A History of Marketing

A History of Marketing / Episode 50
Fifty episodes felt like a milestone worth marking. So I wanted a guest who was, well, obviously awesome.
April Dunford is the authority on positioning for B2B tech companies and the author of the updated and expanded edition of Obviously Awesome. I’m a huge fan of April’s work and frequently reference her book, her blogs, and her frameworks in my daily work as a marketer.
April’s premise is provocative: positioning cannot live in the marketing department alone.
She argues that if the CEO, sales, and product leads aren’t in the room providing input, marketing is left guessing about what makes the product special and who it is actually for. Without their buy in, marketing will inevitably lose the “battle of opinions.”
In this conversation, we discuss:
* Building on Ries & Trout: The positioning pioneers defined the concept in their 1981 book, but they didn’t give a how-to manual. April does.
* The death of the “positioning statement”: Why filling out a template is not a methodology.
* Blind men and the elephant: How sales, product, and marketing departments each hold a different piece of the puzzle.
* Skip the parts people don’t read: April discovered that CEOs don’t finish books, so she cut her manuscript in half.
April is one of the most persuasive and grounded thinkers in the field. Here’s my conversation with April Dunford.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Special Thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
The Origin of April Dunford’s Positioning Framework
Andrew Mitrak: I have a confession to make. Every time I join a new company, among the first things I do is I visit aprildunford.com and I enter my new email address and I download one of your positioning templates. You probably have several of my old corporate email addresses cluttering your mailing list. Sorry about that.
April Dunford: I appreciate you jacking up my newsletter subscription numbers.
Andrew Mitrak: And a big fan of your work and I want to say congrats on the updated and expanded edition of Obviously Awesome.
April Dunford: Thanks. I’m super excited to get it out there.
Andrew Mitrak: For this conversation, I wanted to start back before you became the go-to expert on positioning, and when you were coming up in your career, when did you first encounter the concept of positioning?
April Dunford: That’s a good question. Pretty early, actually. My first real job in tech was at a little startup and I was brand new and junior, they assigned me to a product and the thinking was that product wasn’t doing very well and the plan was to shut it down. This is why I got assigned to it as the product marketer.
We didn’t end up shutting it down. What we ended up doing was looking at gathering some feedback from people that were using the product, and then we got an idea to reposition it. We didn’t know it was called positioning, we thought we were doing, we’re just doing a Hail Mary thing to see if we can make this unsuccessful product successful doing something slightly different.
We repositioned it, relaunched it, and it was super successful. Revenue started going up to the right, everybody’s happy, we’re making a lot of money on that product.
And then we got acquired by a big company in California and the big parent company assigned us a couple of products that weren’t doing very well and then said, hey, do that thing you did with the other one. I didn’t have really any idea what we did with the other one. I was worried about getting fired, I thought, okay, I better figure this out.
I did a deep dive into positioning. I figured out, A, this is what it’s called. B, I had a lot of conversations with smart marketers asking them about, how do you do positioning? If you were in this situation, what would you do? Do you have a strategy for that or a methodology for that?
I also read a bunch of books. There’s the classic positioning book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by these guys Ries and Trout, written in the early 80s, but even back then was considered the book on positioning. And then I took a couple of courses and some post-grad stuff at a couple of universities just learning about positioning.
I dumped into this whole positioning thing pretty early in my career, and I was really interested in this idea, could we get a way to do positioning in a really repeatable manner so that we wouldn’t have this problem of, we launched the thing and it didn’t work and then now we’ve got to try and change it. Could I get to a point where there is a process for us to follow to, first of all, maybe do a better job guessing at what the positioning should be in the first place, and then secondly, if we do need to change it, is there a nice repeatable step-by-step thing we could follow to do that.
Is Product Positioning Intuitive or Learned?
Andrew Mitrak: You initially positioned or repositioned a product without even knowing what positioning was or knowing that it was called positioning that you were doing. And then you went to look at the literature. What’s your takeaway from that? Does that reveal to you that the fundamentals of positioning are somewhat intuitive or can be learned, or do you feel it was just dumb luck really? Or do you feel there were parts of it where this is just obviously the right thing to do for the product? How do you overall think about, can positioning sort of just be an intuitive thing, or is it best to look at the literature that’s out there?
April Dunford: Sometimes it is really intuitive. I would say that’s true. I would say a lot of the time when I talk to founders, they’ll talk about how they built the product in the first place, and they’ll be, we saw this need, we had this idea, we could do this in a different way than the existing products that are out there.
And we looked at it, we understood what the competition was, we built a thing that was demonstrably different, we understood what the value of that thing was because it was solving our own pain, we understood what kind of customers would want to buy that, and therefore what market we position in. It’s just, it is what it is, it’s super easy. And I think that happens a lot in the early stages of a company. Not for everybody, but I do think it happens a lot.
However, what also happens a lot is if you fast forward two or three years, the market’s changed. Maybe your competitors caught up with you and the thing that made you really different isn’t different anymore. Or maybe the way people buy or what they want to do has totally changed. Or maybe your competitors did an acquisition and that changes the whole way everybody thinks about this market.
Or maybe you and your product have changed, and you now do a whole bunch of other stuff that you didn’t originally do, and that enables you to get at a different kind of customer to deliver a different kind of value. Now how do you position it? That’s where people get messed up. Sometimes it can be quite intuitive at the beginning, but then a whole bunch of things change and it’s, okay, now the positioning needs to shift. How do we do that? Because we didn’t do anything the first time, it was just obvious. I think that happens a lot.
The other thing that happens a lot is you have this thesis when you launch the product and you said, okay, we saw this problem and this is what it’s gonna be and these kind of people are gonna love us for these reasons and here’s the competitor. Then we launch it, and it turns out our thesis was incorrect.
