Right About Now with Ryan Alford - You Might Also Like: Math & Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing with Bob Pittman

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

Introducing Bonus Episode: Secrets from the Marketing Masters from Math & Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing with Bob Pittman.Follow the show: Math & Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing with Bob PittmanOver the years Bob has asked dozens of business titans to share their secrets –what’s inspired them, how they’ve exceeded their career goals, and the important lessons they’ve learned along the way. In this bonus episode, we’re highlighting memorable stories and secrets from marketing masters. AT&T CMO Kellyn Smith Kenny is honest about her takeaways from unsuccessful campaigns and Gwyneth Paltrow talks about the piece of feedback that changed everything for Goop. Entrepreneur and filmmaker Andrew Jarecki reveals that his successful business came out of trying to solve a problem for himself, while Jon Bon Jovi and Bobbi Brown have wise words on the power of authenticity. Finally, Olivier Francois gives us a behind-the-scenes look at an unforgettable Superbowl commercial.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.DISCLAIMER: Please note, this is an independent podcast episode not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced in conjunction with the host podcast feed or any of its media entities. The views and opinions expressed in this episode are solely those of the creators and guests. For any concerns, please reach out to [e-mail].

You're listening to Math & Magic, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to Math & Magic. I'm Bob Pitman. Over the years, I've talked with dozens of guests ranging from marketing executives to musicians to company founders. I've asked what inspired them in their childhoods, how they've reached and exceeded their career goals and what tips and tricks they've learned along the way. In today's bonus episode, I'm highlighting some of the most memorable marketing stories.

The lessons our guests learned the hard way by trying and failing, by taking a big risk, or maybe by getting a piece of feedback that changed everything. Kellyn Smith-Kenney is the Chief Marketing and Growth Officer at AT&T. And that's not the only iconic brand she's helped innovate. On her resume, you'll find companies like Microsoft, Hilton, Capital One, and Uber. I wanted to know what experiences have helped her cultivate the power of a brand.

experiences have helped her cultivate the power of a brand. Gosh, I've had such incredible opportunities in my career. The thing I learned at Microsoft is that technology and technology alone is not going to be the reason why somebody adopts your product. I worked at Microsoft and the very first product I worked on was Windows Vista. It was one of the most highly anticipated technology products of its era. I think it was five years in the making. People everywhere were on the edge of their seats waiting to see what Microsoft would release. You probably remember that when we released it into the marketplace, it landed like a nuclear thud. Bomp, bomp. It was a total bomp.

And what we learned in that time was that we had fallen in love with the technology and we had forgotten about the most important person in the equation. And that was the end user. We missed the consumerization of technology. We missed that the vast majority of our customers weren't using 99% of the features that we put in that operating system that ultimately bloated the operating system, slowed it down, and made it far less attractive. And so the incredible lesson learned from Microsoft is focus on the customer. I've seen at times in my career, whether it was teams I was on

or competitors I was facing off against, is when you obsess over the competition, instead of obsessing over the customer, you're gonna get yourself into big trouble. Because if you're obsessing over the competition, all you can ever know is what they've already done. You can't drive a car 90 miles an hour down the road if you're looking in the rear view mirror.

And when you're studying the competition, you can only be looking backwards. It sounds like you probably did the same thing at CAP1, Uber and Hilton too, the consumer focus. Seems to be your hallmark. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I would say at Capital One, we were incredibly, incredibly scientific

about how we went to market. And so we treated it as this just obsession with getting better and better. The other thing that was incredible about Capital One is that that company found religion about building a brand through all of the testing and learning that it did. And so years and years ago when Capital One was one of the largest customers of the US Postal Service,

they ran a test, a blank envelope with no branding on it, and then an envelope that actually had the Capital One logo on the outer left-hand corner. And what they originally found was that the blank envelope outperformed the branded envelope. And right then and there, yeah, ouch, and right then and there, the founder and CEO of Capital One, Rich Fairbank, said, this is unacceptable. We have got to build this brand. And so that's when the company really leaned into building awareness, building consideration, building familiarity, and ultimately preference. Kellyn has learned to use challenges as stepping stones to new ideas.

