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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to OnStrategy Showcase. I'm Fergus O' Carroll in Chicago. We are going back on our live Tour next month, May 28th in Kansas City. So if you're in that area, we'd love to see you at Barclay. OKRP is where the show is going to be taking place. We want everybody from the community to come together. So look for tickets to go on sale soon and we'll announce the panelists as we get close. Then following that, we're going to be in Minneapolis at Carmichael lynch in June. I think it's the third Thursday in June. There'll be more information on that coming soon and then from there we'll head out for the rest of the tour. You may have noticed this past week that the winners of the US effies were announced. And I think you can get the list. I'm guessing at this, but I think you could probably get the list of winners on the FE website@fe.org but for those of you watching this on YouTube, this is the list of winners. It's pretty sizable. And I was going through this yesterday. There's a lot of great stuff that's come out this year. So if you're on this list, look for me to be tapping you on the shoulder soon to see if we can get you on the show to talk about your case. Very excited about it. We are going to be in Cannes and I'm thrilled about it. This will be my first time in Cannes this year. The last couple of years I've been trying to figure out what I would do if I was going to be there. And so the Effie's and I have worked out these roundtables around the EFFIE Best of the best awards. So we're going to be there on stage doing roundtables with various combinations of clients and creatives and judges to talk about the best of the best awards and what's in those cases. So if you're going to be there, I'd love to love to connect with you and excited to be in Cannes. So let's get back to today's episode. We're talking Rocket Mortgage and for those of you who are frequent listeners to the show, you know, we've talked about this on past episodes. I'm a big fan of the work. I'm a big fan of the people behind it. And just by way of background and information here, there's a couple of voices or couple of names you're going to hear thrown around in the episode. So I thought it was important to first Sort of lay out some of the groundwork. Jonathan Mildenhall, who most of us are familiar with, he was at one point at Koch. He then worked with his guy at Crispin, which is Peter. So that's where Peter and Jonathan first met. Then when Jonathan left Coke and went to Airbnb, he recruited Peter to come work with him at Airbnb. So Peter was with him from the very earliest stages of strategy development at Airbnb. Then when Jonathan ultimately ended up going to Rocket, he recruited Peter again to come join him. So those of us in the industry know the importance and the critical importance of having a kindred spirit in this business. It helps so much if you can find somebody who has the same taste, has the same instincts as you do in the business. So these guys are a great example of that. One of the things leading into the beginning of this episode that I was curious about was why Jonathan Mildenhall had gone to Rocket in the first place. And so we'll start the conversation off with that. So this is Peter Giorgi, svp, Brand marketing partnerships and creative excellence at Rocket. And Zach Foster is Chief Strategy Officer at the agency Miramar. Enjoy. Why would Jonathan take this job? Did he see something in it? And then how did he pitch you? Because this was a brand that was very retail oriented. It didn't have a lot of distinction. Why did you guys even take this on?
- [03:56]
B
Well, I think the story with Jonathan likely starts with Varun becoming our CEO at Rocket. That sort of sets the brand and the business on a much different path because he was intent on just changing everything. And, you know, so his first phone call is to Jonathan because he thinks we've got this fantastic business that's in search of a brand that. That can stand up to that. And Jonathan is. Is the best there is at finding that thinking and creating that kind of work. And I still remember the phone call from him and just saying, I think I might work again. And I was like, you're what? You know, it's like the guy's worse at retiring than. Than John Wick, basically. Just keeps going, just keeps coming back. And, you know, and I was just
- [04:52]
A
like, yeah, he's not an old guy. I mean, this guy, you know.
- [04:57]
B
No, he's not at all. He likes to say that he is, but he's not. He's got many, many great years left in him. But. But honestly, he didn't even tell me where he was thinking of working. I just remember saying, no, I'm in. Whatever it is, if. If it's exciting, to you. And if you, if you are going there to set out to do what I know you want to do, then yes, you know, sign me up. We talked about the brand a little bit and the space and opportunities there and what was missing. And I honestly just started writing, you know, just, just sort of thinking and reading and sent him a six page sort of stream of consciousness document around where I, I thought the brand could go and what homeownership should mean, you know, to the country and to culture and what's changed and how much owning a part of the country means to our identity in the US and how unique that is. And then kind of followed that up again with something else and we just really hit the ground running. Once I was there, I think Jonathan started in January and I started about six weeks later. And we had probably briefed the agency by Zach, what, May, June?
