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Marketing Vanguard
Greatest Hits - The Intersection of Design and Marketing: Mauro Porcini, SVP and Chief Design Officer at PepsiCo
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- [00:01]
Jenny Rooney
Partnerize is the only partnership management solution powering profitable growth for marketers through an end to end software platform and comprehensive service practice. The Partnerize Platform delivers a fully integrated, comprehensive suite of discovery, recruitment, optimization, payment, brand safety and fraud prevention capabilities supported by unrivaled service expertise. With partnerize, you're in control of the entire partnership marketing lifecycle, all on a single platform.
- [00:31]
Mauro Porcini
Reason is the ability to arrive to a conclusion step by step with a discursive kind of reasoning. Thinking, intuition or intellect is the ability to jump to that conclusion. But Spinoza was saying, in reality, intuition and intellect is nothing else than reasoning at the speed of light.
- [00:52]
Jenny Rooney
Hi everyone and welcome to the Marketing Vanguard Podcast. I'm Jenny Rooney here at adweek and I am thrilled today to be joined by Mauro Porcini. He is PepsiCo's first ever chief design officer. He has been there since 2012. And Mauro, I'm so excited to be joined by you today. Thank you for joining me.
- [01:12]
Mauro Porcini
Thanks for having me. Perfect pronunciation of my name by the way.
- [01:16]
Jenny Rooney
I tried, I tried. I'm sure perfect is not true, but close to it I hope. But I'm thrilled to have you here. You could probably steer this podcast yourself with one hand tied behind your back, but for those who don't know, I'd love to share a little bit about you at the top here. As I said, you joined PepsiCo in 2012 in that role as Chief Design Officer. You're infusing design thinking into PepsiCo's culture and is leading a new approach to innovation by design that impacts the company's product platforms and brands, which include Pepsi, Lay's, Mountain Dew, Gatorade, SodaStream, Doritos, Life Water, Bubbly, et cetera. And your focus extends from physical to virtual expressions of the brands, including product packaging, events, advertising, fashion and art, collabor, retail activation architecture, and digital media. It is such an extensive remit and I need to ask you this first question, Mauro, how do you tie all of that up in a bow because it's just so extensive?
- [02:14]
Mauro Porcini
I think the key is to have a vision. I call it the dream more than the vision, but we can translate it also with a word that is more business friendly. But it is literally a dream. And there are multiple phases of this dream. The first one is the one of reaching as many people as possible. And this is what companies like PepsiCo give you. The ability to reach billions of people all around the world by reaching as many people as possible, trying to create value for them. Some form of value, functional, emotional, this is what I studied as a designer. When I was 18, 19, I started to study design. This is what they teach you at school. They teach you to observe people, understand their needs, their wants, their dreams, and create something valuable for them. This value can come in different form and shapes. It could be convenience, it could be fun, it could be style, but there is some form of value. And then they tell you, by the way, you also need to sell them this stuff that you create. These products, these experiences, these brands, these services. But what drives designers is this ambition and this desire and at the end of the day, this dream of creating value for people. So when you as a designer, enter a company like PepsiCo, historically dominated by marketing, sales, business goals, the aim of growing the business of this big corporation all around the world, the first thing you think as a designer is, wow, I have an amazing opportunity to reach as many people as possible to create value through design. Now, an enabler of that is to make sure that companies like PepsiCo understand the value of design, understand what design is about, understand what design thinking and design centricity is about. But this is just once again, an enabler to do something that is much bigger and broader and more purposeful, that is the creation of value for people. So you will hear me many times if you check online interviews and conferences. I'm a big ambassador of design. But the reality is that this is really an enabler for something bigger. I'm an ambassador of human centricity. I'm an ambassador of creating value for people. And I strongly believe that if you do create value for people, then you create also financial value for the companies you work for.
- [04:44]
Jenny Rooney
Okay, so I have two quick questions on that. How would you distinguish what's the difference between design and creativity?
- [04:52]
Mauro Porcini
Well, first of all, there are multiple interpretations of design. So design as such is that discipline that is all about creating solutions for specific people, needs and wants. This solution can take different kind of shapes. Products, brands, services. We talked about this a second ago. Design thinking starts to be closer to the world of creativity.