We get out there and we’re, man, we launched this thing and we thought banks were gonna love it, but it turns out we’re selling to insurance companies, we didn’t really build it for that, but they’re buying it like crazy. Now we’re in the insurance business, hello. And they love it, but there are some things they don’t love so much, and they’re comparing us to competitors we never really thought about. How do we position this thing because we thought it was gonna be something else.
And this is not unusual, to be honest. We call that a pivot in lean startup language. It’s not unusual for a company to build something for one market and then get in the market and find out, whoops, the market’s a little bit different than we thought. People are looking at our product a little bit different than we thought. We’re getting pulled into another market, so how do we position for that? And again, that’s when having a methodology for this would be helpful.
The B2B vs. B2C Divide in Positioning
Andrew Mitrak: You did your positioning exercise initially and then went to the books, went to Ries and Trout and the others. Do you find yourself as you’re reading the literature on positioning, was it confirming what you did, oh, that’s what we did was called, or was it saying, oh, were there things that you’re, oh, I wish I had known that to start, or what was the discovery process for reading?
April Dunford: No. And I was so mad about this. Here’s how this went. I went and I’m having all these conversations with people, I’m talking to all these smart heads of marketing, right? And I’m saying, how do you do this positioning thing? What do you do? And everybody’s doing it the way we did it, which was a little bit of trial and error, a little bit of getting some feedback from customers, a little bit of, let’s try this and if it doesn’t work we’re gonna adjust. A bit of messing around until you get something that works.
And that feels terrible when you’re the head of marketing because your head’s on the block, man. And if you don’t figure it out fast enough, everyone’s gonna get mad and you’re gonna get fired. And that was unsatisfying.
And then I took some courses and read the Ries and Trout book, which does an amazing job of defining here’s what positioning is, here’s why it’s important. And then they give you a whole bunch of examples. But the examples aren’t tech, this thing was written before the internet, man. I think they have printers, HP printers or something is the closest thing in there, not even software. And I’m selling databases, and they’re talking about repositioning the country of Jamaica, and I’m, this is different.
Andrew Mitrak: It is also very B2C oriented. I think the examples are Avis or Coors or beer. Do you find that both because of the tech gap with it and maybe the B2C bias that you as a B2B tech company...
April Dunford: The B2C bias is killer in this stuff. I took a bunch of courses too, and it was the same thing in the courses. All the examples were shampoo and toothpaste and makeup, and I’m, again, I’m selling 200 grand worth of database stuff to really smart technical people. I don’t think this is the same. It’s selling a vacuum cleaner. And I thought the B2C bias is terrible.
The other thing that you get in B2B tech that you don’t get in consumer is think about it. If I got toothpaste and I’m selling that toothpaste or hair shampoo to people that have dry hair or people that have dyed hair or something like that, right? And then if I decide I’m going to do a shampoo for babies or a shampoo for old ladies or a shampoo only for people with very, very curly hair, usually what you’d do is you wouldn’t take the same product and try to evolve it into that market. You would launch a whole different product and say, I’ve got this other thing, and that’s for the curly hair people, and this one’s for babies, and this one’s for people that dye their hair, whatever.
Whereas in tech, it is very normal for us to launch a product in one market and then reposition it a whole bunch in the future. Let’s take Salesforce. When Salesforce first launched, they were aimed at the very, very bottom end of the market. Their initial deal was they were focused on companies that had sales teams of less than 10 people and the first three seats were free. And why were they doing that? Because the top part of that market was absolutely dominated by a great big competitor, and they didn’t want to go compete there. So they started at the bottom.
But guess what? They inched their way up, and by the time they got to the mid-market, the big competitor had self-destructed and they were gone, and the top end of this market was wide open. And if you look at Salesforce right now, would you say that’s a product for very, very small businesses? No way, man, too expensive, too complicated, too everything. We just don’t have that in consumer products where you’re, it used to be this thing and now it’s this other thing and now it’s this other thing.
The other thing that you’ve got in B2B is that the positioning matters a lot because the stakes are really high. Especially if I’m looking at enterprise software, the stakes are huge. You’re going to make a recommendation to your boss to buy 200 grand worth of software. You make a shortlist. You don’t just walk into the store and pick the thing off the shelf and say, oh well, if I got it wrong, I just won’t buy that one again. You’re going to get fired if you make the wrong choice. You got to make a shortlist, and it’s positioning that makes or breaks whether or not you’re going to get on that shortlist.
And then once you’re on the shortlist, you got to survive long enough for them to take a real good look at your stuff. And if you get eliminated because often the shortlist is five, six companies these days or more, depending on whose data you believe. But let’s say there’s a shortlist of six, seven companies, you got to make it to top two. Otherwise, you don’t get considered. Your positioning is really important in that because the company hasn’t done a big deep dive into all your stuff yet. We just don’t have this in consumer. We don’t go out and buy a pair of shoes and make a shortlist and have a six-month process to figure out which one we’re gonna buy. We go out and we buy it and if it stinks, we just don’t buy that one again.
Navigating the B2B Buying Committee
Andrew Mitrak: One of the other elements as well from B2C versus B2B is often in B2B the buying decision maker or the buying committee is not the end user of the product, right? And there’s this abstraction between that. And that’s the other element is how do you market to both the end user and the decision maker.
April Dunford: Yeah, that happens a lot in B2B. The economic buyer is often distinct too, right? What you have is this committee of people and you’ve got someone who’s what we would describe as the champion. And that champion, usually it’s their boss or someone that said, look, we gotta buy a new accounting package, buddy, go figure it out. You go figure it out, look at all the accounting packages and tell us which one to build, which one to buy. And then that champion is gonna go do their homework, so your positioning really matters for that person.
But the champion also has all of these stakeholders around them that have to agree, otherwise the deal doesn’t get done. If the champion, let’s say the champion is on the business side and we’re buying technology, usually they got to go to IT and make sure IT is okay with it. IT can’t make the deal happen because they’re not in charge of selecting, but they can kill a deal by saying, oh I don’t like it, it’s too hard to manage, it doesn’t integrate with the stuff we have now, it doesn’t meet our compliance regulations, whatever, whatever, right?
