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- [00:00]
Fergus O' Carroll
Welcome to OnStrategy Showcase. I'm Fergus O' Carroll in Chicago. You can connect with me on LinkedIn and follow us on our YouTube channel or on the podcast platforms. And if you're on the podcast platforms, do please give us a rating, a five star rating if you will, and if you wouldn't mind. It helps with broadening the reach and spreading the good word. We'd appreciate that on the podcast platforms. You can also see all of the creative work associated with with all of our episodes on our website@onstrategyshowcase.com there's about, I think there's 300 episodes on there now. And it's an amazing archive of great creative work and great thinking from all of our interviews and from all of our guests. So do check that out. Wanted to talk a little bit about what starts next week in our episode. It's actually a new series called Planning for Effective Outcomes. We're doing this in partnership with the Effies and those of you who are regular listeners will know that we did this a couple of years ago. And one of the things, and it was very successful for the show and for progressing, I think, the way that we approach marketing and marketing strategy and marketing effectiveness. But we're updating it this year, kind of a 2026 upgrade because I think partly we had forgotten to include the voice of clients and we had forgotten to include or overlooked the idea of including media, which was a mistake. So this year we're not only updating the entire series, we're including those other voices and many others throughout the six episodes. So starting next week, we're going to be launching the first episode. And the first episode is featuring three CMOs. And that episode is going to be about how they get from that blank sheet all the way to the point of giving the agencies a brief. Because the basic premise of this series is if you don't do all of these steps right, all of the subsequent steps will suffer. So we're going right back to the earliest and first stages to understand what's happening early, what are the challenges that they're facing internally, what do we need to be aware of as we then get briefed by them? So for that episode we have Colin Cavanagh, CMO of Pernod Ricard, Adam Kraw, global head of Prime Marketing for Amazon, and George Felix, evp, CMO for Brinker International. You'll know George, most recently from his great work with Mischief on Chili's. That will be followed in episode two by an episode we actually recorded it yesterday, which is going to be what happens then from the point where the client briefs the agency and how is the agency reacting to that brief, interrogating that brief, improving upon that brief, collaborating on that brief to develop its own creative brief. So we're going to sort of take this in a progressive point throughout the entire series. So Joan joining us for that second episode will be Will Grundy, CSO at Adam and Eve TBWA in London. Esther Franklin is Chief Strategy Officer for Publicist Media here in Chicago, Elizabeth Paul, Chief Brand Officer for the Martin Agency and Marcus Collins, a best selling author. If you haven't read for the Culture, you should give it a read. I think there is a second book in the series coming out next year and he's also a marketing professor at the University of Michigan. We'll talk about these subsequent episodes as we go a little bit further on in the series. So do check that out starting next week. Back to today's episode. A couple of weeks back we were in San Francisco for the Live from Uber tour stop. And this was actually the last stop in our tour series. The most recent one, season three starts up again in May, but we stopped at Uber to talk about Life in the Valley with a great panel and Uber, thank you so much for hosting us. It was a great space, a great crowd and I also want to thank Ipsos Tracksuit and the Effie's for making this live tour possible for this show. Without them it would not happen. So thank you to those great companies. Do support them as best you can. So about the panel, we have Danielle Hawley, global head of creative and brand at Uber. We have Brian Wakabayashi, head of brand at Colab, which is Inside West Cafe, which is a private equity firm in San Francisco. Whitney McGraw is global head of brand marketing for Airbnb and Gareth K. Is a VP Brand for Coinbase. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. It is Life in the Valley live from Uber in San Francisco.
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Host / Interviewer
You guys all came from the agency side. Make the case for why it is a good thing to do to go
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Fergus O' Carroll
to the client side.
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Danielle Hawley
Oh wow.
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Host / Interviewer
Ask each of them to do this.
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Danielle Hawley
Look, I think it's about influence and there's a lot of amazing independent agencies and I love agencies. The big ones, the small ones, the networks, the independents. So I would never say anything to disparage the work that agencies do, but I do think that they're particularly in tech and particularly on the west coast, there is less of an influence that agencies can have at the very, very Top. It's just a reality. And so for me, the specific opportunity at Uber was that it was a very large scale, but the brand wasn't written at all. Normally you can go to a startup and write the brand, but you don't have the scale that comes with it. So it was a very unique opportunity six years ago for me. But I think even more so, having gotten to where I got in the agency world, having been very senior with very senior clients, and realizing how little influence I truly had on their business, on their points of view, made me really want to see if there was a difference, to have influence on the inside.
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Host / Interviewer
Why do you think they were not open to influence?
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Danielle Hawley
I think it's just gotten very insular. I think that's gotten very focused on especially tech, because I know we're talking about the Valley. It's gotten very focused on stock prices. It's gotten very focused on business. And I think brand and therefore agencies have a uphill battle to climb to talk about the value of brand. I mean, thank you, Tracksuit, thank you, Ipsos, for helping us talk about why the creative and the work that we do matter so much. But it's an uphill battle. And I believe, and I've experienced that being on the inside allows you to have a little bit more influence. You get to build a relationship in a different way. The most senior stakeholders, the executive leadership team, knows that you're living and breathing their business every day, and there's a trust there.