- [05:14]
Jenny Rooney
Yes. Yep.
- [05:15]
Mauro Porcini
And is the thinking that then enable you to create those solutions. And there are three different lenses that you take in consideration. Is the world of people, desirability, the world of business viability, and the world of technology manufacturing. So the feasibility lens. So design thinking is all about creatively thinking solutions for those people, using these three filters to identify those solutions, and with an iterative kind of process, develop them and taking them to market. Creativity is somehow the how so is. I often define creativity as intuition in action. So if your goal is to design something, design thinking is your methodology and your way of thinking. The enabler to find the best possible solution is creativity. And creativity, once again, is this connection between an intuition that you have translated in action. The action is the creation of stuff. That's why we call it creativity. Now define as such. It may sound like something very emotional that comes from your guts, because that's what you think when you use a word like intuition. The truth is that intuition is something that you nurture, is something that you train. It's something you develop in time. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza, hundreds of years ago, was making the difference between intellect and intuition on one side and reason on the other. Reason is the ability to arrive to a conclusion step by step, with a discursive kind of reasoning. Thinking, intuition or intellect is the ability to jump to that conclusion. But Spinoza was saying, in reality, intuition and intellect is nothing else than reasoning at the speed of light. So essentially, to have that kind of reasoning, to arrive to the conclusion is very important. Your training, your background, your curiosity, all the learning you have been developing over the years, you keep cumulating, cumulating, cumulating, cumulating. These will emphasize, will amplify your ability to have what we call the intuitions that nothing else connecting the dots, the data, the insights accumulated over time at the speed of light, and then you transform it in action. And creativity comes from that.
- [07:41]
Jenny Rooney
So let me ask you this. Obviously at a company like PepsiCo, you get reams and reams of data and analysis and financial numbers. But you started the conversation talking about this concept of value and making sure that your reach and the reach that you have, and literally having an impact on individual human beings. What for you, Mauro, is your sense of success in any given day, what gets you so excited? Because you see something you're like, that worked, that caused value for somebody. And I don't mean the numbers and I don't mean all the financial data. What's an example of something that gets.
- [08:14]
Mauro Porcini
You so happy and excited is the smile of people. So their reaction is a real smile, but it's also a metaphorical smile. A smile and the positive energy you can feel literally online when they react to a project, when they react to an initiative that you led. And then in general, I've been always a sort of entrepreneur within these companies. 12 years in PepsiCo, 10 years at 3M. And before that, I had my own agency, I created my own agency. So I've been lucky enough all these years to come in and build my own enterprises within These enterprises. And because of this I never been somebody thinking, well, I'm going to have a two, three year cycle and then I'm going to think about my next job, my promotion to a different role, or eventually I go out of this company, I go somewhere else. I've been always in for the long run, for the long term projects. And the meta project has been the one of creating the right culture within these companies, a culture of design, but in other words is a culture of human centricity to then enable me, my team, to design those products and those brands and those services in the proper way. So a lot of energy comes from the journey and then step by step looking back and seeing how far we came from where we started, but always reminding also the dream and remembering where we're going now, why this is so important. Because in the day to day then this job is painful, it stops. Because every day you are there trying to change the game, trying to rewrite the rules, do things that people don't expect, are not used to and they're perceived as risky. And the real innovator, the real innovator is the one that when you achieve something, when you arrive, maybe you change a big chunk of the culture of your company, maybe you were able to deliver projects that nobody expected. Once you get there, you're already thinking about what else can I change? So the real innovator will live his entire life in this kind of condition of uncomfort, of perception, of risk, of transformation. And so unless you have the dream and you have also the ability to step back and appreciate where you're coming from and celebrate that, if you don't have that, it's tough because in the day to day it's difficult. It's really, really difficult. And again, just to close what I said at the beginning, the smile of the people you serve, the smile of the people out there, consumers, customers, users of any kind, when they react to those projects is powerful. When we launched recently the redesign of Pepsi, that's a difficult project because when you redesign a brand that is known all around the world, that is iconic, that is loved, that has been around for 125 years, the risk to screw it up is really big. And so imagine the tension of me, my team, years of project, now you're ready to launch it, what is going to happen when you see billions of impressions with 99% positive sentiment, that's where you get a lot of energy.
