Transcript

Bennie F. Johnson

Hello, and thank you for joining us for this episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. In today’s episode, we’ll explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations of individuals that flourish at this intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We’ll introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know.

Through our thought-provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, our special guest is Donna Shaw. Donna is managing director of Media Link, current partner of United Talent Agency. She is currently a member of the board of directors for the Ad Council and serves as marketing advisor for Clutch Shop. In 2024, Donna was awarded the She Runs It Change in the Game Award, specifically honoring for quantum meet changing the way organizations align to proactively meet new challenges. Before she was awarded this award, she had been honored by Adweek and the Adweek 50, honoring media, marketing, and tech’s indispensable behind the scenes stars. Previously, she served as SPP of Starcom Media Vest where she led global teams for clients such as Visa, Walmart, and PNG. Donna, welcome to the podcast.

Donna Sharp 

Thank you, Bennie. So excited to be here today.

Bennie

Well, it’s really great to have you here. I’m so impressed with your work and your leadership with Media Link and United Talent Agency, but I’d love to get a sense of how it all started. Did you wake up one day and say, you know, I’m going to be managing director of Media Link and have this profound space on industry? I doubt that’s how it started, but I’d love to hear.

Donna 

Oh no, it definitely didn’t start that way. And I firmly believe in a lot of luck and circumstance, especially early in your career. You gotta lean into it, but I was lucky to have entered the marketing industry at a time when digital media was digital media instead of just media.

When I moved into my first agency role with Starcom out of college. I was the only member of the team who had a Facebook account because I had had one at Vanderbilt University. And so there were some definite benefits of circumstance of being a true user of media that was growing rapidly and to be able to translate that into the needs of my clients.

But then, as I mentioned, you’ve got to lean in and I have never looked back from loving what’s changing and innovating in the marketing space. And so I took great advantage of the amazing agency that I worked for. I started with them in Chicago. I moved with them to southern China and then led global businesses, as you mentioned in my bio. And then at the time was when I started to have that dream later in life, of becoming managing director of Media Link.

As I realized there were some real opportunities to change the way the modern chief marketing officer or chief growth officer puts in place their people, their platforms, their partners and their process to bring really amazing consumer experiences and business outcomes to life. so I’ve been here for almost eight years and it’s never a dull moment. It continues to change.

We were acquired by UTA a couple of years back and have gotten really close between traditional marketing approaches and entertainment and talent, which is really where a lot of marketing is moving. And so what I love in my day to day is I’m responsible for foresight on behalf of my clients. So I get to focus and lean in to what’s changing and what’s new all the time.

Bennie 

Okay. So speaking of kind of being immersed in what to do, what advice do you have for marketing professionals at the beginning, middle or later stages of their career in today’s rapidly changing environment? love talking about you leaned in when no one else had a Facebook page. So there’s kind of power of being the one who has it. So if we think about today and we, you know, replace Facebook, we find and replace Facebook with new AI tools or find and replace Facebook with TikTok. Or whatever’s next, what advice do you have for marketing leaders?

Donna

Well, Bennie, I think for the career entrance, I am continuously jealous of those entering our industry early in their life, early in their careers, because in media and marketing, you are never more of a deadly weapon than when you are in fact a cutting edge consumer. 

And I would argue that the majority of people who come into this industry have actually taken a moment to look at themselves and see themselves as a consumer of entertainment, of culture, of media, and can be quite self-reflective. One of the things I’ve loved about working in this world is that you can be so insightful and bring value from day one in your organization simply by looking at your own patterns of behavior. One of the areas that we have been both advising clients on, also advising ourselves at MediaLink is encouraging as our interns come in and as our entry level colleagues come in asking them, what are the tools that you are using to shortcut, to do things more efficiently? know, for me, it was just the way in which I was communicating and leveraging media as a normal college student became incredibly valuable to the organization as someone who was a natural user. 

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right.