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Host / Interviewer
How about you, Gareth?
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Gareth K.
I think partly influence. I think it's absolutely correct observation. I think for me it was about trying to increase the surface area that I could bring my strategic thinking to. So I think far too often, sometimes you're asked, and again, this problem as well, client side, to think about how an ad or how a piece of communication can go and solve a commercial problem. And the reality is an ad is at best going to be a very expensive band aid.
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Host / Interviewer
But are we really still doing ads, though? I mean, I don't think any agency would say we're in the ad business anymore. Have we gotten past that, do you feel, or is that a set of perception?
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Gareth K.
I still think that's how they make their money. I think that's a problem. They sell advertising size units to clients. They sell output. They don't sell outcomes.
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Host / Interviewer
You can throw cans at, Gareth, if you want to.
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Gareth K.
No, I love my time in advertising. I learned probably more from the brilliant people there and had great fun.
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Whitney McGraw
Didn't you have an agency?
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Gareth K.
I had a consultancy. It was not an agency. But no, but I feel about surface area. I just really enjoy thinking about how can you build the kind of operating system strategically and then influence not just comms, but you think about product experience, customer service, how you think about events. I just get excited by the different kinds of opportunities and canvases that you can build the brand through and build the business.
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Host / Interviewer
I felt the same way coming up. I would always get most excited about ideas that could just reach every part of the business and then you try and sell it in and they'd be great. Sorry, somebody else is kind of doing that shit. And I think that's probably changed somewhat more recently. But it's a valid point most likely still, right?
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Gareth K.
I think so. And it's about being able to have the conversations on the corridors or in the Slack channel. Because things move so quickly, the people you need to build alliances with to make things happen at that scale tend to be cross functional. So I think it's one of those things that's really important. I still love making ads. I still love making ads, but it's part of what I enjoy doing rather than being maybe 80% of what we're doing, which I think maybe I'm wrong and maybe it's an old guy, hasn't been advertising for too long. But I do kind of feel that most of the work that comes out of agencies are brilliant bits of advertising communication and they're fantastic. But I just wanted to do stuff that has a bit more expansiveness within its scope.
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Host / Interviewer
Right. And even in ad testing, it's always weird to me that the thing that gets tested is the ad. And campaigns are judged based upon ad testing rather than sort of campaign wide or whole communications frameworks. And beyond that.
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Fergus O' Carroll
Right?
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Brian Wakabayashi
Yeah.
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Host / Interviewer
So Whitney, how about for you Airbnb
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Whitney McGraw
Now, I started my career working for WPP in Hong Kong, which was sick, by the way, like working on Las Vegas sands when you're 21. I was just telling someone about this earlier was a great entree into like, wait, this is a job? Like you're going to pay me to do this, But I spent a lot of time at Apple's advertising agency, Media Arts Lab. And so that was fun, great family vibe. And you know, I would say today at Airbnb, we really value agencies because of the outside perspective that they can bring, the scale that they can bring to our work. They are our partners. But I think the magic maybe of being in house and being client side is the way that you can shape the business. It's your point, I think, around influence but it's also just access to information when you can really deeply understand how the business works and how the product works. Marketing is a really neat kind of backdoor, soft way to actually shape how the business manifests.
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Host / Interviewer
So do you see yourself as an advocate for creativity? Is that part of the way you think about what your job is?
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Whitney McGraw
Of course, yeah. And creativity can come from anywhere. One of the, I think wonderful things about Airbnb specifically is our founder is a creative and it's a very creatively led company. And that doesn't mean you have to have the word creative in your title. Creativity is about thinking outside of the box and having big ideas and having interesting solutions. And the expectation is that that comes from anywhere.
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Host / Interviewer
So, Brian, for you, in what way is it different or the same? Because when you and I talk, you come at it from a venture capital, private equity point of view. Sometimes your objective isn't about long term business building. It's a little different. Is that a fair way to say it?
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Brian Wakabayashi
Yeah, it is. I mean, I might go back a step and answer your first question, which is like, why did I make the jump to sort of the out of the agency world and the client side? And I didn't really think I was ever going to get off the agency ladder in my lifetime. I think I was 19 years in at that point. And I think really, you know what, it was an app. It was a sort of just to set the stage. I didn't know anything about pe. If you said you want to work for a PE firm, I would have to look up what does PE firm stand for? I was sort of hapless out in the world and a lot of doing a lot of weird gigs. I worked on like Twitch and Mazda and a host of random startups. And I started seeing that like, you know, there was a very different vibe when you get under a McCann or BBDO billable structure for a type of client and type of work, it is, it's much more. You're working with founders, you're doing things that are very direct and fast. You have to figure out how to think on your feet and figure out how to impact the business in a quarter or everything is quarterly, sometimes monthly. In a startup world, when burn can be like, hey, we have nine months left. And through that I had met our managing partner, Alan Mask at Westcap, and he was actually. Gareth knows him too. He was actually small world. He was looking for a freelance strategist. And that was one of the ways I sort of started there. And I think the Reason I sort of settled there was I knew that I didn't want to be in one brand. And Colab is a way. Essentially what Colab is is a creative studio inside a private equity firm. Every portfolio company we invest in, I either touch or consult with or advise. Right now I think we're at 35, 36 portfolio companies. It's a lot of startups that you would not necessarily touch at a holding company agency, but you get to jump in and do cool stuff.
