← The Marketing Architects
The Marketing Architects
Building The “Brand” Case with Tory Pachis, SVP of Marketing at Amica Insurance
00:39:21
For 90 years, Amica Insurance only accepted new customers through referrals. Then they opened their doors to everyone—and discovered they had less than 3% national brand awareness. For a direct-to-consumer insurance company, this sparked a complete...
Loading summary
Transcript74 lines
- [00:01]
Alaina Jasper
Hello, this is Alaina and you're about to listen to an episode of a new series we're calling the Effectiveness Workshop. After recording over a hundred episodes of this show exploring marketing effectiveness, we realized we wanted more direct insights from CMOs who are applying these principles in their daily work. So we're introducing a new format where we chat with some incredibly smart marketers and jump right into practical takeaways to help you advance your career and your brand. I hope that you like it. Enjoy the show. Marketing Effectiveness. What's your marketing philosophy?
- [00:31]
Tory Packas
What does marketing affect effectiveness?
- [00:34]
Alaina Jasper
Welcome to the Effectiveness Workshop.
- [00:37]
Angela Voss
Marketing Architects.
- [00:39]
Alaina Jasper
Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects. And I'm joined by my co hosts, Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the chief prided architect of misfits and machines. And we're joined by by a guest today, Tory Packas, the senior Vice president of marketing at Amica Insurance, the longest standing mutual insurer of automobiles in the U.S. a direct writer, Amica also offers home life and umbrella insurance as well as annuities. Tory has over two decades of experience in both B2B and B2C, marketing, branding, distribution and advertising. He's been a driving force behind Amica's marketing strategy, including their recent high profile partnership with the Boston Celtics. Prior to joining Amica, Tory held leadership roles at the Hanover Insurance Group and Travelers, where he led advertising, media buying and more. He's a marketer with a passion for both performance and brand, which is the best kind of marketer in our opinion. So we're delighted to have him on the show. Welcome, Tory.
- [01:43]
Tory Packas
Hi everybody. Thanks for having me. It's an honor to be on the show. I almost feel like this is how you know you've made it as a marketer. Oh no, I don't know about that.
- [01:50]
Alaina Jasper
Concerning for marketers, man.
- [01:51]
Rob DeMars
I don't know about that. Now Tori, there's a little factoid that I heard and you can tell me if I'm wrong on this. I hope it's correct that you actually can speak Greek. Is that true?
- [02:03]
Tory Packas
I can, yeah. I'm a first generation American. Both my parents immigrated here. In fact, my real name on my driver's license and on my passport is Soterios. And the name Tori my mom gave to me after watching and learning English from soap operas. She said there was a handsome doctor named Tori on Days of our Lives when I was a little kid. So she said we're going to give him the nickname Tori. So I'm named after some C list actor from the 70s, I guess.
- [02:32]
Rob DeMars
I love that. Well, ironically we have a lot of Greek listeners, so I was wondering if you could say welcome to the Marketing Architects Podcast in Greek.
- [02:42]
Tory Packas
Marketing Architects Podcast. I don't know the real translation of Marketing Architects Podcast.
- [02:47]
Rob DeMars
Fair enough. That was very good though.
- [02:49]
Angela Voss
So we're national, more cultured thanks to Tori. You elevated us already.
- [02:54]
Alaina Jasper
Well, we're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. Always trying to root our opinions and data research and what drives business results. This interview with Tori is part of our Effectiveness workshop where we talk to marketers who are leading the way for effectiveness in the US And I usually kick off these interviews with a piece of research or an article. And for this one I found an article from friend of the pod, Mark Ritson. It's titled there's no Such Thing as Performance Branding Marketing. In the article, Ritson argues that brand marketing drives long term growth while performance marketing focuses on short term sales and the two should be approached separately. He reminds us of the long and the short of it theory which emphasizes the importance of balancing long term brand with short term sales activation. Ritson believes it's possible to sell products and build a brand in the same ad, but trying to do both at once often dilutes the effectiveness of each. The reason is simple. Long term brand marketing is all about creating emotional connections and building memory structures over time, where short term performance marketing is aimed at driving immediate action with more rational, product focused messaging. So Tori, I wanted to open with that article today because when I chatted with you about coming on the show, one thing you mentioned that really interested me was your experience introducing more brand to the performance and brand marketing equation for Amica. And we are going to talk about that. But first to focus on the article. Do you agree with Mark Gritson and others that performance and brand should be separate campaigns, creative budgets? Or do you think the two could be blended?