Donna 

And you mentioned it, Bennie, that the usage of generative AI tools, we’re talking about it often in theory at marketing conferences or in published articles, but folks who are graduating from college right now or entering the workforce, whether or not they went to higher education, they’re just using these tools. That’s how they’re getting to answers. And shortcut is not a bad word in my book. That’s one of the things that I ask people and I genuinely wanna know what…

What apps are you using on your phone that I’m not aware of and what tools are you using to get your job done faster than I did. So I think that’s definitely part of the early stage. I’ll flip then to the late stage. A lot of the work that we do at Media Link is advising chief marketing officer or chief growth officers on how they shape the future of their teams, their talent, their tech, and the way they go to market.

By the time you get to that level of your career, it’s interesting because often what has gotten you into the C-suite as a marketer has been your excellence in creativity and your capability as a tactician. And then once you’re on the executive team and you are representing the leadership of a company, it’s no longer your depth of expertise that is the majority of your time and focus. It’s actually how do you think and translate what the business needs into an amazing team or an extended team and agencies of experts to go execute? And then how do you translate back up what it is that you’re seeing and hearing from consumers and what the response and reaction is to your products and to your positioning and your messaging back up again into where the business should be going. And so that’s what keeps me energized is that balance between how do you

How do you build the future skills and platforms and process and agency models? But the leader needs to set that in place, but then needs to translate to a very different audience who doesn’t speak in the same jargon that we do here in the marketing world.

Bennie

So speaking of kind of audiences and changes, you when you merge with UTA, you talked about being kind of celebrity client focus. Give me some of the thoughts that came in and what were some of the breakthroughs that happened when you take media links background and prowess with UTA and kind of let the two work together. How did that work for you?

Donna

Well, there’s a lot of cultural synergy between where UTA has leaned in as an agency very early and with much depth into the world of digital talent and where MediaLynx roots began, which was understanding the highly complex and ever-growing marketing value chain of media partners and technology platforms with the advent of digital. As I mentioned before, digital just became media.

We’ve found some really great complimentary approaches to the landscape of the market. And then more specifically, when I’m thinking about the modern marketing mix, more and more the traditional thoughts about here’s my creative and my message and here is my media, I have a budget to do X, Y, and Z. There is so much more focus on partnership with influencers, letting creators actually be part of

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right.

Donna 

The development of your message and your content and market. And in many cases, finding that while it is much harder to measure that the ROI and the impact because of the ability for an authentic voice to speak to audiences in a different way can be so much higher for a brand. so where we’ve found some really unique opportunity for our clients is the insight and the access that we can provide.

in not just thinking about the more traditional roles of media, creative, CRM, loyalty, but also culture as a new skillset and one that’s not necessarily filled in the traditional way of, I have like, you know, a head count in a team that executes on culture, but instead what is it that I’m embedding in and across my teams and who are the additional voices that I’m working with? 

That may mean creating new models and instances where you are sitting down to brief a group of partners and instead of your AOR, you are talking with really meaningful creators from social media. And they are actually helping you with the development of content, the development of message, and in some cases, the development of product.

Bennie 

Right, right.

Now, how do you create that space, right? We’ve had such a kind of lockstep relationship between client and agency and media. And this is really kind of an accordion, finding a way in which customer voice and creator are kind of nestled into this conversation. How do you create that dynamic space as both for the agency? I’m sure there people in the room who are used to an older model, as you mentioned but then on the client as well who have used to, well, I thought my voice came from the agency in making sure you have space for this value.

Donna 

It’s complicated, Bennie, and that’s also why I have a job.

Bennie

Yes, and we’re happy that you do.

Donna

Me too. And I say that though, there are some tips and tricks that I want to pass on. As you open up the voices and you expand the table that you’re setting, with the number of partners that are contributing to the development of your brand, of your brand story, and of the distribution of that story to consumers, you have to have a really clear understanding of what everyone’s roles are. It has never been more important to have a crisp and clear brief so that everyone knows ultimately the goals that you’re looking to drive towards. 

And I think that there is a lot of cultural nuance depending on companies. Some like a little bit of healthy competition and tension between their partners. And we’ve seen this in the past with multi-agency models and bringing in platforms. So your media partners directly into the briefing process where they can also pitch for ideas and content. But there are others who also prefer a much more clear delineation of these are my leaders and I expect when you show up, you show up together and ideate together. Both of these can work, if I’m going to be honest, some of it depends on the culture of a company. But what we’re seeing is in order to compete in this marketplace.