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Host / Interviewer
With the one thing that you said to me which I think will fascinate people in the room and on the stage, you chose to take the word strategy out of your title.
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Brian Wakabayashi
Yeah. So I was hired as a head of brand strategy for the studio and then we would go and do these sort of brand strategy exercises like a four Cs or a positioning. And I would spend eight weeks and I would do a lot of interviews and research and present this 100 slide deck. And it was definitely too much for a startup to just go like, what is this? And even at the beginning of that process, they actually referred to the, the process is discovery or a bring down deck. And I'm like, why are you calling it discovery? I'm not a lawyer, I don't really know what this is. And then over time, I realized at a foundational level, I was trying to run the triangle offense, but I was coaching a middle school team. These were not marketers who had this big foundational understanding of we need a positioning, it needs to be distinctive, we want category entry points. All those things were just foreign language. So we were like, let's strip this down. And when we started doing that, we realized that they understood that they needed a better story. You need a story for investors, you need a story for your customers, you need a story for press. They understood that that story had to be consistent, it had to be sharp, it had to be supported by insights. And so I stopped selling a strategy and started selling brand and messaging. I didn't take brand out because that can also be. There are certain founders that are going to be allergic initially to brand and you have to sort of bring them along the journey and go, you know, you do care what people think of you. And if you don't, if no one knows who you are, you're not going to be able to convert them as easily. And so you have to bring them through the journey of not being overly reliant on performance to a place where they respect that performance brand mix. And then they grow.
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Host / Interviewer
You know. We titled this episode Life in the Valley. Do you guys think of yourselves as. I mean, you guys, your brands are of the Valley or of. I don't even know if they are. I mean, do you think of it as of the Valley?
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Whitney McGraw
You know, this place can actually become so insular, right? And I think, you know, one of the things that I found, especially, you know, working on Airbnb, we're in 190 countries. Like, it is your job, if you are responsible for the brand, to be the voice of the consumer. And it's actually helped me immensely to leave this place. Right. And to have, I think, more of a robust perspective. So, yes, I think Airbnb is maybe born in the Valley, but the brand and the people who work on it have to represent travelers all over the world.
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Danielle Hawley
I think the second that you say tech and the second that you say Valley, there's like a flood of negative connotations that come into the fray. But there's also a lot of good things that are born here. Innovation, certainly. First to market, first movers. You know, there's not. Not everybody is understanding the fact that there's going to be autonomous vehicles in their neighborhood, right? That is a very. That is one of those things that happens in San Francisco. And to Whitney's point, it's a bubble, right? It's insular. We think that's how the rest of the world is experiencing things, and they're not. I think we filter for it by taking the good pieces of it and translating them market to market. So the innovation spirit, the disruption spirit, the really brave sort of messaging that we have because we had to stand out because we had to be the disruptor. I mean, I think you ask anybody at a Thanksgiving dinner table what Uber is, and they're like, oh, they disrupted the taxi industry. Like, the disruption thing follows us is never going to go away, is the thing that I think the mass public understands. And so that feeling and that, I think duty and obligation to be constantly reimagining things around the entire world is absolutely something that we live and breathe every day.
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Gareth K.
I think there is pros and cons about this Valley thing. I'm not sure if I even think the Valley is a thing anymore. It's not really a geographic thing, I don't think. I think it's a state of mind, and I think there's pros and cons to it. I think there's the dangers. It can be a bubble. There's a lot of groupthinking, I think, exists here, and I think there's a lot of quite rightful pride in the product. And it can often be product first. And look how smart this piece of engineering is. And maybe is lacking the sense of what problem are we solving out there in the real world. But I think there's real upside to the mindset. I think firstly there is a real sense of, I think technology. And Ben Horowitz of A16Z always talks about the etymological meaning of technology being a better way of doing things. I think thinking about how you can create better outcomes, better progress, try and address broken systems is really important. I think there's the best companies here and the best people have a real desire to be kind of frontier thinkers. They want to be on the edge of things. They want to be looking for new space and to go and kind of grow in interesting ways. And then I think there's actually a really beneficial thing working on brands and marketing, which is there's a massively natural disdain for anything called brand or marketing. So you have to go and do things differently. You have to be unconventional, you have to go and build different approaches rather than maybe having the playbooks you had in your agency careers. And to me, that's all the stuff that keeps me excited.