- [04:19]
Tory Packas
I absolutely agree with the article and when I was reading it I thought to myself, while there are so many similarities between what the author is saying and what we've been able to do here at Amica. I agree in the sense that brand is a long term play that fuels future demand and I think if you don't purposefully keep the two objectives separate, it's easy to overreact and pull from one budget or one objective to support another. I've been in scenarios where as we're approaching maybe the fourth quarter or Year end results and the a lead goal or sales goal is in sight. It's easy to pull from that brand budget or objective to fuel short term demand, but in doing so, you know, you're really pulling from that long term investment. And brands take time to build. Investing in brand is a long term play, it's a slow moving target. I also think it's important from a creative standpoint when you keep the two objectives and budgets separate. You're really allowing your creative team to develop campaigns, unique campaigns that support each of those unique objectives. That being said, I've worked at places where there isn't a brand budget and the majority of the spend is in performance channels. And if you've looked at it, you could see that performance channels can actually help mold brand perceptions in the absence of a brand budget or objective.
- [05:42]
Angela Voss
Yeah, I think a lot of marketers might be in that spot, probably more than want to be where their sole purpose right here and today is to ensure the lead counts are met, their site traffic, et cetera. You know, we operate only in the linear and CTV space and I think a lot of marketers would just consider that brand versus the entire ecosystem of marketing. It's brand messaging, it's brand budget, et cetera. And TV certainly is extremely effective at building brand awareness and mental availability. But this is one area that perhaps I don't know Elena, how you feel and Rob, that we've differed a little bit in terms of opinion with Mr. Ritson and a couple of others. We have ample data to support that TV and CTV can and should be both a sales activation and a branding channel. You know, turn on the NFL on a Sunday afternoon. And entire insurance category, it feels will attempt to provide a bit of a masterclass on brand plus performance and tv. You've got Liberty Mutual and the Limu Emo stories, but a lot of times tagged with an offer. And so there's a mix of approaches, many of them using both story and sales activation tactics in the same creative message. So it's a tricky one. You've just got a mix of approaches. I think TV definitely can do both. It's a channel that reaches both in and out of market consumers. But interesting to hear, kind of the journey that you've been on and bringing Amica to more of that brand side just versus just being speeds and feeds of the insurance category.
- [07:15]
Tory Packas
Some of the companies that you mentioned, every company's at a different point in their brand journey. Right. And a lot of the companies that you mentioned have been investing in brand for decades at Amica, we've just recently started investing in brand. We've got a really interesting history where the first 90 years of our existence, the only way you could get an Amica policy is if you were referred by an existing policyholder. You had to be a policyholder in good standing and then you would refer a friend or family member. And for that reason we almost have this sort of club like mentality that's based on scarcity. And we also have multi generational families that have been policyholders for decades. Over 20% of our book has been with us for over 30 years. It wasn't until about 1996 where the leadership team here decided in order to really grow the company, we need to advertise and bring in a wider set of consumers. And you know, the channels at the time were print and direct mail and very little television. So it was mostly performance marketing channels. And I would say it wasn't until recently, maybe the last five years, that our team took a hard look at our position in the marketplace, saw what our brand awareness was and decided we really need to separate these two objectives and invest in the top of the funnel.
- [08:39]
Alaina Jasper
Speaking of your team, I'm curious about the role of the team because you've joined, I'm sure things have changed, you've introduced new channels. So what's the primary role of the team at Amica now and does it differ at all from your role at previous brands? Maybe like Travelers, I've.
