walk into his apartment, it’s summer ’75, I’m 14, and sitting in his apartment is Jimmy Walker, the biggest TV star in the world, and a guy named David Letterman, who had just driven out from Indianapolis in a red pickup truck because he didn’t think he was going to make it. He wanted to get back in his truck and drive home. A guy named Jay Leno, who was sleeping in his car … And so I sat there and I started writing jokes with these guys, and I’m writing and I’m pitching. I kept writing and performing, and I ended up doing the Tonight Show with Johnny and I was 18. And that opened the doors to me.
Now, that’s show business, but I quickly learned that it’s not show business, it’s business show, and I said, “I have to learn the business side of show business, if I’m going to sustain and be in this business.” … I’d start 6:00 a.m. I start calling TV stations and I kept rolling phone calls until 9:00 at night. And I did that five days a week and performed at night on the weekends. I would go out and do clubs so I can pay the bills. And I kept putting one show on and another and another … I just never stop smiling and dialing and producing and keep going. It was like it was systematic.
On his plans for Local Now and Buzzfeed: [I invested] over $150 million to reposition [Local Now]. The reason I did that is because I had been in a meeting with Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, and I asked him what keeps him up at night. And he said, “YouTube.” And I said, “YouTube?” He said, “Yeah, Byron, they start delivering premium content for free, how do I get people paying me XYZ a month?” And so when they told me about Local Now, I said, “Okay, we’re not going to charge $4.99 a month, Barry doesn’t want to pay for $4.99 a month, we’re going to make it free,” and I went to all my buddies who run studios and I said, “Give me any movies on a rev share basis,” so we have over 30,000 movies, TV shows, and documentaries there for free, and we put 780 FAST channels, including approximately 400 ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox affiliates providing their local news. So we’ve tapped into about $10 billion in newsroom infrastructure, and we put it all at Local Now, and I said this is the future in the palm of your hands, and when January 6 happened, our traffic went straight up because people were out and about, away from their TVs, they went to their cell phones, and they watched January 6 live on their phone …
No one knows about Local Now. I go, “How could they have this amazing technology, one-of-one, phenomenal, game-changer, it’s free.” I said, “… you don’t have the greatest brand name.” So that’s why I bought BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed’s been around 20 years. BuzzFeed is BuzzFeed … it’s spectacular, it’s global. It has over 500 million social media followers, 100 million monthly engagement, 3 billion content views a month. 75% of all millennials. I said, “We’re going to rebrand Local Now, BuzzFeed, and we’re going to make it BuzzFeed TV.”
BuzzFeed’s publicly traded, so I went and bought 50 million shares, I control like 57% of the company, and the market cap is … $100 million … YouTube’s doing about 45 billion a year in ad [and a banker told me] “If it were separately publicly traded, it would work well over a trillion.” And I said, “You don’t have to tell me that once.” [Laughter]
I said, “I’m going to use BuzzFeed to chase a trillion dollars, and I’m going to make BuzzFeed another streamer, because YouTube is phenomenal, but 99% of what sits in YouTube is not exclusive.” [Advertisers] want to foster competition, so I’m here helping foster competition. But YouTube’s on track to write up 45 to 50 billion in advertising. It’s growing 13% a year, and if we own 2% of that, that’s a billion dollars. I’m telling you, a billion dollars and buy you a private jet.
The two greatest words in media, free and streaming, nothing will beat it.
We’re highly acquisitive, we’re looking to buy other companies and grow this, and we want to grow. [To the audience] If you want to sell, talk to us. We want to grow this, we want data, we want direct to consumer, it’s global. We’re bringing in, we’re going to make it more global events, heavy emphasis on music, heavy emphasis on comedy, heavy emphasis on news.
On change: Albert Einstein said that the very definition of intelligent life is that it can adapt. We have to adapt. For example, I love all of these changes, I love, you know, the new opportunities, and so I I’m just getting, I’ve never been happier since I quit my paper route uh 50 years ago, and I’m like, “Okay, I can’t think of anything better to do than chasing a trillion dollars.” That is what I want to do for the rest of my life.
