← The Digiday Podcast
The Digiday Podcast
If Google's cookie phase-out ever comes, here's what a cookie-less future looks like for Mars' chief brand officer Rankin Carroll
00:49:49
Loading summary
Transcript71 lines
- [00:00]
Rankin Carroll
Foreign.
- [00:11]
Tim Peterson
Welcome to the Digital Day podcast. My name is Tim Peterson. I'm the executive editor of Video and Audio Digital Day Media.
- [00:17]
Kamika McCoy
And I'm Kamika McCoy, senior marketing reporter here at Digiday.
- [00:20]
Tim Peterson
Hey, Kimiko, how's it going?
- [00:23]
Kamika McCoy
It's going all right. It's going all right. We're coming off of super bowl weekend, which I can imagine every marketer and advertiser in America is suffering either a commercial induced hangover or a regular hangover right now, or both.
- [00:41]
Tim Peterson
No, that. That's very real possible, especially with this industry. Both is extremely likely. So I had a family situation, so I wasn't able to really watch too much of the super bowl, really, at all. So, Kimiko, catch me up how I know how the game was, because I've been able to check out the recaps. It seems like I didn't miss too much on the game front. How are the ads?
- [01:05]
Kamika McCoy
I. There was a lot of chatter. One thing that I, that I, that I do feel is like, I like still being able to tune into real time to how the ads are going. But, yeah, they were. There were a couple of good ones. Right. Coffee Mate had a good one. Disturbing, but good. And then you had Doritos with a really, really nice one with aliens and whatnot. But I think for the, for the most part, I was a little bored, to be honest with you.
- [01:30]
Tim Peterson
Okay, got it. And then our guest this week, if I'm not mistaken, is a marketer, and I don't remember if, like, they had an ad in the super bowl or not. Remember who's the guest this week?
- [01:41]
Kamika McCoy
This week we had Rankin Carroll, who's the chief brand officer at Mars, overseeing their candies. But they had a Super bowl spot that was not on the national screen, if that makes sense. So they took advantage of the second screen. I talked to Rankin about how they did that. It was a, I think a second screen with the Yin yang twins reliving my, my millennial childhood here. But we talked about that. We talked about a little bit about their acquisition last year with Kalanova and kind of what all that means. And then we talked about data, something that's been back and forth given Google's I want to call it Never Ending Kiss Good Night now with its third party cookies in Chrome. So we talked about a lot.
- [02:23]
Tim Peterson
Got it. So advertise on the second screen. So they didn't. They weren't actually a Super bowl advertiser. They advertised on, like, social platforms.
- [02:32]
Kamika McCoy
Yep. So they had their own channels and social. As to how they Approached that. Which is interesting because as the landscape gets more fragmented, which is something that Rankin and I talked about, you know, how do you, as an advertiser, kind of create those monocultural moments when they cease to exist? So many places?
- [02:49]
Tim Peterson
God. Okay. And, yeah, So, I mean, I'm really excited, you know, hear more about that. I think that's really interesting. But going back to the monocultural moments that were yesterday, were there any ads that really stuck out to you, for better or for worse?
- [03:05]
Kamika McCoy
For better. The ones that I mentioned, Coffee Mate. It was that creepy one with a tongue. But it was memorable, right? Where it's like a party in your mouth and. And whatnot. Very reminiscent of, like, your humorous super bowl commercials. Doritos had a fantastic one. I don't know who the actor was in it, but they've got this, like, UFO type deal going on. That was really good. The rest of them were just. I think part of the reason why they were boring is because they had so many celebrities and it just kind of haphazardly thrown in there. Right. There's a lot of dependence on nostalgia, a lot of dependence on celebrity nostalgia. That was good. I mean, that was, you know, that was the reason for it. The ones that I. The only one I'm really willing to critique here. ChatGPT had their first ad in the Big Game. I sat through that 30 seconds, and I still didn't know what we were talking about. It was not until I saw their logo that I said that the light bulb came on. You know what I mean?
- [04:01]
Tim Peterson
Okay, so, Ko, you mentioned the open AI ad kind of coming into the Super Bowl. There was this question of, like, is this the super bowl that's going to be dominated by AI ads? Like, you know, a few years back, there was the super bowl that was dominated by crypto ads. Did you find, like, an overrun of AI ads? And was there an absence of certain types of advertisers? Because I feel like a week ago, last week's episode, maybe we talked about, like, there was an expectation there was going to be fewer automotive advertisers, fewer, like, movie advertisers, TV advertisers in the game. Did you pick up on any sort of shift in the types of advertisers that did show up or didn't show up?