- [08:53]
Tory Packas
I've had the privilege of working at some great companies in the insurance industry, really well run companies and terrific marketing leaders. So I've seen several models exist, I think at some of the larger carriers there's a separation between business unit or performance marketing teams and more enterprise brand teams. Here at Amica, it's all under one umbrella. We made a strategic decision a few years ago to combine corporate communications and our business unit marketing under one umbrella. So we have five centers of excellence on our team that we've developed. One focused on marketing data science, another focused on brand and creative, a team focused on media and platform, one focused on web strategy, and another one that's focused on project management and operations. So we have a set of objectives and key results that we manage the business on. They range from top of the funnel, certain brand equity targets, to lead volume sales, lead quality, premium targets, and even a cost per sale target. But I think it's unique in the sense that we see ourselves as serving four audiences. Existing policyholders, prospective amica customers, but also employees and communities are really important audiences for Us, we have a long standing heritage of working with nonprofits in the local communities. It's a big part of our brand promise. About a third of the jobs that we handled as a marcom team last year were geared towards employees. So we're very employee centric. It's part of our culture. So for that reason we have very broad objectives from building brand driving leads, but also serving those four audiences.
- [10:35]
Alaina Jasper
I love hearing that you have those different audiences. I'm starting to understand more of how you sold in brand because I think some of our best clients, they don't just look at brand marketing as a way to reach new prospects. They love that it reaches employees and current customers and more. But I have to ask how you did this, because introducing a more brand is sort of a dream for a lot of marketers and yeah, we want to hear how that happened for you. How did you introduce more brand channels to your mix and then balance them with your strong history with your more traditional direct performance marketing?
- [11:10]
Tory Packas
Yeah, it's an interesting journey. I joined this company in the middle of a pandemic in 2020 and one of my first questions to the marketing team at the time was, can I look at our brand tracker to see what our brand health metrics look like? And realized that we didn't have any brand brand metrics because we didn't really invest in the top of the funnel. Like I said, it was mostly direct mail, paid search and a mix of print, little bit of tv. So our first step was to arm ourselves with data. We found a good firm to help us with brand tracker to measure our health metrics. And that's really where we found that our unaided awareness was less than 3% countrywide in a very competitive category. As a direct writer who has no other distribution other than call centers and a website site that was concerning. There's a pretty interesting formula in the insurance category where there's a direct link between brand awareness and recall and your quote rate. The higher your awareness, the more likely you are to be quoted. There's also an interesting relationship between your lack of awareness and the number of companies you're quoted against. So, for example, maybe a State Farm who's leading the category in awareness might be quoted against one or two other carriers, whereas an Amica at the time with 3% awareness might be quoted against six or seven other carriers. So we knew we had to really invest in the top of the funnel. It was a series of meetings with our CEO, our coo, our CFO, and even the board of directors to What I call create a burning platform. This is where we are. This is what's going to happen if we don't act now. And I'm so fortunate to have a leadership team here that believes in marketing as an investment. I've read the McKinsey study that might have been quoted on this show where there's a disconnect sometimes between the C suite and marketing and that that doesn't exist here. We've had the support of leadership to really invest in, in building the brand and it's paid off in our results.
- [13:11]
Angela Voss
That's awesome. It sounds like you've created this vision, right? Just starting with something like what does our brand funnel look like? Let's just start there unaided. At less than 3%. You know, it might not be super common to have a C suite look at that data and say, well, we should or we shouldn't invest brand. I'm sure there's a mix of reactions to data like that. So then you recognize that brand is a problem. You look to channels to try to solve that. As a TV agency, of course we're deeply passionate about television as a channel, both linear and ctv. Could you share your experience with tv? Are you approaching it then more as a brand building channel, a performance channel? A combination of both.