And one lesson that's been ingrained time and time again is listen to the customer. It's a sentiment our next guest has also taken to heart. Academy Award-winning actor Gwyneth Paltrow has a business born from passion. In 2008, she started a newsletter with personally curated recipes, travel tips, and more. It transformed into Goop, the lifestyle brand now worth $250 million. It was a consumer's feedback that helped Gwyneth realize how to monetize what she was building and to combine editorial and commerce. Let's hear what happened. For so long, I was so allergic to being transactional in that sense.

And I'll never forget, I published one issue of Goop. I published an article on the French pharmacy, which I'm sure you know when you go to Paris or anywhere in France, the pharmacies there are so cool and they have like, you know, homeopathic things and they have like all this special stuff. And so I wrote a piece saying, you know, this is this great, you know, burn cream and this, there are these probiotic tampons and there's this great lip balm and all this stuff. And a woman stopped me and she said, Oh my God, I loved that article on the French pharmacy, but it was so frustrating for me that I couldn't just click to buy everything. I was on amazon.fr trying to buy this and that and searching and it was the first time that it occurred to me that transaction could actually be a service as well

and that you didn't have to push product for revenue. If you made or curated things that you really believe in and thought were going to genuinely elevate someone's life in some way that you could do what we then called contextual commerce. And we've always stayed true to those principles, you know, we're obsessed with clean beauty and we have the highest clean beauty standards in the business. And so I think when people come to the website, they understand that and they understand that there's a really strong point of view.

I have a very strong point of view around fashion. So even when we were just buying from a wholesale perspective and had a multi-brand matrix, it was very specific when we started G-Label, our clothing line, is very, very true to me. So I wouldn't have been able to sleep at night if I felt like I was pushing something on somebody. Gwyneth realized there's real value in her point of view and recommendations.

By listening to her subscribers and to her own intuition, she closed the gap in the market that other people hadn't yet figured out how to bridge. Likewise, Andrew Durecki's journey as an entrepreneur started with an unmet need. Today, he's a filmmaker behind incredible documentaries like Capturing the Freedman's, which earned an Academy Award nomination, and of course, the Emmy Award-winning HBO series, The Jinx, the life and deaths of Robert Durst. But before he moved to the creative side of the business, he made a fortune on an idea trying to solve a problem for himself, and movie film was born.

Marketing this brand new concept was no easy feat, though. I was trying to go to the movies around 1988, and I was calling my local theater, which you used to have to do, because the New York Times didn't have all the showtimes in it. The theater phone lines were always busy because the theaters didn't understand that there were 2,000 people trying to call in a 20-minute period for that

night. And I got through at 8.15, and the machine told me that the movie had started at 8 o'clock. And I thought, why did I just ruin my night? And this multi-billion-dollar movie industry doesn't get that I'm not able to go out and buy my $7 then movie ticket. So I thought, you know, voicemail was pretty advanced

then and I thought, why don't we create a service that lets you push buttons? Maybe it's a free local service and you put in the first three letters of the movie title, put in your zip code and it would spit out just the theater closest to you, just the information that you needed. I thought that would be a cool thing for me to use. I didn't really think about it as a business at first.

And then eventually when we put it up on a bit of a lark, we started to see people calling and suddenly we were getting, you have 27 calls this hour. And then later I would call and say, you have 142,000 calls this hour. Like that started happening call and say, you have 142,000 calls this hour. Like that started happening and we were amazed by it. And so that's the idea. You get it started.

How did you know how to turn that into a business? It's true. And you know, I was very lucky because my dad is a very smart business person and, you know, he started out as a psychiatrist, but he always had a business bug. He was so smart about business. So, I think I immediately thought, well, this thing that we just put together seems to be working for consumers.