- [11:30]
Jenny Rooney
How long was that in the works by the way?
- [11:32]
Mauro Porcini
Yeah, it took years to redesign Pepsi because when you have a design team in house for projects as big as the redesign of an iconic brand, there is not a start, a beginning and an end of that project. You don't go to an agency and you tell the agency, well, we need to redesign Pepsi. You have six months to come up with an idea, then we do some tests and then we launch it in one year and a half. At a certain point, yes, you have an official start of the project. Yes, you have a timeline. And you need to respect the timing and everything. But the truth is that the thinking about what is going to happen to the brand, the thinking about the future of the brand, starts long before I joined the company in 2012. The company launched the new design of Pepsi in 2008, 9 depending on the regions of the world. But when I joined in 2012, many countries didn't embrace the new design yet. And Indra Nui, the CEO back then, asked me to try to unite the world of Pepsi around one visual identity system. So I was there. I was working with Brad Jackman, that back then was the president of the Global Beverage Group.
- [12:44]
Jenny Rooney
Yeah.
- [12:44]
Mauro Porcini
And we were trying to figure out exactly how to do it. And the first thing that I did as a designer was to talk to people and ask them why you're not embracing this new design. And a lot of the feedback were the design didn't have enough energy. Energy of Pepsi. This kind of energy was typical of the brand and it was very minimal, very simple. And so the first thing we did to unify the world, instead of just imposing it to them, tweak the design to give it more energy. So we changed the blue from a darker blue to a lighter blue. We made the logo the globe, bigger on the can, on the bottles. We even changed slightly the typography so the font looked like the previous one, but it was a little bit more bold, a little bit more. Again, the goal was to add more energy. We couldn't redesign the logo and the brand, it was too early. So we did that. And with that, we were able to align all the world around that design. But we knew that sooner or later in the future, we're going to redesign it. So what we did over the years, every time there was a limited edition packaging, every time, for instance, we were having an experience like super bowl and we needed to design activations and contents for super bowl or the UEFA Champions League or collaborations with the fashion world every time we were in reality also often testing ideas of what the future Pepsi could be. As an example, if you look at the super bowl visual identity system for Pepsi of the past few years before the relaunch. The blending of the black and blue and this visual asset that we call the poles. So these circles that emanate from the globe were already there. We were testing this idea of blending black and blue because we knew the world was changing, that we really wanted to push zero sugar. The color of zero sugar is black. The color of Pepsi full sugar is blue. And we're trying to understand how we could merge the two words in one consistent identity for the different formulations. Or we have been launching over the years some vintage Pepsi cans in limited editions, trying to figure out how people will react to that. We've been doing a lot of things over the years, all around the world, all the time trying to see how people were reacting to different ideas. And then proactively we started to design ideas what the brand could look like in the future. Far before the project got activated, far before anybody asked us to do it. And we started to pitch it to marketing, pitch it to the CEO. And then step by step the excitement started to raise. People started to get excited about that idea. And at a certain point the project started in a more official way. But there was so much work done before. And this is not just for Pepsi. This is true for a variety, not for all the brands, it will be too much to do it for all the brands, but for brands and platforms. SodaStream is another one where we've been working so much on an idea for a sustainable platform for our beverage portfolio before the acquisition. So that when the company started to think well, we could acquire this brand and this company called SodaStream, we had so much work done on what a sustainable platform could be like and design was part of of those conversations. And then there was the acquisition SodaStream as a company, as a brand, as a product platform. But then a series of other projects that we are developing in house merged into the new business unit. One common goal, the one of making our bioge portfolio more sustainable through those technologies.
- [16:31]
Jenny Rooney
Which is so interesting because I think that speaks also to in it's mentioned in your bio. It's so much more than the physical product design applies to so many different things. I need to ask you this question. PepsiCo has such a history. It's one of the major marketers in the world. It is known as one of the very few marketing talent cultivators in the world. Historically, so many marketing leaders, CMOs have come out of Pepsi. How do you work with the chief marketing officers and the marketing leaders in the organization? What is the dynamic that you engage in?