- [13:52]
Tory Packas
I have a long history with TV dating back decades. I remember managing TRPs and GRPs and DRTV and remnant buys for other companies. I think it's an absolutely necessary channel for brand building. We see it as one that's more the brand building channel, but has a tremendous impact on our performance marketing channels. So one example of that is when we invest in television, we tend to see that our paid search becomes more efficient. So instead of consumers searching on generic product keywords like auto or home that that are some of the costliest keywords available. Top 10 keywords I think are insurance related. We now have more consumers searching on Amica as a brand which is much more efficient. We've seen unique visitors to amica.com our website, double year over year from 2022 to 2023. And you know, I can only point to some of the investments we made at the top of the funnel for driving that. I think just another reason why TV is important for us is creative. We haven't talked about that yet, but we have a very unique creative strategy that's based on highly emotive creative. We kind of looked at where the industry was going and wanted to find the white space and go the opposite way. And I think if you'll look at Our ads, they're emotional and they're geared towards television as a channel. You can't really get that same message across in some of those lower funnel performance marketing channels in such a crowded category.
- [15:29]
Angela Voss
I think that just makes so much sense. That stands out to me creatively in terms of your strategy there and looking for that white space. It definitely does stand apart from a lot of humor, et cetera, being already used in that insurance category. So props to you guys.
- [15:43]
Alaina Jasper
There's. Yeah, Tori, I did want to ask you a bit about the messaging for your brand campaigns, because I did some polite stalking of Amica before this interview. And, yeah, your spots, they stand out. And the tagline I saw at some of them was empathy is our best policy. And that seemed to really match with what I learned about your brand and just your positioning. So I'm curious, how did you find that right message? Like, what was the process of finding it, but then also deciding the best way to share it?
- [16:12]
Tory Packas
So you. You mentioned it. The insurance category seems to have a playbook on creative. Right. I think there was a study at some point done that humor is so closely linked to brand recall. And, you know, we saw the success that Geico had in introducing the Gecko in the late 90s. So there was sort of this copycat league of mascots, jingles, slogans, and they're all very successful campaigns. But when we looked at our mission and our value proposition, it's very different at Amica. You know, our mission statement is to deliver peace of mind and build enduring relationships. And that's not something you often hear from insurance companies that want to build enduring relationships. We lead the insurance category in J.D. power Awards for customer service. So we don't compete on price. Right. Like, we can't play the commodity game up against many of the other carriers. So we made a strategic decision years ago to say, hey, we need another advertising agency partner to help us find what's real about this brand and how to make it different. We went through an extensive agency search with a terrific search consultant named Joanne Davis. We landed on an advertising agency called MOTHER in. In Brooklyn, New York. Imagine standing in front of the boardroom and saying, we picked mother. You know, I got a lot of. A lot of strange looks. But their value proposition aligned with us. They weren't owned by a holding company. They were independent. Their approach to creative really made sense to us. And one of the first moves they made was we sat together with them listening to phone calls in our call centers. Sales calls, service calls, claims calls. And we found that our brand promise and our new brand platform always existed within these four walls here on campus. We just needed a little help telling that story. And they came back and they said, whole categories over here. We need to find the white space. Your value proposition is not price, it's empathy. And that's really where it took off. I think another important aspect of our creative is we don't want to make the brand the hero. I think in a lot of commercials and creative, the mistake brands make is they make their company or their brand the hero or the focal point. The hero should always be the consumer. Brand is the guide to help that consumer solve the problem. So that's why we don't have sort of a spokesperson. We're there to help the consumer solve the problem. And, you know, maybe the last point I'd make is when we listen to pitches from our ad agency on different campaign direction, we measure our ads on goosebumps. A lot of it has been made around system one and system two sort of thinking. And we really want to appeal to the system one emotional aspect to creative. Do you feel something when you see it? And I think the advertising has to be distinctive. It's going to stand out. We don't have the budgets that many of our competitors do, so it needs to really stand out emotionally.
- [19:14]
Rob DeMars
Well, speaking of emotion, you coach basketball now. Is the passion for coaching these young people basketball. The reason why you did a deal with the Celtics, so you could kind of go in there and do a little coaching on that bench as well?
- [19:31]
Alaina Jasper
I don't think they need it, Rob. Didn't they just win, like the finals?
