← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#716: Streamlining brand partnerships with Alan Gould, Mutual Markets
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the Agile Brand.
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Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes. Please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And now onto the show. What if building a brand partnership with
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Interviewer
a major entertainment property could happen in five minutes instead of six months and
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Greg Kilstrom
drive 10 times better results?
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Interviewer
What would that change for your marketing strategy? Today I'm joined by Alan Gold, CEO of Mutual Markets.
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Greg Kilstrom
Alan is at the forefront of a
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Interviewer
major shift in digital marketing and advertising, using AI to reduce friction between brands and entertainment partners, making high impact collaborations accessible to brands of all sizes. Mutual Markets is already working with major streamers and delivering successful partnerships like PopCorner's Super bowl spot with Breaking Bad and Dashlane's collaboration with NCIS. Alan's here to talk about how AI is democratizing access to branded entertainment partnerships and what that means for the future of marketing. Alan, welcome to the show.
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Alan Gold
Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
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Interviewer
Yeah, absolutely.
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Greg Kilstrom
Looking forward to diving in here.
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Interviewer
Before we do, though, why don't you start with giving us a little background on yourself and your role at Mutual markets?
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Alan Gold
Sure. Well, I'm one of the founders. My brother's the. The other founder. We've been working together for more than 20 years. Been involved in a lot of media companies. Got started, you know, about 20 years ago, created the first alternative measurement firm, IG Research. We were backed by Insight and Bessemer, and we sold it to Nielsen. Then I went to work for Graycroft. I was their first venture partner. I formed a fund with my brother to invest alongside some of the investments. I was seeing it at Greycroft, and then a few years back, decided to dive back into an operating role and pursue this opportunity.
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Greg Kilstrom
Nice.
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Interviewer
Nice. Well, yeah, let's. Let's dive in here. And, you know, first thing I want to talk about is what I touched on in the intro is just, you know, redefining brand partnerships by using AI and so why don't we start with setting the stage here? What's broken in the traditional brand partnership process between marketers and entertainment partners?
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Alan Gold
Great question, Great place to start. Think about it this way. I mean, most digital advertising today and a lot of advertising on television, think connected television is all done programmatically, right? So. But brand partnerships are still done very analog, meaning, let's say somebody wants to form an alliance because they're. They've got a new feature or a new product line, and they're. They're going after a different target, and they want to. They want a partner that reaches that audience immediately for the, you know, for. For all the obvious reasons. That process, typically today, starts with a phone call. It starts with an email. It might involve meetings. It definitely involves figuring out who you know in Hollywood that has some connections to some show or some movie or some podcast or some audio book or whatever content you're. You're talking about. But it's extremely analog, so there's no exhaustive way to look at who might be your best partner. There's no way to kind of get rid of the lawyers in this process, because all of these deals are bespoke, if you can believe it. So they typically take six months to a year, which means only the very biggest brands typically do them because they have the staffs to do them. They have the time to do Them. So as a result, you end up with 99% of the brands in the world, marketing alone.
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Interviewer
Yeah, yeah.
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And so, you know, as I mentioned at the, at the top of the show, Mutual Markets is able to shrink what's traditionally that, that long process, not only that takes a lot of time, but takes a lot of people. You know, as you mentioned, it takes lawyers, it takes people that either know people or, you know, all, all of the above. Right. All the logistics shrinks that down to five minutes. You know, how is that possible? You know, can you walk us through kind of the user experience of the platform?
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Alan Gold
Absolutely. Well, that's the, that's the power of AI. I mean, we've spent a bunch of years kind of refining our own algorithms, figuring out how to use the large language models that are available. And we've come up with a way for a brand to search through every, every television show and movie ever made, for example, and look for cognitive connections. Some might be obvious, some not obvious, but to come up with a selection of partners which happens instantly, and then to review those partners, as in whatever depth you might want to, and then the process is as simple, you know, as typing in. You just type in the, your brand name into the platform and we quickly generate a creative brief, has the brand voice on it, the voice of the consumer. We generate the Personas, all the typical information which in, in the prior world could take weeks to generate inside an agency. We generate a lot of shows to take a look at TV movies. And then if you want to select a partner because you think, God, these would be great pro, you know, you know, a lot of these programs, maybe they have 5, 10, 15, 20 million viewers on a regular basis and you want to attach yourself to them in order to kind of grow your awareness. You just select them on the platform and in as little as, you know, an hour or maybe a day later, the content owners respond to you and that's it. Other than the brand providing information about the number of impressions they want to buy, that's about it. But that whole process that we just described, a brand can do initially, if they know what they're doing or they've been on the platform once or twice, they can do it in, you know, 15 minutes. And that removes about six months of time. So that makes it possible for smaller and mid sized brands to take advantage of forming brand partnerships, which is something we're really proud of.