- [06:17]
C
Yeah, I think it was May.
- [06:19]
B
It was probably May. I mean, Jonathan had, he had the work and he had the core creative idea with him that year in Cannes. So from sort of January start date for him, March for me, to
- [06:37]
C
getting
- [06:37]
B
really deep into what this thing meant. Meaning, like, what is, what is the culture and character of this place and the people that make it? What role does Detroit play in that? What is Dan's sort of DNA and how's that transfer to this? And then constructing the brief to actually having work to share was less than six months.
- [07:01]
A
So, Zach, you're handed up strategy with a really great jumping off point. Were you involved in any of that earlier work? Was the relationship, had it been established with Miramar where you were able to get involved in some of that or not?
- [07:18]
C
I think there was still a fair amount of strategic work to be done. I mean, I think that one thing that's important to call out that we haven't yet is this wasn't about putting a fresh coat of paint on Rocket Mortgage. This was about like, Rocket Companies has an entire portfolio of brands. So Rocket has, you know, Rocket Loans, Rocket Homes, Rocket Mortgage. And so it was like all these fragmented pieces that were Redfin.
- [07:48]
A
Redfin.
- [07:49]
C
Was Redfin around later? Yeah, Redfin came later this, this past year. But the task was actually like, unite all of these brands under one umbrella, under one master brand called Rocket. And it was everything from like, brand new visual identity that a great team out of London did. Brand new, you know, product suite, brand new digital experience on Rocket.com where we're bringing all these things together and putting a campaign out in the world. The ambition, and I think partially why Jonathan took The job and why Peter joined on was like, this wasn't about, like, reinventing or disrupting mortgage. This was about creating a new category called home ownership. And so, like Fergus, when you talked about, like post 2008 and the competitive set, it's like we've gone from competing with other mortgage lenders to, like, competing with every stage of the home buying and homeownership process. So, like, there are times we're competing with like, Nerd Wallet and Intuit, like personal finance. Other times where it's Zillow, you know, upstream. Other times where it's United Wholesale Mortgage going, you know, fighting the broker battle, servicing, you know, like, actually servicing the mortgages out in the world. And so it's like, I think the enormity of it all is like, we have this enormous challenge in America where people can't buy homes. The process is universally awful. You know, there's some crazy stat that like 60% of people cry during the home buying process. And we need to bring all of these pieces together in a seamless way in the product experience. And the brand should reflect that. So I think it's really important. And so, you know, it's like digital experience was brand new. The team and the agency was brand new. The. The visual design by Otherway was brand new. And then the work that we put out in the world from Miramar was everything. It was. It was brand new.
- [09:57]
A
And I. One of the things that struck me, and I see it more frequently these days than I think I have in years, is the fact that you landed in a space that most people in the industry would define as a category benefit. So many of us are trained to find that blue ocean space, that unique space that is only ownable by your brand. And there's a lot of people who fully buy into that. And there's a lot of strategies that go wrong because they do that, but sometimes nobody's there because it's not a great place to be.
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C
But.
- [10:32]
A
But then there's a lot of times when people don't go there because they're faced with that question of, well, shit, anybody could go there. That's not unique. And so we talk about those sort of spaces being category benefits. The theory being that if I promote that, well, then everybody in the category will benefit from that. That's the risk side of it, the opportunity side of it is what you guys did. Peter, I think. And in an organization that hasn't been doing that type of marketing historically. Tell us about that journey number one. How did you get to that Would you agree that that's what that is, number one? Number two, how did you get to it and was it a battle to plant your flag there?
- [11:14]
B
So I, Yeah, to me, one of the worst pieces of feedback a client can give is, well, anybody could say this. It's just so lazy, right? Because what it lacks is the introspection to think, well, anybody could say it because our product is probably very similar to our competitors product. And, and then as a, just a, I don't know, as a marketer, a fan of, of what we get to do here, it's like, yeah, but nobody else is saying it. That would be my response. That piece of, well, hey, this is a category benefit. Great, let's own the category then. Because the rest of this category is talking about rates and terms and speed and ease, and none of them are talking about what you hear from people when you ask about homes and what home means to them. Nobody's talking about that. And you know, Zach and I would talk all the time about how we sell something that nobody wants. Absolutely nobody wants a mortgage. And that's like something I would remind myself of. Is that.