- [04:40]
Kamika McCoy
There were more mustaches flying thanks to Pringles than I saw AI. I saw a lot of nostalgia. I saw a lot of celebrities, a lot of patriotism, but I didn't see as much AI as I thought I was going to be. Like I mentioned, ChatGPT had their ad which you know, again, 30 seconds into that I didn't know what we were talking about and I was paying attention. But besides that it wasn't overrun a lot of it. I still say that we see a similar thing to what we saw last year was celebrities. You know, really banking on celebrity nostalgia. You had Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan kind of recreating their When Harry Met Sally moment. I think Matthew McConaughey was in three ads. I saw him in an Uber Eats ad and then two Salesforce AI ads. But yeah, it wasn't overrun in the same way that Cryptocurrency had a couple of years ago was was interesting. Who sat this one out was car brands. We saw Jeep was a sponsor and we saw their Ram truck. You know they had a pretty good ad too. But yeah, the rest of the like Kia, BMW and handful of other, you know, big time auto brand car maker sat out this year. And the notion, you know, based on other headlines is there are essentially bigger fish to fry as opposed to shelling out $8 million for a Super bowl spot. Right then we saw a telehealth company. There was the expectation that there would be more pharmaceutical ads in there. We did see those sprinkled in. Hims and hers showed up with their ad this year promoting kind of their weight loss supplements and as well as some of their broader capabilities. So it was a, it was a more varied experience than it has been historically. But like I said, real, real, real big leniency on, on celebrities, specifically Matthew McCon. How was it viewing on Tubi this is their first year that they had it streaming on that service?
- [06:35]
Tim Peterson
Yeah, yeah, which ended up being really clutch for me because again I had a family thing happening so I wasn't able to watch it in front of a tv but I was able to check in on the game intermittently on my phone because Fox, who had the rights to the super bowl this year, also owns Tubi, which is a free ad supported streaming TV platform and they simulcast the game on Tubi going into it. I think we had talked about this on the podcast like a few weeks ago when Fox announced that Tubi was going to be simulcasting the Super Bowl. I was really interested in seeing how Tubi would handle the live stream because we've seen live streaming issues when it comes to Netflix in the past and glitches and all that. And Tubi hasn't livestreamed anything definitely not to this level before. And so I was kind of expecting there were going to be some glitches or at least like buffering where the resolution would get really bad. I experienced none of that. It's the game started up immediately, which was wild to me because I was just on my phone, like, I wasn't even connected to Wi Fi or anything like that.
- [07:43]
Kamika McCoy
Yeah.
- [07:44]
Tim Peterson
And I didn't run into any resolution issues, any buffering issues. Granted, I was only watching for a couple minutes at a time, but there were sometimes when the game cut to an ad break and it cut pretty seamlessly to the ad break, whereas normally that would be when you would have some sort of glitch or some sort of buffer or something like, we will be right back with your regularly scheduled broadcast. None of that. And then. So my sister was with me. She knows I don't have a pay TV subscription anymore, so she was just like, wait, how are you watching the game? And she's a big NFL fan. She watches a lot of games. She has a YouTube TV subscription. So she came over. I told her like, oh, to be simulcast in it. She goes, what's to be?
- [08:35]
Kamika McCoy
What's to be?
- [08:36]
Tim Peterson
Which was maybe kind of suggested to me Fox could have done a better job of promoting that Tubi was going to be streaming the super bowl because my sister watches NFL week in, week out.
- [08:50]
Kamika McCoy
Yeah.
- [08:50]
Tim Peterson
So. So she should have been aware that Tubi was broadcasting this or streaming the Super Bowl. That said, maybe the idea was that they wanted her to be watching on Fox so they didn't want to promote it as much. I'm not sure I'm going to be talking with the CMO of To Be for the Future of TV briefing this week. So I'll be able to ask her about that then. But. But that's later in the week. Let's talk about this past week. So we talked a bit about the super bowl, but th. Those weren't the only, as you like to call them, juicy scoops indeed of this past week.
- [09:25]
Kamika McCoy
Yeah, juicy scoops indeed. So a handful of platforms, including Pinterest, Snap, Meta and and others had their earnings. And for Pinterest and Snap specifically, they're seeing growth. And it almost seems like their bet on artificial intelligence is paying off here. Right? Snaps revenue was up 1.5 billion Q4 last year compared to 1.36 billion the year before. That same period, Pinterest was 1.1 billion for Q4. And both of them have reportedly leaned into AI for targeting. Right. For personalization ads and things like that. And it seems like that that payoff is. Is winning for for now. Right.
- [10:10]
Tim Peterson
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Because, I mean, I guess it helps that I'm not familiar with, like, what Pinterest user numbers were for Q4, but, like, I saw Snap grew. It's. I believe it's the daily active user base, which is important, like, because, okay, you can introduce, like, more finely targeted advertising options, but if the audience isn't big enough within those targets, it's kind of like, what's the point from an advertiser perspective? Because they want to reach a narrowly defined audience, but only if there's enough of that audience for them to reach. So that's interesting.