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Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, well, and so all of this, I mean, obviously making the logistics of it a lot more streamlined is incredibly value valuable. All of this is aligned around the idea that consumers want this type of content.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Interviewer
So, you know, you've said, you know, consumers want brand and content that makes sense. You know, content that reflects both a brand's values as well as their personal values. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, why, why is that, that authenticity and that, you know, the making sense part of that so, so critical in these partnerships?
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Alan Gold
Well, for the obvious reason. Right. You want to, if you're going to align with someone, your brand values do have to align somewhat.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Alan Gold
But in, I mean, we're in a, we're in such a different world today. Greg 2025, if you're a brand, you're competing out there against every piece of content ever made.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right? Right.
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Alan Gold
You're not just competing against the average ads being run by your competitors. You're trying to gain the attention of consumers who now have access to literally everything. So, so you have to start your marketing meetings going, kind of, how do we do that? So you have to really change your definition of authenticity to be. Is the partner, someone that our consumers like. I mean, and that becomes the majority definition as opposed to, we have this checklist of values. Does the, does the entertainment property, you know, meet each and every one of them? I give you an example which is current. Are you watching White Lotus?
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Greg Kilstrom
I am, yeah.
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Alan Gold
Right. Well, millions of Americans are watching White Lotus. Great show. It starts every season. Well, how does every season start? You tell me.
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Interviewer
There's some kind of, it's kind of after the fact. It's kind of the murder is, is hinted at but not revealed. Right, exactly.
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Alan Gold
There's a dead body somewhere that gets discovered. Right. That's how each show starts. And then essentially, if you boil it down, what makes the show so much fun is it's skewering traveling, upper income Americans. Yeah, that's the, and it's, that's what as, as, as, as the murder mystery gets solved. Right. So, but think about who their partners are, because they have like 12 for this season. They have 12 brand partners that are integrated with the show. And you got the four seasons, you've got American Express, you got BMW, and there's a bunch of others. So if they were using strict kind of checklists, they would never in a million years partner with a show that starts off with a dead body and then makes fun of their buying group.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right, right.
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Alan Gold
But the definition of authenticity has to be larger today. It has to be kind of a realization by brands that their consumers are real 3D people.
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Interviewer
Yeah.
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Alan Gold
That have entertainment preferences that don't mean you shouldn't acknowledge them.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right, right.
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Interviewer
Yeah.
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Alan Gold
Which is the way that we look at it at mutual markets. Because the power here is you want to, as a brand, lever something that your consumers already love. That's the authenticity. So now you're getting introduced by a piece of entertainment that they like from a brand's perspective. I mean, up to a certain point, it's not for you to decide what's acceptable viewing for your consumers. Right. They'll tell you, and then you do the alliance with them. And I'll give you a kind of a. Kind of a bigger example of this. I mean, if you think about sports leagues like the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball in the US and the Premier League overseas, what all of these leagues have in common is that they have, you know, major partnerships. But, you know, the NFL has 40 of them. And they do it because obviously, you know, football is. Generates the highest viewership and it has devoted followers, but it's not without scandal. I mean, we now know that playing the sport can kind of damage your brain and lead to early death, and that doesn't seem to dissuade Verizon.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right, right. So
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Alan Gold
brand managers need to think boldly here, and many, many do. But historically, it's just been the, you know, the bigger brands that have kind of done these major associations, and I think they, you know, they kind of like it that way.
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Interviewer
Right, right. I can imagine it kind of gives them the.
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Greg Kilstrom
The.