Same thing with end users. Often the end user is not an end user making this purchase decision, but they can have a big influence in that. If they look at it and say, well the UI is this and this is terrible, we’re never going to get people to be able to use this thing, we’re going to kill it. Or sometimes they’ll do a pilot with some end users, and if the end users give it the thumbs down, then it’s no good.
And then you got to run it up to the economic buyer, which is generally another person too. And a lot of companies get really messed up with that and they’ll say, well the person that signs the check is the CRO, so that’s the buyer. And it’s, yeah, but the CRO assigned the whole purchase process figuring out who to buy to somebody underneath them. So you better figure out who that is because the CRO just says yes to whatever that other person suggests.
We don’t have that again in B2C. This isn’t it. Sometimes in B2C stuff where it’s complicated, let’s say you’re buying insurance or you’re buying a car or you’re buying a house. Maybe there’s a spouse involved, maybe there’s a financial planner involved, maybe you get a little advice, but it’s nothing like what a typical enterprise B2B purchase process looks like. It is way more complicated.
The Critical Distinction Between Branding and Positioning
Andrew Mitrak: When you write about positioning, you make a hard distinction between branding and positioning, and you’ve written that you’re not a fan of the term brand positioning, which is a phrase you hear sometimes. Why do you draw a line between the two or how do you make this distinction?
April Dunford: Well, here’s what I think. I think marketers like to make stuff up. I think marketers like to just redefine something for the sake of redefining it. And branding is probably the most poorly defined marketing term I can think of. When you say branding, you really gotta say, okay, what do you mean when you say branding?
At most of the enterprise B2B companies that I worked at, when we talked about branding, the brand of the company was a lot about how we showed up in the market in terms of, what was our tone of voice? What was our iconography look like? It was a bit like what was the vibe of us when we showed up? What were the fonts and the colors and the pictures we used, and the way we did messaging and text, tone of voice stuff. That was all kind of branding, which is very different from positioning.
Positioning is an input to that. If the big value of, let’s say I sell security software to banks, right? My branding should convey a lot of trust and solidness and authority because that’s what we’re trying to convey. If I’m selling software for daycares, maybe I can get a bit more playful because I’m talking about kids and moms and things. And I could use different colors and more playful images and maybe a bit more casual tone of voice and all that kind of stuff.
And so in my opinion, positioning should inform what the branding looks like. But now I’ve seen other people define branding in a way that it includes all the things that I would call branding, and it also includes positioning, and we’re going to just kind of munge those two things together. That’s okay, if that’s the way you want to define it, but I still see those two things as being distinct. You got to do the positioning thing first, and then the branding thing flows from that.
Why Positioning Must Go Beyond the Marketing Department
Andrew Mitrak: And is this somewhat related to how you argue that positioning should not just be a marketing exercise? That if the CEO and sales leads aren’t in the room, that the positioning won’t stick. Is that tied to why positioning is different than branding, is that it’s beyond marketing?
April Dunford: Definitely, it’s definitely not just marketing, right? What we’re trying to do with our positioning is we are trying to define why should a customer pick us versus the other guys. And we need to think about, first of all, who are the other guys? What’s the alternative to what we do? And we should all be in agreement on that. Sales should understand that, marketing should understand that, CEO, product should understand that. We should all understand what makes us distinct and the value we can deliver to a business that no one else can.
We need to get that in marketing, product management needs to understand that, sales needs to understand that. And then we all need to understand who’s a good fit for that, which is what are the kinds of companies we’re trying to target and therefore what’s the market that we intend to dominate. That is a strategic set of decisions in a way, and it’s very easy for teams to get out of alignment on that.
It’s very easy for sales to decide, we’re just going to sell to these big companies because we like doing these big deals, man. We need to decide, is it worth chasing those big deals? Are we actually going to win them? Or are we more likely to win if we’re chasing a deal in the mid-market, for example? Again, I think this is, we get this distinction between B2B and B2C. In B2B, when I’m selling a big ticket thing and there’s a shortlist of companies to look at, we really need to understand what makes us stand out and what makes us different so that we can help the whole buying team understand what that is and move this deal along.
If I’m just selling toothpaste, or makeup or a T-shirt, it often has nothing to do with the product and it has more to do with pure branding, right? This thing is going to make you look rich or, the Kardashians wear this thing so you should too or something.
Whereas, it’s not like it’s all totally rational when we’re buying enterprise software, we don’t, there’s often quite a bit of irrationality in there in that the champion is worried about making a bad choice. The champion will often default to a really safe choice because it’s not going to get them in trouble. Or if the champion has an opportunity to look like a hero, they might take that too because it’s good for them personally.
It’s not like it’s all totally rational, but at the end of the day, they do have to make a case to their boss. And that case has to say, look, we looked at the other things and we picked this thing for these reasons, and the reasons are narrow. This is either going to help you make money or is going to help you save money and that’s about it. We got to make that stuff super, super clear. Whereas, you’re buying a T-shirt with your own money, it’s fine. Maybe if you’re a teenager you gotta complain to your mom, but… [Laughs]
Andrew Mitrak: [Laughs] Totally.
The Conflict Between Sales, Product, and Marketing in B2B Tech
Andrew Mitrak: So I’ve also spent most of my career in B2B tech and on marketing teams, and whenever I run through positioning, I do find that there’s this issue where we have a number of stakeholders in product, and they tend to be biased towards product-led growth or if there is some land-and-expand model or some freemium model, they are biased towards what product can influence as far as growth is. And sales almost always is not interested in land-and-expand. They want big-ticket deals. They don’t hit their quota—
April Dunford: I think it feels good to land a big deal if you’re in sales. I think that feels good.