- [10:45]
Kamika McCoy
And part of it is they're kind of, you know, lot of platforms right now are taking, I don't want to say taking advantage. Right. But they get the spoils of the Tik Tok ban as advertisers are kind of shifting gears and looking for contingency span, contingency plans, excuse me, and spending elsewhere. Also, at the first sign of the TikTok ban earlier this year, back in January 19, you had a lot of content creators on Tik Tok that started saying, you know, follow me on Snapchat, follow me on YouTube shorts and things like that, which kind of, you know, converted some audiences. So I, I imagine there's a couple of factors at play here. The question that becomes, you know, is this growth sustainable? Which I think we ask ourselves every quarter, Right?
- [11:24]
Tim Peterson
Sure, yeah, always a question.
- [11:27]
Kamika McCoy
It was a similar story at meta, which had 48, a little over 48 billion in quarterly revenue. But here's the thing. Deep Seek shook Wall Street a couple weeks ago. And I think the question then becomes, for all of these bets that are happening on AI for targeting and personalization on the back end, right. If you've got Deep Seek saying that it can come in cheaper, better, you know, well, cheaper does better, better, I.
- [11:54]
Tim Peterson
Think remains to be seen because I feel like there were a couple more stories last week about the. Some of the hallucination issues with Deep Sea.
- [12:02]
Kamika McCoy
I was going to say cheaper, better, faster. So maybe just cheaper. We'll stick with that part of the.
- [12:06]
Tim Peterson
Triangle, which when it comes to Wall street, generally, that's what they care about most anyway.
- [12:12]
Kamika McCoy
But if you've got competitors coming in saying that they can do it cheaper, that then raises questions, you know, for all the money that' sunk into this place, how long is that bet gonna. Gonna pay off? So, you know, going back to the, the Super Bowl, I think creatively we haven't seen AI pay off in the way that it's said to have. But on the back end it looks like things are, are shaping up. But that was only one half of the revenue figures. You are looking at this from a video podcast perspective.
- [12:42]
Tim Peterson
Yeah, so you know Spotify and YouTube, YouTube's parent, YouTube's parents parent company, Alphabet, owner of Google, which is owner of YouTube. Those two reported earnings last week. And there's been like this interesting dynamic between the two of them as more podcasts are going towards video and people are able to watch podcasts. That's been really beneficial to YouTube. Spotify has been trying to get in on that. Earlier this year in January, Spotify updated its revenue sharing program for podcasters to compensate them a bit differently when it comes to video podcasts. But it seems like a lot of the gravitational pull right now from a video podcast perspective is much more towards YouTube than to Spotify. Sarah Guaglioni, our senior media reporter, wrote in her media briefing last week where she talked to a number of podcast publishers including like the New York Times was in there, I believe Vox Media was in there. And they talked about how they're really orienting their video podcast strategies around YouTube right now, whereas Spotify is still a bit unproven for them. So they're not writing off Spotify by any stretch, but they're kind of looking at it as well. We already have the audience on Spotify from a listener perspective. YouTube gives us an opportunity to reach a new audience, to expand our audience, to get incremental audience. So that's where we're going to really be foregrounding things. Someone from Bloomberg also made an interesting point in that on how just the way that you have to handle video podcasts for Spotify is different than for YouTube. It basically like usurps the audio version of podcasts, whereas they actually create produce different, meaningfully different episodes of a podcast for video than for audio. So they can't just do a one to one replacement, which I wasn't aware of. And you know, when it comes to DJ Media's own video podcast strategy, that was a really helpful insight for me to be thinking about as we start to dig more and more into video podcasts for our own shows.
- [14:52]
Kamika McCoy
Yeah, I suspect it's for me personally just anecdotally looking at this, it's a chicken and the egg situation. Right. Because I feel like for Spotify that would take a heavy lift of kind of rebranding itself to get people to even see it as a place for video podcast to get the eyeballs and whatnot. Because even me, if I Go to go watch a, you know, podcast. The first place, I would think is to go to YouTube, which is known for videos, as opposed to Spotify, which is known for audio. So, you know, maybe a marketing strategy around that. But it's an, it's an interesting play that they're, they're making.
- [15:25]
Tim Peterson
Yeah, yeah, it'll be interesting like if you, you know, speak with Rankin again to get the Mars perspective on video podcasts and to what extent, as you know, from a brand point of view they are looking at video podcast or not. But it sounds like you and Rankin had plenty to talk about when it comes to the super bowl and all the kinds of other things.