I wonder how much I can promote it. I wonder how I can promote it. I talked to my dad about it. I talked to other smart people that I knew. It was pretty clear that all of our customers were walking through the doors of about 5,000 cinemas in America. So if I could get the number 777 film in front of people, up on the screens and trailers before the movie.

I also figured out everybody's motivations quickly. I went to a bunch of conventions, Show East and Show West. I didn't know anybody. And I just walked around and talked to everybody. This is the movie business. The movie business. And I just walked around and talked to everybody. This is the movie business. The movie business. And I realized that nobody was talking to each other. They didn't understand that moviegoers were having trouble

going to the movies. It was just a pain in the neck to do it. And the studios didn't really control the theaters. The theaters didn't control the studios. And I thought, well, there's a window in here where I could make things easier for the consumer and also make something that would be very useful for the industry. So, we just started to figure out where are the little pinch points and leverage points. So, for example, I knew that the theater owners had control over their movie screens.

At the time, nobody was doing advertising on movie screens. So I said to the theater owners, if I give you a 30-second ad for Moviefone and it's entertaining, will you put it up on their screens? Knowing that they had a problem, which was that the newspapers were charging them a fortune to put their movie listings in the newspapers. The studios weren't helping them. So they said, well, if this guy's coming along, he's just going to do it for free. I'll give him 30 seconds of free time before the movie. So that was an example of some marketing thinking that helped us tremendously. And it

was a very, you know, what do they say, all marketing is local, you know, getting out into the movie theaters, handing out little cards to people, getting that message up on the screen. It sort of flowed naturally. Andrew went on to sell movie phone to AOL for almost $400 million. He said it started on a lark, but soon enough he recognized that there was powerful potential in connecting and leveraging industry players. We'll be right back after a quick break. Welcome back to today's bonus episode of Math and Magic where I'm sharing some of my favorite

marketing stories. John Bon Jovi has sold 150 million albums worldwide and he's played nearly 3,000 concerts for 35 million fans. Plus, he's made waves as an entrepreneur and a philanthropist. When I sat down with him at the Possible Conference in Miami, I wanted to know how he thinks about his brand and its impact. Nothing would have happened if he didn't have a song. So the brand had to be built on a solid foundation, which was the song, and being true to who

and what I was in order for the collective we to then be true to who we were. And so that is the basis of all of it. Not to chase fads and fashions, which is also really important to me. Fads and fashions come and go and the truth will always prevail. Were you ever tempted with any of the fads or fashions? I don't think so. I may have been a byproduct of the clothes you wore in the 80s or the haircut you had, but that's who and what you were in real time.

And if the next fad and fashion came along, i.e. in our business, boy bands and then grunge music and then rap, we were there at the advent of rap. And to start doing duets would not have seemed honest, you know, to certainly be with a boy band and or, you know, none of that would have rang true. So I was smart enough to know not to get a flannel shirt when Seattle became popular.

It was just to stay the course. Let's talk about intergenerational hits. My friend's daughter was 22. She was in a college bar. Living on a prayer comes on. The kids all start dancing on the tables. They weren't even born when the song came out. What is it about your music that connects with such a young generation, even though it was made originally for a completely different generation. Again, I think it comes down to truth.

If no matter what we're collectively marketing and or the dirty word it's selling, it has to be based in truth, because even if you pull the wool over someone's eyes once, it's not gonna resonate the second time, right? So when we wrote a song, if I was doing it from a place of honesty, that song resonated with me, and therefore I was confident it would probably resonate with that audience. Songs like Living Under Prayer, when we wrote them, to be bluntly honest, I didn't realize what we had,

but I felt that the character-driven storyline was legit. And in doing so, you know, obviously that's one of the many that has stood the test of time. That it's as simple as that because it's just... it's everybody's story. John Bon Jovi has built a career in authenticity. It's by speaking his truth that he connects with others. Bobbi Brown has also made a name for herself by sticking with her strengths, even when others were saying that her makeup style would never catch on.