Andrew Mitrak: Exactly, exactly. And they want marketing to support that positioning. Marketing, we have our own ideas and customer research as well on what we think.
April Dunford: Well, we like the ones—we like the market that’s the easiest to respond to our marketing stuff, which is often terrible leads too.
Andrew Mitrak: Right. That’s an issue.
April Dunford: We love time waster leads. We love those. It looks good in our metrics and we’re like, I don’t get what’s wrong in sales. They don’t ever convert any of our beautiful leads.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, exactly. I feel like a lot of dynamic can be summed up to either: Sales wants more leads, okay, then marketing will get more leads.
But then sales says, “No, not those leads. We want better leads. Those aren’t high quality enough.” And then marketing adjusts and then gets fewer leads.
I feel like that’s a cycle that a lot of companies find themselves trapped in.
April Dunford: It really helps to have a clear definition of what a best-fit customer is and why. Not just that we think this is a best-fit customer because we wish we were doing deals like that. It should be: “This is a best-fit customer for us because we are the only ones that can deliver this specific value.” If you look at us versus the other things that a customer is going to compare us with, we are the only ones that can deliver this specific value, and these are the kind of people that really care a lot about that. That’s what we really need to get at the root of. And it shouldn’t just be that we like those companies because they’re bigger and they have bigger budgets. Well, guess what? If they’re bigger and they have bigger budgets, then that means we’re going to run into these competitors that can handle that. Do we actually serve that customer better, or are we better at something else? And so getting everybody together in a room to get really clear on that is going to help us with all those problems when sales says, “Well, we don’t like these leads.” It’s like, let’s sit down and talk about what an excellent lead looks like and why. It should tick these boxes because we are very likely to win those deals for these reasons.
Andrew Mitrak: In the dozens or hundreds of companies you’ve consulted with that have implemented positioning successfully, is it an equal split between partly marketing, sales, and product? Are they all like equal one-third owners of the process? Is it usually best if one is the owner of it and the other two are stakeholders? Does it need to be the CEO who is on top of it on the exercise? What’s the best model, or is there one right solution or ways to make multiple versions work?
“Marketing Never Wins the Battle of Opinions”
April Dunford: This is actually a great question. So I’m a big fan of doing a cross-functional exercise because, just in my own experience when I was in-house and working as a head of marketing, if I didn’t get everybody in the room together, I couldn’t go have a conversation with sales and think I had it and then take it to product because then they’d rip all that stuff apart and say, “No, that’s all wrong, it’s this.” Then you take it to the CEO and the CEO has got their own opinions and you end up with something else. So it’s just way more efficient to get everybody in the room together.
But if you’re going to get everybody in the room together, we can’t just have everybody in the room together just say, “Okay, why does everybody love our stuff?” then that’ll just be a battle of opinions, and marketing never wins the battle of opinions. So the way my process works is we start with this conversation around competitive alternatives. Now, what’s funny about that is the question is: if we didn’t exist, what would a customer do? At that step, I think sales’ opinion on this matters more than anybody else’s. But it doesn’t stop everybody else from having an opinion, but everybody else’s opinion is generally wrong.
Sales vs. Product Perspectives on Competition
April Dunford: So I’ll give you an example. Often what we’ve got, like when you go to product management and you say, “Who do we compete with?” they generally give you a way longer list of companies than sales does. Because product management is living a little bit in the future, right? They’re thinking about the roadmap, they’re thinking about where we’re going, and they’re looking at the superset of who could compete with us and who should compete with us. What they are not looking at is who does. Sales knows that. Sales knows that.
Now, if I go to sales and I say, “If we didn’t exist, what would a customer do?” they can tell me exactly who lands on the short list. They can tell me who’s causing us pain out in the market right now. They generally won’t consider the status quo as a competitor because a good salesperson, if they lose to status quo, they will say, “We lost to no decision.” And in the minds of a good salesperson, that is not a no; that’s a “not yet.” We’re going to get them someday, just not this week, man. And so if you’re doing this exercise, you have to pull that out of the sales team, but it’s very important for the product team to hear what the sales team has to say. Because the product team is thinking about a different set of competitors, which is fine, by the way. Because they’re building for the future, they need to be looking at that.
But when we’re talking about positioning right now, if the competitor is not causing us any pain, they may never cause us any pain. We don’t do a very good job of predicting the future that way. And the reality is if they do cause us pain next year or the year after, we’re going to adjust the positioning to take that into account. So step one, when I’m talking about competitors, I think sales’ opinions matter more.
And then we didn’t even talk about marketing. Marketing, if you say to marketing, “Who do we compete with?” they’ll list the people that are spending the most money on marketing. That’s who they worry about because that’s who they’re fighting for keywords and everything else. And they go, “Oh my god, these guys, they’re everywhere! We see them everywhere. Oh my god, they have the biggest booth. Oh my god, they’re all over the place.” But again, if they’re not causing us any pain in sales, well, maybe you’ve got some competitors burning a lot of money on pretty s**t marketing that isn’t doing anything.
The other thing you get is the CEO will have this opinion. Often the CEO was really involved in sales at some point, but maybe it’s been a couple of years. Or maybe they only see certain kinds of deals in certain situations, so they’re biased towards that. Again, sales understands the reality on the ground. So when we go to step one, personally, sales’ opinions matter more, but we’ve got to get everybody on the same page.
Then we get to step two: okay, if we didn’t exist, this is what a customer would do, this is what we’ve got to position against. Now we get to step two, and step two is all about: what have we got that the other guys don’t have? Who knows that the best? Product management, by a mile. Sales doesn’t know. They don’t even pitch stuff they don’t understand. Marketing doesn’t know because there’s lots of stuff the product does that marketing thinks is useless or they don’t understand or whatever. The only people that can really give you the straight deal on “what have we got that the other guys don’t” is product management. A good product management team knows all about that. So again, other people in the group might think they know the answer to this; product management knows the answer to it.