Bennie

Right. Right.

Donna 

If you can’t find a way to integrate talent and creators more upstream, you’re going to be losing. You’re going to be losing on opportunities. And this is one of the areas where we continue to see disruption from earlier stage companies is some of the benefits of having smaller teams and more fluid roles where people are expected to wear mini hats and pitch in in different ways. It has allowed them to work with external partners and talent more directly. They’ve cut out a lot of the middle layer that adds to the telephone of, know, this is what the brief, how I interpret the brief and then how I interpret the brief that I interpreted from someone else to someone else. And really a lot of these major Fortune 500 companies are trying to find that right balance between

Bennie

Right.

Donna

How do they serve the scale that they have and the complexity that they have, many of which are portfolio companies, but how do they operate in such a nimble way so that they can get the best out of what is likely the new media and content channels for most of your marketing organizations to come?

Bennie

I think there’s something powerful that you’re talking about where if an organization is more wed to the brief as a template, to the job description as a template, to the lane of the role, then it’s gonna limit your flexibility. And when you have a smaller group, you don’t get the luxury of falling back on, is my job description. You know, you kind of.

Donna 

Mm-hmm. And so much, of this question of job description. I mean, we build org designs as part of our job. And we are at a time… I was hosting an event yesterday with 20 local marketers, and the look on their faces when I said we are now in the time of re-orgs every year being the norm was not a friendly, welcoming look.

But this is a lot of the reality of if you have companies who require very rigid structures and definitions of what roles are, they’re not able to keep pace with the amount of change. so see if a few different themes that are coming from that. So on one hand, this rapid change of let’s restructure, let’s just create the understanding within our culture that your job is likely to be reevaluated every nine to 15 or so months. And that that’s just how we’re going to operate as a company. Or you have an understanding of the fluidity of skill sets and how you create resilience in people within your company. And you acknowledge the investment that you’re going to put into the education skill building and capability building to help them continually flex, but that they need to know that they’re showing up to be in a slightly different role every day. And then we are also seeing a rise in the blend of fixed and flex talent of looking at, know, what are my full-time employees who have very specific ownership and accountability and what are the flex talent modules that I need? What skill sets do I need right now? But that may continue to change. You you think about there was a rise in, everyone needs prompt engineers. We need AI prompt engineers. And, and we’ve already seen the quick movement of, well, no, like everyone should be trained on how to write great AI prompts. Like that shouldn’t be an individual team or person’s jobs. And some of these structures that if you, if you look back to when some of us joined the industry 20 or so years ago and you were creating digital centers of excellence.

Many of those digital COEs were critical for five, even 10 years in organizations, but we’re changing too quickly now. And so the concept of creating a standalone center of excellence to tackle something in a silo by themselves, that may be more a three, six, nine month task, as opposed to a multi-year journey and career building journey. And for some people that’s really intimidating and scary. For me and and many of our clients, you got to lean into the excitement of you’re part of a dynamic and changing industry and you’re at the forefront of technology and understanding what consumers want.

Bennie

You know, it’s, it’s really interesting because that’s so much of a change across generations. So in our marketplace, we look, we have five generations in the marketplace now, and there are generations who stayed at one employer in one lane of a role for a career. And that was the expectation. Now you may not be talking about many of those members from that generation being in the workplace, but much of our educational prompts are still designed in that way. So your younger employees are coming through school programs that are still built in that way.

How have you used this as an opportunity to accelerate and excite people about the work at hand? Like, no, you won’t be in one company in one role for 40 years. And that’s a good thing.

Donna 

Well, some companies would still like that, Bennie, but I tend to agree with you that what was thought of as negative on a resume, like you, probably remember the phrases of like, there’s a, that’s like a, job hopper or a company hopper. That’s not, that’s not a bad indication anymore. And instead it’s more about experience and expertise. So understanding that roles are changing, right? So maybe the role in a title and a description is changing.

Bennie 

Right.