On education: Education’s everything, that’s what we have to do. We’re a small little tribe, America. We’re only 330 million out of the global population of about 8 billion, that’s rapidly leading to 10 billion, and as we get closer to 10 billion, we don’t have enough resources to support the 5 billion, so we have to make sure our tiny little tribe, our American tribe, of only 330 million people, is at the top of that pyramid, and we can’t stay at the top of that pyramid unless we make sure everybody is fully engaged, educated. Don’t [have to] worry about food and security [or] being homeless. So I want to make sure we do whatever we can as a company to not only, you know, you know, just grow our business, but do good while we’re growing it. And so I said, let’s use our resources to really grow, you know, education in America by supporting HBCU sports and getting capital.
On the Skydance/Warner Bros. merger: I understand there are folks who are saying, you know, we have to get bigger, we have to have scale. I appreciate the markets. The mergers, unfortunately, have created a lot of layoffs. And I’ve used that as an opportunity to recruit talent that I never thought I would have access to. [For example the former] head of ad sales for Warner Media, and she did about a billion a year for their syndication division. She’s one of the best hires I’ve ever made because one thing I never think about are ad sales in syndication. I’ve been able to hire, I don’t know, a dozen, two dozen of some of the best executives that have been laid off by some of the best media companies in the world. And it’s the gift that keeps on giving. And I’m sitting around waiting to see what’s going to come out of this next version. I’m hiring. They’re laying off, and I’m hiring. And I’m like, keep giving me great executives because my business is growing because I’m able to hire the best of the best, and they’re phenomenal.
On support for Black-owned media: [In a speech at Stanford University, MLK said] there are two Americas. One America has access to opportunity, education, and economic inclusion. We must provide that for every American, every American, or else you have two Americas, and two Americas will not survive, America will implode unless we all have engagement.
He was a great prophet, and he taught us that the greatest trade deficit in America is the trade deficit between white America and Black America, and between America and women. Women, I’m a firm believer that these are the groups that are excluded when it comes to economic inclusion. Now, I can’t speak on behalf of women because I’m not a woman, but I can speak on behalf of Black people because … some of my best friends are Black. [Laughter]
So what I said to get the conversation going is this trade deficit where you take a lot of money out of our community, but don’t do business with Black-owned media, isn’t right. And I just called them on it. And by the way, most advertisers said, “Thank you, thank you for showing us the way to make it better. Thank you for showing us how we should be better as community leaders.” And it was a conversation that had to be had. And I’m glad we have it, but I haven’t had that conversation in a while. So, I’m glad we have it, because you have to survive. We’re watching too many voices go away and we don’t have a real democracy unless all of our voices are heard and widely distributed.
About engaging consumers: I invested about a billion dollars buying ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox affiliates. Really, it was ironic. I ended up owning some of the TV stations who would hang up on me when I called them. And uh now we’re selling. We’re selling them because, you know, the technology allows us to go direct to the consumer. And uh you know, so that’s going well so we can reinvest and we can go direct to the consumer, whether it is on digital platforms or out of home. The consumer is everywhere, and you have to give them content; the technology has zero value unless we have content and stories that engage them, that pulls them in, because once we engage them, then they can then we can sell whatever they want.
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Anthony Scaramucci, Former White House Communications Director; Founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital; Author of All the Wrong Moves.
In conversation with DPAA President & CEO Barry Frey.
On (now former) White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia’s first press conference: When Trump shits on me on Twitter, he says [I had the job for] 11 days. … Anybody see this woman’s press conference today? There’s a chance she can beat my record. I mean, I’m sitting there and I go, uh oh. Right now she’s lasting 1/11th of a Scaramucci. They were like sharks on this poor woman today. And the minute she looked at her notes to read from, she was dead, you can’t do that. When you get fired like that, you don’t take it personally. It’s politics.