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Interviewer
The turf to themselves, so to speak. But. But also, you know, I think to go back a little bit, you know, the. Maybe the term values. You know, I think when certain people hear the. The term values, there's. There's a certain set of criteria that is applied to that. But I think, you know, maybe the broader definition of values is. I mean, again, if I'm watching White Lotus and I see a BMW, BMW doesn't necessarily have all of the same values that I have, but if I like to drive nice cars, I value the brand, you know, so in other words, like Val, maybe values in the broadest definition of the term apply. Not just is it sustainable, is it, you know, some. Some of those kinds of things.
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Greg Kilstrom
Would.
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Interviewer
Would you say that's true?
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Alan Gold
Oh, no, I think it has to be true. I think you, as a. As a brand, you have to assume that your consumers are complex and contradictory at times.
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Interviewer
Right?
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Yeah.
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Alan Gold
Right. So you can. You can enjoy BMW. You can, you know, you can enjoy watching White Lotus, and, you know, you can believe in sustainability. I mean.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right, right.
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Alan Gold
And you so you meet your consumer where he or she is.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Alan Gold
And I think that's a, I mean, that's a start. The reason why they're all doing it. Right. So why is American Express doing it? Why is BMW doing it? Because there's high passion for the show.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, right.
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Alan Gold
If there's high passion for the show and there's an association, it pleases your consumers to know yet you're doing something with them. And consumers are far more likely to start with noticing the white Lotus part of the partnership.
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Interviewer
Yeah, yeah.
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Alan Gold
So that's where the, that's where the benefit comes from. It's the recognition that the entertainment partner is really the first thing that catches the eye of the consumer, not your brand.
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Interviewer
Yeah.
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Alan Gold
And once you kind of, once you get over that, then you know, on, on mutual markets, you know, we now have, we now have brands that are doing, you know, partnership ads with multiple pieces of content. In reality, what they're doing is they're, they're partnering up for a certain percentage of their digital advertising in addition to the advertising that they do alone, which we call kind of mono.
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Interviewer
Yeah.
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Alan Gold
And then the beauty of our system is it's an apples to apples comparison. Right. Because if you take your partnership ads, you compare them to the ads that you've been running against the same target.
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Interviewer
Oh, right, yeah.
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Alan Gold
There's no complicated, this is not a complicated thing to measure the difference.
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Interviewer
And so, you know, to, to go back to the point of the, you know, this has generally been the domain of the large. I mean, you know, you mentioned Four Seasons and BMW and you know, great, great brands, but not every, not every brand is, is household name or whatever. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, what, what does that mean for the, for the smaller brands out there to be able to have access to these things, like maybe even give an example of, of how, how a brand's been able to, to leverage these partnerships?
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Alan Gold
Sure. I mean, I can, because I've been authorized to, I can talk specifically about two B2B brands. So B2B brands make up a large piece of the advertising, especially if you're talking about the, you know, the Google Ad network or anything on meta. I mean, there's a ton of B2B advertising out there. So we've had two companies come through the platform, NWN, which is kind of a fast growing high tech firm that a lot of companies use to manage their access to the cloud. And, and then Dashlane is another one which Even though it's B2B, a lot of people have heard of it because it started out as a password manager, but now it's kind of more of a cyber, full scale cyber security. So they did super interesting partnerships. NWN does 25% of its business with the emergency responder community, in particular firefighters, like nationwide. So they did a tie up with Fire country on Paramount, CBS and that drove incredible results like so on their digital advertising they saw 20% click throughs, which is kind of outrageous.
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Greg Kilstrom
Wow.
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Yeah.
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Alan Gold
And the CMO had to go back two and three times to check the data. Obviously, you know, it so exceeded anything they'd ever seen. And then that worked all the way down. They ended up signing way more new accounts as folks came through the funnel. And the folks at Dashlane did a partnership and they're redoing this partnership again with ncis, the show which it's America's largest television franchise in terms of viewers and time. It's over 20 million a week on the various platforms. And the show stands for Protection, Integrity, security.
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Interviewer
Yeah.
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Alan Gold
So. And that's what Dashlane stands for. But everybody knows who NCIS is.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Alan Gold
Those ads also performed incredibly well for them, which is why they've come back and they're now doing, I'd have to check, but they're going to do four or five campaigns with four or five separate shows because they went through their testing phase and they were so happy. But I would say for B2B brands that are kind of very active and especially beginning the process of generating awareness through digital advertising as well as emerging consumer companies. So if you're third or fourth in your category or you're being, and you're being vastly outspent, how do you get noticed?
