← The Marketing Millennials
The Marketing Millennials
295 - The Struggles of In-House Creative Teams with Jen Rapp, CMO of Superside
00:33:27
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- [00:08]
Daniel Murray
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the.
- [00:33]
Jen Rappers
And that brief creation process is sort of, in my opinion, what delineates a great marketer from one that's not. Like, you have to be able to explain to your creative team in a really clear and concise way what you're looking for.
- [00:53]
Gen Rappers
Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. Today I have Gen Rappers, the CMO of super side. She also was the VP of brand and communications at Clayo. She also worked for Doordash Arteryx. She's been all over the place. She's one of the best marketers I know. Excited to chat all things marketing. But first, Jen, welcome to the podcast.
- [01:17]
Jen Rappers
Thank you for having me here. This is one of my favorite podcasts. Marketing Millennials. Like, you guys. You guys are great. I'm really excited to be here. Thank you.
- [01:25]
Gen Rappers
First, let's get into. How did you get into marketing?
- [01:28]
Jen Rappers
Yeah, for sure. So I started working for Patagonia straight out of college, and I basically talked my way into a job there doing their PR. And I ended up doing their PR for 10 years. Like, I was there for a solid decade. And working there in the pr, like, communications function was not like a normal PR job. Yes, there's like product placements and all that kind of stuff. But really it was a time in the company's evolution where Yvonne Chouinard, the founder, really wanted to tell the story how business could be a force of good. Like, we were, we were polluters, we were part of the problem, but we were also determined to be a part of the solution and believe that business in general could be a part of the solution. And so really, like, my job was to go tell that story to the media, and I kind of turned into an accidental marketer in the process because, you know, good storytellers are great storytellers, whether they're telling it in a performance marketing ad or they're telling it, you know, to the New York Times. It's like storytelling really, you know, became a part of who I am and my DNA while I was at Patagonia. And I then after being at patagonia for like 10 years, which is so long to be at a company, it's like, it's like our parents generation number of years these days, I went to Tom's Shoes. Actually. I was Friends with Blake Mikoski, the founder, and he was like, hey, come run communications. But the day I got there, the CMO went out on medical leave, and Blake and I were like, okay, cool, let's run this marketing function together. And so that was my first time really having ownership of, like, marketing channels. And I love that. It was like, I kind of felt like I had been in the communications bubble for 10 years, and suddenly I was like, oh, my gosh, I have so much more tools at my fingertips to tell better stories, to use different things like influencers and ads and content to tell my stories. And that's really how I got into it.
- [03:41]
Gen Rappers
That's a really cool journey. So Patagonia, Toms, Terex, and then into B2B SaaS, which is a total flip from those type of brands, but there's a lot of similarities. But I want to go into the topic we're talking today, and I want to start off of, like, what is one of the most overlooked challenges in house creative teams face that marketers miss?
- [04:07]
Jen Rappers
As someone that's been running creative teams for the last 10 years, the biggest problem creatives face today is bandwidth. Like, they are asked to perform and create more and do more and build more than ever before at a time when they're, like, less resourced than ever before. So that was, like, a real issue. And in my teams, every creative team I've run from Doordash to Klaviyo to here at Superside, it's like my creative team is maxed. Like, every ECV or every creative director that was listening to this right now is like, shit, yeah, that's my life. Like, every day I'm totally, totally burnt out. So this whole idea of being asked to do more than you have resources to do leads to the creative team being often called, like, the bottleneck or the blocker. And it's a real source of frustration because creatives want to do what the marketers need. They want to do what the business needs them to do or wants them to do, and yet they're just spread extremely thin. And it's hard for people outside of the creative team to understand and respect that.
- [05:23]
Gen Rappers
I think there's. I mean, two things that are happening that go side by side that I've seen when I was in marketing operations is.
- [05:31]
Jen Rappers
Yeah.
- [05:32]
Gen Rappers
One is platforms now let you test in fast creative for such a low budget, where back in the day it was expensive to test creative because the channels were expensive to change. So now you can run a Facebook ad with 15 different creative or in Tests. But the problem is you have to get 15 pieces of creative made for that ad. The second part I see is there's no clear direct line to teams. So what happens with a lot of creatives is that they get asks from 30 different teams and there's no, like, prioritization model for this, or there is a prioritization model and then revenue is always prioritized and brands left alone or something else is prioritized and left alone. So what are some, like, what are, what are you seeing are some solutions or some ways that our creative teams are inundated right now?