On the 2016 Trump election victory: I mean, people probably don’t remember this, but I worked on the campaign for 10 months. And then when we won, I was one of 16 people on the executive transition team … and by the way, none of us thought we were winning, including President Trump, back in 2016, and so we literally had nothing done for the preparation of the transition. If Trump knew this, he’d be super upset with me, but I took all the personnel records from the Romney campaign and I brought them to Trump Tower, the day after we won, because I knew we were so far behind, we ended up staffing most of Trump 1 with what would have been Romney’s personnel decision in 2016, right? Probably would get pissed about that.
On managing during the first Trump term: What I would say is that it’s impossible to manage in a situation like that, so you don’t even try to manage it, I think. What you’re really trying to do is reduce whatever the potential harm is that, you know, one of the big jokes in Trump’s first administration is we were always going to have infrastructure week … the president said he was going to fix the Medicare situation, Obamacare, Medicare situation, and so I’m going to have a plan for you in two weeks. That’s nine years later … I want to be fair to him. I think most Americans appreciate what his second administration did on the border, because if you look at the 12, 13 million people crossing the border illegally, it puts a tremendous amount of pressure on lower and middle-income people in the United States. And ywhether you’re a conservative or you’re a Democrat, Milton Friedman would tell you if you have a welfare state, you have to protect the border because market forces dictate that more people will come into the country and participate in the welfare state, right? … I think what’s happening now though is that he’s cut back on legal immigration, which I think is a problem … because we need that for labor, we need that for intellectual capital, including technology and so forth.
On his decision to work for Trump: I think it was the stupidest decision of my career, potentially my life, to go work for President Trump. Uh, my wife certainly didn’t want him to work there. She hates Trump almost as much as Melania …
I made an ego-based and pride-based decision. I grew up in blue-collar neighborhood, I went to Tufts and Harvard Law School, I worked at Goldman, I built up successful businesses, and now I get a chance to work for the American president, and I was trying to fit a round peg and put it in a square hole or vice versa.
On his first (and only) press conference: I thought it went well, but there were Republican operatives that called me and said, hey, you can’t talk like that anymore, you can’t speak that directly from the White House, you’re frankly telling people too many truths, you can’t do that, you got to talk away from the White House where people turn the television off, not raise the volume on the television. And so, that was the warning shot number one for me.
If you think you’re having a bad week, and if you don’t have cancer, you should call me … I got my ass fired from the White House, my wife filed for divorce on me, I missed the birth of my son, all those comedy shows that you’re talking about were lighting me up like a Christmas tree. Bill Hader played me on Saturday Night Live … they couldn’t bring in Alec Baldwin?
On publicist Howard Bragman’s advice: You should leave the United States and you should buy yourself a villa in Tuscany and disappear for five years and come back sometime in 2024.
On a third Trump term: … anything can happen in our country, I think we know that, and I think that if you had a 50-year-old Donald Trump with 55% of poll ratings, I think it’s a different story. [He’d] probably try to wreck the Constitution and challenge it.
But an 82 year old with [an approval rating of] 30%, and that is 6 points below Hoover at the depths of the Depression, it’s 7 points below Richard Nixon, two days before he resigned, so these are historic lows … I think it would be super tough for him.
On what Trump does next: Donald Trump’s moves are pretty basic: pardon his family members, pardon himself, to cause a controversy at the Supreme Court … he’s not dying, guys, because only the good die young.
The three wrong moves we’ve made that led to today: When we allowed China to come into the world trade organization, [it was] understandable that we did that, but we never checked China, and so when they grew to the size of say Germany, they still had the same treatment in the WTO like the Dominican Republic … they became an economic superpower on our watch, and we thought they would open their market to us, it turned out that they didn’t. The second one was we went to war in Afghanistan, in Iraq, we cut taxes two times … the expectations were we were out of those wars in months [but it was] two decades, two tax cuts, and it and it led to two massively disastrous wars for the United States, and we put $3 trillion on our credit card, guys, which is 20% of our national debt, but that also set the trajectory for the current deficits. The last big mistake … [the book is non-partisan and about] good people who are well-intended, care about the country, are making decisions, are expecting certain outcomes and they get different outcomes … when we gave the money to the banks, we left no money for lower and middle-income people … 5,000 people at the banks in the year they got the bailout, made a million dollars or more … just the optics of that has a tremendous amount of anger, which led to the populism that we have now.