- [12:27]
A
Why is that?
- [12:28]
B
Well, you. I don't think you want a mortgage. You want a home. What you. The mortgage is a means to have the home, right?
- [12:35]
A
The mortgage is a feature versus benefit, Right?
- [12:37]
B
Yeah, exactly. And so I want home. I want a place to raise my son. I want a place to make him pancakes on the weekend. I want to teach him how to throw a baseball in the backyard. I'd rather not have a mortgage. Right. And that's no different than thinking, you know, what I want is maybe not the shoes. I want to run the marathon. I want a sense of accomplishment that comes from that. I don't want the yoga pants, I want a six pack. And so if for some reason in financial services we forget those fundamentals of how to create an aspiration and own an emotional space, but because you just sort of think, well, at the end of the day, it just, you know, all people care about is a low rate. Okay.
- [13:22]
C
I felt like we were creating a category. And so, so, yes, and in a sense, we were selling a category benefit that didn't really exist yet called homeownership. Because it was, you know, for a investment and as large scale and important as buying a home. It is the worst possible process imaginable. Like you, I always, I always relate it to like, it's like, it's like the Amazing Race where it's like you're set out and you have like A really opaque goal and you have to talk to random strangers along the way and you're probably gonna cry at some point. It's like the idea that, like, the category of homeownership was actually like eight different categories, you know, from like home search to financing to, you know, servicing to refi and beyond. And so the challenge of creating a brand new category with a brand new category benefit was absolutely very intentional. Like, there was very little debate that that's what we were trying to do. The charge from Jonathan and Peter, and I forget, I always forget the agency that published that humankind scale, Leo Burnett, like, one of the first things that Jonathan, Peter shared with us was this thing called the humankind scale. Fergus, I don't know if you've seen that, but it's.
- [14:43]
A
I don't recall.
- [14:44]
C
It's like a scale of one to ten on like, how good creative is. And one is like it's destructive. Two is no idea. Three is it's invisible. Four is I don't know what the brand is. And then it keeps going up. So like seven is it's an inspiring idea, beautifully crafted. Eight is it changes the way people think and feel. Nine is it changes the way people live. Ten is it changes the world. And so the imperative to us was like, everything from our big brand category level, big brand work, down to our product work needs to be at least a 7 or above. So it needs to be at least inspiring work, beautifully crafted, and at best, it should change the way that people think about the category.
- [15:31]
A
So, Peter, let's talk about the a point that you brought up when we chatted, I think it was last week, you said that there were great discussions around the brief and the early stage creative work. And you guys went through a number of iterations before you got to it. Is that fair to say? And could you tell us what was it about that early work that wasn't resonating to the degree that the final work was?
- [15:57]
B
That's. You can't expect the agency to hit it out of the park the first time and bring in, you know, ten game changing ideas. I think that's, you know, that that's probably not fair to anybody, but it's a process of going through things and, and working really collaboratively.
- [16:15]
A
And
- [16:18]
B
I think to the credit of everybody who's involved in this work, we all agreed that those first round of ideas weren't right. And we all agreed, we agreed we needed something else. And then, Zach, I don't know if you agree, but it felt like we sort of Circled the wagons and got back to work really quickly to come back with something else. And I don't know if there's anyone who would argue that we ended up in the wrong place.
- [16:43]
A
When you look at Help Everyone Home, that's an amazing springboard to be. That's the client brief, for Christ's sake. That's pretty powerful stuff, right? I suppose you then have to put it through the filter that you talked about earlier of it's more than mortgages. So it still seems to make a ton of sense. How do you then get to John Denver and to that first super bowl spot? I know that's ultimately where you end up. And it was bigger than. It was bigger than a spot, obviously, that entire campaign launch.
- [17:18]
C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, Help Everyone Home was such a gift, as was the purpose line of. To give everyone their shot at a more prosperous life. You know, it's like, damn, it, like, hits you in the heart. And especially in the moment that we were in of just like. It's such an economical missions. You know, we see all these, like, big, flowery, platitude missions. And this is like, there was a lot of rigor and work that went into cracking those three words. Help Everyone.
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A
Hope, no doubt.