- [19:36]
Tory Packas
If Joe Missoula needs an assistant on the bench, I'd be happy to volunteer my services. I love the game of basketball. I played it growing up. I coach AAU basketball in my limited free time for my four children. But that's not the reason why we partnered with the Celtics. Although I get asked that many, many times. You know, what led us to the Celtics was really trying to solve a business problem or an objective that we had. And that is, how do we grow in New England? Our home markets are such an opportunity for us to reach potential growth. We also looked at where are the eyeballs today? And you guys are a television agency. I mean, I think there was a report that, what, 95, 96 of the top 100 most watched programs last year were live sports. So people are watching sports. We want to grow in New England. And another business objective we have is connecting with a younger, more diverse customer. Our average customer, age @ Amica is 60 years old. And a lot of that is because of the longevity of that model that I talked about when we were referral only. We need to find a way to build the brand not only with more consumers in that sort of baby boomer stage where we already resonate high, but how do we connect with a younger, more diverse consumer? And half of the NBA audience is under the age of 35. Right. So you start looking at these objectives and, you know, you also look at this team. This team is unbelievable. Right. They just won their 18th championship, the most in league history. They've signed their core for the next five years. I don't think we could have timed this any better. My CEO said to me when we were after we signed the deal that, you know what, Tori? Sometimes it's better to be lucky than brilliant. And I don't know if I should take that as a compliment, but you.
- [21:33]
Angela Voss
Were in the right spot at the right time. I'd say take credit for it.
- [21:36]
Tory Packas
That's right. So it was a team effort, and we couldn't be happier to be locked in with the Celtics over the next few years. They're poised to be great. And maybe the final comment on the Celtics is we talked about how do we make this front page news instead of just sports page news. So one of the things that's so important with this is our involvement with the Shamrock Foundation. They have a. A nonprofit entity. I talked about how community is so important for our brand. We are going to partner with the Shamrock foundation to donate over $2.5 million, which they will match over the five years of this deal to build early education childhood centers in Providence, Rhode island, and outside of Boston. There is such a need and a lack of quality early education. They took us through some research when we first partnered with them on how important years 1 through 5 are for young people and how, you know, it's very predictive for how they'll turn out in adulthood. We combined that and we said, how do we make meaningful change in the communities? So it's more than just a patch, and that's something we're really, really proud of as well.
- [22:47]
Angela Voss
That's so inspiring. It's just a really cool story. You had a lot of initiatives and kind of stars aligned for both the business and just a larger cause. I want to shift a little bit into how do we know things are working from a measurement perspective. You said something earlier. You measure on goosebumps and measurements is probably something that we talk about on this effectiveness podcast more than anything. Else, if there was one single topic, and you've now got things like television, you've got sports team sponsorships, and you've got direct marketing efforts, certainly must be more than just goosebumps when it comes back to the bottom line. How does your team prove the impact of all of these efforts?
- [23:27]
Tory Packas
Yeah, I don't. I don't think my CFO would accept Goosebumps as a KPI. I was gonna say, I guess we evaluate creative pitches on Goosebumps, but we have a lot of KPIs that tell us whether we're moving in the right direction. I referenced some of them earlier. You know, we have these OKRs around brand equity that we measure through a brand tracker. We obviously look at leads and sales. Lead quality is important for us. Within the insurance category. We're very selective about driving a preferred risk into Amica. So that's another KPI we look at, obviously premium for our life product. And we're always trying to manage efficiency as well. So we measure cost per policy. But I would tell you, cost per policy has been an interesting one and, and one that we've had a lot of debate about here at Amica. I think if you purely look at cost per policy and compare us or benchmark us to many of our competitors, we will look as outliers. And I think the reason for that is we're in a different part of our brand journey. As I mentioned earlier, we're more selective about the type of customer bringing in. So it costs more to dislodge that preferred customer that maybe doesn't shop as frequently. Obviously, we're investing in brand that we believe will pay off and make us more efficient in the long run. So one of the metrics that we're talking about using instead is more of an LTV to CAC sort of ratio. If our average customer is staying with us for decades and, you know, is it fair to really compare us to maybe a competitor who doesn't have that sort of longevity? So there's many dashboards that we look at. We are very careful not to overreact to brand metrics in the short term. Although we look at them month to month, it can take time. And we believe we're investing in the future that way.