Then we get to the third step, which is value. This is where marketing comes in a little bit because only marketing understands even the concept of what value is. So they’re helpful in that respect. But here it’s a little bit interesting. Sales knows what a customer thinks is valuable and what they don’t. So they’re a good litmus test. If we come up with a value prop, sales is a good litmus test: does this sell? Sales can tell you generally because they know customers, they’ve been selling to customers, they know what flies and what doesn’t. Marketing understands what value is, so they know what a good value prop looks like and what it doesn’t. So this is where we see a lot of sales and marketing. But again, everybody’s got to agree on what this is.
Then we’re going to get to this segmentation, which is: okay, we’re the only people on the planet that can deliver this value, but not everyone cares the same about it. So what are the characteristics of a good-fit account? And that is kind of a little bit of everybody chiming in on: okay, if the value looks like this, what needs to be true about the account in order for that to resonate? Are they bigger accounts or smaller accounts? Is there something in their tech stack that makes them more likely to make that more appealing to them or not? Is there something about their business model or something about the team we’re selling into that’s different? That’s a group conversation with everybody. So we have this team together. We obviously need the CEO in the room, and the CEO needs to believe that this is important work and sponsor this thing. But when I run one of these exercises, everybody needs to chip in, and everybody’s opinion is important at different steps in the exercise. This is why this is so difficult to do when it’s not a team exercise. It’s like that old picture of everybody wearing a blindfold and they’re all touching a different part of the elephant. The guy on the tail says, “It’s a snake,” and the guy on the leg says, “It’s a tree.” It’s a bit like that. Sales knows something, product management knows something, marketing knows something, the CEO knows something, support knows something. We’ve got to pull all of that out together and then synthesize it into something we can all agree on, and we’re all singing the same song, and then we move forward.
Evaluating Positioning Success from the Outside vs. Inside
Andrew Mitrak: As an outsider, I like to evaluate a company’s positioning or try to understand their positioning. But if positioning is this strategic foundation and it’s not branding, it’s not messaging, it’s not even just marketing, how do you go about evaluating somebody’s positioning from the outside? How do I tell if a company’s positioned well or if they just have a really talented copywriter?
April Dunford: I’m glad you asked this because sometimes what I’ll see—and this bugs me a lot—I think I’ve been guilty of doing this in the past when I didn’t know any better. But sometimes what I’ll see, and I see this a lot on LinkedIn or social media, a random person like me will pull up some B2B website and say, “Isn’t this terrible? Who could understand what this is? Look at all that jargon! Look at all that stuff. Oh, this is terrible. This should be more B2C-like. This should be really easy and it should be exciting.”
And the first time I saw one of these that I thought was really funny, this was a company that was growing 200% year-on-year on about $100 million revenue. And I’m like, my dudes, it is working just fine. So here’s the thing: it is very difficult for you to assess how good copy on a homepage is working if you are not the target buyer and you don’t even know who the target buyer is. If I’m selling something to—I was working with a company that does this stuff with airlines and I’m selling a very technical thing to people that do maintenance on airplanes—like yeah, man, you’re not going to understand what that website is talking about. And that’s okay. What really matters is: is it working with a customer, and is it doing the job we want the website to do? So that’s one thing.
The second thing is, like you say, there’s copywriting and there’s positioning. If I look at a company’s copy, I don’t necessarily understand the strategy behind it. I don’t know exactly how they’ve defined a best-fit customer, for example. So I don’t know exactly who they think their competitors are. Therefore, I can’t tell: is it doing a good job of differentiating them from those competitors? Because I don’t know them, I don’t know their competitors, I don’t know who their buyers are. It would be very hard for you from the outside to figure this out. And so I don’t think doing a homepage teardown is a particularly good way to understand someone’s positioning. I get this a lot where a company will send me a link to their homepage and they’ll say, “Can you just tell us if our positioning sucks or not?” and I’m like, “No! Because I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know who your target market is, I don’t know who your competitors are, I don’t know anything.” And so it’s really hard from the outside to assess that.
Identifying the Signs of Weak Positioning
April Dunford: Now, on the inside, poor positioning shows up in a set of very distinct ways. So the way I used to assess it—let’s say I got hired as the Vice President of Marketing and then everybody wants me to just spin up a bunch of campaigns, and I’m like, “Okay, but let’s make sure the positioning is good before we do that because otherwise I’m pouring water into a leaky bucket.” So let’s have a look at positioning.
How I would assess that is I would walk over to sales—because I’m always working with enterprise companies that have sales people—and I’d be listening in on first-call conversations. Now, this is really easy because everybody records it with Gong, so you just listen to the Gong calls. But first-call conversation, weak positioning shows up like this: the customer shows up, the rep is there, and the rep’s doing their thing and they’re saying, “Hey, let me tell you something about us, and we’re this, that, and the other thing, and we do this and that for companies like you, blah blah blah.” And you can see the customer just getting super confused, like making this face: “What the heck are you talking about, man?” And usually what you’ll get is a few minutes in, and the customer will go, “Stop, stop, stop. Just back up. Back up. Go back to the beginning. I’m not sure I got it. Go back, say it again.” And the rep’s got to go back and repeat it again. Or they’ll get halfway through and the customer will ask a question, and the rep will be like, “Oh my god, the customer didn’t understand a thing I was talking about.” If you’ve got happy existing customers but a new customer is coming in that confused, that is usually a positioning problem.
The other one you’ll get is prospects comparing you to things they shouldn’t be comparing you to. That is a clear sign of bad positioning. So they’ll come in and say, “So you’re like a CRM, right?” and you’ll be like, “No, no.” Or they’ll be like, “Oh, so you’re just like Workday?” “No, we’re nothing like Workday, what are you talking about?” And then the rep has to back up and do it again. So this idea that the customer thinks they know what box to put you in, but you’re actually living in a different box, that’s a sign of weak positioning.