- [06:37]
Jen Rappers
Well, I think we're, you know, I think there's been two real big inflection points in the state of creative. One is like, moving into the digital age. Like when we moved into the digital marketing age, like, I don't know, 12 years ago or something, it suddenly became like a finite number of exactly what you said. The finite number of resources suddenly or the needs, Whether that was like an out of home, it was, you know, an advertisement in a magazine. It was, you know, like there was a finite number of assets that were needed. You go into the digital age and like you said, infinite number of assets needed, infinite number of pieces of content needed. Like, you could just churn out creative and content and ads 247 and probably still not meet the needs of your business. You made another really interesting point. Like, and then going into that a little bit further, that second evolution of the creative team or the creative state of, like, the industry is AI and that. And we're in that right now. Like, we're living and breathing sort of that same uncertainty and same, like, holy cow, things are changing that we live through in the digital revolution that we are today in AI evolution. And so these creative teams are going like, one, I know it can help me. Two, I don't know how to get trained or which tools to use or, like, where to use it and when. And we're back in another, like, kind of moment of uncertainty for the creative team.
- [08:19]
Gen Rappers
And then also people are telling them, just use AI will help you scale your job.
- [08:25]
Jen Rappers
Totally. And I remember. So when I was in college, I worked for a rock climbing company called Black Diamond Equipment. I was a copywriter. And they were like, hey, we can you also be our photo editor? I was like, well, I guess, yeah, I'm not trained, but sure. But I was there during that evolution of, like, moving from film photography to digital photography, if that tells you how old I am. And it was like every photographer was like, holy cow, am I going to lose my job. What's going to happen? Where am I going to go from here? And we're seeing that with creatives with AI right now. They're like, whoa, I better catch up, I better learn these tools. If I don't, am I going to be sort of left in the dust? And that's a really big commitment to make if you're a creative, like to go and fully upskill yourself, learn things like mid journey and the huge amount of AI tools that are out there and then understand when and how to bring them into your work. It's like a total again like creative revolution. And I guess I feel really comfortable speaking about it is because with super side were in a unique position of like solving both those problems for people which, you know, I'm here at Superside because I was a customer like at Klaviyo, my creative team faced that bandwidth problem and my whole team was just feeling so beat down that they were the blockers for everything for the business. And we hired Superside. We hired Superside to come in and help like sort of serve as an extension of our creative team. Superside is not an agency. They really feel like an extension of your creative team where you have a close relationship with people that can turn products, projects around incredibly fast. And then also I'm here because of what we're doing with AI and the fact that it's absolutely fascinating. And in some ways or many ways, Superside really is your team's shortcut to an AI enabled team because all of our creatives have been skilled on the AI tool. So that basically if your team is maxed and they don't have the bandwidth to get skilled, like, we've got you covered. And so those are two ways that like Superside today is sort of meeting that need and meeting creative teams where they are and with challenges they're facing.
- [10:54]
Gen Rappers
I want to take one step back from that because I also want to know like when as a marketing leader did you like come to the realization? Because we said earlier that these creative teams are tapped, but that means that like a lot of marketers don't know what goes into the creative process and the creative team. So how could marketers at least, like, how do creatives help bridge the gap with like their marketing leaders and how can marketing leaders help the creatives in the early phases before they even start thinking about anything else?
- [11:26]
Jen Rappers
Totally. So every creative that is going to listen to this is going to say, oh my gosh, you're totally right. And every marketer is going to be like, oh, my God, it's the last thing I want to do. It really starts at the briefing process. It's like, as a marketer, let's say I'm starting a Black Friday Cyber Monday campaign, okay. And I kind of know what I want this campaign to achieve, and I have some loose concepts, and yet I can't design any of the assets. And so I have to create a brief for my creative team to give them insights into what I, as the marketer, am trying to achieve. And that brief creation process is sort of, in my opinion, what delineates a great marketer from one that's not. Like, you have to be able to explain to your creative team in a really clear and concise way what you're looking for. Your creative team will perform better. They will be able to work faster. They will be able to achieve your needs quicker if you start with a really strong brief. And so if you're a marketer and you're working with a creative team, it absolutely behooves you to dedicate time to go figure out, like, how do I write a great brief? Go read some great briefs online, like, educate yourself on what great brief writing is. Your creative team will love you and they'll work harder for you if you can do it.