- [19:28]
Fergus O' Carroll
We'll be right back. Want Always on Brand Metrics that Deliver Value to Stakeholders this episode is brought to you by Tracksuit, a beautiful, affordable
- [19:39]
Host / Interviewer
and always on brand tracking tool that
- [19:42]
Fergus O' Carroll
helps consumer marketers and agencies answer the
- [19:45]
Host / Interviewer
question is what we're doing working? A not so secret fact is that companies pay $100,000 or more for brand tracking, which is out of the question
- [19:55]
Fergus O' Carroll
for many modern brands whose budgets are under pressure. Tracksuit provides enterprise level brand tracking without the big price tag. Their in house research experts do the heav lifting, using best in class practices to craft and launch your survey and get you results fast.
- [20:13]
Host / Interviewer
Tracksuit is fast becoming the common language
- [20:16]
Fergus O' Carroll
for marketers and agencies to measure and
- [20:18]
Host / Interviewer
communicate the value of brand building.
- [20:21]
Fergus O' Carroll
Check it out@gotracksuit.com that's gotracksuit.com Our tour is also brought to you by Ipsos Creative Excellence, the experts in using research to inspire and empower creativity. Every marketer knows the best creative of work starts with a strong brief. Yet the reality is many briefs that brands give their agencies miss the mark. In fact, Ipsos found that only 5% of brand marketers say the quality of their briefs is really good. That's why Ipsos created Creative Fuel. Creative Fuel is strategy research designed to help brands ensure the messages in their brief are something both their audiences and their Agencies can get excited about. With creative fuel, marketers can build confidence and buy in around the kind of simple, bold, empathetic strategies that inspire the caliber of work we're discussing today. So if you want to start fueling your next campaign with strategy that really moves the needle, check out Ipsos Creative Excellence and their Creative Fuel solution. More info@ipsos.com that's Ipsos I P S
- [21:32]
Host / Interviewer
O S.com now back to the show. The other thing is you just brought this point of brand and stuff. What also struck me is that each of you have got brand in your titles and when, if you're. And that seems counterintuitive to what we normally associate with the Valley. Let's just call it the Valley for the sake of discussion. Today we think of brand as being something that the Valley wants to sort of push aside in favor of tech and product. But all four of you have got brand new title. Is that a signal that things are changing in the Valley?
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Whitney McGraw
Nope.
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Host / Interviewer
Tell me.
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Danielle Hawley
You know, I don't know if I've ever really thought very hard about the fact that there's brand in my title. I think, I think about what I do and what I do is think about style guides and brand guidelines and a way to conceive, keep things consistent across the 76 markets that we happen to operate in. And I think that's very important to build what we like to refer to as trust and reputation. So brand around Uber is actually referred to as trust and reputation because that makes sense to our policymakers, that makes sense to the folks that we work with. I don't know, maybe I need to
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Whitney McGraw
change my title, Fergus.
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Host / Interviewer
No, but I mean, but you know what I mean.
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Whitney McGraw
I totally do.
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Host / Interviewer
Obviously it works for your organization, but it's not at all what we would think would be.
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Brian Wakabayashi
Yeah,
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Host / Interviewer
I mean, optimistic about it because I'm like, hey, this is good because I look at OpenAI, I look at anthropic, I look at those big ass brand campaigns that are coming out of the gate and the people working on those. I'm trying to think if they don't necessarily have brand in their titles, but they're here tonight. But I don't know if they have it in their titles. But my point is, is there a signal of change now? Is there an acceptance of brand and therefore maybe this sort of performance oriented past has caught up with us?
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Brian Wakabayashi
I don't, I agree with Danielle on some level. It's not. I don't think things have massively changed in the recent years in terms of of attitudes towards brands. I think that in many ways there's an old, I forget the origin of the quote. There's an old tech quote about advertising as a tax on bad products. And that attitude provides.
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Host / Interviewer
Was that Bezos? I think Bezos Best Buy.
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Gareth K.
I think it's Best Buy. I think, I think so, yeah.