- [15:42]
Kamika McCoy
Yeah, talk about two people yapping, which I love. So, yes, Rankin and I did talk about a lot. We talk, we, we talked through their second screen approach to this year's super bowl as opposed to, you know, having the traditional 30 second spot. They had a second screen one which worked on their own channels and social to kind of keep the conversation going and seeing momentum on their own channels, which was interesting. We also talk about the long kiss good night with Google and Chrome Extension. You know, how that's shaping up, what that means for how they're finding their data. They had a really interesting project where they started with M&M's and finding data within, you know, that subset of audience and kind of finding a way to use AI and, and, you know, internal mechanisms to scale that across other brands. And then the last thing that we touched on was the Kenova acquisition that was announced last year and kind of, you know, where things fall with that. So it was a real good conversation and I'm excited for you guys to hear it.
- [16:53]
Tim Peterson
Discover Digiday Streaming and Video Awards, formerly the Digiday Video and TV Awards and its new categories including Best Interactive Video Experience, Best Sustainable Production Initiative and more. Recognize your team's hard work in modernizing streaming and video through your company campaigns and technology. Learn more about this program and discover more of this year's categories and past winning campaigns from PlayStation, Roku and others@digiday.com DSVA.
- [17:26]
Kamika McCoy
We are so glad to be joined by Rankin Carroll, Chief Brand Officer of Mars. Hi, Rankin, how are you today?
- [17:32]
Rankin Carroll
Amazing. How are you?
- [17:34]
Kamika McCoy
I am doing all right. Glad to be joined by you. I like to start all of my podcasts with a fun question. I know we've got a lot that we'll be talking about today, including super bowl and we'll be talking Google's never ending kiss goodnight was the long kiss good night. Now it's never ending if you ask me. But I like to start with a fun question. So here's my fun question to you. Given your chief brand officer at Mars, what is your favorite snack?
- [18:02]
Rankin Carroll
Oh, that's a hard one. My first gut answer is Snickers ice cream bar. Cause I love a Snickers, but put it in some ice cream bar, and that's a killer, killer experience.
- [18:14]
Kamika McCoy
That's the creme de la creme.
- [18:15]
Rankin Carroll
Yeah, that's. That's as good as it gets for me. Second favorite, probably. I do. I do like a gummy. I love a starburst gummy.
- [18:23]
Kamika McCoy
Those are good. Those are good. Especially the packs that are just specifically reds and pinks.
- [18:29]
Rankin Carroll
Oh. Oh, yeah.
- [18:29]
Kamika McCoy
Chef's Kiss.
- [18:30]
Rankin Carroll
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's good stuff. And, you know, that's why we're in the business, because it's good stuff. Right? How could you not come to work every day and be stoked about that? So it's good fun.
- [18:43]
Kamika McCoy
I know, I know. Do you guys have candy all over the office?
- [18:46]
Rankin Carroll
We do, but, you know, it's a bit like Shoemaker's children, right? You know, for the first three weeks, you eat as much candy as you can get your hands on. And by the way, they give you free candy every month, so you get all you need. But, you know, after a certain point, you just realize, I can't live this way. So, you know, in moderation, you enjoy, you stack responsibly.
- [19:04]
Kamika McCoy
It's a beautiful thing you do, lest you make your dentist a very rich person. Well, I know we've got a few topics that I touched on that we'll go through, but obviously we have to talk about Super Bowl. So Twix has its big game spot this year with the Ying Yang twin. Spots are going for 8 million. As last reported, a lot of brands seem to be playing it safe, leaning on a list celebs, and, like I said, Twix with the Yin Yang twins. Talk to me a little bit about kind of, what's the trend here? Why tap celebs and nostalgia?
- [19:34]
Rankin Carroll
I guess the first thing I'd say is, actually, we're not in the big game.
- [19:38]
Kamika McCoy
Oh, yes, the second screen.
- [19:40]
Rankin Carroll
We are second screening. So the whole thing is built around the insight that we know that folks watching any event, let alone the super bowl, are spending time enjoying the game, enjoying the content on the game, but also second screening. And we know that people are multi and triple and quadruple tasking at any given time these days. So we are not on the big game. But we are aiming to get part of the super bowl traction, be part of a hype, be part of the conversation, be part of the earn conversation and most importantly, give our consumers what we think is a pretty fun and enjoyable experience. They can compete with their friends and whoever is able to stare down longest wins two beautiful gold bars courtesy of Twix. Because of course two is more than one.
- [20:24]
Kamika McCoy
I think the second screen conversation is so interesting because you know, there's, I think there's multiple screens at this point that are happening that people are kind of paying attention to. Right. So talk to me a little bit about those insights. What's the importance of like, you know, opting out of the big 8 billion dollar game spot and opting to do the, the second screen stare down instead?
- [20:44]
Rankin Carroll
Yeah, I think, listen in. In the evolving media environment where we know that more and more of people's engagement with media is non, traditionally non paid channels, by the way, they're still 30% of our mix. So I'm not decrying them or saying we don't do that. We absolutely do. We're big fans of paid and linear. It's a different part of our mix now. And we know that where consumers are spending their time is increasingly in other places and this is one of them. So I guess we think about how do we engage with consumers, what's the data tell us about where they are, how they're spending their time? Because at the end of the day we want to bring the right engagement with the right message at the right time, with the right offer at every touch point, whatever that looks like. And I think this is also, I think earned used to be a bit of a we'll take what we get and just can we, can we create a conversation and get some buzz? I think now we're trying to make that experience rich, engaging and worth, worth their time. Right. So I think that's the impetus behind the design of second screen.