- [12:53]
Gen Rappers
Well, yeah, I mean, the brief is everything. And the more examples you can give of what you are looking for, the better. I. I've seen the worst thing you could do is give a little brief and say, you be creative and do this, and then you be creative to do this. They come back and you say, this is not what I'm thinking about. That happens all the time where I've seen, hey, this is the best way to do it. And I've seen and I've learned from personally doing it for like the market millennials and stuff like that is give them thousands, like, not a thousand, but give them like 5, 6 examples of what direction you're going to. They're creative for a reason. They can figure it out from the things that you go. But give them like, this is like, for example, when I did Market Land, I said, I want to conch Coachella vibe with Disneyland. Or like, and here's like the Coachella poster, but like Disneyland map. And I want a mixture of both these things. And they came back with something amazing because I was like, show them multiple Coachella posters, most multiple things on Disneyland told them exactly the vibe. I'm going through the festival. And they came up with something really cool.
- [14:02]
Jen Rappers
You have to give directive and often like, and this is not a fault but non creative people sometimes don't know what they want until they see what they don't want. And so if you don't write a good brief, your creative team is going to go in, create something and only when you see their first draft will you be able to say like actually I don't like that. Like actually here's where I want to go. And like avoid that first step altogether by giving them that direction, by giving them the inspiration, by, by even coming to the table with some ideas of what you believe the campaign concept could be or should be or like showing other work. That's awesome. Like that's a huge, huge, huge first step.
- [14:47]
Gen Rappers
I also have a question because I, I feel like there are a couple type of different creative that are out there and they're creative that is performative which all creative should be pretty performative in some sort. But they are like, but they are creatives that are better at making creative for ad.
- [15:05]
Jen Rappers
Yeah.
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Gen Rappers
Platforms and there's creative that are better at doing content, visual stuff. This is creative. So what are some ways to. I know Marcus, wireless is like get, create, get the right creative for like a performative measure.
- [15:20]
Jen Rappers
Totally. So this is a marketer. Today is one of the biggest challenges, like you hear a lot that creative is the new targeting. Like really as we all have universal access to these targeting tools through Facebook and LinkedIn and all the platforms. It's kind of a level playing field in terms of tooling and who you can reach. Creative is the way you differentiate yourself and it's not always what you as a marketer believe is going to perform that actually performs a fun anecdote is when I got to doordash they had this like direct mail piece and this was pre rebrand and it was this little flashcard or whatever you call postcard that had a flaming burger on fire and it was flying through the air in this horrible like space setting. And I was like, you guys, this is exactly where we never want to be again as a brand. Like this is awful. And it makes me cringe seeing this highest performing piece of direct mail ever. Like by hands down every single thing that we made that was beautiful, more like trendy, more cool, like nothing performed like the flaming burger. It would have been really nice to know that from the get go or in a really much more fast way so that I didn't have to go through the year long process of being like team, don't make me this. What I should have said is like make Spins on this because this is working now. Give me a flying, you know, drumstick going through the sky. But like, there are platforms out there today that can help you figure out if your creative is performing or not. We at Superside recently launched Super Ads for this exact reason, I think. And Super Ads basically does exactly that. It looks at all of your different ad creative and tells you which is performing the best. But not only does it tell you which is performing the best, it goes deeper and it says like this emotional state that you create in this ad, like the humor, the seriousness, the fomo, whatever emotion you're pulling on the ad that's working, colors, graphics, CTAs, like, it goes deep into what about the creative is making it perform well. And that for like a marketer is really important. It's also really important for a designer and for a creative because for the first time ever, like Super Ads is a tool that's really visual. It's really easy to understand people like me that don't have a background in performance marketing. Like I didn't grow up through the performance marketing ranks. Like I'm always on the hunt for a tool that like doesn't require me to go into ad manager and figure out what's going on. And so Super Ads really does that. And I think Superside was in a really great place to be the leader in this because we sort of are at the intersection of like digital marketing and creatives and like, how do we support them both and get them speaking the same language?
- [18:32]
Gen Rappers
I have more of like tactical question of what for marketers out there. Can you define or give like, I wouldn't say define, but give the elements of what goes into a great creative. It doesn't have to be like, what are the great creative.