Donna 

I just think that we have it as an infrastructure for job descriptions and hiring protocols. We haven’t caught up to the speed with which skill skills are changing and skill requirements are changing. And, and that’s, that is part of the innovation that we’re all looking to be a part of and, and need to see in the industry. It is interesting. I will call out though. And, and I am not a generational in a psychologist or expert by any means.

But I think there’s an assumption that the youngest or newest generation would be the most adept at this role changing. But there are also a lot of interesting cultural nuances of the latest generation entering the workforce and having much more specific requirements about boundary setting. And so it’s interesting to see these two sides colliding between the job market needing much more

Bennie

Mm-hmm. Right.

Donna 

flexibility in their employees and more than ever before a very empowered and confident young workforce stating this is what you hired me to do. These are the tasks that I am paid to deliver. And so this is going to be a really interesting time. I’m looking at a lot of the folks in kind of the mid-career of the workforce and you asked me earlier, Benny, so I promise to come back because you said the beginning, the middle and the end, I kind of skipped over the middle. So here’s the middle part is that this is a really interesting cohort, I think, to take advantage of the fact that they were brought into the workforce in that like work hard, get recognized mentality to be flexible, to lean in and use tools far beyond what, you know, they’re officially required to do. And

Bennie

Okay, let’s talk about it.

Donna 

and to really rise up as leaders who understand the culture of the new employees in our industry and to set new rules for what leadership and like I said, resilience looks like in terms of being excited about coming to work and knowing like I was taught a process when I onboarded that will be different in six months, but different as in more efficient.

As in more automated and getting to better outcomes. And I can be a part of driving that. And so I’ve got to learn both the gut instinct that will never go away with the marketing field, but I can also lean much more aggressively into tools and data to help me get answers faster.

Bennie 

Right, right.

One of the things that’s really fascinating in this moment is the various dimensions of change. And we’ve talked a bit about change in terms of relationship with the client and the agency within the teams and the space. But one of the most rapid areas in the most visible areas of change are with our consumers in the space. Talk a bit about what you’ve seen in the last few years in terms of the changing priorities and appetites of our global consumer base.

Donna 

I talked a little bit about the ecosystem of partners that you create. And for many of our clients, the consumer is part of that. Whether you have intentionally created a space for consumer feedback or consumer input into products or marketing innovation, or you can’t help it because the internet and social media is just an open call for anything you want to say, feel, think, or complain about.

Bennie 

Right. Mm-hmm. Yes.

Donna 

And so this has been a really interesting opportunity. mean, many, many marketing leaders obviously use tools like social listening, but go a step further to invite their consumer cohorts in to help give meaningful feedback into the creation of their products and their campaigns. They also rely on consumers. What marketing campaign today doesn’t have an expectation of engagement from your consumer?

Bennie

Mm-hmm. Right, right.

Donna

and of shares and perhaps creation on behalf of you. That goes far beyond the influencer or the creator or the official media player that you’re booking. We already set KPIs and expectations of consumers taking active roles in our marketing campaigns. And so if you don’t think the consumer is part of your marketing ecosystem, you’re not reading the plans that you’re approving.

Bennie

Right. Right. Right.

Donna 

And it’s a real opportunity and it’s more daunting. Like I said, right now that orchestration of all the different voices and partners and platforms is both a wealth of intelligence, but it’s also a cacophony where you need rapid prioritization. You need those roles and responsibilities of where I need input versus where I need approval. And that goes to consumers too. There are some brands who are thinking about their consumers or a small subset of them to preview content with, to make sure that it speaks to them, that it’s inclusive enough. And so that is actually putting an A in the racy against your consumer set, which is very different than what we would have been talking about years ago.

Bennie

Right. And if we think about that, if we focus on who’s accountable, who’s accountable in there, where do leaders draw the line in which you have consumer contribution, consumer co-creation, consumer acceleration? Where do we draw the line to say, okay, we have to take more control over the reins of the brand or the activation?

Donna 

I mean, ultimately, if you’re a chief executive of a company, you’re the one who has to answer to the board and to the shareholders and to your employees if you’re privately held. But I think there’s a strategy to the involvement of the consumer and keeping in mind they’re not a paid employee most of the time. they won’t feel the same.

Bennie

Right.