- [21:48]
Kamika McCoy
I think there's also something to be said. You know, actually just read a story about this, that social media is kind of facing some competition for the second screen from owned channels like microsites, blogs, websites and things like that. That's obviously what you guys are doing here as well. So talk about the importance of that second screen kind of being an owned channel as opposed to relying on a third party.
- [22:09]
Rankin Carroll
Yeah, I mean, I think we play and owned as well as, I mean, listen, we're playing across paid or shared and owned obviously as the brands that we're managing. So it's not one versus the other. It's really what's the right mix for the right engagement with the right consumer based on what we know about their behavior and what they want to share and how they want to share. Because we're doing quite a bit in owned and in partnerships to create experiences and co creation experiences. And I'll talk later maybe about a thing we're doing on Snickers that we did, Snickers AI, which again was a great experience built based on consumer behavior and what that looked like around the Euros and around soccer fandom. So I think we're starting from behaviors that we know to be pervasive and driven by data to build experiences that are rich and meaningful and relevant around the event itself. And that's leading us to a different channel mix, that's leading us to different campaign design, that's leading us to be, as you say, social owned first in many cases. And I think you'll see coming this year more of our big brands coming social first. Not because just the media dollar figures point us there, but because that's where consumers want to be and where they're spending their time. So if that makes sense. So I think it's really about following the consumer and building experiences that are worth their time and increasingly as they engage with them their money because we are also introducing experiences for them to get involved. If I talk about some of the work we're doing in China, working with TikTok and designing in app experiences. So while they're engaging with content from creator X, they also can be led to a live stream, make a purchase in that live stream and come back into the experiences. So again, high quality entertainment and engagement, but also commerce happening at the same time in the same experience. So it's getting super interesting.
- [24:04]
Kamika McCoy
You're tapping into something that I think a lot of people have been, or a lot of marketers, right, have been trying to figure out. We saw this, I guess you can call it a pendulum swing during the big DTC boom, digital era and whatnot where performance, performance, performance. Right. Direct response. Then slowly but surely we started to figure out that brand is also important. Right. Where you've got to balance the two. Your chief brand officer. That puts you in an interesting perspective. So give me a little bit of your purview about that brand versus performance, I guess argument and how you think about it.
- [24:37]
Rankin Carroll
Yeah, listen, first and foremost we, I think based on our behavior for nearly a century, believe brands are at the heart of what we do. And brands with meaning, brands with in many cases purpose not always, but, you know, capital P purpose. Why? Because that starts with consumer needs. That starts with understanding consumers and what they want and how our brands relate to them and how they relate to our brand. So we will always, in my view, be. That will be a critical part of what we do. On the other hand, we also know that as we get to data driven personalization, we get better return on our investments. So that sort of pushed us down the road of performance. I think our first steps, and I think I speak probably across industry here, not just for us, but our first steps in performance were really lurching towards, I want better return towards a conversion. And it became very focused on that at the expense of content. So it just became how many versions can I do? I have lots of options to optimize. And I think we lost, didn't lose our way, but I think we got distracted by that. The balance, I think, got a little out of whack. But we know that our brands are beloved. Our brands have value, our brands have meaning for people and we always want to keep that in balance. As I say, however, we know that when we personalize, when we build addressable content to go new, addressable channels, we see lifts of 20% and more on our returns. So that's great. But we are not myopic about. It's all about the conversion. The conversion, the conversion. Because I think what happens by the end of the day is you've got a CFO going, well done, you're getting to conversions faster, but your brand is eroding over time. And I think that's the balance we're super conscious of because we're building brands for decades, not for next year's P and L delivery, if you know what I mean. But growth and return on investment is obviously critical. It's getting harder to grow, it's getting harder to get return on the array of investments you make. Because so much of what we do, if I step back, I talk about 80% plus of our content is proven effective, whatever channel it's in. So we feel good about that. That also means 20%, that's a lot of dollars, is not proven either because it's failed so didn't work out. That's actually a good thing. It means we're learning something. But more importantly, we're also experimenting all these new channels. So as we move down the road of earned, shared and owned, we're going to go try some things that may or may not work. Second screen. That may or may not be a brilliant idea, but it's really a first step in a journey that is an experiment without blowing our brains out, if you will, to find that out. But I think we've taken the opportunity to make it a really rich and a really cool experience for the consumer and they'll tell us what they think based on their behavior and how it plays out. But anyway, there's a lot of rabbit holes I could go down but hopefully that gets to the question.
