Podcast
The Big Impression
Hosted by The Current · EN
The Big Impression returns for another season of insights and inspiration from leaders at the world’s most influential brands. Editors and co-hosts Damian Fowler and Ilyse Liffreing will look to uncover candid stories on game-changing campaigns from some of the world's biggest brands — including wins, losses, and lessons. New episodes are released every Wednesday.
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Ace Hardware’s Molly Hjelm on bringing the retail back into retail media
5d ago00:24:39Summary readyFor years, retail media networks have raced to prove they could operate like media companies — scaling ad platforms, expanding measurement capabilities and building full-funnel offerings for brands. That’s all well and good, but Ace Hardware wants to make sure it doesn’t lose sight of its core and unique offering. On this episode of The Big Impression, Molly Hjelm, corporate VP and head of retail media at Ace Hardware, explains why embracing the unique advantages retailers already have — merchant relationships, localized inventory, customer trust and real-world shopping behavior — helps propel the media side of the business. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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E.W. Scripps’ Seth Walters on making premium sports more accessible
2w ago00:22:04Summary readyAs sports rights grow more fragmented and expensive, E.W. Scripps is making a different bet: free access, broader reach and a bigger role for ad-supported television. As Seth Walters, head of CTV sales at E.W. Scripps, says, “Our superpower is distribution.” Walters joins The Big Impression podcast to explain why Scripps is leaning into free over-the-air and streaming sports at a moment when so much premium live programming sits behind paywalls. Through Scripps Sports, the company is building a portfolio around women’s leagues, local teams and underserved audiences — while giving advertisers a rare combination of scale and live attention. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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Best Buy Ads’ Lisa Valentino on retail media’s next chapter: commerce media
3w ago00:22:25Summary readyBest Buy has long been synonymous with consumer electronics, but today it’s making an equally aggressive play to become a major force in media and marketing. In this episode of The Big Impression, Best Buy Ads President Lisa Valentino joins hosts Damian Fowler and Ilyse Liffreing to discuss how the retailer is turning stores, media and data into one connected commerce platform. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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Oura’s Doug Sweeny on turning data into daily wellness
4w ago00:28:56Summary readyOura may be best known for its sleek smart ring, but its bigger ambition is changing how people think about health. In this episode of The Big Impression, CMO Doug Sweeny joins hosts Damian Fowler and Ilyse Liffreing to unpack how a wearable brand is translating complex data into something people actually use and act on. The timing is global. As the official wearable of the Winter Olympics, Oura stepped into one of the world’s biggest stages. But instead of leaning into peak performance alone, the brand took a different angle: focusing on everyday habits like sleep, recovery and stress that shape long-term health. That approach comes from how Oura sees itself. Under the hood, it’s as much a health care company as a tech brand, built on medical research and biometric data. But on the surface, it’s something far more human: a tool that helps people understand their bodies in real time. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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Land O’Lakes’ Heather Malenshek on reshaping rural America’s story
Apr 2200:26:12Summary readyLand O’Lakes may be best known for dairy, but its latest effort has little to do with selling butter. In this episode of The Big Impression, CMO Heather Malenshek joins hosts Damian Fowler and Ilyse Liffreing to talk about a campaign that’s aiming for something bigger: changing how rural America shows up in culture. Called the Modern Rural Collective, the initiative skips traditional ads entirely. Instead, it partners with filmmakers, writers and platforms like Imagine Entertainment and Getty Images to tell more accurate, nuanced stories about rural life. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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Stanley Steemer’s Andrew Schneider on owning the spring clean
Apr 1500:25:46Summary readyStanley Steemer is one of those brands people recognize instantly — if not by name, then by that jingle. But recognition isn’t the same as relevance. In a world of robot vacuums, DIY hacks and endless shortcuts, the question is: Do people still think they need a brand like this? In this episode of The Big Impression, hosts Damian Fowler and Ilyse Liffreing talk with CMO Andrew Schneider about how a legacy brand earns its place again, starting with a moment everyone knows: spring cleaning. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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Introducing The Big Impression Podcast