And then the other one you’ll get is a customer coming in and saying, “I get it, I get what you do, I get it. But I just don’t get why anybody would pay for that. Can’t I just do that with my accounting package? Can’t I just do that in a spreadsheet? Why would I just hire a couple of teenagers to come in and do that? That doesn’t seem...” and then in that case, what the problem is, your value is not clear and compelling. So inside we can assess it; outside, I don’t know.
The Pitfalls of Tech-Forward Positioning
Andrew Mitrak: It’s very tempting to be one of those LinkedIn people from the outside, but on the other hand, I was at a unicorn B2B freight tech startup. It was in the trucking industry and won a bunch of awards, raised a whole lot of money, and our marketing was great—everyone thought our marketing was great. But at the underlying thing, the positioning was often wrong. It was very tech-forward: AI, automate your freight, Uber for trucking type messaging. Everyone was like, “Oh, this is a no-brainer, let’s do this.” And I’d listen to Gong calls in sales and hear somebody pitching all this tech to a supply chain manager at a company in the Midwest, and it’s like speaking two different languages. The startup ultimately folded in a pretty dramatic way. But underlying it, there was just the wrong positioning. It’s easy to say this looks bad or great from the outside, but really you have to get inside the company before you really pass judgment on it.
April Dunford: Fundraising’s not revenue, right? Fundraising’s not revenue. But we are in crazy times right now where there’s so much excitement about certain parts of the market where things are emerging, like all this AI stuff is so cool and the potential for this stuff is so big. We see this with pricing models changing, and now we’re looking at usage-based pricing versus subscription pricing. It makes it a lot more difficult to figure out if this company is actually successful or not.
Positioning During Rapidly Changing Markets
Andrew Mitrak: Do you have principles for running a positioning exercise through a period of rapid change? It can feel like you’re building the foundation with positioning, but it’s moving so fast it’s like building the foundation on quicksand.
April Dunford: I have some opinions about this. Stuff is changing really quickly, but I think companies are going to have to be very clear in their messaging and positioning about what’s real and what we can deliver today versus what is vision and a direction, and where we want to go, and frankly, hype. We’re building the market. Because I think if you’re building an AI company right now, you’ve got to do both. You’ve got to hype the hell out of stuff that doesn’t entirely work today, that doesn’t do exactly what we know it’s going to be able to do in the future—and we might not even be sure when—but we also have to sell what’s on the truck that a customer can buy right now.
Those two things are often different. If you look at the one I think is the most remarkable to look at, it’s the vibe coding tools. If you look at what influencers from these vibe coding tools are talking about on LinkedIn and social media, it is super inspirational. You’re like, “Wow, that is so cool. Look at all the stuff we’re going to do.” Right now, there’s a bit of panic in the markets, like, “Oh my gosh, are we just going to be able to vibe code accounting software? Why should we even have accounting software? We’re going to vibe code a CRM. Sell Salesforce, man, that stuff’s just going to go away.” But then you go to their website, and their website doesn’t say they do that at all. Their website says, “Build a nice prototype,” because that’s what they’re actually selling today.
Now, they’ve got investors and whatever, and right now it’s very difficult to be heard in the noise without being super hypey about this stuff, so they’ve got to do the other piece too. They’ve got to show the vision. They’ve got to show where this is going. They’ve got to show it in order to justify the valuations. They want people to be mucking around with it now with the idea that we should start doing some stuff with this now because in the future we’re going to do way more stuff with this. So there’s this balance, I think, between where you’re at and what you can sell today, and being clear about that when you’re in a sales process. You’ve got to balance that with this other half, which is hyping the hell out of it. When I say it, I mean the future, So, I’m hyped hell out of where this is going and what it’s going to be able to do and what’s happening in the future and all that stuff. The hype stuff changes very rapidly. What we’re selling and what customers are actually doing with it changes about the same as everything else. You’re going to have to check in on it in six months and see if it’s different or not, but in less than six months, your positioning’s probably okay. If I look at the vibe coding tools, those sites haven’t changed much at all in the last year.
Andrew Mitrak: So overall, the act and the role of positioning doesn’t change in a period of rapid technical change. There might be new vectors for positioning; there might be new ways you can position within a new category.
Balancing Today’s Reality with Future Vision
April Dunford: What you should expect is to be very careful, and you should be watching your positioning, and you should be very ready to adjust it when it needs to be adjusted. In a normal market, when I was in-house as the VP of Marketing, we would do a check-in on positioning every six months. That was more than enough, and it was rare that we would check in and have to change it if the positioning was less than a year old or even less than two years old. It’s pretty rare we would do the six-month check-in and say, “Whoops, need to adjust something”. These days, especially if you’re in this AI world, you might want to do that quarterly, and you should be very ready to make the adjustment if you think that it’s needed. But do I think your positioning’s going to change quarterly? No, I don’t. But it wouldn’t surprise me if you changed it within a year. That wouldn’t surprise me at all.
Applying Positioning Principles to Your Career
Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask about how you’ve positioned yourself and positioned your own book. It feels like you’ve been very deliberate about your own positioning. You focus primarily on B2B tech, which is where you have your experience. Do you think that marketers should be applying these same positioning rules to their own careers?
April Dunford: Maybe. I don’t know if I’m a great person to give career advice, but it certainly worked out for me. When I was working in-house, you’re applying for jobs as the VP of Marketing and you’re up against everybody else, and you’ve got to answer the question, “Why me and not the ten other people you’re interviewing?” In order to have a clear answer to that, you have to be able to say, “What am I better at? What have I done more than the other people? What’s my edge over everybody else?”