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Greg Kilstrom
Right, right.
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Alan Gold
Think about it.
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Interviewer
Yeah, yeah.
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Alan Gold
You have to do something different. Right. And so this is, this is the something that's different and new. I mean, essentially we've created a, you know, a programmatic structure by which you can create a partnership ad.
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Interviewer
Yeah. And those companies, you know, those startups, to, you know, to the earlier point, don't have the bench of lawyers and, and people and Hollywood contacts or whoever to be able to make those. But by making it programmatic to your point, it's, it makes it accessible. And, and it sounds like it works.
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Alan Gold
Yeah, it does. I mean we often get asked, well, how do we get rid of these bespoke agreements and the lawyers? And that was simple. The first thing we did was we gathered up hundreds of these contracts and we actually used AI to figure out, well, what are the constant terms here that everyone's using and we created terms and conditions which reflect the constant terms. Once you accept the terms and conditions, just like on, you know, Etsy or any other marketplace, now you're in.
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Interviewer
Nice. Nice. So use AI to do that part
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Alan Gold
as well as we used AI to do that. We use AI to figure out the cognitive connections and we use AI at the back end to help make the ads.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right.
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Alan Gold
Because it's. You have to train an AI model to understand the very specific rules around how you can combine the entities because there are still a lot of rules around that. The trick is, you know, if you can make all those pieces work, kind of show me great shows. Maybe some I would have thought of some I didn't get rid of the lawyers and can you make these ads quickly? So for the firms that are working with us now, we're just a part of their daily marketing toolkit. We're nothing special. That's our whole mission here is to turn this into something that's not special.
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Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, no, I, I know what you mean. Well, you know, and you mentioned several uses of, of AI just then and, and throughout what's, you know, as you're looking out, you know, over the next months and, and, and years, you know, where do you see AI taking things like this further? The, you know, whether it's brand partnerships or just in general.
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Alan Gold
Well, in, in broad, like at a 30, 000 foot level, Greg. I mean AI is definitely gonna even the playing field here.
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Interviewer
Right.
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Alan Gold
Because, because it's now doable. Smaller mid tier companies are now going to kind of have a foot into the partnership world. Right. And that can lead to bigger and that can lead to bigger and better things. One of the things that some clients are doing on our platform is they'll pick a partner, they'll run a campaign and if it works, that gives them the proof to go spend the time maybe to do something even outside of us.
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Greg Kilstrom
Got it. Yeah.
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Alan Gold
So it's a great way to test. So AI in general will democratize the ability of smaller mid size and it also allows big brands to do this. Like if P and G has been doing this traditionally with three of its brands, now they can do it with the other 57.
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Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, good point.
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Alan Gold
And so I do think that what will happen here is that kind of making use of partners will simply become part of the planning process. I mean that's ultimately how AI will impact this. What was analog will be digital and what was digital will be democratized.
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Interviewer
Yeah, yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
Love it.
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Interviewer
Well, Alan, thanks so much for joining today. One last question for you before we wrap up. Sure like to ask this to everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Alan Gold
Okay, so I'm not a coder. I mean maybe I know good code when I see it, but I'm not a coder so I'll I can. My answer to this is non technical. It's mostly about sure how I can continue to help the company grow and and make the right judgment call. So I run, I lift, I play a lot of tennis and that's how I remain agile. I mean agility for me is keeping my brain such that I am making the connections I need to make as fast as I can. And so that's the only, that's the honest answer I can give you. Agility for me is like making my brain work such that my judgment, the judgments that I have are good ones. And then I can participate at the speed necessary to stay up with my brother and his technical team.
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Interviewer
Yeah.
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Love it. Love it.
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Alan Gold
Thank you so much Greg. This was a real pleasure.
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Interviewer
Oh, thank you so much. Again, I'd like to thank Alan Gould, CEO of Mutual Markets for joining the show.
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Greg Kilstrom
You can learn more about Alan and
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Interviewer
Mutual Markets by following the links in the show notes.
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Greg Kilstrom
Thanks again for listening to the Agile brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagile brand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.greggkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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