Donna 

level of accountability that you will, but they will certainly have felt a part of the co-creation process. And so if your expectation is that they’re going to help drive, you know, your product or service into the cultural stratosphere and help drive mass incremental sales, you want to involve them in. But that’s where I mentioned the gut and the science as a leader, because sometimes consumers can be faulty witnesses.

Bennie

Right.

Donna

Particularly against products or services that don’t exist yet. So you also have to have the foresight of thinking about how something that doesn’t yet exist in market and you can’t have true consumer feedback, how that might be perceived, but what’s your plan for a rapid response and continual response as you launch something into market?

Bennie 

Right. It’s interesting that you talk about from an AI term, hallucination, but from a consumer space, having kind of a faulty sense of what’s happening in marketplace. It reminds me of this beautiful article that I read once before, and I’ll keep the brand nameless, but it was this beautiful story about how families and communities and people all gathered around to go to this one retail establishment, to go to this one bookstore, and they talked about how much it was important. And how much they valued it. And this was everything about the space.

But the bookstore went out of business because although people had wonderful experiences of their consumer interaction, and this was the cultivation that was in there, they didn’t do one simple action. No one bought any books, which was the core purpose of said brand and said store. But if you talk to the consumers, you’ve got this entire litany of all these dynamic engagement opportunities they had that had nothing to do with the principal purpose, shareholder value, or bottom line of the business. And I think in reading the story, it’s like, if somebody is responding to these inputs, you would go completely in the opposite direction of what the business was.

Donna 

Well, and Bennie, what they might’ve determined was we do actually have a viable product. We’re just charging for the wrong one. Right? Do we actually have a viable real estate community space product and we need to pivot. And that’s where I think they’re the ability to open yourself up to wider understanding of your competitive set. what you’re at a macro level, everyone is competing for time and money.

Bennie

Right.

Donna 

But you might think I’m cola A and I’m competing against cola B, but there’s a lot of other things that I might slurp on. And there’s a lot of other reasons why I might be drinking a bubbly bubbly beverage that have nothing to do with thirst quenching. It might be might be to do with boredom, right? Like so so there’s just such an interesting. Yeah, yeah, that’s a reason why.

Bennie 

Right.

Right. social gathering, right.

Donna 

A lot of the rise in alcoholic bubbly beverages has has definitely been a boon for many companies. But that again, this is why I think the chief marketing officer’s role is continuing to be exciting. But there’s also more responsibility and and more pressure because as you are responsible for the voice of the consumer into the business, which is really the core definition of what a CMO is bringing to that C-suite. And then the reflection back outward externally of what our brand, our business, our product is, does, stands for. There’s a lot more complexity now. There’s a lot more stakeholders in that decision and a lot more choices to be made. And so how do you think about the cascade of choices? What you can allow your teams to be accountable for. There’s been a lot of discussion and debate about, about smaller emerging brands, really leveraging social media conversation and content almost exclusively organic to grow. And in many cases that the individuals behind that are social media managers, social media analysts that are, they’re trained and then they’re empowered.

And they have clear KPIs and they have some guidelines that they’re following, but they’re also hired because of their ability to think quickly and, perhaps make mistakes, but quickly understand and respond. And so on one hand, have this additional piling onto the shoulders of the chief marketing officer, but you’ve got a workforce that’s hungering for more accountability and control.

And honestly, the…the amount of different channels and places and spaces to communicate requires that you cascade some of that responsibility down. And this is the place where MediaLink plays is really how do you have that right operating model that can drive consistency, but not complacency, meaning it takes so long to get every message out or to get every communication approved because you’re so focused on like a single command and control approach.

But if you allow too much ownership and in some cases, like I’ll let the creators determine my brand is one of the questions you asked about Benny. Then what is the role of my brand in me? Sometimes that can be really good. You have, you know, a meaningful celebrity wearing or endorsing my product and all of a sudden it takes off. But then what if something happens to that celebrity?

Bennie

Right. Right.

Donna 

or if the next one who picks it up is not necessarily what I feel is representative of my brand. So how do you have that balance? Again, it’s what keeps us busy.