Feb 2400:00:30Summary readyEditors and co-hosts Damian Fowler and Ilyse Liffreing uncover insights and inspiration from leaders at the world's most influential brands. New episodes drop every Wednesday on all podcasting platforms and YouTube. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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Pedigree’s Natalia Ball on turning an underdog into a Titanium Lion
Feb 1800:26:09Summary readyNatalia Ball, global chief growth officer at Mars Pet Nutrition joins The Big Impression podcast to talk about how Pedigree transformed a local Brazilian insight into a global business story. She also shares why she is now focused on the next frontier of growth: Connected commerce and making sure brands show up when AI agents, not just people, are making purchasing decisions. Episode TranscriptPlease note, this transcript may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio. Damian Fowler (00:00):I'm Damian Fowler.Ilyse Liffreing (00:01):And I'm Ilyse Liffreing.Damian Fowler (00:02):And welcome to The Big Impression.Ilyse Liffreing (00:09):This week we're joined by Natalia Ball Global Chief Growth Officer at Mars Pet Nutrition home to brands like Pedigree and Sheba.Damian Fowler (00:18):Last March, pedigree launched a bold, purpose-driven campaign in Brazil celebrating mixed breed dogs, especially the iconic Vela Caramelo.Ilyse Liffreing (00:27):It wasn't just a campaign, it became a movement boosting adoption and challenging long held bias.Damian Fowler (00:35):The work went on to win top honors at the 2025 cans. Lions including the titanium lionIlyse Liffreing (00:41):And its impact is still rippling across markets and media channels worldwide.Damian Fowler (00:45):So today we're unpacking what made it work with the person who helped drive it. Natalia, tell us about the Carello campaign and how you landed on the idea.Natalia Ball (00:57):Carmelos are mixed dogs that are beloved in Brazil. They are found on the streets everywhere. They are the subject of meme, street culture, and people just identify Carmelo as the Brazilian dog. However, the inside that we discover was that this dog is 90% less likely to get adopted than breed dogs. So it is the most popular dog in Brazil, but the most overlooked. And when we learned about that, we decided that we wanted to make a difference and that we wanted this dog to get the position it deserve and pedigree decided to champion the underdog and become the official brand of caramel's in Brazil.Damian Fowler (01:41):You talked about the caramel. Could you just describe a little bit more for people who don't really know the caramelo and that term Vita, where does that come from?Natalia Ball (01:52):Yes, so caramels are basically mixed breed dogs that you can find on the streets of Brazil everywhere they are called caramel because they are caramel color and that's what it is in Spanish and they tend to be that caramel color, short hair. But there are different ways that these dogs look and feel because they are mixed breeds. But like I said, they are beloved dogs in Brazil, but when it comes to getting a pet, getting a dog, they are not the ones that people are going for. They see them as street dogs, not a dog that you have in your house. And the whole campaign was about, like I said, championing these caramels, driving adoption of mixed breed dogs, not only breed dogs. And we did that by saying that if caramels were considered non breeded, pedigree was going to give them a breed and who better to give them a breath than pedigree.Ilyse Liffreing (02:48):Great. And then at what point did you connect that insight to the campaign itself?Natalia Ball (02:54):What you need to know about pedigree? Pedigree is one of the largest dog brands in the world. Pedigree feeds more dogs than any other brand, and it has been there for many years and for the past 20 years or more, pedigree has been driving adoption, encouraging people to adopt pets everywhere. We have had a lot of iconic campaigns so much which maybe you would've heard, like for example, docs on Zoom during COVID or the child replacement program, which was a very interesting one. And we were talking about adoption in Brazil, but other local brands were talking about adoption too. So we were not cutting through and it was only when this insight came to us, which was a very deeply local insight that we made the connection, if we want to drive adoption in Brazil, this is going to be the way in and we're going to make this as big as it can possibly be.