- [27:36]
Kamika McCoy
Yeah, we love a rabbit hole and I'm gonna go down one right now.
- [27:40]
Rankin Carroll
I live in one.
- [27:41]
Kamika McCoy
Yeah, you mentioned data and personalization, things like that, that performs better. But you know, I think we'd be having a dishonest conversation if we didn't say data wasn't getting harder to come by. Especially when you've got Google's like I mentioned, never ending or long kiss goodnight, depending on who you ask. You know, the most recently the Google's VP of privacy sandbox at the iab. There's going to be a one time global prompt for users to opt in before, you know, given the industry several months on top of the years that we've had to prepare. So my question now is kind of, you know, with the waxing and waning, you know, the going and coming, stopping and starting that Google does with its third party cookie and with that data and that information, how does a company like Mars kind of cope?
- [28:26]
Rankin Carroll
Yeah, look, I think, I think we all know that it's going there and I think, you know, we're moving towards a cookie list future and we think that's a good thing because I think in the end it respects consumers, respects privacy and we think that's right and that's what we hear from our consumers. So we start from there, I think as we move beyond third party cookies, because I think we are moving beyond that and they've always had flaws, right? They're limited in what they contain. They break, they're broken. So they're very imperfect. They're kind of. We had what we had and it was the norm for the standard, the standard for the industry. As we move beyond that, I think we're focused on innovating in that context, I think is the heart of your question. So there's probably three areas I'd talk to in that respect. One is leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning, obviously in that regard, because what we find is it lets us do much more by using alternative data points that are often stronger than third party because we're able to scan a wider array of data sets, we're able to correlate and make distinctions within that. The signals are actually potentially stronger and more pointed in a good way. And we're using consumer authorized, if you say data, so we feel good about that progression, but that also leads us to learn things. So we're starting to make connections we weren't seeing before because we're outside of walled gardens, we're outside of our partner access points, if you will. So that's really interesting and exciting and I think we're starting to see that come through. I think we also are obviously taking first party data and enriching it with second and third. So we work on that basis because it gives us a much clearer picture of really what our consumers are looking for. Obviously in cpg, there's limitations to that at scale. Like if I take M&Ms, our main source of first party data is the M&M's brand. And a lot of what we do on D2C, you know, 80% of our first party is probably coming from that brand. So that has inherent limitations. But we start to take that and enrich it, as I say, and try to marry it up with some of the signals we pick up in others. It's becoming a really interesting place to look and we're endeavoring to grow that trove of first party as well. And then I think the last thing I'd say is really to get to better insight. It's about using data to get to better category insight. We talk about demand spaces, understanding what consumers want in a certain mindset in a certain demand state and what they want from our brands. And that allows us to also get to tailoring and addressability in a much more powerful way. And all of these things add up to what we're finding to be better returns on our investment. So I talked about up to 20% when we get to getting the right content against the right media, all driven by the data we're collecting. So it's a real time of change. It's a time of massive learning and it's an exciting time. Honestly, as crazy as the world is, it's probably one of the most exciting times ever to be in the practice of what we're doing in marketing and brand building. And it is this balance of brand building and performance which is kind of the norm.
- [31:38]
Kamika McCoy
I do want to do a deep dive on the M&M's thing here and look kind of this as a case study, if you will. Right. So Google starts to phase out as third party cookies. @ what point do we start looking towards Eminem and you Know, where do we find that data, how do we test it and that type of thing kind of give me the juicy scoop there, if you will.
- [31:55]
Rankin Carroll
Yeah. As I say, the largest part of our first party data comes from the M&M's brand as nearly 80%. But the issue with that data is it's really about our fans. So that's, that's helping us get to know them better, tailor for them more effectively and plus up the offerings we give them. And just one example of that is we started to match up. We worked with Spotify and took our first party data and matched it up against playlists and found where there was high indexing between our first party and the data we were getting out of Spotify. And that actually led us to a whole set of insights around how we could execute more effectively. And that became an exciting thing that we're able to scale. So that's a very simple example of taking a partner's data they would share, matching, enriching, enriching our first party data and leading to a better delivery. As a simple example. And that was on the M and M's cold brew. Unbelievable. By the way, if you got a chance to try some M and M's cold brew, that's probably my third favorite snack. Just saying. But that's one example of. And I think the challenge for us in CPG because it's less of a closed loop system, is to make that work. Now, having said that, again, without over. We're measured in our use of AI, don't get me wrong. But I think AI is also helping us unlock the concept of digital impulse because we're an impulse business and if you go to a convenience store, you know how it works and what drives it. But we're actually finding more and more through the pandemic. Obviously we opened up to online much more than we ever were before. And now our aspirations to grow in that space are much greater because we found A people understand it and B the cost of technology is dropping as it always does, and that's enabling us to be much more real time with increasingly lower value purchases. Because it used to be. How could you make the business model work from a data, from a delivery, from all the standpoints, from a $1 or $2 purchase? Well, that's starting to make a lot more sense. And by the way, people aren't delivering single packs of M&Ms, but they're coming, as you know, through the doordashes or the instacarts of the world. But that's all rooted in how we are managing it with those partners and finding a route to digital impulse. So that's a big part of how data is starting to change the fundamentals of how we go to market and how we transact and then ultimately how we drive to conversion.