- [17:07]
Mauro Porcini
Look, you're right, I'm not saying this because I work for PepsiCo, but I work every day with a number of talents that is mind blowing. And I'm saying this because I've been 12 years out of 30 of career in this company. So I've been also in other companies. I've been exposed to many different realities and the caliber of the marketers here is outstanding. Now the most brilliant one are the ones that understand their strengths but understand also their limitations and they are not afraid to embrace diversity of thinking in what they do.
- [17:45]
Jenny Rooney
Partnerise is the only global partnership management solution powering profitable growth for marketers through an end to end software platform and comprehensive service practice. The Partnerise platform delivers a fully integrated comprehensive suite of discovery, recruitment, optimization, payment, brand safety and fraud prevention capabilities supported by unrivaled service, including the category's only in house support program. With Partnerise, you're in control of the entire partnership marketing lifecycle, all on a single platform. Partnerise gives marketers a better way to.
- [18:25]
Abby Forsyth
Partner for all your meeting, event and workplace needs. Conveen is a partner, not just the place. A preeminent global hospitality company within the meeting, event and shared workplace industries. The company and its portfolio of brands provide clients with concierge style service in house, food and beverage in house, event production resources and dedicated service staff. All to ensure a seamless and memorable experience.
- [18:53]
Mauro Porcini
I feel lucky and privileged because I found many of these people in the company. But over 12 years I also found people that didn't have that kind of mindset and especially this was a big learning. At a certain point I remember when you may divide, I love to do these polarizing divisions to convey an idea. So let's say the marketing community there are the more operational marketers, they're the one that are really good at operations and then there are the one that are more creative. At the beginning I was thinking, well, if I need to choose between the two, probably the best marketer to partner with is the creative one. I realized very quickly that was not true and it was not enough. At least I found very creative marketers that were so creative that they didn't respect creativity of the design world. It's just a different kind of creativity complementary to marketing. But you need to respect it and you need to empower it and you need to give space.
- [19:51]
Jenny Rooney
Well, we learn more from frankly the dissimilar than the similar, right?
- [19:55]
Mauro Porcini
Exactly. So on the other side I found amazing partners who are more of operational kind of marketers eventually less creative, but they respect the design more. The truth is that the ideal marketer is the one that can combine the two. The two dimensions. And with the one that we're combining the two dimensions. Super creative, but really good at execution as well. But then also on top of it, had this ability to respect diverse thinking and embrace it and give it space and really work together with them. We did magic things. And that's why at the end of the day, I've wrote it also in my book in the human side of innovation is all about people. You can talk about processes, you can talk about capabilities, what marketing does, what design does, what sales does, what. But at the end of the day, it's all about how the people manage that, know how those tools, those platforms. And so just in the example I made, the ability to respect others, the ability to get out of your comfort zone, the ability to empower others, and so on, so forth. The curiosity is one of the key drivers of innovation. The curiosity of being intrigued by somebody that is different from you. It could be a designer, it could be somebody coming from Asia. It could be a woman if you're a man. It could be a black person, if you're a white one. The curiosity of seeing in that diversity of background, the precious gift of knowledge. There is something that you don't know because you just have a different perspective. It's not that your perspective is worse than the other or is better. It's just different. And so the best leaders are the one that understand how important it is, that difference and embrace it. And together, in a teamwork kind of efforts with empathy, with kindness, with EQ, are able to connect everybody around. One dream, one goal.
- [21:50]
Jenny Rooney
PepsiCo is a massive company, multinational. So many products and brands, honestly, obviously it makes sense for that kind of a company to have a chief design officer. Do all companies need chief design officers? Do you think there's a role that design, that kind of person who owns the design priority has, should that be a priority at all?