(03:51):Because we, from the very beginning saw we understood this idea of the vi Lata. You mentioned it before by the way, the vi lata is how you call mixed breed dogs in Brazil. And so when we had these conversations about this insight, the injustice of this beautiful dog not getting adopted, but also the cultural impact that it would have on resilience themselves, who could see themselves related in the fact that they were being championed, we decided to go really big on this campaign and not only do just an activation, but actually we are doing this campaign. We did it all of last year and we continue activating through this year. And some of the ways in which we championed this was actually by creating a caramel kennel club by creating the first ever caramel DNA testing. And it's the largest ever DNA test done in mos in all of history, kept creating a Carmelo dog show and not only that, putting caramels for the very first time ever on our packs. So it was really a way to give them the rightful place.Ilyse Liffreing (05:01):I love how you guys just took it a step further than even just it being a campaign and you actually adopted it into your packaging and the whole bit. At what point did you realize that the campaign wasn't only just a marketing ploy and it began actually affecting culture?Natalia Ball (05:23):Yeah, I mean this campaign has really changed culture in Brazil, but it was a campaign that was deeply rooted in culture itself because Carmelos were part of Brazilian culture. But when we realized the campaign became bigger than ourselves, absolutely. When it started driving difference in adoption of Carmelos, we saw more than 200% lift of caramelo adoption just in the first month. And we saw a 65% increase in likelihood to adopt a Carmelo in the future with this campaign. And then when we started seeing other brands and other businesses even outside of the pet care category start using the Carmelo in their campaigns in their advertising, that's when we knew this had really hit culture big. An example of that was Chevrolet that actually launched a partnership with Netflix that launched a documentary about caramel, and several launched a caramel or a caramel colored car in a promotion.(06:29):Other brands like Honda or Whirlpool also feature caramels in their advertising. So we started seeing that this became much bigger than ourselves, but maybe the biggest achievement that we had with this campaign other than driving adoption itself, which was the cost at the end of the day, was the fact that we were betting on the mixed pre-doc actually not being accepted in dog shows because only breed dogs are accepted usually in dog shows. But at the end of the day, the movement became so big that after only two weeks of this campaign, the federation that actually controls the dog shows called us and said, we now want to move to accept mixed breed dogs in all of our shows. So that was a huge achievement that we never knew it would be possible.Damian Fowler (07:18):What's really interesting to me about this campaign is the way you focused on one region, one country, one market, but obvio...
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Diadora’s Antonio Gnocchini on the power of discovery
Jan 2200:29:24Summary readyHeritage sports brands may be tempted to rely on their history to appeal to a new generation that wasn’t there to see it. But in the fast-moving digital attention economy, that’s a mistake, says Antonio Gnocchini, chief marketing officer at Diadora.He joins The Big Impression podcast to explain how the iconic Italian brand is reclaiming its spot in the performance market. By leaning into a challenger brand mindset during the Paris 2024 Olympics — without the price tag of official sponsorship — Gnocchini and his team are shifting the focus from nostalgia to high-performance innovation. Episode TranscriptPlease note, this transcript may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.Damian Fowler (00:00):I'm Damian Fowler, and welcome to this edition of The Big Impression. Today, we're looking at how a heritage sportswear brand carved out its own spotlight at the Paris 2024 Olympics without being an official sponsor. My guest is Antonio Gnocchini, Chief Marketing Officer at Diadora, the iconic Italian brand known for its made in Italy craftsmanship. In the lead of the Paris, Antonio and his team launched a global brand campaign built around Diadora's roster of Italian athletes from Trackstar, Larissa, Yapacino, defensers and speed skaters, all while showcasing innovations like the Atomo Running Shoe. That's the first high mileage running shoe made in Italy in three decades. We're going to break down how Diadora timed its campaign to maximize the Olympic moment, how it differentiates itself from giants like Nike and LVMH, and what this strategy says about building awareness in a crowded high-stakes marketing landscape. So let's get into it.(01:07):Antonio, can you tell us about why the Paris Olympics was such an important moment for Diadora as it sought to elevate its brand name again?Antonio Gnocchini (01:18):So if you are a multi-category sport brand, Olympics is certainly the big event, the main event, your main catwalk of the main show. And you prepare for it for a long time because you need to be in one of the most competitive environment with the best product, competitive athletes. Everything needs to be perfect. And it's also one of those moments in which you can go deeper with attention, with messages. If you are serious about sport and you want to communicate, sport brand values, what you really stand for, it's not easy, especially today in moments in which the attention is not much, few seconds from everybody. Channels are very fast and flattened messages very easily. The Olympics is a moment in which for a few weeks you have the attention. You have people connected and engaged. You have people who care. And so it's a perfect environment to talk again about what you stand for.