For me, because I had done a lot of positioning stuff early, that kind of became my edge. I could talk about that in a deeper way. By the time I was at a company and then we got acquired, I had positioned a bunch of things at the acquired company. So by the time I came out of that one, I had positioned five or six products. That’s a lot, really. A senior marketer could go their whole career without repositioning anything if the positioning is working. So I thought I had that as an edge. In the later part of my career, if you hired me as the VP of Marketing, you hired me because you thought maybe you had a positioning problem. I could talk intelligently about how we were going to fix it, and that’s why you brought me on.
I wouldn’t be applying to jobs where what they were really looking for was something really outside of that and it wasn’t really in my deep skill set. Yeah, I know a lot about lead generation, and yeah, I know a lot about email marketing. Yeah, we’re doing SEO and whatever; I know a lot of stuff about that. But am I going to get that job versus the person that comes in and says, “I managed this ginormous Google Ad budget at the last thing and all we did was SEO and I’ve been doing SEO for 15 years, I’m going to yak your ear off on that”? I’m not going to win that job. So I’m trying to focus on applying to jobs that are a fit for my stuff and then making sure I’m positioned in there as the best person for that job.
That’s worked out pretty well for me. As a consultant, I’m trying to do the same thing. I’m trying to stay in my lane. I get tons of calls from companies that are B2C, or they’re B2B but they don’t have a sales team, or what they actually do is professional services. I’ve done a few services companies, but only if they tick the boxes. I’m pretty serious about who makes it through my filter, and that’s because I want to make sure we’re really, really successful. If it’s outside of my wheelhouse, I don’t know, I’m just kind of guessing. So I try to stay right in my zone of excellence so that if you make it through all my filters, then I feel pretty confident that we’re going to get a good result because I’ve done 300 other companies that look just like you. And you’re probably going to pay me more money to do that because I’ve done 300 companies that look just like you. Everybody else you’re talking to has done a little of this and a little of that, and it’s not like they don’t know what they’re doing, they do, but they don’t quite have the experience level in the little box that I do. So I try to stay in my little box where I can look you in the eyeball and say, “I’m probably the best person in the world to do this.” Not this, not this, not that, not this other thing—just in this little box right here. I think I’m the best in the world.
The Strategy Behind Positioning “Obviously Awesome”
Andrew Mitrak: Did you apply your positioning frameworks and methodology to your own book, Obviously Awesome, and could you share a little of that process?
April Dunford: Yeah, so I was really clear when the book came out on what I was positioning against. What I was positioning against was, first of all, the old positioning book, which is the book that came out in the ‘80s by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Again, I love that book, and I think that book’s really good at defining positioning. What it doesn’t do is give you a how-to: step one, step two, step three. So I positioned mine against that and said, “Look, we are very much in alignment, Ries and Trout and my stuff. We agree on the definition of positioning, we agree what it is, we agree why it’s important. I’m giving you the how-to; they are not.” That’s why you need my book and not theirs.
I was also positioning against the “positioning statement,” which was a common sort of folklore way of doing positioning inside a company. A lot of companies, if I went and said, “Have you done positioning?” and they said, “Yes,” what they’d done is filled out a positioning statement, which isn’t a methodology at all. But it was just kind of the thing that everybody did. So I was positioning against that as well. In the book, there’s a mention of the Ries and Trout book and the reason why I was frustrated that it didn’t have a how-to, and then it talks about the positioning statement and why I think that’s not a good way to do positioning. So I’m positioned against that.
When I look at what I’ve got that the other guys haven’t, it’s a methodology. It’s one, two, three, four, five, six. Nobody else has a methodology. I’m going to give you a methodology. I am sure there are other ones now but one, two, three, four, five, six. The value of that is being able to do it in a repeatable way. Even if you’ve got to muck with the process, even if this is just a starting point, you at least got something.
Designing Content for the CEO Mindset
April Dunford: Then the “who it was aimed at” was primarily CEOs of companies, but also, I would say my primary audience was the CEO of a tech company, but also at a secondary level, heads of product or heads of marketing. I did a lot of research with CEOs as I was writing the book about how they buy books, how they find out about books, and how they read books. That was super fascinating. The actual product of the book looks and feels the way it does because of that research. I talked to 50 or 60 founders, and here’s what I found out.
How do you find out about books? You find out from your friends, other CEOs. It’s all word of mouth. Nobody goes to the bookstore and says, “What am I going to read today?” and browses the stacks. That never happens. They get a recommendation, people start talking about it, it’s word of mouth. So you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to spark some word of mouth on this book.
The second thing that I thought was surprising is the CEOs don’t actually read books; they read half-books. Almost everybody told me this. I said, “How do you read?” and they’ll say things like, “Well, I’ll get on the plane, I’ll do my email for an hour, and then I’ve got two or three hours left in the plane ride, I’ll pull the book out and I’ll read and get to the end of it.” They’ll basically say, “I pull the book out and I read.” And I said, “But wait, you only got two or three hours, that’s only half a book. What happens?” And they say, “Well, if there’s bits I can skim, I’ll skim it and skip forward. You know, these business books are full of fluff. Sometimes there’s a whole chapter I can skim, or if they have a case study or something, I’ll skip that. You more or less get the gist of it in the first half of the book anyways because these books are so fluffy. So basically, I never read the back half of a book.”
So I decided, “All right, I’m not writing a typical business book that’s 80,000 words or 90,000 words that takes you six, seven, eight hours to read. I’m writing a book that’s half that, and you can get through it in three or four hours.” Then I’m going to make the bits that you could skim, like the case studies and things like that, very obvious. I’m going to put them in a shaded box so that if you want to skip it, skip away. So it’s obvious what the core stuff is and what the stuff is you could skip. We’re going to make it like In-Flight Magazine—that’s what I kept telling the book guys “This is the inflight magazines”. I thought that worked pretty well. The number one feedback I got on the book after I put it out was CEOs would come to me and they’d say, “Oh my God, it was so good. I finished it in one sitting.” And I loved that. Part of the reason they finished it in one sitting is my original manuscript was like 70,000 words and we hacked at that thing until it was half the size. So yeah, I did use my process for that book.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s so cool. Well, thanks for taking me behind the scenes of that. Congrats on the book and its success, and congrats on the updated and expanded edition of Obviously Awesome. I hope listeners, if any listeners enjoyed this conversation, they definitely enjoy the book; it’s available to order right now. Also, I highly recommend your podcast, Positioning with April Dunford. I’ve been listening to it to catch up and research prior to this interview and enjoyed it a lot. It’s super inspiring. I already mentioned your website, aprildunford.com, which has a lot of great resources as well. Is there any other place you’d recommend where people should connect or follow you? It seems like you’re everywhere.