- [25:12]
Alaina Jasper
I don't know. I like measure on Goosebumps. I actually wrote that down. But it's obviously the rest of it's great too, especially the thought of kind of multiple models and we would definitely be aligned with you. You've been talking about brand and thinking about the long term. It makes me so excited. Like all this conversation's amazing because it's what we talk about on the podcast all the time and you're someone who's really doing it, which is so great to get to talk about and have an example. And it sounds a lot like marketing effectiveness, which we're fans of here on the show. We talk about it a lot, maybe too much, but we've been asking these heads of marketing CMOs that we talk to about marketing effectiveness because we think it's sort of rising in the United States. So what does it mean to you? And do you think that there's any kind of a gap in the US?
- [25:58]
Tory Packas
I've heard some of other CMOs answer this question and they're probably much more eloquent than I will be here in terms of the definition of marketing effectiveness, because I think it really depends on what your business objectives are. There's some companies that are maybe investing in brand or others that might be investing more in performance marketing channels. So at the end of the day it's like, what are the problems you're looking to solve or what are the business objectives that you're looking to accomplish? For me, I think part of marketing effectiveness is finding the optimal fit between brand and demand. That's one thing that we've talked a lot about here and really finding the right mix between creative for different objectives. We've had a lot of success in building great television campaigns that are based on empathy as our best policy. But how to translate that message into lower funnel channels is something that I think we're still working on. One of our fastest growing media channels has been social media. Right. So how do you translate that sort of message where you don't have 90 seconds to tell a long form story? We've also been testing into podcasts recently. You know, we had a lot of success advertising on the Mel Robbins podcast in June. It was actually one of our most successful campaigns in terms of driving brand and unique site traffic to amica.com because we were able to do some very emotive storytelling with Mel's help on that podcast. So long way of saying marketing effectiveness to me is just finding that optimal mix between brand and demand and making sure that you've got the right creative for each channel delivered to the right audience.
- [27:44]
Alaina Jasper
What about the gap? Not to put pressure on you, but do you think the US do you think we're behind here to the uk, Australia or what's your opinion?
- [27:51]
Tory Packas
You know, I don't know. I've read some of the materials. I'm not as much of an expert on the international model. I've heard some of the experts say they're in a different sort of place in terms of how they evaluate creative and media. To me, it's apples and oranges. We are such a large country here, 300 million plus people. And sometimes when you look at these smaller countries, it's a little bit different, or it's apples and oranges. You're able to really carve out a different message that speaks to that audience. There's so much diversity here in this country and polarizing points of views. I don't know that it's fair to compare both markets.
- [28:29]
Rob DeMars
Well, speaking of polarizing points of view, we love a good polarizing point of view on this show. We love contrarian thinking you mentioned, even as you look to creative taking a contrarian view with against what everyone else was doing. What would you say is your most contrarian marketing opinion?
- [28:51]
Tory Packas
I think it's time for a contrarian corner. Oh, my God. How much time you have? So many. I'll give you. Can I give you two?
- [29:05]
Rob DeMars
Sure.
- [29:05]
Tory Packas
All right. So one is really relevant to what we experienced here at AMIC over the last year in the insurance category. Last year was one of the most unprofitable years in recorded history. Between the catastrophic events and record inflation. The way we measure profitability as an industry is what we call a combined ratio. And the combined ratio was record high. As an industry, so many of us carriers were raising rates to get rate adequacy or become more profitable. And in doing so, many companies pulled back on marketing as a way to restore profitability. We saw a unique opportunity for us, you know, as a challenger brand with the market share that we have. I'm a big believer in the equation of when your share of voice is greater than your share of market, that's usually a leading indicator for brand growth. I think you had Peter Field on here at one point. I've used his research to create the burning platform here at Amica. But we saw a unique opportunity, right. And while others pulled back on advertising, we actually doubled down on advertising and increased our share voice to the highest point it's been since we've been recording it in difficult economic times when others were pulling back. And what we saw was growth as a result of that. I think there's something to that, right. To have the guts now we were a mutual company, so we don't have shareholders. We can take more of the long view and do things like that. That's one Contrarian view is invest in marketing when times are tough because it'll have long term impact.