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Danielle Hawley
I think it was Best Buy or
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Brian Wakabayashi
Nerd Squad or Geek Squad. Anyway, that's an engineering, financialized sort of like sensibility that says like if we build it, they will come. And then you have a lot of people building things and sometimes not a lot of people coming and you go, well, did you tell everyone it's here? Did you show them how it works? There's a little bit of that sort of journey that has to happen and I think it's because most tech startups, I mean if you think about being of the Valley, it's funny because before I took my job I watched Silicon Valley because I didn't know what a term she was. And surprisingly large amounts of that show are relevant to that world. But you start to learn like, okay, there's a grinder to get the best sort of minds in software development and data science and AI and all those things and that the top of the top wind up here and they're competing for YC Money and all sorts of like the seed stage and angel and they're really just, they're battling every problem with code, with data, with a rationalist sort of view. And at some point if they're successful and if they're that top 10%, 1%, they start to go like, okay, well now we have to do all this other stuff and they sort of see it as like, ah, well, it's not really what I do, it's an ancillary thing. I think that journey really becomes. We usually say it's like seed series A scale where seed. You only care about the investors because your entire business is funded by investors. So you don't have to make money, you just have to get someone to invest in you. You get the scale or I'm sorry, you get the Series A and you only care about the product. Like, you know, customers are sort of like almost like an add on to the product. The product is everything, they're nice to have. Yeah, if they come great, because the product is great. And then finally you get to the mature stage when they're scaling up, that's when you start to see the C suite, the leadership start to evolve and they go, actually we are here to serve customers and make money, which Sometimes they don't until scale. So they're like, how do we make money? We. We have a brand, and that's part of it. So it's a maturity curve. And like, a lot of the. What most of the stuff I'm talking about is at a different scale than Coinbase, than Airbnb, than Uber. So I think that it's like a very different stage in the maturity, but it's the same sort of spirit or ethos that runs sort of Silicon Valley tech companies. I mean, I worked for six years on Xbox and Microsoft, and you still saw some of that thinking. And it's not of the Valley, but tech companies have a core spirit that it's like we can engineer through any problem, and then they mature and they become wiser.
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Host / Interviewer
So, Gareth, I mean, I think you're pretty deliberate about branding your title. How do you then go in and work with product? How do you go in and work with engineering? How do you sort of articulate your purpose and value? If assuming they're skeptical, they may not be.
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Gareth K.
I'm not sure how deliberate I was about my title. It's probably the most contentious part of my negotiation, to be quite honest. More so than conversation. I was constant because the danger of being called someone doing brand or owning brand is one. One person should never own that. That's super dangerous. And second, there's too many of these companies who will see brand as being the flashy campaign. They'll see the bit of the iceberg sticking out the water. They don't see the real value of the brand, which is the stuff under the waterline, which is essentially building an operating system that the business can run on. It helps codify your purpose. Your direction, frankly, becomes the organizing idea that everything can kind of be judged against and flow from. I think when you get that right, that becomes the moment you can have the conversations with product and with other stakeholders, because what you're talking about is allying, perhaps really smart technological leaps, really good ideas in terms of how to innovate. But you're giving it intention, you're giving it direction, and hopefully creating a sense of momentum in the business as well. So I think the trick is, how do you build that blueprint, an operating system where you can partner with different parts of the business? It's about being super open. I've had to lose a load of ego and just be able to go and try and work with people towards better outcomes, but in the right direction.
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Host / Interviewer
Are they able to go ahead, please?
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Danielle Hawley
Well, but I experience that I have to do that from the bottom up, where someone like Whitney gets to do it from the top down. Right. And I'm curious as to why is
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Host / Interviewer
because of Brian Chesky.
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Danielle Hawley
Yeah. Brian Chesky starts with brand. Brand is the organizing function. It is the thing that sits above everything. It is the thing that makes decisions about NAV&UI and product development and look and feel and tone and reason for being. Where, you know my experience has been, the business grew way faster than the brand and it was exactly what Brian is describing. Produce, produce, make new products, start in different ways. You know, Uber Eats was, was, was not on the map until Covid. All of a sudden it's 50% of the business now. What? You've got one brand going this way, another brand going this way. Does everybody know us for Uber Eats or they knew us for rides? There was a really big problem and I had to go catch the running train and pull it back and try to make sense of what these two things had to do with each other as a brand ethos. So I'm curious what your experience is. I'm six years in. You're not but like what, four months, you know, how's it going and have you learned any tricks? I've got some if you need them.
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Gareth K.
I'll definitely get you take up on your tricks. There's no doubt about that. I feel very lucky in that I kind of stand on the shoulder of giants in the business. Kate Rauch was there before CMO Michael Tab to buy, who was the kind of chief creative officer there. We're just brilliant people who help the business understand the value of brand because there's no doubt we're in that position where the business outpaced the brand. Like what was the brand? No one cared. How do we go and keep growing the the business? Their work helped the organization see the value of brand and actually how it could help link to. Brian's a very mission driven founder, which really helps. They're mission driven. It really helps. So that became a connective tissue and we definitely have moments where it feels like you're going on even in the four months you're going on the right journey and then something happens in the market or there may be a desire to go and think about how we're going to build different products and it begins to go like that and you've got to go and work out how to bring it together again. Actually where you end up may be a different place than where you started from. So that's what I kind of quite like about it's fluid. I think if you try and think a brand is a rigid thing, you're going to fail. It will just shatter. You got to be able to think about kind of strong opinions softly held, and how you can, like, grow and evolve that over time. I think.
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Whitney McGraw
I think it's an interesting conversation. And I know we all want to think we're unique, but I do think Airbnb is a unique business and company in this landscape. Because what you were mentioning, one of the things that separates the way that we operate is the brand truly does sit atop everything. It's not a title or something that a specific team is responsible for. It's the vision for the company, and it's why we exist, and it's what we mean for people. And so the way we kind of think about it is, okay, there's brand, and then we develop a product that delivers on that promise, and then we develop marketing that communicates that and hopefully resonates with people.