Bennie

Well, in speaking of keeping you busy, I’m going to ladder up again, because I’m sitting here thinking about, you know, you have one brand that embraces the chaos and another brand that needs a more measured approach and a third brand that it’s somewhere in between. How do you in laddering above everything, keep your teams and the work focused in there? Cause I can only imagine like it’s some places it’s control chaos and that’s good for the brand and good for the work.

Other brands could never survive a week of control chaos.

Donna 

I mean, I’d argue, Bennie it’s always controlled chaos. It’s just how much control, at least these days, right? Again, because of the fact that the consumer is a participant in campaigns and in your product experience. But you’re absolutely right. Their culture is so incredibly important when you think about the right structure. What structure is gonna work?

Bennie

Yes. Right.

Donna 

What you can cascade accountability down to what level and is it, you know, a brand manager within a portfolio that is that single throat to choke for all things about that brand or ultimately does that ladder up to a marketing director? What are the elements that you actually allow your agencies to be fully responsible for delivering? You you approve the budget and the KPIs and they can go.

And there are certainly brands who have benefited from the shared responsibility, again, with really clear KPIs and a box within which to play, but others who have struggled when it comes to transparency and brand safety and staying consistent with their brand guidelines. So you have a bit of this ricochet sometimes of, let’s go very broad, distributed, and then centralized. And I’ve recently spoken about this theme as it relates to some of the added pressures from shareholders and some of the precedent being set in the US market about companies being sued for marketing choices. In particular, in recent months, companies being called out for their DEI initiatives and stating that this is defrauding…

Shareholders because the leadership could not appropriately define the potential business risk. And my big concerns among many is that if innovation and doing things in a different way that have a plan for long-term benefit but not necessarily short-term are being so heavily scrutinized.

How do we keep fantastic marketers engaged and in their roles when there is so much added pressure? And now the necessary pressure for some major corporations in the US to say, you need to very accurately predict any potential short-term negative impact of a choice that you’re making about your positioning, your creative, your product portfolio.

It’s not just marketers, but it does feel like in particular, one of the biggest crackdowns on marketers needing to be able to really clearly predict. And the hard thing is that certain levels of innovation you can’t predict or you know are long-term investments, which shareholders don’t always understand.

Bennie

Right. And it’s interesting because as you’ve described it, you know, the risk all falls down to the low point, kind of like a leak in your house, like the water falls at space in there. And that becomes the marketing manager, the brand manager holding it all together. Right. Where we’re being pushed to be dynamic and try and daring, but at the same time be responsible to not be too daring, not be too risk taking, but be daring and risk taking. At the same time.

Donna

Well, it’s part of the lore of taking a marketing job, right? Like you get to understand what consumers want and you get to tell stories and you get to, you know, shock and awe and drive brand love. And, you know, whether it’s for a long time, you know, the dream of having a Superbowl spot to tell your story that stands out the most or the opportunity of creating a groundswell campaign that consumers take over.

Bennie

Right.

Donna 

Innovation is pretty core to this industry and why people come into this industry. But this is, this is part of where my call to action has been. How do we bring a level of confidence and courage to continue to innovate in a marketplace that is becoming perhaps a bit scarier for chief marketing executive.

Bennie

Hmm. Right.

Donna 

And also I would say I expect privately held companies to be able to aggressively thrive right now when they’re making innovations and decisions that are based on what they know consumers want. And that’s certainly not the environment that we want in the US or globally, but maybe an unintentional consequence in the short term.

Bennie

So we’re going to pivot a bit and talk the longest term. We’re going to talk a bit about the future. And we were discussing before and talking about your role as not only kind of media leader, but as mom, and thinking about what does media consumption, marketing, and engagement mean and look like for the youngest of us. So I know in our work that we do each day, we have a responsibility to the present.

But a greater responsibility to the future. So talk a bit about what that means for you. It can be in this moment, it kind of navigate today for tomorrow.

Donna

I feel much more weight than any of my CMO clients that I’ve been talking about when I consider the behaviors and the exposure of my three-year-old toddler. Professionally, I’m constantly thinking about new modes of communication and access to information and entertainment. And then when I turn to my home life, I’m wondering how much of this do I want?

Bennie

Right.