- [30:46]
Alaina Jasper
Yeah, we love it. We won't disagree with you there, by the way. We're all like drooling. We're like yay.
- [30:52]
Tory Packas
Yeah. I mean we saw it during the pandemic, right? Like I think a lot of companies kind of went through that and the, that held the line and doubled down are probably reaping the results now. Maybe. One other one I'd leave you with is this concept of people have short attention spans that the future is 15 seconds, 6 second ads, bumpers. I think there's a place for all of that. But I also think that there's a place for long form still. And if you're delivering the right message like we are, with an emotive sort of storytelling component, there's still a place for 60 seconds, dare I say even 90 second long form ads in television and other high reach media. One of our most successful campaigns this year was a campaign we call what you leave behind. It was to promote our life insurance product. And the idea here is no one wants to think about their own mortality, but we wanted to tell the stories of family members where someone had passed on and left a physical item that reminds them of their loved one and make that connection between a physical item that you leave behind could be the same as a life insurance policy protecting your legacy for the future. These were nearly four minutes in length. We created three of them. By all accounts how we measure attention. People are watching them from start to finish. So there's an appetite for long form if it's to the right audience and you're telling the right story. That'd be my other contrarian view.
- [32:24]
Angela Voss
Another good one, I think, a testament to the credibility that you've built with your team. I mean not just marketing during a downturn which can get people fired easily, but also stepping out into a space that not many players play anymore. 62nd, 92nd, even longer. Very cool what you've done.
- [32:47]
Rob DeMars
You made a lot of really amazing decisions. What would you say has been your best one? And on the flip side of that, what would you say? You're like, God dang it, I'll never do that again.
- [32:59]
Tory Packas
Best decision, I would say. I'm going to give you two here as well. I'd say the first one is making the difficult call from a brand platform standpoint to remove price from all of our messaging, making that very difficult 180 pivot to say we're not going to market on price, we are A service oriented company, and it might result in fewer leads coming in at the top of the funnel because we're not marketing on price. But the ones that are attracted to this value proposition will convert at a higher rate. So I think the entire sort of creative switch that we made, I think the other one is just people I have, and I'm not just saying this, but I have the most talented group of marketing leaders and marketing team that I've ever worked with in my career. They challenge me every day. They come with creative ideas. We're all aligned on the same vision. We've designed these okrs. So there's tension intentionally between brand and demand and we roll up our sleeves and we have really tough conversations all the time. So I think another really good move is just having the best team hiring, making organizational changes that put the best team on the field or on the court, I should say, for basketball analogy.
- [34:14]
Rob DeMars
Awesome. All right, what's a boo boo? What's one where you're like, ah, dang it.
- [34:18]
Tory Packas
Oh, man, I don't want to get myself in any trouble here. So what I'll say in general is just one thing I've learned over my career is the most precious resource we have is time. And I think it's easy in a marketing role. In a marketing leadership role, you could spend all day engaging with people that are trying to sell you different things or vendors that have the next solution. I think a boo boo or some mistake would be just not dedicating time in the past to what really matters. I think now we're laser focused. I'm laser focused on the big rocks that will drive our strategy forward and have no problem saying no to things that maybe I didn't earlier in my career. Last year, we handled over 1300 projects, and part of that is being able to say no to some good ideas that maybe don't align with our okrs.
- [35:13]
Angela Voss
Strategy is choice.
- [35:14]
Alaina Jasper
That's great. Well, Tori, thank you again for joining us. This episode was so fun. I'm thinking this will be like a case study for marketing effectiveness. And marketers can send this, send it to your boss and convince them to invest in brand. Well, we like to end on a bit of a fun note. So I thought it might be fun to talk more about sports. Everyone here loves sports except for Rob. So you've made large investments in the Celtics and that partnership. So here's the question. If you could choose to have front row seats for life, they're free for any sports team. Which one would you choose?