(02:41):And so going back to the Olympics was a statement to say, we actually are a competitive sport brands, a performance brand, not only lifestyle of it. And so yeah, it was such an important environment for us. Also, these Olympics was maybe one of the first ones that I've seen since I started doing this job when you could see some challengers brands activating and being visible.(03:15):In the past, this was really an event only for main sponsors and official sponsors mostly. Now this is a moment of challengers. And if you find the right way and if you had a good connection with your outlets, you could be doing a successful marketing campaigns and actions.Damian Fowler (03:35):That's really interesting to hear you say that. And I think, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. Is the kind of media environment that we exist in now, does that make it possible for challenger brands to find a way to reach audiences that they otherwise might not be able to find back when it was the main TV channels and big glossy mags, there are more niches now in many ways.Antonio Gnocchini (04:00):There's a very interesting report that Business of Fashion and McKinsey release every year. And the most recent one was a study from McKinsey, which they were showing displaying how the sport market, which was dominated by only few incumbents. And you could see that at Olympics, still today, the most recent one, the usual suspects are dominated most of the sports. But in this past few years, there is a change going on in which incumbents are really under pressure from Challengers brand in the sport industry. They're gaining momentum. Challenges are gaining space, gaining market share, and also visibility. And you can say that maybe this is linked to the explosion of running as a global movement, but it's not only that. Running certainly as contributed, because running is one of those categories that is really extremely democratic. And yeah, sure, track and field main athletes, famous names help, but you can become a successful running brand without having only the most amazing hundred meters runners.(05:37):You can be successful by working in other ways. And you see brands starting to become more visible through running in the sport industry.Damian Fowler (05:47):What's interesting about Diadora is that it has this very significant legacy as a sports brand. I mean, I think back to my childhood when I used to absolutely love Beyond Borg. And as soon as I saw the name Diadora, I remember Borg. And of course there's other soccer legends like Roberto Baggio or Francesco Totti. But in recent years, it's been a little bit maybe eclipsed by bigger brands that you just mentioned. So you're a challenger brand, but you're also a legacy brand. Could you explain a bit more of the context around the history of the brand?Antonio Gnocchini (06:24):If you are passionate about sport, when you land at Diadora and you visit the museum, it is a kid in a candy store. That was my experience at the museum is you could see in real life the objects of desire of your youth. In my bedroom, I had posters of all these heroes and there's a moment, there's a scene in King Richard with Will Smith, in which you hear for a moment in the movie, you hear Venus and Serena Williams coach telling Richard Williams to wait on the Nike offer because the perfect offer for any tennis player at the time was the one Jennifer Capriati was getting from Diadora. When I watched the movie, I was like, whoa. So we wear really the tennis brand and the brand that was in relation with athletes, especially tennis athletes. We were the tennis athletes brand. What happened?(07:34):I think that the brand, the company really focused for few decades on product, product marketing, sports marketing contracts, traditional marketing actions. While in the meantime, other brands, other sport brands have become very sophisticated, very innovative in their marketing strategies, films where Nike's main language and they were exciting product of their marketing department. I think the brand here, the Theodo has been focusing on other things and lost the engagement with consumers globally. And then for a few years, as I was saying, the focus had been really on capitalizing on its legacy and becoming more of a lifestyle brand. But in reality, the market can tell you that if you're not serious about sport, you lose your credibility as a lifestyle of sport brand.Damian Fowler (08:42):Yeah. So the new campaign or the more recent campaign is about reasserting that sports connection. How else would you define the brand as it is now?Antonio Gnocchini (08:57):I think that what we needed to do ... So the first thing that I wanted to do is to prove that the sensation, the feeling that we had was correct. So we run a long and insightful brand health monitor study, and the results of that study was showing that, yes, that we were a legacy brand, people recognized the name, but they couldn't really link it any longer to specific performance product, and they were not buying performance product any longer from the Adora. So we were also associated linked to values like being Italian, but at the same time, it was this idea of romantic Italian, quaint, Italian, traditional. If you want to be successful in sports, you have to talk about innovation, you have to be recogni...