What Trump will do if Democrats gain power during the midterms: If you like what he’s doing, you’re going to be super happy because he’s going to be doing more of what he’s doing in an exponential way, I mean, he’s going to look to probably take $10 to $15 billion for himself and his family … it’ll be almost impossible for them to stop a war or to stop another war … They could block the purchase of diesel from Russia … I think Scott Bessent [is] calling other countries saying, let’s see if we can sell that diesel to you, because remember, the Secretary of Treasury doesn’t have presidential immunity, so if he buys the diesel and he’s breaking the 2022 legislation put in place to … block those imports from Russia, then he’s actually breaking the law, and that could be a big issue for him unless the President decides to pardon him.
On Trump’s relationship with Putin: He’s compromised. He’s basically a cipher for Vladimir Putin, he sold out, and there’s a reason … Yeah, there’s definitely reasons and they got him, and they got him shit scared, and if you look at the, if you really want to read a great book, you can read Catherine Belton’s book called Putin’s People, and in the book, she describes when Putin has a hold on you … there’s 15 things in the book, Trump is 15 for 15. Threatened democracy, go after our allies, disparage our morality, you know, we’re no better than them, they kill people, we kill people, you go right down the list.
On Democratic Socialists: Probably the best thing that Trump had going … the Democratic Socialists are missing the culture of what’s going on in the United States.
[Listen to AOC who] took her pronoun designations off her Twitter feed and her other social media feeds after the election in 2024, she also said three weeks ago, “woke one” was crazy.
There were 10 boys that transitioned and played women’s sports in high school in 2024. Donald Trump spent $300 million on that issue … so he took a very minor issue, 10 people out of 330 million people, and he made it into a cause celeb for culture, so the DSA, you know, they work here in New York, but it’s not going to work here in the [parts of the] country that they need.
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Radhika Duggal, CMO, Major League Soccer
A conversation with Nicole Estebanell, U.S. CEO, Hearts United (part of Omnicom Media)
On the ‘Thanks World. We’ll take it from here’ post-World Cup campaign: Well, we see opportunity kind of in two places in the funnel and really across the funnel itself. First, the upper funnel awareness … The World Cup was an incredible awareness and interest building opportunity for us. We had 45 players in the World Cup across 17 country teams. So, our job at Major League Soccer was to make sure every single person watching knew who our players were, the countries they were playing for, and the amazing work that they did on the pitch. And we put a team together to really focus on getting that message out through every channel we have: owned, operated, paid, earned, night after night, day after day.
So, that awareness and that interest was a really important job for us. But, awareness is like a flash in the pan. It goes away if you don’t do anything with that. And so, the second job was really figuring out how do you turn that awareness into actual fandom. Not just for the sport of soccer, which is great, but also for Major League Soccer, for our clubs, and our players. And that job of week-over-week, channel orchestration, marketing that doesn’t sort of cease match after match after match, is what we are still doing today. Taking that awareness that the World Cup got us and telling player stories, using connected campaigns to serve up the right message about the right player for the right customer.”
About this being the most ambitious marketing investment to date: I think there are a couple of things that were foundation setting that gave us the conviction to know this was the right thing to do. And by this, I mean a connected campaign that was largely ambitious, but coordinated across the league and clubs. It is 31 marketing teams all working in unison for this given moment. And by the way, our 30 club teams are so, so, so proud of their individuality. So, it wasn’t a small feat to convince us all to work together. But, we did it because we knew this would be the most crowded media market ever. We didn’t have a hope of breaking through unless we all went together. We did it, and, and one of the things that gave me the most conviction was getting to know over the last two and a half years, the brilliant club CMOs that I have the pleasure and opportunity to work with. Once I started to meet with and learn from and realize who those folks are and the passion and the conviction and the intelligence that they had, it was no question that we should partner together.”