- [35:45]
Tory Packas
Oh, that's a no brainer. It'd be the Boston Celtics.
- [35:49]
Alaina Jasper
Okay, maybe besides them. I should have eliminated them besides itself.
- [35:54]
Tory Packas
So, first of all, let me. Let me just say, if the Celtics look great, I mean, as we sit here today, they are off to a fast start. I can see Banner 19.
- [36:03]
Alaina Jasper
I don't know, the Timberwolves look pretty good too. Corey, we're gonna have to see.
- [36:07]
Tory Packas
Oh, yeah, well, maybe. But Banner 19, I mean, to have the Ameca patch immortalized on that jersey, should they be fortunate enough to win, would be a dream come true. Aside from that, if not the Celtics, one thing I didn't bring up is we also own the naming rights to the Ameca Mutual pavilion here in Providence. The Amp for short. And that was actually one of our first big brand moves. We could do a whole nother podcast on how that came about. But it used to be the Dunkin Donut center, the Dunk. And after a 20 year relationship, Dunkin moved on and we turned it into the Amp. And the Providence College Friars play there. So maybe if it's not the Celtics, I would say the PC Friars. Front row seats.
- [36:54]
Angela Voss
Those make sense. Rob, you want. You want to go or you want me to?
- [36:58]
Rob DeMars
Oh, go ahead, Ange.
- [37:00]
Angela Voss
I mean, it's easy for. For us to say, I guess our home team, but actually it's not easy to say our home football team. It is very hard to be a Vikings fan, but I am a die hard Vikings fan, and I would love front row tickets to see the Vikings. Beyond that, I would love to watch my kids play sports for a lifetime. Wouldn't that be great? Unfortunately, we can't do that.
- [37:24]
Rob DeMars
Oh, that's a good one.
- [37:25]
Tory Packas
That is a good one.
- [37:26]
Rob DeMars
Wow. Okay, so you're right. I. I really don't enjoy watching sports. I'm kind of a weirdo. But I have a good answer, which is any event at the Summer Olympics, because I'd only have to watch it every four years.
- [37:44]
Tory Packas
Rob, I'm going to bring you to a Celtics game and convert you to basketball.
- [37:47]
Angela Voss
Yes, basketball.
- [37:49]
Rob DeMars
All right, sounds good. I'll take you up on that.
- [37:52]
Alaina Jasper
Luckily for me, I might live in Minnesota, but I'm not a Vikings fan. I'm a Packers fan. So easy. Front row seats. And those things are valuable if you get on their waiting list for season tickets. You're on there for a lifetime. Like you're basically, I should get on there for my kids because they will be packers fans. So that would be.
- [38:11]
Tory Packas
That's awesome.
- [38:12]
Angela Voss
I don't know. Did you follow in your father's footsteps. Isn't he a Vikings fan?
- [38:17]
Alaina Jasper
My dad's a fair weather Vikings fan, so we never watched the Vikings. It was never good weather for them, so we were never watching. Well, Tori, thank you again for joining. Anything you want to plug will include, you know, your LinkedIn, Amika's website. Anything else before we sign off?
- [38:33]
Tory Packas
Yeah, I mean, check us out on amica.com, what you leave behind is a great campaign we've done. Listen to our Mel Robbins podcast. I don't know if it's fair to promote another podcast on this one, but hers is okay. I like her podcast and just we're doing great things and I'd love to come back, you know, maybe in a year or two and share more highlights of how this investment is paying off in results.
- [38:58]
Alaina Jasper
We would love it.
- [38:58]
Angela Voss
Thanks so much for joining us.
- [39:00]
Tory Packas
Thank you for having me.
- [39:01]
Alaina Jasper
That's it for this episode of the Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor de Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn. And if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing.
- [39:16]
Tory Packas
Marketing Architects.