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C
You know, it's just like, it gives you a sense of scale of just like we're talking about everyone. Like everyone who has the ambition to own their own piece of America. We're going to get them home and we're going to help them home. It also, like the fact that it had home. And the mission statement, again, directed us back to the category that we were in. We're not in the mortgage business, that we're in the home business. We're in the home ownership business. So I think that that mission, all that, like, foundational work was such a gift, I think. I think you know better than anyone, Fergus. It's like, it's such a gift to have that starting place.
- [18:29]
A
As long as it's good. Yeah. As long as it's good. Yeah, yeah.
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C
It's, you know, garbage.
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A
And most times clients give you what they think is gold, and you're like, this ain't even bronze.
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C
Totally. Yeah.
- [18:41]
B
I think the other.
- [18:44]
C
The other gift was just like. It's funny, like, Jonathan tells this story about when he used to work with Wyden Kennedy. And I think it was Dan Wyden called him the most predictable CMO ever. And he took it as like a big insult. And what. What he meant by it was, no, no, it's not an insult. It's not that you turn out the same work from brand to brand. It's that, like, you have this red thread of taste and wanting to touch, like big goosebump, human emotion, togetherness type ideas.
- [19:20]
A
There's also the thread which is probably what helps Peter. I'll stay with you, Zach, though. It's probably what helped Peter and Jonathan come to this space because the common spirit is belonging from Airbnb right over to Rocket. Right?
- [19:37]
C
Yeah, I certainly feel that. And I think like the other gift was like, tonally the charge from Jonathan and Peter beyond what I said about like, that scale of like creative ambition. We're here to make the best work of our careers is, you know, Rocket Mortgage had been in the super bowl before and it was like big, entertaining, celebrity driven super bowl spots. And so, like the imperative early on from Jonathan and Peter was like, we're going to go from entertaining America to moving America. And as we restage this Rocket brand, like, we're going to elevate at a higher level and we want to make people cry. If people don't have goosebumps and they're not welling up, we've done something wrong. And so that spirit and the spirit of help everyone home and this big platform that we had cracked and owned the dream, which was this very empowering invitation that no matter who you were, like, you can grab it, like, you can grab your, your piece of the American dream, you know, and the dream part of it's important, like the American dream, it has references to that. It's not just living the dream, it's owning it. And for us, it was like, because it's the super bowl stage, which is obviously a very different beast. You know, we needed something to like, rally and unite America at one of our most divisive times. I think one of the threads was we saw a clip from a game, an NFL game being played in Germany. And there was this amazing clip where suddenly like 70,000 fans in this German stadium started breaking out and Take me Home Country Road. And we were just like, holy shit, this is across the, you know, across the pond. And like, they're talking about this song that's all about, like, getting back home and, like, belonging for home. How cool is that? And so I think that that among many other things was like one thread. And so we're like, I wonder if we could get the rights to use that song and reinterpret it in a modern way and kind of bring lots of different American voices and faces together to represent that, like, plurality of the American Dream. And so, you know, we. We cracked this concept of just like this confluence of different, very specifically chosen consumer segments coming home, you know, homecoming. So whether it was a plane full of veterans coming home singing Take me home Country Road, or a pregnant mom or a, you know, first generation Hispanic homeowner, all these people from very different worlds, all united by the longing of home.
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D
Let's get you home Almost heaven West Virginia Blue Ridge Mountain she river
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B
Life
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D
is old there Older than the trees Younger than the treasure and mountain.
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C
Yeah, I can't wait to get there, man.
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B
Country road
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D
Take me home country road.
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A
So that's year one in the Super Bowl. You have, you have this spot. It takes off. I mean, we've seen some of the brand tracking results through some of our partners, too, about how you guys have killed it in terms of not only awareness but consideration of the brand since this campaign launched. The. We're going to have to skip ahead a bit here, but you then come out in this past year's 2026 Super bowl with a slight adjustment on that theme. What fueled that, A lot of that
- [23:58]
B
for us started with the first round of brand tracking results that we got from the launch of the Take Me Home, Country Roads campaign. I think that we had briefed in, you know, Super Bowls in February. By May, we had briefed the agency again.
- [24:16]
A
Interesting. Wow.