Donna

To be cascaded and exposed. And it’s fascinating that we are just in the early stages of understanding the impact on development and how our brains process things and how we build relationships. I’m a pretty skeptical optimist, right? I want lots of amazing things to come with all of this innovation. But when it comes to your own kid, right?

Bennie

Right.

Donna 

I also have to be careful and I don’t want to overexpose. So right now I’m leaning on the no screens as much as possible, but then I’m wondering like, oh, am I actually going to be holding my child back from being the media genius that I want her to be? It’s a good, also, grounder when you’re thinking about the innovation and opportunity. And as I mentioned, why people go into the marketing field to begin with is that they tend to be more reflective of their own media and marketing consumption as a consumer and so you can’t help but do it on behalf of your families.

Bennie 

Right? I smile as you mentioned that because I am both a proud and scared parent of teenagers now. And so I’ve given up the guard rails in there. Now I realize I have an in-house focus group.

Donna

Yes. Very true.

Bennie 

Which is kind of, you get a chance to watch it real time in terms of, you know, the best intentions of parental parameters up against the very real reality of marketplace tensions.

Donna 

Yeah. And you get real live, real time feedback. Right, Bennie?

Bennie 

I do get it. You know, candor, you know, radical candor all in your face. That’s what I get for all the. Yeah, that’s what you get as soon as I come into the door. Right. So, and that’s the beauty of being a parent because I’m sure, you know, it’s sometime it’s karma for we were teens before we were parents. It’s based in there. So my friend, be on the lookout. You know,

Donna 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Don’t have to wait for the 360s. Thanks for the heads up, buddy.

Bennie

That’s what I’m here for, know, not only marketing conversations, but, you know, to help you through the toddler years into the preteens into teens now.

Donna 

Life lessons and marketing lessons.

Bennie

So I’m going to go back to the conversation of talent. You know, as we started off with this kind of connection of media and talent, what have you learned in the last few years of how talent has taken the reins in marketing and advertising? Remember, we used to bring talent into the room and say, here’s a script and here’s what you do. Now, you know, talent is bringing us into the room and saying, this is what I can deliver.

Donna 

We’re seeing it from all sides. We are seeing the celebrity created brands, which are exploding and taking off at a rapid pace. You think about the product lines that Mr. Beast and Emma Chamberlain and others have launched. I they are brand, product, creative media, all rolled into one. And so I would argue that…

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Donna

There may be more marketing impact on the talent landscape, even more so than vice versa, where anyone who is becoming a, know, I hate to use the word celebrity because I think that definition is changing, but celebrities are marketers. They are building brands and they’re media companies. I mean, when we look at evaluation of potential talent partnerships, you know, we’re not just looking at which… you know, what’s their box office hit number? You know, what’s their perception? It’s also how big is their social following? How often do they post video content? It’s the way in which we would have evaluated media years ago. And so it’s a really interesting opportunity. We’re also seeing the, not the rise, we’ve already risen the career of a creator. And the question will be, of course, that, you know, until retirement age, career, but certainly in the interim, there are many content creators who have taken their passions and their experience and created meaningful media properties, some of which are being bought up by major media companies or driving certain traditional media companies to their demise. So it’s a huge opportunity, I think, for both sides to learn the marketing muscle.

Bennie 

So if you had one last thing to say to a marketer in 2025 as advice or counsel, what would you say?

Donna 

I’d say we understand that the pressure has mounted the access to information, the responsibility of translating not only rapidly changing consumer behavior into your business, but also changing rapid business dynamics into your marketing and communications. But creating opportunity for your teams to develop the future skills to lead you and leaning into that blend of technology and talent can help you get through this. Those who have leaned in on a model that acknowledges both is equally important are really gonna be the ones who come out on top.

Bennie

I think that’s an incredible word of advice to lead up with in our world. It’s media, creative, dynamic marketing is everything and everywhere. And those who build in are going to come out on top. 

Donna, thank you so much for joining us. And thank you all for listening. Is this part of this episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. Once again, I’m your host, Bennie F. Johnson. Thank you, Donna. Thank you for leading and offering such a candid view of our world.

Thank you.

Donna 

Thank you.