On measurement: The league had spent the prior two years building the analytics and the technology to make sure that we can measure … to make sure we can make smart decisions, we can optimize on the fly, and we can measure the outcomes and learn for the future.
We’re measuring the outcome, particularly on viewership and on ticket sales, which are our two sort of most significant KPIs.
On risk: Anytime you’re doing something for the first time, it feels like a bet, and I’ll have to admit, some of the bets we made worked well, and some of the bets we didn’t … If there’s a marketer that tells you that everything they are doing is successful, they are lying.
I think one really good example of a bet we made, that we’re measuring the success and outcome of, is we said for the first time in our league’s history, we, at the league, are going to help any clubs who wanted to sign up for us to make their brand spot. So, their creative that they would then put paid media behind and put out into the market. I thought, you know, a couple of clubs might sign up for that [but] 15 clubs signed up … We are typically responsible for making one 30 or 60-second asset, coming up with a paid media plan that is national and putting that out into the world. For the World Cup, we made 16 of those.
On budgets: We don’t have endless amounts of budgets. We have to be really, really smart about how we’re investing and where we’re choosing to invest.
Local vs. national: I think the first thing about that is, this is a mindset shift, right? As a league marketer, you’re not trying to build people who are fans of Major League Soccer. You’re trying to create the ability for our clubs and our players to really shine, because fans become fans of clubs and players first, not necessarily of the league first. And then if you go with that premise … the conversation becomes pretty easy. We made a decision very early on that every opportunity we could have to highlight the local club, we would … Creative were all about the local club, their stadium, their player, their fans … Fan fests and watch parties in partnership with Fox and FIFA that took place in many of our local markets … didn’t say MLS anywhere. We had a lot of communications programs, particularly with the local Fox affiliates. It wasn’t about the league. Our local clubs showed up on those Fox affiliate programs with their coaches and their players and told their stories.
Learnings: The biggest learning, I think, for me through this process is, what makes a consumer a fan is a player and a club.So, we got to lead all the way into that and take ourselves, if, if needed, sort of out of the picture and be the vehicle that drives them for clubs.
If you think about soccer celebration, a big fan fest where you can show up as a consumer for free and, and watch a match, those in-person activations are all about the club and all about the local community. The vendors that are showing up to serve food, for example, the entertainment opportunities that are available, those are all tailored to each local market. And because of that, they show up differently in each local market, and because of that, they really do appeal to fans.
Impact of sports: Sports and culture are so synonymous with each other. A core, core, core soccer fan is going to tune into an MLS match because they’re interested in the soccer on the pitch [or] their favorite player is playing. But all the people around them that are sitting next to them on the couch at home, or that someone brings to a stadium, they’re in it for the spectacle and the entertainment.”
Star players like Messi: We think about that star power, you know, how do you use that to build a relationship with MLS that lasts beyond someone’s interest in just one player? The reality is a star player peaks someone’s attention. And if we can find a way to then bring you back and serve you up more content about other players, well, what we found is that someone who falls in love with one player, we can broaden their interest to others. We serve them up very human stories about other players, who they are on the pitch, but importantly, who they are off the pitch. And that starts to pique folks’ interest, so that they broaden their interest. And over time, we can serve them up enough content that they, we, we believe they’re going to be interested in either watching a match on broadcast or attending a match in person. And we know when we get someone to experience a match, that’s the turning point … our product is second to none.
About emotion: Every product is the same … You have to identify a problem, you have to search for information, you have to evaluate alternatives, you make a choice, and then you decide after you’ve made the choice was it the right choice or not, essentially. And that sounds so, so, so rational and unemotional. But for every product, at each of those steps, it’s very much an emotional decision point at each of these.
We know that for Major League Soccer, it’s got to be about us proving to that consumer that this is the most fun and entertaining thing you can do with your time. We know that when consumers are making a choice about our products, it’s based on a player or a group of players that they’ve fallen in love with. We think those are the two primary things.”
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Craig Brommer, CMO, American Eagle Outfitters; Conversation with Stagwell Vice Chairman David Sable.