- [24:18]
B
So it's a pretty quick turnaround. Right. And so we learned a few things from the. From the data from the brand health reports that we got from Sarah Taraf, who leads our Knowledge, Data and Insights team. And I mean, candidly, it was like we were trying to fill in some of the gaps or make up for some of the weaknesses in that first round of messaging that we were all in love with. But you have to sort of respond to, you know, to what you're. What we were hearing. And we felt like there was a need to maybe adjust the altitude of the product messages. So Zach mentioned things like Rent Rewards, oneplus va. What we saw in the data was that really the products we sell are mortgage and refinance and home search. So it's actually sort of 10,000ft up from that very finite consideration in terms of the specific product. People just know, I'd like a mortgage. I need a mortgage to get a house, I need to refinance to.
- [25:21]
A
Because you were marketing at the product level and therefore you were seeing that there was more stickiness at the product level and less at the micro.
- [25:31]
B
Yeah. What we're seeing is that, you know, as much as advertising VA loans is fantastic. And the country is behind our veterans. Of course, if you're not a veteran, the tracking data told us that you sort of shut off at that point. Right. So it's wonderful to have that, but it's not relevant to me. And so you get less relevance if you're talking about a 1% down mortgage. When you talk to someone who's ready to put 20% down, it's just not quite as meaningful. So we needed to adjust the altitude of the product messaging.
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A
I'm sorry to interrupt you, Peter, but. So the product messaging followed the super bowl spot launch. This is other work you're doing over the subsequent two to three months.
- [26:09]
B
Yeah, that's right. It was all sort of conceived in the same. At the same time, because we needed the super bowl to launch, but then we needed really strong product messaging to carry the thread through. It was something that Rocket hadn't done traditionally, that we felt Jonathan and I and the rest of the folks at Rocket felt really strongly about, is that we needed one consistent, coherent, you know, campaign that we could. That we could sort of lean on. And we also knew coming out of year one that our audience related more emotionally to sort of consistent narratives. And so we had this vignette approach that works really well in terms of giving you modularity and a lot of options, but it wasn't landing in the way that we needed it to. So the. Yeah, the candid answer is sort of like we had to look at all the weaknesses in the first approach and think, where do we go from here? And so if reminding people of home and what home means is year one, what else is it that gives people satisfaction about where they live? And, you know, in looking at some of our research about our. Our client segments, we found that that was the neighborhood. It was the place they lived. Your neighbors, your neighborhood. It gives you a sense of pride. It gives you a sense of belonging and feeling of place. I'm gifted with exceptional neighbors here, and I've. I've told them that they were part of the inspiration for where we landed.
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A
They're.
- [27:39]
B
They just made me feel at home when I moved here. You don't get to choose your neighbors, but the difference between being really happy with where you live and being greatly dissatisfied can be as random as, who do you live next door to? How are they? And, you know, we. We ended up just thinking very nostalgically about how things used to be. And so Zach mentioned earlier, you know, 90% plus of us believe homeownership's foundational to the American dream is still something we believe in, and yet we think it's going further and further away. Trust on our neighbors is declining year over year and has been for 50 years, and it's declined rapidly over the last five years. And yet Americans will tell you they're craving, you know, they're craving more relationships, they want to be more social, they want to be part of something, of a community. And so it's sort of, I think for me, part of what we're doing is reminding everybody what we used to be or what's possible if you just really believe in it and orient yourself around that again.
- [28:49]
C
We were also very focused on like the individual first time home buyer and that first time around. And it's pretty wild what changed internally at Rocket in the last year as well. So like you mentioned, Redfin. So like Rocket acquired Redfin. So like now we were putting the pieces of the puzzle together that it wasn't just getting a mortgage. It was like actually the first step of the process of like the dreaming and the searching of home. Rocket acquired Mr. Cooper, which is a brand that probably most people have never heard of, which is the largest servicer of mortgages in America. So now we're like actually maintaining a relationship with people over 30 years of a mortgage, not just selling their mortgage. And so we felt like for the first time the pieces of this, like larger homeownership story and experience were coming together. And as we became bigger as a brand, like Rocket now services one in every six mortgages in America, which is just like mind boggling. And so we're becoming this massive brand. And so part of the ambition was, hey, we have Redfin, which is like on the ground. Real estate agents, like operate on more of a local level. How do we make sure that we as a brand are seen as like personal, local, on the ground, in the neighborhoods, and not just this giant corporation with one in six mortgages. And so there was like a company imperative and some of the changes going on. And then I think the thing that got us most excited was just like, I mean, as sadistic as it sounds, like the cultural landscape of just like, you know, we've been polarized and divisive for a while, at least we've been told that we are polarized. And we were moving into a place where just the rhetoric and tenor of that divisiveness was reaching new proportions. And so once we found some of that data around, like, you know, one in every, you know, like one of, one in four of us know our neighbors by name. Now we have historic distrust in our neighbors. We're in a loneliness epidemic. We're spending less social time with our neighbors than ever before. And then we were going into this, like, super bowl period where, you know, ICE raids and, like, people showing up in neighborhoods and kidnapping Americans and Hispanics terrified to go outside. And then it was compounded by the fact that, like, we couldn't even agree on our halftime show. So, like, we had a separate halftime show. And so, like, obviously, horrible context and divisive context, but it kind of created the perfect, like, perfect storm for leaning into this idea when most brands didn't want to go anywhere near that, any of these topics, like.