- [22:13]
Mauro Porcini
Companies arguably, profoundly believe that every company needs a chief design officer, but you need the right kind of profile. A chief design officer is much more than a designer. And this is a mistake that I saw many companies doing over the years. They look for design leaders and they hire great designers eventually. But the chief design officer is much more than just a designer. No design already that is very complicated because you study design. You may study graphic design, or you may study industrial design or fashion design, or experience organizational design. And they're all different. It's like if you study biology, or you study chemistry, or you study in science, we know you call it science, but they're all very different disciplines. So first of all, the great designer is the one that understands all these different dimensions. Because in this world where the brands are on stage 24, seven across, every touch point of the brand itself, they manifest themselves through many different touch points. You need design leaders that understand how to design the right product, the right packaging, the right communication, digital physical experiences, all these dimensions already that is super difficult to find because there is no school that prepares you for that. But on top of that, you need people that know how to talk about business, that deeply understand the business world, the strategy. And they also know how to teach design, how to present design, how to story tell the value of design. So understanding of design, understanding of business, storytelling of the value, and then the ability to bring orders with you, so inspire others. And these orders could be the top executives, your peers in different functions and your teams. Because the reality is when you build a new capability from scratch, it could be design, but it could be any other capability. A big part of that job is cultural transformation, is literally changing the way the company think. And then immediately after or together in parallel, the process is the ways of working of the company. So every company needs a chief design officer because this kind of people bring to the table a different complementary perspective to the one on marketing.
- [24:33]
Jenny Rooney
Best advice you'd give to chief marketing officers against that thinking?
- [24:37]
Mauro Porcini
Well, you need to find the right people, you need to empower them and not be afraid of that diversity of thinking that they bring to the table.
- [24:47]
Jenny Rooney
I have to ask this question, Mauro. Everybody asks this question, but I do think asking it of you is particularly interesting. What's your take on AI and the raise of AI and how it's going to affect. I mean, obviously people talk about how it's going to affect creativity, human creativity. How do you think it's going to have effect on design priorities?
- [25:04]
Mauro Porcini
I'm a big fan of AI. I am a big fan of any new technology that come to life and somehow can reshape the way we work. We imagine the future and we create that future. I think that AI, until the moment when it will be able to recreate completely a human being. So the way we think, we feel, we act until the moment, and when we arrive to the moment, we'll have a variety of different problems that have nothing to do with creativity, design and marketing. The AI may think, why do we need human beings at all? But hopefully we'll never arrive to that moment. Until that moment, AI is just a tool. It's a platform. You need the ability of humans to have intuitions, to dream, to make mistakes. I used to work at 3M, the company of Postit. Postit came out of a mistake of a human. And then there was one human that made that mistake in the laboratories of the company. And there was another human that saw the mistake and decided to teach it to the business organization. And with a lot of resilience, he pushed it until he went to market and it was super successful. So there is always that human component in the way you use the tool that makes all the difference of the world. And the beauty of AI is that it's going to make our work by far more effective. It will increase speed, it will increase the ability to explore different kind of scenarios and solutions in a very efficient way. It will unlock also diversity of thinking. As a designer, at the end of the day, I'm in front of a white page as well as a marketer, by the way, any professional, you are in front of your blank page and you need to figure out the next campaign, the next product, the next thing. You get to that with your biases, with your background, with your history, with your experience. And it's so difficult to change perspective and come up with new ideas. Now, there are multiple ways to do it without technology. Just having conversations with people different from you, traveling, reading books, really trying to change their perspective. Because innovation at the end of the day is always about looking at something that everybody looks at and you look with your eyes, then other people look at the same thing with different kind of perspectives. If you engage in conversations with these people, my perspective number one, is going to connect with your perspective number two. And we're going to create, if we blend it with respect, a third perspective that is perspective number three and is the innovative one. Now, AI can play a role in this because the moment I write a prompt, for instance, for a new idea and AI is going to leverage her background that is different than my background, AI will surprise me with solutions that I didn't expect. Now, these solutions are not by definition the right ones. The role of those solutions is to ignite new thinking in me, to inspire me to think in different ways, to break the boundaries of my biases and my perspective and create a third new perspective. That is the perspective of AI merged with mind that could create something very innovative. And again, machines and humans working together to create something special and different for the future.
- [28:33]
Jenny Rooney
Well, I feel like we're going to need a part Two of this conversation, because there's just so much more. We've really only scratched the surface. But as a last question, I'll ask you this. Who else should we interview next for the Marketing Vanguard podcast? Who else out there is somebody that you admire so much, either from afar or somebody you know very well?
- [28:50]
Mauro Porcini
Look, I don't know if you interview him already, but my friend Joe Gebia, the founder of Airbnb, I have not.