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Host / Interviewer
I would look at Airbnb and say that Airbnb's brand is built. And I don't know if it's true to say, but I would think of Airbnb as almost saturated the marketplace in terms of its. And part of it is now is building these sort of sub services that are an expansion of the relationship with the consumer and new revenue flow. Because it feels to me like the Airbnb brand is baked. It's now a mature brand and it now is like generating new revenue. So is that new services? So is that part of what you focus on now is building that services business?
- [32:21]
Whitney McGraw
Yeah. I'm glad you feel that it's baked. It is definitely baked in our more mature markets, but it's nowhere near where it needs to be around the world. So a core part of what we think about is when we talk to the people who love and use Airbnb, that thing, how do we get that light bulb to go off for people around the world? And so one of the things we're really focused on from a growth lens is how do we grow internationally? The other thing that we're doing is introducing new lines of business. So, yes, experiences is back. I feel like I'm going to start to lap myself with all the things that come back around. But, yes, we now have experiences and services. And I think the intent is if you kind of buy into this Airbnb way of travel, you can go somewhere, you can stay in a real neighborhood, you can do something with real people that feels local and insider, and it just might be a more authentic way to experience a place. So that's the bet. We're really excited about it. And to your point about it being more mature, I think one of the other things that's interesting and maybe unique is Airbnb is a brand led direct traffic business. If we do our job and we make sure that Airbnb is top of mind, when you think about travel, you come to us first. And that's actually a much cheaper, less expensive way to market. So thinking about some of the things you're mentioning and the work that Kate did at Coinbase, I don't have to run around and validate that we should do these things. It's actually core to the business strategy. So the thing that we get to do is think about, okay, well now how do we do it the best or in the most interesting way, in
- [34:14]
Danielle Hawley
a way that resonates with France.
- [34:16]
Whitney McGraw
Yeah, exactly, France.
- [34:18]
Host / Interviewer
And then one of the other things, and I'd love to, Brian, jump in anytime, anytime you want here, but do you want to jump in now or do you want to?
- [34:25]
Brian Wakabayashi
I kind of want to, yeah. On the comment, the whole idea of product and brand being a divide, I think I've experienced both sides of it in that when I was at an agency working on the brand campaigns, the product marketers come in and they were always sort of our adversaries because they were always trying to like throw more RTBs into the, into the video. That was pure and perfect. I think you on the other side of it, I mean, frankly, my job right now is no longer really even. It's a generalist marketing job. Because when you were working with a founder, you're working with a CEO or the C suite or even sometimes the board you're really representing, just marketing writ larger and they're asking you questions about things I have no idea about. But we have someone who understands Search. I'm like, oh, yeah, I have to fake it until I can get through that conversation. But the product brand divide is real. And I think the entry point, if you're a strategist or a marketer or you're in a role, is the product designer. And I say this as my chief creative officer for Colab is a guy named Jason Mamoro. It came from Airbnb. He designed the original experiences and he believes in a philosophy he calls brand led product design, which I think comes from his Airbnb roots, but also comes from his personal roots as a brand designer turned product designer. And I think the main thing with that is there's going to be that kindred spirit in sometimes the pm, but also often the product designer to go, what is that experience we want people to have? That experience is also a story. And that's where the two cross. So I think in a tech company, or even a non tech company, where you have PMs, product designers, brand designers and brand people, that creative lens is where it'll cross over. Because that's the moment where you can go, I can help you sell that thing in. That's amazing. But may not have the AB testing to back it up right now, but let's figure out how it fits into the bigger story. And conversely, when they come to you and they're like, we need to figure out how to promote this product, that we have a small launch, I think that's the give and take of getting product into design. I have nothing against engineers, but I have no real ability to influence that. But the product designer does. And so the product designer has usually earned the trust of the engineering team. They know we're not going to give you some shit that's going to be difficult to make and throw off your timeline. There's a give and take there. So if you have the product designer's trust, I think you can create, or the head of product's trust, the CPO's trust, you can create that synergy. But it's hard. It's a lot of AB testing and a lot of incrementalism across pieces of the journey and then you get lost in that and you're like, well, we maximized all these things, but the entire thing is now shitty because I feel like you're asking me for money at too many points. So you go back to, well, that's the tension between optimizing your product and doing so in a brand LED way. I think that's sort of the magic when it happens.
- [37:14]
Host / Interviewer
I don't typically talk about this on the show a lot because sometimes it kind of bores me. Oh, good. But since we're here in the Valley, let's lean into it.
- [37:27]
Brian Wakabayashi
AI.
- [37:29]
Host / Interviewer
Oh, how do you guys think about it?