- [18:52]
Jen Rappers
That's a good question. That's a hard one to answer too. Okay, one is that it's visually arresting. Like I think that the first thing that catches someone's eye is the visuals. That is first and foremost. Is it visually arresting? Does it catch your eye? Does it, Is it bright? Is it not? Is it really like serene? Like, but something about it has to visually catch your eye. There's a reason that like God awful ad, like remember it was a display ad, like I don't remember like 15 years ago. And it was this crazy thing that was like moving like this. It had its legs and its arms this flying all over the place and it was this weird little dancer and it like caught everybody's eye. And that was like one of those visually arresting moments. Second emotion. And that comes to the copy. It can also go to the visuals. Like, what emotion are you tapping into that hooks someone. Like, is it hunger? Is it fomo? Is it, like, heartwarming? Is it funny? Like, those elements really make a difference. And if you can, like, capture someone emotionally, even in, like, a tiny little ad on Facebook, you can win. Like, I worked at a company called Owlette, and we made this little piece of technology that goes on a baby's foot. It's basically similar to a pulse oximeter. Tells you if your baby is breathing and tells you if the baby's heart is beating and what that heart rate is. And those are really scary things for new parents. And we would get stories and testimonials from parents all the time saying, look, you saved my baby. And here's a picture of, like, baby in the helicopter getting whisked away because we got an alert on our outlet sock. And being able to tell that story, even in a simple Facebook post or Facebook ad was one of those moments where you were like, every parent can relate to this. Every parent doesn't want to live this or they want this. This product to avoid that situation ever happening. And so that emotional tie is really important. Second and last. I won't go into this too long, but your cta, like, is your CTA obvious? Is. Is the ad compelling that person to follow through on that cta? Is it. Click here. Learn more. Is it get your first order free? Is it, like, get a discount? That's that final tie is like, have you visually, emotionally caught that person? And then do you give them a really easy way to follow through?
- [21:40]
Gen Rappers
I love. I love those. And I. I would add one more thing, because I think it goes into cta, but I think it's really important. Is the offer.
- [21:51]
Jen Rappers
Yes. Yes. You put it better than I did.
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Gen Rappers
Yeah. Because, like, I think, like, so many people don't test the offer. Like, they try to, like, test, like, the visual. They try, like. But you could. There's. So the offer is, like, one of the most important part of an ad, and people just don't test the offer that they're giving where it could be 20% off, it could be free trial. It could be. So whatever it is, the offer is one of the most compelling reasons someone takes the next.
- [22:20]
Jen Rappers
The next step of your 100% at DoorDash. One of our biggest and best, like, ways to get new or to acquire new customers. Was our, like, first order free? Or is, like, it was, like, first five order. It was something like that. And we literally had a growth product individual dedicated to building and coming up with those offers. And we called it growth product. At the end of the day, it was really like, is it for, you know, five orders for $5? Is it, you know, get a free piece of cheesecake today? Like, offers are big and you made a really good point there.
- [23:02]
Gen Rappers
Yeah. And I think, I mean, the lucky thing, which I'll go back is like the digital age allows you to test offers at rapid speed with landing pages and. But we'll go into the problem with that, which I want to. Black Friday is coming up for a lot of marketers. Cyber Monday is coming up for a lot of marketers. And getting creative rapidly is one of the hardest things. So how do you come over that barrier of like, hey, I need creative by tomorrow. How do you communicate that to creatives? How do you, like, how do you prepare for those moments as a marketer?
- [23:40]
Jen Rappers
Yeah. Well, number one, like most retail brands start their Black Friday, like holiday planning in June or July. Like at toms, we called it Christmas in July. It was like literally all minds shifted to how are we going to get through the holiday seasons come July? And that requires preserving your creative team's bandwidth early in the season. And so I do run creative teams and when I run a creative team, I like to think of it almost as a product team. And we have like a product roadmap and we might call it a marketing roadmap or a creative roadmap. But really make sure you are planning well in advance for bandwidth needs, both like leading into Black Friday and then during Black Friday because you will undoubtedly have have surprises that come up, whether that's a website that goes down and you have to send out, you know, a ton of emails saying sorry, or you decide last minute your sales aren't doing as well as you expected and you want to throw another offer into the mix. The other way to do it is to like plan ahead in terms of external support. So if you have a two person creative team or a 10 person creative team, but you really need a 20 person creative team through the seasons, partner with someone like super side, like superside can come in through the holiday season in and help you survive. Like a lot of our ads really joke about the emotional freedom we give to creatives because, because we come in and we help make the creative team the hero, whether that's during Black Friday or through another part of the year. But don't be afraid to say, hey, external resource, we need to lean on you. Like that is, I know at times there's been like trends where it's poo pooed to like work with an external partner. But like those days are over. Like the volume is such that like we need to embrace that and be able to say, hey, look, if we partner with a super side, if we partner with an external partner, like super side, like our team is going to have, there's going to be able to be more creative. They're be able to do what we hired them to do. They're going to be able to like think better and do better work and give that external like give all that production work to superside. Give all the like create 45 A B tests, holiday ads, like outsource that stuff. You, your creative team deserves the freedom to like do more for themselves. So plan ahead. Is what I'm saying is like RFP that stuff way earlier in the year and then again preserve that bandwidth during the holiday season so you can move fast and not like a dinosaur.