- [31:51]
A
But I gotta guess. You. I've gotta guess. I think you did a brilliant job of threading the needle or sort of existing on the sharp edge of that knife without getting cut, because, you know, polarization, even though it may not be amongst the mass population, it certainly is amongst certain small people with massive followings. You didn't. You didn't poke the giant. You did it in a perfect way. I mean, was that tough to do? Was that a lot of discussion about what words can we and can we not do? How. What messages, what. What stories are we telling? And we can't tell because it's. It's very divisive. It could. It could hurt the brand as much as help it.
- [32:36]
B
Yeah, I don't think it was very hard to do, which may be a little naive for me, but, you know, we remind ourselves that if the brand's mission is to help everyone home, we've really got to think about everyone. Who's that does that. That has to mean everyone or it's untrue. If it's not authentic, then. Then we can't achieve it. Right? And so we had to look for those moments of unity. It's like the things that unify us, not the things that divide us. And the reason, for example, in year one, that, you know, what we did following the super bowl ad with having the stadium in New Orleans sing Take Me Home, Country Roads, that works because the brand's founded in this idea of unity. Homeownership is something that brings us together. That's what creates neighborhoods. So focus on that. If there's something we want to introduce that is maybe creatively interesting or sort of, you know, really culturally tense, but it's going to create a moment of intense divisiveness, then that. That's something that we didn't want to consider. You had to remind people that what makes this place great is all of us together, believing in the same things, like, focus on that. And you see these moments in, you know, in the spot that, again, are super deliberate. Everything in there is 100% on purpose. But you know, the old guy who's a little leery of his new neighbors, who then sort of softens a bit because his neighbors turn out to be helpful.
- [34:13]
A
I mean, dude, he's more than a little leery. He's like an asshole. Let's not get himself.
- [34:19]
B
It's really just kind of a look like, who are these folks? I don't know.
- [34:22]
A
Oh, man. He's like, who the hell is moving in next door? I thought that was one of the most powerful. You weren't divisive, but you made the point. Point there beautifully, because. And for those who haven't seen the spot, that one person. There's a Hispanic neighbor moving next door to this white guy, this older white guy. The Hispanic guy moving in says a nice greeting to the guy, and the guy has the American flag hanging on his porch, and he gives him a disgusting look. And so for me, I was like, holy shit, that's pretty. That's pretty ballsy. And that's deliberate.
- [35:01]
B
Yeah, I don't know. I wouldn't characterize it.
- [35:04]
A
I wouldn't characterize it that way.
- [35:06]
B
I think maybe indifferent. It was sort of like, you know, I've seen people come and go, hey, what's happening to this place? I've been here for 40 years. You know, where I live, I have neighbors across the street who have been here in Jersey for, you know, 40 something years. And so for somebody like me to pop in, I kind of got the same thing. But what was important there is. We recognize that what creates those neighborly moments, those things that can be really enriching. It's just small acts of kindness.
- [35:38]
C
I think to Peter's point earlier, too, one of the big distinctions from last year this year was having more of a central narrative, or at least in this case, like, two intersecting narratives. Whereas last year it was. We really had, like, a whole kind of collection of vignettes and never really told a single story. And so I think there are so many layers to the work that I'm proud of. Like, even just what you just mentioned, Fergus, of how home ownership and buying a home is often depicted as, like, this super celebratory, we're moving to a new neighborhood. Isn't that amazing? And what the data actually shows is, like, a lot of times you're moving because something unfortunate happened in your household, like a divorce you know, so let's tell that story that nobody's telling. Let's tell the story about a Hispanic family bursting at the seams in their home and the terrifying notion of moving into a new neighborhood in this time in America. And so two very different worlds and challenges colliding. Both of them feel pretty uncomfortable in their new neighborhood. And I was thinking about back in May, I live in St. Louis, and back in May we had a tornado. And usually you get these tornado warnings and you just kind of ignore them. And this one actually, like, ripped through our neighborhood and our kids school and, you know, our street and just devastating. And it was one of those moments where, like, everyone came out. Like, it was like the perfect reminder of, like, why we need each other and why neighbors are so important.