- [37:32]
Brian Wakabayashi
I have a just a really funny story. So, like for the last year I've been doing this thing where every time I write a brief or a presentation, I'll have AI write it and then I'll write it, but I won't look at what it's writing until I write it. And then I'll sort of compare and contrast and always try to figure out how to sneak that into the meeting and go, here's something I wrote and here's something AI wrote and see what they prefer. I've been doing this for like two, three years now and so far I have not lost.
- [37:59]
Host / Interviewer
What do you got, like a control group or.
- [38:01]
Gareth K.
What do you mean?
- [38:01]
Brian Wakabayashi
Basically like if I have, if I'm presenting briefs, I'll just like, here's two briefs. And, and in the beginning it was super easy to beat AI and it's getting a little harder and harder. It's gotten sneakier about sneaking stuff in that's like client bait where it's like, let's put more stats in our positioning statement. I'm like, who's putting fucking stats in a positioning statement anyway? I will say this. I think that in the question of how we work, we are definitely leaning in hard. All of our portfolio companies are accelerate bi. I have a. No, he's not. Double PhD, a PhD slash masters data scientist genius guy who does all of our engineering coding training and he'll go in and we're seeing huge productivity lifts. I don't think it's as pronounced in marketing yet. And I have my own reasons for that. I think it's basically because it's not as profitable as getting. Coding is the best use case for it. It's the most developed. You can get an engineer to 3x to 5x of his or her capacity speed, et cetera. And if you can show that to a founder or whatever, they're willing to invest. But Colab separately has been basically having genai for video, for research, for springboards. We've used that for the AI sort of brief slash concepting tool. We've played with all of that. We still use it a lot. I see it as if you use it, there's a right way to use it and a wrong way to use it. And I think it's, it's, you know, there's the dark side of it too where you worry about like whether you're bringing about the destruction of the human of capitalism writ large. But in my mind I think that at this point people are blowing a lot of that doomerism stuff up because it's marketing. It seems more powerful than it is.
- [39:57]
Host / Interviewer
What do you mean by that? The way that they're promoting it.
- [40:01]
Brian Wakabayashi
Yeah, I mean like a lot of AI scuttlebutt is oh, we're going to have 50% unemployment and it's going to wipe out all white collar jobs. Which if you've. I ran some. And cloud is the best platform right now. I ran some cloud stuff two days ago and I had 40% of them are dead links. And I'm like, you can't even get a link right yet. I don't think we're at the precipice of a cliff where humanity is going to fall. Because if it's one thing I know that's more powerful than AI, it's capitalism. And I feel like people will find a way and businesses will find a way. I don't buy that every layoff is AI driven. I think it's mostly business driven and AI covered. I think there's a lot of productivity
- [40:43]
Host / Interviewer
answer the what as in square and what Dorsey recently did. No comment.
- [40:49]
Brian Wakabayashi
I don't know anything about square. No inside information about block. But yeah, there's a lot of this, like people saying, oh, we laid off 20% because of AI. And I'm like, did you? Or was your stock price lagging for five years? You overhired? Maybe, maybe it's a mix. But I think it's true that if you are not trying and if you're not present and if you're not playing with these tools, it's a dangerous thing. I think our work style and our work, like we were talking about workflows. Right now we're in the phase of AI where we're doing. We're trying to get it to do what we do, and that's not really the optimal way to use it. And thinking about, I think we're going to figure out how to use AI to do things that we can't do today. But for now, we're just trying to be like, hey, let's do the thing that I do every day, but faster.
- [41:36]
Host / Interviewer
What about you, Daniel? What are you.
- [41:38]
Danielle Hawley
The way that it affects Uber the most is less about AI and more about a larger cultural conversation that is robots versus humans. And we are in a world where autonomous vehicles have arrived. And yet, to Brian's point, they are small. There are not a lot of them. We have 9 million drivers on the platform. You're talking about maybe 500,000 cars from the loudest of the autonomous vehicle makers at this point. And yet they are dominating the conversation because of the way that they can use the PR engine to their advantage
- [42:12]
Whitney McGraw
and because it's amazing. It is also amazing. The server experience is incredible. Absolutely.
- [42:19]
Host / Interviewer
I still haven't gotten it. When I was going to try, I was going to try and get one while I was here.
- [42:22]
Danielle Hawley
You have to.
- [42:23]
Host / Interviewer
I saw them all driving by and I'm like, I can't even flag them down. So I'm like, why would
- [42:29]
Fergus O' Carroll
sound like
- [42:29]
Host / Interviewer
A New York cab.
- [42:30]
Whitney McGraw
Since the iPhone, it is the best consumer experience. I have had to get in and have it be completely Zen and smell good and drive so smoothly and have a conversation. It's. Sorry. So good.
- [42:45]
Danielle Hawley
No, it's true. It is very good. And we need AVs to be on our platform. We need to be an aggregator of all of the autonomous vehicle solutions all across the globe. Because frankly, it's just like Domino's. Domino's has their own Apple, but also they're on Uber Eats. Right. We need to have Waymo, we need to have Zoox, we need to have all of these players on our app because a lot of people are not going to want to download seven apps. They want to come to Uber and they want to get what they can get. At the same time, we have 9 million drivers who are going, what are going to happen? And so we're on one hand trying to secure more AV partners and on the other hand trying to say to drivers, it's okay. And that, to me, is the existential crisis of our business. It is our opportunity to own the future of mobility. And it is something that my team is incredibly focused on.