- [28:56]
Jenny Rooney
Yet had him on, but I will.
- [28:58]
Mauro Porcini
He is great. He's great because he's a designer. So that's interesting. A designer that found a business like Airbnb, and he combines the ability to dream and execute a really concrete project like Airbnb with purpose, with this dream of doing good for humanity. And he's a great storyteller as well.
- [29:21]
Jenny Rooney
Awesome. Okay, I will reach out to him. And I'll come back to you at some point, too, because like I said, we need a part two. Thank you so much for joining me, Mauro. And I'm sorry if I did butcher your name because you say it so much more eloquently than I do, but I'm thrilled to have had this conversation. Thank you so much. And let's definitely talk again very soon.
- [29:38]
Mauro Porcini
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
- [29:41]
Abby Forsyth
The most innovative marketers are the ones who dare to ask the questions that matter and encourage a culture of curiosity in their organizations. That's the essence that distinguishes the 10 marketers who are being honored as winners of the inaugural Survey Monkey Curiosity Awards. The premise of the awards is simple. Celebrate extraordinary marketing professionals working at Survey Monkey customer companies who are driving innovation and shaping what's next for their businesses, industries, and communities. And today, we have the pleasure of sitting with one of the award winners, Abby Forsyth. Abby, hi. Welcome to the show.
- [30:13]
Jordan Praetano
Hi. Thank you so much.
- [30:15]
Abby Forsyth
Yes, and congrats again for this really cool award. You know, we've been speaking to some of the award winners, and everyone has such a cool story. But for our listeners, let's hear your story, your backstory, and just maybe some parts of it that kind of led up to this moment with winning with Survey Monkey.
- [30:31]
Jordan Praetano
Yeah, for sure. I think one thing that's probably different than any of the other award winners. I grew up in a smaller, more northern community here in Canada, and sports, specifically hockey. It was always very central to my life. I eventually pursued a degree in business and marketing in Toronto, and I hadn't planned to work in sports marketing, but I joined MLSE Mapley Sports and Entertainment in a retail marketing role. And it wasn't long before I realized how energizing it can be to work on brands that people are really, really passionate about. And that's just the reality of sports. So after that, I worked for a few years on the brand marketing team for the Toronto Maple Leafs. And my work as a marketer there was really focused on how do you reinvent a 100 plus year old brand for younger audiences. And that work, starting to think about how we position our brands differently for growing audiences is what led me to my role as brand manager of corporate and cultural marketing across all of our teams here at mlse. And that's the work that got me nominated for this great Curiosity Award.
- [31:39]
Abby Forsyth
Wow, that was a great response and I commend you for being able to kind of break into the sports industry too. I feel like anyone who loves sports and gets to work in sports marketing is very lucky because it's such a passionate environment and clearly you have passion for it. So kudos to you for landing in there and being recognized for it with SurveyMonkey. So what work did you do and how did you get nominated? Like, what led to that specifically?
- [32:07]
Jordan Praetano
Yeah, so my work at MLSE is really focused around integrating social impact into our marketing strategies and making inclusion core to our brand strategy. So I think of my role as a marketer to be about using data to develop stories that reach the right people, which is sometimes the harder part, and ultimately help people resonate with our brands and in different ways. So one of the best things for me about winning this award was that I was nominated by colleagues of mine from our youth, Sports and social impact team. And they've been really important partners in making this work informed by data. And that's, I think, what has made it maybe a little bit different than what you might see other places in sports and ultimately really impactful. So some of the things that were referenced in my award nomination were around our Maple Leafs Indigenous Celebration game, which takes place in our arena for 20,000 fans that actually get to be there. But a lot of the work goes beyond that as well in how we actually bring our teams closer into communities that we're looking to serve marginalized communities like indigenous communities here in Canada. And so that team is really central to what we call a Change the Game research project. And it's really just about finding more information, more data about access, engagement, equity when it comes to youth participants in sports. And so it's been really special to be able to root the work that we're doing and how we can help impact youth in our Community and sort of bring everything full circle. So that's kind of a bit of the story of me getting nominated and why I'm so proud of it.
- [33:47]
Abby Forsyth
That's beautiful. My goodness. I'm so curious. Talking about the theme of curiosity, like, was this kind of your brainchild, the celebration? Was this the first time that the organization was doing something like this?