On Gen Z: I had a new piece of research that was placed on my desk a couple weeks ago from our friends at Harris, and I’ll give you a guess to what the three top purchase drivers of Gen Z are. Number one is friends, number two is mom, and number three is physical stores. And I bet if you use the same data 10, 20, 30, and more years ago, it would be the same thing … And so, for all of the news and all the hype around social media, AI, influencers, creators, all the things, you have three things driving my industry that probably were driving your industry, you know, many, many decades ago.
On mental health: We are facing a true mental health epidemic amongst Gen Z: loneliness, despair, anxiety, driven largely by screens, right? We see it in the data and we know that the counterbalance to that is a return to the real world.
On the return to malls: People are returning to malls in a very big way because they’re craving this community, interaction. It’s great news for American Eagle … For us, the call to action internally really has become, how do we become the happiest place in the mall? So that when you take the time to get in that car, take the time to pay those gas prices, take the time to pay those parking prices, that we’re going to be one of the very first stops on that journey that the results are, are there.”
On converting young consumers: We recently did some research to better understand how many touches it takes for our young customers to go ahead and convert. It’s about 30 touches. So think about that for a second … When I think about our marketing organization, the silos have been completely broken down. The media team is the media team. The social team is the social team. The insights team is the insights team. It’s not as if we’re operating in a physical world and a digital world, we’re operating in one world with one customer in mind.
What’s different today: [Consumers are on] their phones and saying, ‘I’m headed to the Aero store’ or ‘I’m going to see Beyoncé, I bought this outfit.’ Or they’re coming in and saying, ‘I noticed that this influencer was wearing this product, where can I buy it?’ So, the journey is different. The end result is the same, so many of them are actually converting in the physical store.
Leaning into culture: Campus culture is so important. Whether it was homecoming, whether it was rush, whether it was going back to school and outfit your dorm rooms, we lean into those. [It is] about coming together with these community events. Some of them are designed for brand building, some of them are designed to be commercial opportunities.”
About Sydney Sweeney: I am very comfortable and very confident that my marketing gravestone will now read, ‘Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.’
And the funny thing about this journey that my company was on, is the first four days of that campaign, and we were like the heroes of marketing … and the stock goes up 25% in the first couple of days. We have a record in customer acquisition, our jeans are flying off the shelf. This is going very, very well. I’m literally at home, I’m walking my youngest daughter, a high schooler, down to the kitchen to make her lunch, and she says ‘oh by the way, you’ve been cancelled on TikTok.’ … I called David, and I said, ‘David, I need some real intel.’ It turns out social media is not the truth.’ … The New York Times came out many months later and said that about 25% of the negativity was bot activity … a vast, vast, vast majority of Americans, cutting across gender, geography, ethnicity, cutting across anything, knew what the campaign was about, liked the campaign, thought it was cheeky and … was diametrically different than what social media was saying, and the mainstream press ultimately said.
On Trump’s comments: That Saturday night, I get a text that says the … New York Post, Page Six, is going to report that Sydney is registered as a Republican.
And of course that set off another complete storm, because the next night, the President commented on the campaign and on Sydney,from the tarmac in front of Air Force One and the next morning had a full-throated tweet, positive, around American Eagle and Sydney Sweeney … In the prior presidential election, guess what brand in America was the number one most bipartisan brand across all brands, not just in our industry: American Eagle.
Threats, deciding what to say, and the aftermath: Another thing that makes this interesting is that we are in a so-called quiet period, you know, a public company about to announce earnings, we can’t go out and say anything, and we just had so many bombs being dropped, you know, against us, the brand and myself … and my family, including my 80-year-old parents, were threatened. The FBI had to get involved, it was a hard … experience. And I think that there may have been three other CMOs that had gone through this, you know, maybe ever, but certainly in the last decade or so, and, fortunately, a number of them reached out.
Finally … the stock goes up 40% again, because … new customer acquisition that achieved record results and again, the business was booming … It’s crazy it’s been a year, and anytime anyone hears about American Eagle you can bet that they have a very strong opinion of the campaign.