- [26:29]
Gen Rappers
Yeah. I read somewhere, I don't know what the exact step but like 40 or like 45% of their time, a creative person's time is done like doing like product project management stuff instead of like creative stuff which like people don't account for that as well in a creative team's process.
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Jen Rappers
Yeah. Do you also. Yeah. Want to know who the worst planners and like organizers are on the planet?
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Gen Rappers
Creative.
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Jen Rappers
Yeah, it's creative. Like the last thing you want to do is like ask a creative person to serve as an ops person. It's like the worst use of their talent and their energy. That's why like on my creative teams, I always really love to have extremely strong operations and project managers. Like you need that. You've hired creatives to be creative. Don't ask them to pm the heck out of everything.
- [27:25]
Gen Rappers
I know we mentioned it a little bit, but I wanted to go into this. What are things that our AI is doing to this industry right now?
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Jen Rappers
Do you want a list?
- [27:36]
Gen Rappers
Like we get to give to the most top two important things?
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Jen Rappers
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Number one, I think it is allowing human creativity to multiply in a really fast order of magnitude. So good creative AI takes really good human ideas. Like AI does not come up with ideas for you in the way you might want it to. What it can do is take a really good idea from a human and bring that to life way faster and maybe even better than that initial person's idea was. And so we're seeing a lot of that today is like we are, it is expanding the humans creativity 2 it is allowing you to do stuff way faster. Way, way faster. And oftentimes without the need to pull bandwidth from an individual that might not have any. So if you want to do different iterations on an app ad, like, AI can often come in and do that. If you want to do mocks and create, like. So let's say we're. We're doing a campaign and we are creating a brief AI, can one make the brief writing better? Like, there's a lot of AI programs out there today that can, like, take a brief and help you fill it in in a way that, like, is better than what a human could do with more ideas, with more suggestions, with more color. And then two, it's really great for, like, the storyboarding initial idea part of the creative process. So we will do. We will create a lot of storyboards at Superside with AI so that we could, like, the team can create them. Bring them to me an hour later. I can be like, it looks great. They go off and create. But so it's really helping, like, the iterative process and speeding that up. The most basic answer is that it's making, like I said, like, things happen faster. So you can create, you know, 400 images in an hour rather than four.
- [29:56]
Gen Rappers
I think that's great. Yeah. It's like the thinking time goes. Goes down. Like, you have, like, someone to. Something to spit ideas and spit back at you and share your. So you totally. So that's great. I want to also ask you, what I ask everybody is, what is a marketing hill you would die on brand.
- [30:17]
Jen Rappers
The power of brand. I think it.
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Gen Rappers
I mean, I will. I will always plus one when people say brand.
- [30:24]
Jen Rappers
Yeah, Yeah. I think brand lifts all boats. And without a brand, every other dollar you spend as a marketer has to work much harder. There's a statistic out there that says, like, if your brand awareness goes up by one point, the effectiveness of your performance marketing spend goes up by 10. Like, it is it. There is a true, like, lifts all boats element to brand and investing in your brand and brand awareness. Brand also carries you through really hard times, like recessions. It carries you through mistakes you might make as a company or missteps you might have with, like, a botched product launch. Like, if Patagonia goes and launches some coat today that, like, tears easily. It doesn't, but it could. But the brand and the belief and the quality and the trust you have in that brand is going to make you be like, all right, that's okay. We're gonna. We're gonna move past that doordash messes up your order. It's like, all right. Yeah. But you know, I believe in their brand. I believe that they stand for like consistency and brand. It is a hill advertisement and the.
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Gen Rappers
Last question I have for you is where could people find your journey? Super size journey. All that good stuff.
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Jen Rappers
Yeah, for sure. So superside.com is the easiest way to find the super side brand and journey. We have a big rebrand coming up. It's going to be gorgeous. Come back up for Thanksgiving and look at our website super ads. And then for me, I'm just gen wrap on LinkedIn. I have no idea what my handle is. You can tell it's real important to me. You can follow me on Instagram. I'm a Jen rap dash Kai k a I. Yeah, I would love please reach out on LinkedIn. I love when people try to connect and love meeting marketers and following each other's journeys.
- [32:31]
Gen Rappers
Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and I do think this is like a problem a lot of marketers are facing and there are definitely solutions to this problem. And thank you for diving into those with me.
- [32:49]
Jen Rappers
Of course. Anytime.
- [32:52]
Daniel Murray
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.