Bobbi's the founder of Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, which she sold to Estee Lauder in 1995. She continued working for her namesake brand until 2016. Since then, she's launched Jones Rowe Beauty, a direct-to-consumer cosmetic brand that has stayed true to the style that made her famous. Right before 1990, the whole scene in New York was a lot of parties, a lot of going out to the clubs. Women were doing makeup like multicolored eyes and overlined lips and all this crazy stuff and when I came to New York I got a job to do a cover of Cosmopolitan with Jerry

Hall. I tried everything in my power to do her makeup great and she was so kind and she said, beautiful job but can I have the mirror? I gave her the mirror and she said, can I just make a few touches? She redid her whole face and I learned watching I didn't feel bad I really learned but I realized I can't do that kind of makeup so I started doing it my way and it kind of slowly caught on so what was your Inspiration for your way because this was not the way no it was definitely not the way when I was in middle school

I wanted to be pretty and I didn't think I was and I would use my mom's makeup to make me look tan and pretty. I don't want anyone to know I was wearing makeup and then when I became a makeup artist I started doing that to models. People told me I'd never work. If you want to work you have to learn to do the other thing but I just couldn't do it and so I started doing it my way and it slowly, slowly took on.

What big names adopted your style that sort of gave you cred and sort of pushed you over that tipping point for you? I did a cover of Rolling Stone with Annie Leibowitz and I made the guys look good. And Keith Richards' manager came over to me and said, oh my God, can we book you again? And so I got a couple times got hired to do it because I always made people look healthy. Stones, that's pretty good. That was pretty good. Some might have seen that moment when Jerry Hall redid her makeup as a failure, but Bobby was determined to keep doing things her way and it caught on. This was

just a sign of the many successes that followed by trusting her gut and staying true to herself. Olivier Francois is another Math & Magic guest who is able to take an idea and tap into something bigger than himself. Olivier is now the CEO of Fiat. I ask him about what I think is one of the greatest lines of all time, imported from Detroit. This became part of the impactful Super Bowl commercial during his time as CMO of Fiat Chrysler. It all started when he was trying to introduce a new car at the LA Auto Show. One thing I didn't know is that the LA Auto Show is really where you celebrate Japanese cars,

is really where you celebrate Japanese cars, German cars, maybe Italian cars by the way, but for sure not a Chrysler. So too late I'm on stage presenting my new baby and when I realized that LA is home of the imports I just instinctively pitched it. I made this up on stage I say hey I know that you guys like imports and we are in LA so look at this car like imported from Detroit it was just my ending and actually a couple people came and said that's a good line for an ad and then I thought of it you know and I say yeah that's a good life for an ad then clearly the soundtrack came I have four kids two of which at the time were very

much into hip-hop and Introduced me to Eminem and obviously when we started thinking of Detroit Obviously that tune came to mind when you have one chance one opportunity that totally connects together Chrysler Detroit and all of America So I was obsessed with securing that song which Ended up being an endeavor to say the least. I'm certain. Once I had the song Eminem was so intrigued, you know, he was never scripted to be in the commercial.

He was just kind of probably intrigued and at the same time maybe a bit scared by rightfully so, you know, what are these advertisers going to do with my song? I promised him that would be Probably more largely about Detroit than just about a car for sure or even a brand but He came on set and then I just a magic happened. So from 600 cars per month to six thousand after the commercial that's a math aspect, and the magic is what happened in the whole country because obviously the commercial resonated with more than just Detroit, with more than just car guys.

It resonated as a message of pride for all of America. M&M ended up starring in the commercial, and the final line of the screen reads, Imported from Detroit. You may even remember it from the Super Bowl in 2016, or it's not too late to look it up as the perfect example of both math and magic. I'm Bob Pippman, thanks for listening and stay tuned for a brand new season of math and magic with a whole new batch of marketing stories coming to your ears soon.

That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeart Podcasts. The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sydney Rosenblum for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat. The Math and Magic team is Jessica Kreinchech, Bahid Frazier, and Julia Weaver. Our executive producers are Ali Perry and Nikki Itour. Until next time.