Marketing Leaders Join Variety’s Interview Studio

Top marketing and advertising executives sat down with Variety in the C-Suite presented by Canva at Cannes to discuss their successes with major campaigns, approaches to connecting with consumers and strategies for brand growth.

The first day of conversations included Disney’s Rita Ferro and Catalyst Brands’ Marisa Thalberg, Autodesk’s Dara Treseder, Unilever’s Esi Eggelston Bracey, DoorDash’s Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, Hilton’s Mark Weinstein, NBCUniversal’s Karen Kovacs, Kimberly-Clark’s Patricia Corsi and Paramount’s Domenic DiMeglio. Additionally, Lisa McKnight from Mattel and Raja Rajamannar from MasterCard joined the conversations.

Rita Ferro, President of Global Advertising, Disney and Marisa Thalberg, Chief Customer and Marketing Officer, Catalyst Brands

Back in April, JCPenney partnered with ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” to launch a new brand marketing campaign titled “Yes—JCPenney.” 

For seven weeks, the late-night show aired the segment, “Really Big Deals,” every Thursday to promote discounted fashion, home and beauty items available for purchase at the department store. The campaign also included ads in Times Square and at Simon and Brookfield malls nationwide, featuring models wearing JCPenney apparel. 

Thalberg, chief customer and marketing officer for Catalyst Brands (JCPenney, Aeropostale, Nautica), spoke about the power of partnership and how it can be a transformational experience that benefits both parties rather than being solely transactional. 

“My one wish in client and media relationships is that it shouldn’t be transactional,” Thalberg said. “It should be a partnership. The fact that we could both be sitting here now, saying we did something that has never been done before, where we both benefited. That is — in life and business — the definition of a successful partnership when both people benefit in ways that they couldn’t otherwise.”

Ferro, who is the president of global advertising for Disney, talked about the rise of more personalized experiences within consumer products while discussing the upcoming release of ESPN’s new standalone streaming service. Expected to launch in the fall, the ESPN app will allow sports fans to subscribe to the network for $29.99 a month without requiring a satellite or cable TV subscription.

Dara Treseder, Chief Marketing Officer, Autodesk; Esi Eggelston Bracey, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, Unilever; and Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, Chief Marketing Officer, DoorDash

Amoo-Gottfried discussed the importance of bringing in content creators to promote DoorDash. He shared how DoorDash works with both major creators and smaller creators.

“Because we have all of these deals across the platform, we have hundreds of local nano influencers that are talking just about a particular deal in their hometown to their audience,” he said.

Treseder emphasized that creators need to be given control over how they post about brands. “I think when brands get it wrong is when you try to be prescriptive because then all of a sudden it’s gone from actually content creation to like advertising and it doesn’t work as well. But when you give the content creators the space, that’s when the magic happens,” Treseder said. 

In addition to working with content creators, Eggleston Bracey touched on incorporating talent into campaigns. She broke down Unilever’s approach to its “When Sally Met Hellman’s” ad with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, explaining how the company tapped into both nostalgia and “iconic entertainment culture.”

“It wasn’t just borrowing from culture, it was bringing culture back,” Eggleston Bracey said.

Mark Weinstein, Chief Marketing Officer, Hilton and Karen Kovacs, President of Advertising and Partnerships, NBCUniversal

Weinstein and Kovacs spoke about creating interactive, in-person activations through their collaborations and creative expertise. With collaborations with films like Universal Studios’ “Wicked” with a pink and green split hotel room suite and planning premium fan experiences such as BravoCon, the key is to weave in cinematic storytelling for an ever-growing social-media driven generation. 

“Gen Z is about to be the wealthiest generation. How we engage with them and how we think about them is critical to the future. We need to be strategic. Who are we? Which communities are we trying to bring in? Do the voices match up?” said Kovacs. “A lot of these bigger programs require long-term thinking, shared values, a level of strategy and implementation that really goes with the arc of time.”

“Some of the creators we work with are getting used to starting work with brands they want to be scripted, and they want to deliver your brand message. I don’t need that from you, that’s advertising. What I want you to talk about is the experience you’re having at our hotels. How was the stay experience?” said Weinstein. “You’ve gotta trust that the trade off for the authenticity, for the connection with their community is worth it to the hundreds of thousands of followers they have. They want to hear it in that voice. But, I think the trade off is worth it any day of the week.”

Domenic DiMeglio, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Paramount and Patricia Corsi, Chief Growth Officer, Kimberly-Clark

Corsi and DiMeglio are both responsible for leading marketing and growth strategies for their distinct companies. Corsi is the chief growth officer of Kimberly-Clark, a consumer goods company with well-known brands such as Kleenex, Huggies and Depend. 

With the expansion of AI and algorithms, Corsi noted that creativity plays a significant role in connecting with audiences and creating media that stands out from the high volume of content available to consumers. 

“If you don’t have things that touch your heart as much as the algorithm touches your mind, you’re going to disappear in the sea of all the contents that are going to be very similar.”

DiMeglio, the executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Paramount, discussed the importance of insights when evaluating data to gain a deeper understanding of consumer behavior.

“Just because there’s a number on a page doesn’t mean it’s precise,” he said. “To avoid being data rich and insights poor, ensure the folks on your data team, marketers and in all disciplines use your products as much as possible as well as your competitors’ products. Also, understand what’s happening in the marketplace and in culture to help make sure you can understand what’s happening in the numbers themselves.”

Peter Giorgi, Senior Vice President of Brand Marketing, Partnerships and Creative Excellence, Rocket, Lina Polimeni, Chief Corporate Brand Officer, Eli Lilly and Lee Brown, Vice President, Head of Global Advertising, Spotify

On the topic of making sure a brand stays culturally relevant, Brown said that keeping users engaged with Spotify means “being at the heart of fandoms and making sure that we can deliver new experiences, new discoveries of their next favorite band, of their next favorite podcaster.”

The company thinks about “how do we provide the best tools for the users, for listeners to discover, experience, feel, live, be a part of it? And so that expression of our brand comes through in everything we do,” he added.

Polimeni discussed how partnering with artists has changed perception of her industry. “It’s been interesting to see how pharma traditionally for creatives tends to be the place where good creative goes to die. And so I have had this mission to really counter that because I think the purpose of medicine is so high,” she said.

She found that Lilly “went from people not wanting to touch pharma in any ways, to now having really high caliber directors not only working on pharma for us, but reaching out.”

Giorgi gave an example of taking creative risks. A successful Super Bowl commercial about homeownership featured the song “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and cut to the live audience singing along. “It had never been done before. We got told ‘no’ up until two weeks before the game…it was really a practical expression of the emotional value of unity that home provides,” he said.