- [34:00]
Jordan Praetano
For this one specifically, it was definitely a group effort on sort of deciding to host that game. Themed games and this idea of bringing people together in community around games is pretty common in sports. So there's different ones that we do. But really finding ways to deeper connect with Indigenous communities was a really important one for us. So it was the first time that we had done it and really doing it in a way where we brought in indigenous leaders, indigenous experts to inform how do we do that? Right. It's a hockey game. It's fun. It's meant to be fun. It's competitive. You know, ultimately the teams are playing on the ice. But how do we bring in important aspects of indigenous culture into the experience? And how do we show that on broadcast so it gets to reach people far outside of the game? That was sort of where we were able to apply a lot of our marketing hats and really thinking about how do we reach more people in something that we do multiple times a year, how do we treat it a little bit different?
- [35:00]
Abby Forsyth
I love that. It sounds like it was a perfect marriage of science and art. It sounds like. That's beautiful. That's really great. Because it can be difficult to kind of execute these sort of programs, but it feels like with the right people on board, the result is really beautiful. So on that note, what role did curiosity play in this? Like, how did you land that you wanted to connect with the Indigenous community? And slash, what does curiosity mean to you?
- [35:25]
Jordan Praetano
Yeah, I think curiosity for me really means. I mean, being open, I guess, is sort of the first part. But also being open to seeing the world and your work from different perspectives, Trying to think beyond my initial reaction to something and then using those new insights or sort of what you're able to come up with when you really push yourself to think about things from different perspectives, different angles, get different people's opinions on the matter, and using what you come with that to ultimately craft solutions. So I think we never would have come up with a lot of the work that I've done over the last few years really focused on these marginalized communities if it was just coming out of my brain. I think what it's really been about is trying to learn from more people, trying to learn from more important conversations happening and then using the seat that I'm in as a marketer on these brands that again, people really care about people. People are really listening to you. My role is about taking the information that I'm learning, being curious with others, and then sort of putting that out through our brands in special ways.
- [36:30]
Abby Forsyth
That's amazing. God, your responses are just really. That's so great. Yeah. And I think marketers like you, that will make a difference in this industry for sure with having that kind of mindset where you chase your curiosity, but also in a way that serves communities that may not always get hurt. So kudos to you for doing that for our listeners. Where can we find your work, follow you and see what you're doing next? Should we check out your LinkedIn? Where can we see what you're up to?
- [36:59]
Jordan Praetano
Absolutely. I try to post as many updates about things we're doing on LinkedIn so you can find me there. Abby Forsyth and you can find the work of our different teams across all of our social channels. So look up Maple Leafs, Toronto Raptors, Toronto FC and Toronto Argonauts and you'll see some incredible things coming out this season.
- [37:18]
Abby Forsyth
That's great. I'm going to go follow the page right now because I know that you and team are like up to the cool stuff there. So thank you so much for joining us, Abby, and letting us into your world for a little bit. And to our listeners, be sure to tune in next week when we sit down with another winner of the inaugural SurveyMonkey Curiosity Awards celebrating extraordinary marketing professionals working at survey monkey customer companies who are driving innovation like Abby here and shaping what's next for their business. So thank you listeners for tuning in and thanks, Abby for joining us.
- [37:47]
Jordan Praetano
Thank you.
- [37:49]
Jenny Rooney
Thank you for listening to Marketing Vanguard, part of the Ad Week Podcast Network and Acast Creator Network. This podcast was produced by Jordan Praetano.
- [37:57]
Mauro Porcini
Executive produced by Al Manarino and John.
- [37:59]
Jenny Rooney
Heil and edited by Lane McGibony at Boutwell Studios. You can listen and subscribe to all of Adweek's podcasts by visiting Adweek.com podcast.
- [38:08]
Mauro Porcini
Stay updated on all things Adweek Podcast.
- [38:11]
Jenny Rooney
Network by following us on Twitter at Adweek Podcasts. And if you have a question or.
- [38:15]
Mauro Porcini
Suggestion for the show, send us an.
- [38:17]
Jenny Rooney
Email@Podcastadweek.Com thanks for listening.