- [43:36]
Host / Interviewer
I heard something, I think it was yesterday. I've heard this mentioned by a couple of different people, but yesterday it came up again and it's important for the people. There's some students here from University of San Francisco. They're here. Yeah. So young people that are coming into the business, I love young people. So they shouldn't freak out too much because the doomsday is saying they're all screwed because they're coming in. I think if you're good, there's always going to be a place for you in this business and in other businesses. What I heard yesterday was that we've got to be careful that AI just doesn't raise the floor, but it raises the roof. So quality can go up, not just efficiency and not that bad. Shit can just get a little better. It's that great shit can get even better. Right? So you need that right now.
- [44:35]
Whitney McGraw
So optimistic.
- [44:36]
Host / Interviewer
So optimistic. It's gonna be great. I am very optimistic about it. I just don't wanna think about it too much. And as I think it's fair to say from listening to you guys, I don't think you guys have figured it out yet. And I think it's important for brands around the world to hear that too, and listeners to hear that, that nobody's really figured it out yet. And maybe it'll come in the professional services sector first. And it'll work its way in and OpenAI can jump up here with their opinion if they want, but that's how I feel about it. It can help good people get even better. And I think there's always room for good people in our industry.
- [45:13]
Gareth K.
Anyone who says they figured out AI is crazy. I mean, it's a lie. Because the reality is when I just think about my experience over 18 months using it, how I began using it and how I'm using it now, and how I think I'll be using it in three months, I never thought I'd be there. There's just so much change. And I do feel at the moment a lot of the focus is on the kind of efficiency piece and the automation and that's really valuable and frankly, helping people really focus on adding value and kind of like creativity and spark. But I think one of the biggest dangers we have is I think people are using it like they use search. They're using it for like to be an answer machine. And I think that's really, really dangerous. All we're going to go and do is repeat what we've always done because these models are trained on the present and the past. The way I like to use it and think about it is they're kind of curiosity machines. And I can go and get inspired about different things, how different people might think about something, how a brief might sound like if you're writing it in the style of Obama speechwriter, whatever it might be, you can go and push yourself to have just new thoughts and new collisions occur at a far greater rate than you've ever had before. And that to me is really exciting as a strategist because we're kind of meant to be the engines of curiosity inside our companies. So if you can go and accelerate that, that's awesome.
- [46:35]
Danielle Hawley
I would also add for you young people, I'm incredibly jealous because we sit in these giant organizations and change is really hard and we're tweaking the edges and trying to form fit things that are so ingrained and we're trying to retrofit them into something that is brand new, that is totally game changing. I think it's going to be really interesting to see the companies that start with it and build themselves with it. I mean, Brian, you're on the, you know, you have a front row seat to that because I think it's like you're not going to be able to tweak your way into really leveraging what AI can experience. I think you have to start from the ground up. So My advice to you guys would be learn everything you possibly can and look for the companies that are starting from the ground up and have to build something from scratch.
- [47:22]
Whitney McGraw
Yeah, and use it, use it, use it, use it. Well, yeah, I mean, hot take. I think AI will make me totally extinct. And I'm working on my landscaping certificate for that reason. But in the meantime, from a marketing and creative lens, we have fully embraced AI into all of our workflows. And we have, I think, a really lovely philosophy and approach, which is kind of tops and tails. So you really want a human at the top. You want to think about that and have that initial spark and kind of craft the strategy. It's helpful to have AI tools in the middle to amplify craft, to amplify the way that we bring it to life. Scale, velocity, all of those things. But. But you want a human at the end to make sure that it's great and ready before it goes. And so that's sort of how we're approaching it. And so far it's really exciting. And it's exciting to see our creative teams embrace it. And so I think we're bullish on AI from that lens.
- [48:26]
Brian Wakabayashi
People have written pieces about like, agencies are done, because we can automate all this. We can agentically framework put the producer and the creative. I don't think that's the end of agencies as we know it or creativity as we know it. I think that's just an expansion of what's possible. So if you think about the number, the percentage of businesses that a creative studio or an agency can serve, it's really the top 20, top 10 people who can pay a fee for creativity is pretty small in businesses. And you think about all the businesses in the world, the small business, et cetera, you could see a world in which agencies serve every business and just AI can enable an expansion of the agency business.
- [49:05]
Fergus O' Carroll
So that's our conversation from Uber Live in San Francisco. Thank you to our panel and thank you to our tour sponsors, Ipsos Tracksuit, and our good friends at the fes. We will be back next week with episode one in our Planning for Effective Outcome series, which we're developing with our friends at Effies, and we hope to see you then have a great week.