- [37:17]
D
It's a beautiful day. One neighborhood. What a beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine? I know it's hard, sweetie, could you.
- [37:27]
A
But you'll still see dad.
- [37:29]
D
It's a neighborly day in this beauty would a neighborly day for a beauty. Would you be mine? Could you be.
- [37:40]
C
Big storm coming in.
- [37:42]
D
I have always wanted to have a baby. We were just like, where are you? I always wanted to live. Since we're together, we might as well say, would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won't you be my neighbor?
- [38:09]
B
Thank you so much.
- [38:12]
D
My neighbor.
- [38:16]
C
The one thing that we haven't quite talked about yet, which I think, you know, is a. Is a thread from last year as well, is just, you know, like, we took, you know, people often think about Mr. Rogers as this, like, you know, cute, like, kind, gentle soul. And, you know, he was actually like a pretty rebellious character at the time, you know, back in the 60s and like. And so this idea of harnessing his spirit at the time when Americans need, you know, kindness and neighborliness more than ever, but tapping into that kind of, like, disruptor spirit, teaming the timelessness of that song, which no brand had ever been able to license in America before with a modern voice like Lady Gaga, who has also stood for, for, like, inclusivity and being a good neighbor and being kind. I think, as Peter put it beautifully recently, is like, you turned this kind of quaint, jazzy, won't you be my neighbor song into kind of a protest song. This, like, longing for neighborliness that we all feel, this, like, plea to be a better neighbor. That Gaga took the song to a whole nother place.
- [39:30]
B
Jonathan put out very plainly, you know, when he started to all of us what the aspiration was. And it's brands like Coca Cola, like Nike, like Apple, like Airbnb. It's those kinds of brands that we want to be able to stand up against, shoulder to shoulder with. And none of those brands was made in a. In a single campaign or in two campaigns. Right. It takes. Like I've often said to my team, the core creative idea is not a set of magic words. It's not a spell. Just do it is not the best tagline ever. Because those three words have some sort of magical powers. I'm not, you know, Dan Wyden's not Harry Potter. It's like those three words mean something because of 40 plus years of incredible storytelling and marketing. And we're going into year three, right? And. And I spent a lot of time last year looking at the first year of the Geico Gecko, and then where it is now, the first year of the Dove campaign for Real Beauty. And then where it is now, the first introduction of Just do It. And where it is today, it's like, okay, we're building something. And that first. The first campaign a couple years ago, it wasn't about one year. One year is a fluke. We can all do one year. We can do one good campaign in the Super Bowl. Two years, three years, five, ten. That's a legacy. And I think that's the lens that we have on this, is we need to continue doing this. We need to continue adding context and building on what came before and reminding people who we are and what we stand for as a brand. That's how we'll change how people feel about this category. And, you know, so we've got to. Yeah, we have to step it up. If I'm honest, I'm absolutely terrified. And like. But, like, why wouldn't I be, right? Like, terrified and excited are very closely related. And so, yeah, I'm scared to death, but also, like, overjoyed at the opportunity that that sits with us to bring something else to this brand. And, I mean, I couldn't be more proud of the work that we put behind us, but I want to be more proud of the stuff that comes next, for sure.
- [41:47]
A
It's Peter Giorgi, svp, brand marketing partnerships and creative excellence at Rocket. And Zach Foster is chief Strategy Officer at Miramar. And it's not. It shouldn't be. We shouldn't wrap up here, Zach, without mentioning the fact that I did spot that Miramar moving truck in that spot.
- [42:07]
C
I don't know who you're talking about.
- [42:11]
A
Thank you both. Man, this is such a. Such a privilege to get the chance to talk to you guys. Brilliant, brilliant work. And how you've managed to make it all come together is extraordinary. So thank you for the privilege of having you here and for being on the show.
- [42:26]
C
Thank you. Love the show.
- [42:28]
A
And we'll see everybody on the next episode.