- [34:22]
Kamika McCoy
Interesting. So we've got the smaller case study with Mars. We look at Spotify, I think you mentioned Instacart and other partners like that. So we've got some data points. How do we then apply it to scale it? Right, because that's just M&Ms. How do we scale it across other brands?
- [34:38]
Rankin Carroll
Yeah, and I think that honestly is an open question that we are working around because if I think about where we are with a lot of this, we've probably been at it for two years running use cases, running learning pilots, be it across. What's the right digital offering, what's the right portfolio to offer in those spaces with those various customers? How do you do that without upsetting your offline customers? So all of those business practicalities are incredibly important and really they're in the weeds, but they're critical to making the whole model work. But to come back to scale, I think we've been experimenting And I think 2025 is where we start to take these ideas to scale. It starts with M&Ms, again based on the first party piece. But I think what we're also doing is, is starting to understand that Snickers has a first party data trove. And I think this is where partnerships start to become super interesting. Right. So if I think about Snickers has a partnership with NFL as one example, well, there's a partnership and that conversation has changed dramatically around what's the give and get between that partnership and where does that lead us from a data. So it's a data driven conversation. If I think about the relationships we have with one of our joint business partners, say Disney, again, different conversations are opening up where we are being. We're only as good as our collaborative mutual benefit and that is opening up our mindset to a data driven conversation. And what is the exchange of data that allows us to create collaborative experiences that are that much more valuable to the consumer? Merits their time, their money, but that's how we will drive to scale. So it's not we won't get to scale on our own. I guess point I'm trying to make a brand like M&M's probably sets up a bit better. But things like partnerships, things like working with our digital partners, meta, Google, Amazon, et cetera, is also opening up doors in that regard. So it's a hot, heavy time in that area and I don't have all the answers, but I certainly know that we are relentless in our mission to figure it out. It's a time of learning, it's a time of revelation and it's a time of what can we take out of. You know, I sometimes call it the tyranny of a thousand use cases because you get so caught up in trying stuff and you know, start by starting becomes your mantra. We'll just go down and try things. Well, that's good to a point. And then it's just like, well, we got to harvest this and take it somewhere. So that's kind of what I'd say we're doing in 25.
- [37:10]
Kamika McCoy
We touched on this a couple of times. But I want you to kind of dig into this topic of artificial intelligence generative AI. I think for like the past year and a half or so it's been a really, really big talking point point in the industry. So how do you leverage it right to, to, to scale and to, for the data and the personalization, how do we use it, how do we harness that power?
- [37:28]
Rankin Carroll
Sure. So first of all, AI is not new to Mars. We've been investing it for a number of years across the business. You know, whether it's enterprise planning, strategic revenue management, a lot of stuff in our supply chains also. But in the marketing side, integrated 360 spending allocations are really getting to next best dollar and moving from MMM type tools into much more AI driven allocation tools and starting to really experiment. And it's pretty interesting the stuff that that's bringing the correlations across. We used to be able to work across an MMM which brought together six, seven, ten sets of data. We're now talking about attribution models and it's not just mta, it's rich attribution across hundred sets of data that allow us to really get to next dollar. That's a super massive breakthrough. Now we are in a testing mode on that. We're piloting that right now in a couple of our big markets and I expect to be scaling that by the end of the year, which is super exciting because you can imagine in a world where dollars are scarce, getting that kind of clarity is incredibly important. We've invested in a lot of innovation labs across our markets and we actually built one in New Jersey where we are doing a lot of sort of breakthrough work. So we filed several patents whether it's like a Mars GPT, so a tool that actually is like A brand brain that anyone in any function can access and really work with data internally. So we're building those kind of tools. Really exciting stuff. There's a tool called Brama AI, which again is a patent we've applied for that is enabling us to do amazing stuff in the innovation space and get ahead of and take out so much wasted work that we used to do. So that stuff's pretty cool. But I think practically it's coming into, from a pure marketing and sort of a media standpoint, the attribution piece, incredibly important. It's also coming into our creative space and I was probably resistant to that. I wasn't convinced. But I have to say it's unbelievable the pace at which it's going. And I think great creators understand it and great creators are leveraging it to bring it into our mix. And so we are now seeing it playing a role in taking out a lot of the, I'm going to call it the drudgery, like, you know, product, product information pages, like the stuff that good people would spend their time on historically is getting taken out. And I really do think AI is freeing up time for creativity, taking away so much of the low level work that is really ripe for automation and creating space for our precious and scarce creative resources to spend on truly using their brains to imagine brilliant ideas for our brand. So I think that's a