About OOH: So, here we are, here we are with poor old Gen Z, where everybody thinks is just Loserville. And yet, we’re out there quite a lot. We’ve been 3D in Times Square, we’ve been on the Sphere, we’ve been all over the place … I think when you do big out-of-home it sets the precedent that this is an event, this is something you want to pay attention to. Homepage takeover, fine, social media … fine, but when you take out something that is larger than life, it sends a message that this is something I want you to pay attention to, this is something that it is meaningful, and in some cases, meaningful for culture. The day after, um, we did that one and only statement on our Sydney Sweeney has great jeans, we had in place a takeover of the Sphere. Now some people find, ‘Oh, my God, that’s the, that’s AE’s biggest F-you to the world, and, and here we go again.’ But the reality, it was placed many, many, many weeks before that in order to create moments. It wasn’t about the few thousand people that walk by the Sphere in Vegas, it was about creating noise inside of social media, etc. It was probably the single smartest out-of-home in the entire relationship. Because that thing was shared literally everywhere … we shot a 3D billboard of the same campaign … It was worth its weight in gold. And that’s not the only thing we’ve done. We’ve done a major takeover, some football stadiums, we’ve done major takeovers at music festivals. I think when, when you place out-of-home, you are making a case that this is an event that your customer base, your industry should pay attention to. And I don’t think anything else does that out there. Even to this day, I know social media can’t do this, I know that TV can’t do it, but only out-of-home can do that.
About artificial intelligence: I’m going to talk out of both sides of my mouth, because on the one hand … every good story needs an enemy, and the best marketers, and the best brands are the best storytellers … Young Gen Z, Gen Alpha, as well, is excited, but also terrified about what AI is doing, especially to, to their jobs.
On the flip side, AI has created an opportunity from a content creation perspective that is unbelievably exciting. For our brand, what we have said so far to ourselves is we will do the AI content creation around overt humor, like it will be very, very obvious that this has been created for AI, it’s fun, and people love you. We put jorts on the Statue of Liberty … So, I think there’s going to be a balancing act going forward that, that the enemy that is AI, there’s some truth in that, and then also the amazing opportunity for all of us to create content that isn’t probably achievable, whether budget, or whether time, or whether, you know, logistically.
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Jochen Koedijk, CMO, Expedia Group; Conversation with Screenverse Co-founder and CEO David Weinfeld.
On social media: I’m from the Netherlands originally, we live in Seattle. My wife is from Thailand, so we go to a lot of places … My wife loves Reels for social discovery. She loves the video. Out of her personal experience as well as sort of like our daughter’s, who were like, oh, wouldn’t it be cool, you see so many cool Reels and videos and you don’t know where it is, but you want to go there. We learned that also, you know, people want to travel to destinations to discover … we built is this cool thing where you can, you see a Reel on Instagram anywhere, you know, neighbor, creator, or whatever, and you can just send it to Expedia, just DM it, and then it will take a little bit, but then Expedia will … tell you where is this, what’s the best time for you to travel, and what are things to do and what are good places to stay and flight routes.
On AI: We use a combination of AI and human … as you always have to if you need a human touch, and if something goes wrong with your travel … To put that in perspective, the AI piece for servicing, we did I think 170 million chats last year … but then there are certain trigger points in the experience that when it really requires the human, it switches, or people can immediately call us and get it [taken care of].
What we see with the trends of agentic infrastructure, is, uh, that we, we have to develop a new marketing. We call it “business to agent.” And the premise behind that is that brands are in empty space. People want to have focus, technical … Agents reason differently from humans.
On leaning into OOH: [We] not only utilize out-of-home [for] big brand moments, where you, you know, like, say, stadium size, your TV ads … but you can actually start using out-of-home from a performance perspective as well. And so, what we do is we integrated into the performance markets, like I said, we do local localized testing, we do geo-location testing, and then we … have a lot of in-house technology, and it’s kind of by necessity, because we started three years ago, marketing technology three years ago wasn’t as good as it is today, and it became a whole different picture for us.