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Dish Media’s Liam Kristinnsson on how linear and programmatic TV are converging
Jan 1400:27:41Summary readyAs Dish Media’s new head of programmatic partnerships, Kristinnsson is helping turn advanced TV into a single, addressable marketplace. Episode TranscriptPlease note, this transcript may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.Damian Fowler (00:00):I'm Damian Fowler.Ilyse Liffreing (00:01):And I'm Ilyse Liffreing.Damian Fowler (00:02):And welcome to this edition of The Big Impression.Ilyse Liffreing (00:09):Today, we're joined by Liam Kristinnsson, head of programmatic partnerships at Dish Media, where he's helping shape how the company connects advertisers with premium audiences across both linear and digital environments.Damian Fowler (00:23):Dish has been pushing hard into the programmatic space. From Dish Connected, it's addressable solution across the ecosystem to Advantage, which links programmatic buying with linear inventory in real time. It's all part of a broader move to bring automation and accountability to advanced TV.Ilyse Liffreing (00:39):We'll talk with Liam about how Dish is tackling fragmentation, what premium really means in a mixed green world, and where the next phase of programmatic growth is headed.Damian Fowler (00:51):So let's get into it.Liam Kristinnsson (00:57):Dish Connected has really revolutionized our product in the marketplace. We've been able to convert an additional four million to five million households into tangible CTV devices across real-time bidding systems across the industry. And it's kind of given us a leg up against some of our more linear competition where we now have full autonomy over our inventory and can enable and provide transparency downstream to any client.Damian Fowler (01:28):That's amazing. I mean, there was a moment there where there was a sort of either all linear or CTV, but this is something that's kind of connecting thoseLiam Kristinnsson (01:38):Two worlds. I think this is the start of the convergence. I know it probably truly started post-pandemic, I would say, but the reality is now that what is perceived as underutilized impression-based audiences are now becoming tangible and kind of overlapping with their traditional legacy linear purchases. And there's much more value to it because we are not enabling people to find attribution in a more roundabout extrapolated way, but we can provide meaningful real time results to third party attribution vendors or measurement vendors.Damian Fowler (02:20):And that brings us to Advantage, which you introduced in May to Power Programmatic and Linear at the same time. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?Liam Kristinnsson (02:30):Yeah. So the beauty of Advantage is it really expands upon what we've already built for Programmatic in Disconnected, but it provides solutions across the whole suite of products we have. Our addressable business can tap into real-time kind of innovations, real-time optimizations against audiences, ensure that we are better delivering across the target audience and finding that incremental reach that in the past may have been next to impossible to verify. And now we have all that inventory in one place. It's kind of like a grocery store when I think the industry has become accustomed to going to a bodega. That's very New York with me, I understand. I like that. But sometimes bodegas have eggs, they have a deli, they might have milk, but they might not always have milk and seltzer and all the little things that you want on a day-to-day basis. And the reality is something lacking when it comes to you being able to actually fill your fridge.(03:35):Now we have all those components that the customer or the client is looking for.Damian Fowler (03:40):Yeah. I like that analogy.Ilyse Liffreing (03:41):It's a good one. Yeah, no, I like that. And now Liam, I'm curious about the advertisers you're working with. Is there a new segment of buyers that Programmatic is really opening the door to here? What is basically your sense of that cohort?Liam Kristinnsson (03:58):Yeah, I think it really has grown overnight programmatic in general, but I think it allows us to have expanded exposure across all clients that are looking for that more meaningful kind of results. I think we are seeing a lot of success in generating a lot of traction across the CPG world, the direct to consumer world. And I think we're finding a nice overlap from a category perspective of what we traditionally looked at as direct IO or addressable business, but maybe not all those brands or clients in maybe like a pharmaceutical vertical would tap or earmark dollars for commitments early in their planning phase. Now they have the liberty and the luxury to find that right audience and enable dollars downstream where we're just not hunting in that lane and now we can kind of, instead of spreading ourselves thin, the technology can enable us to really kind of tap into all those brands, whether it be the CPG or the pharmaceuticals.(05:05):Now on the CPG side, I would double down further. I think because in the linear world, traditionally there's a level of fragmentation when you were to buy linear and you're only getting a percentage of the marketplace. Now the transparency and data that we're passing downstream really changes that, right? Because now these CPG brands are looking to trade off their kind of gross rating points, but kind of understand, all right, am I serving a family that would buy my products? And now we're freeing up the inventory and making it available to those brands that maybe were not always keen on addressable or linear didn't provide enough eyeballs. We're compensating for that with the data we'reIlyse Liffreing (05:49):Providing. Do you have an example of a brand you're working with?Liam Kristinnsson (05:52):Yeah. So I mean, more specifically, even though that wasn't in some of the categories I called out, there was one or two major financial brands that we've been able to elevate our profile quite significantly with and then partner with them around some of their initiatives on the backend. And I think it kind of shows some of the flexibility that a publisher can now provide brands that I don't think they ever associated with a conglomerate or a media company like ourselves.Damian Fowler (06:23):On that point, there is a perception that the space is fragmented and that there's linear here and then there's streaming here. Do you think that that is changing that perception, maybe thanks to some of the work that you're doing?Liam Kristinnsson (06:36):I think that's a lot of our goal. I think that we are simplifying the process and enabling a household or a device level, right? And the device level tends to be at the unique user level and we have the ability to kind of triangulate that and make sure that we're providing good and strong data down to our partners. I think that as a marketplace holistically, I think the fragmentation has changed and I think a lot of that's around some consumer behavior that has changed or specifically around the way consu...
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