practical shift in resource, which is incredibly important. And so I think used right, used responsibly because there's a big worry that as we bring this stuff in, it starts to do funny things because it's not exactly. There's so much still to go. But if I give you an example, just to use a practical one, you've I think heard me talk about the Snickers AI. We have leveraged that use case, which was essentially just to give it a headline for those who don't know it, it was getting into the insight that around a football, a soccer, also known as soccer event in Europe, the Euros 2024, there's enormous amounts of banter, fan banter. Well, that plays right into the Snickers attitude and the Snickers mindset of you make mistakes when you're hungry in football terms or soccer terms, you score own goals so you make mistakes. That's an own goal. We took that insight and said, how do we create an experience that would be welcome and valued by the consumer? We hired a legendary soccer coach named Jose Mourinho and basically the interaction was, you go on WhatsApp, you say, hey, Kimiko My friend has made this goofy mistake and I want to send her a little bit of. Little bit of banter. And then they'd get a WhatsApp message from Jose Mourinho saying, hey, Kimiko, what's up? This. Anyway, it's very entertaining. We wondered if AI could be funny. Actually, it helped us be funny with the right prompts. But the other thing I highlight is it required eight layers of safety to protect us from inputs, to protect us from what it can turn into, and to protect us from the outputs. And by the way, some of the outputs were quite hilarious. They never saw the light of day, but the testing lab was pretty fun. Anyway, I tell you all that to say that was our really first major league use case of application in a creative space and that has allowed us to learn at pace and bring it to our other brands. So we are working right now building on the tech stack that we built around that and the learnings around safety that we built around that and bringing that into the creative space, which is super exciting and opening up things we never thought we could do before. And I won't get into the examples. There's a lot of work in progress right now. So all this to say AI has moved from being something foreign, a little bit scary, to something that I think we are working hard to be safe and govern properly. And we work very hard on governance and making sure that these things are safe, that our brands are safe, most importantly, that our consumers are safe when they use it. They won't get upset by what they're experiencing. But we're finding a lot of traction beyond just the productivity aspect. There's a creative aspect. The last thing I'd say in this area is, I think what I'm also recognizing, I think we are recognizing is we are marketing increasingly to two constituencies, humans and bots. Why? Because you will have agents working for you and we've got to be able to market bot to bot, if you will, and AI is enabling that. So agentic AI, that was the big talk at CES this year. I think there's a lot of talk. I think actually the application is incredibly exciting. Again, early days, but it's moving very quickly. So I think what we're trying to figure out is what's the right mixture of human creativity and. And AI enabled creativity and AI enabled connectivity through this agentic approach. So again, it's an experimentation, it's a sandbox right now, but it's pretty exciting. That was a super long answer, but.
- [43:54]
Kamika McCoy
It was a good one and it clarified a lot of things and prevented me asking several follow up questions. But what, what happens here is there's, you know, you've set a good road forward. So curious to see how that pans out. And we'll be sure to stay close with you, of course. You know I can't let you go without asking one final question. I saved the worst for last Last August. Last August, Mars made a really, really big announcement to acquire Kellanova, which would take the candy brand and snack food brands, put them into one. Is there any insight that you can offer us about where we're at with that right now?
- [44:27]
Rankin Carroll
Yeah, I mean, listen, it's subject to the customary closing conditions, so we are working through the potential acquisition as noted in the press, and we're going through all the steps. So I've got to be measured in that. But what I would say is that portfolio is incredibly exciting. It's got some of the best brands in the world. If I look at Pringles or Cheez Its or Pop Tarts and back to what we talked about, paid or shared owned. If you look at what Pop Tarts was doing around college football and some of the bowl games. If you look at what Cheez it does in the NCAA around again around Valicta Football. If I look at Pringles, it's an incredible global brand that really has consistency, distinctiveness around whether I see whatever country I see it in. It really feels like a brilliant, powerful brand if you look at how they play it through both offline and in store as well as online. So it's a brand I really appreciate and I'm hopeful that we'll some point be working with them as we go forward. So brilliant brands and an exciting business. I mean, I think it's very complementary to Mars. What I would say is if it closes, I think it'll be exciting to us because it's incredibly complementary from both a category perspective, but also from a route to market perspective. But I'll leave it at that.
- [45:51]
Kamika McCoy
Absolutely. Listen, I have so enjoyed chatting with you today. Thank you so much for letting us pick your brain and get to know the Mars brand. Well, that brings us to the end of this episode of the Digiday Podcast. Thank you to everyone for listening and please don't forget to share this episode with someone who you think would enjoy it. You can even rate us and leave us a comment on Apple Podcasts. We'll be back next week with another episode of the Digiday Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.