April Dunford: I feel like I used to be everywhere and now I’m not. I don’t do a lot of social media these days, for example. Occasionally I’m inspired to post something on LinkedIn, but it’s not very often. The best way to follow my stuff is the newsletter, the podcast, the books—these are the main things. If you go to aprildunford.com, you see links to all that stuff.
Andrew Mitrak: They’re all great. I’ll link to it in the blog that accompanies this post. April Dunford, thanks so much and congrats again.
April Dunford: Okay, thanks.


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A History of Marketing / Episode 49
Have you ever stood in front of a 500-year-old painting of a father devouring his son and asked yourself, “Who paid for this?” Me neither. Until I met Peter Van Wijnaerde.
Peter is a CMO based in Ghent, Belgium, and the writer behind a Substack that connects art history to modern marketing.
Rory Sutherland recommended I speak with Peter (which is as high a compliment as you can get in this field) after seeing his presentation on medieval branding.
Peter’s premise is provocative: art was the original marketing department.
Patrons funded paintings, statues, and tapestries not for beauty’s sake, but because they needed to project power, build legitimacy, and sway public opinion. The separation of fine art and commerce is a relatively recent development.
Peter brings a perspective that’s part art aficionado, hobbyist historian, and marketing strategist. He shows us that “stopping power” has been central to persuading the masses for a thousand years.
Here is my conversation with Peter Van Wijnaerde.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Quick Update: Thank you to the thousands of marketers from around the world who have played The CMO Game! It’s been amazing to see the response and I’ve had a few marketing professors reach out to request using it in their classes.
Special Thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. And thank you to Rory Sutherland for introducing me to Peter.
The Intersection of Art History and Marketing
Andrew Mitrak: You’ve written about so many topics connecting history, marketing, mythology, and art, and branding, and merging the past with the present in our work as marketers today. So how would you describe the content of your Substack and your perspective that you bring?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: I like to stretch out the history of marketing a little bit to before the 1950s. And I love art and I love looking at art and I love using those art pieces that were made to compel people to have stopping power. I use those to explain how marketing is really one of the oldest professions there is and what we can learn today of marketing. So not that there’s no surprises anymore in the current time, but my blog is about widening the scope of the time frame of marketing.
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned one of the oldest professions. It is funny when Pompeii was uncovered – the ancient city that was covered by Mount Vesuvius. They discovered brothels but also they discovered artwork that would point people to the brothels. Right. So if prostitution is the oldest profession, there seems to be types of advertising to get people there. So they were very interconnected. So advertising does seem like an old profession.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Exactly.
Andrew Mitrak: So what was your initial spark? How did you start connecting the past to the present?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: I was always a very visual person, liked to engage with things that are visual. But I think the spark happened my first time in Vienna in the Belvedere. I started to appreciate medieval art. And normally medieval art is something we laugh about. You have the memes with the medieval cats and there is full Instagram feeds full of that. But actually we should not laugh with medieval art, because it’s very communicative. Because it’s very symbolic. It says there are two guys and a child and the child is just a little human and this is happening, right? And so it’s basically like a cartoon. I started to appreciate it, started to look at it and then started wondering, that must have been expensive and difficult to make. Why were people making this?
Uncovering Medieval Marketing in the Bayeux Tapestry
Peter Van Wijnaerde: The moment that it clicked was when I was doing medieval travels through Europe. And I was in France and I was in Bayeux. Have you ever heard about the Bayeux Tapestry?
Andrew Mitrak: I don’t know about the Bayeux Tapestry. I’m not too familiar with tapestries in general.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, it’s a 70-meter long tapestry that was embroidered in the year 1080, let’s say. They don’t know precise but it was embroidered there. And it’s a tapestry about the Battle of Hastings, about William the Conqueror kicking out the Anglo-Saxons out of England and putting in Nordic rule in England. And this guy, his brother, yes, this one.
Andrew Mitrak: For listeners, most people listen to the audio, but I am going to, because this is a visual conversation, I’ll pull them up on the screen, because I find it useful to hear and see what you’re talking about. So I’m sharing my screen and showing the Bayeux Tapestry.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: So what’s so interesting about the Bayeux Tapestry is that it’s a scroll of 70 meters, it’s about 40 centimeters high or something. And it tells the story about why William the Conqueror thought he had the right to conquer England and what the deal was and how they prepared for it and who they talked to and the whole story from beginning to end is on that tapestry. And it was made...
Andrew Mitrak: So it’s a really wide tapestry. Cause it’s like frame by frame. Cause it’s... wow, okay. Yeah.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: And you can roll it up too. And it was made by his brother, the Bishop Odo of Bayeux. And what’s so interesting about it, it was not a painting, it was not a statue, it was a tapestry. And there is actually really no other tapestry of that kind. But if you think about it, it was mobile, you could roll it up easily, you can transport it easily and put it out somewhere else also as easily. So it was actually a bit of a prop of a PR tour for William the Conqueror by his brother the Bishop of Bayeux. And then it clicked. And I thought, oh my god, they should give this Odo guy an Effie Award or something because he invented a completely new way of storytelling to convince the people that this king is their legitimate ruler. And you don’t do that by building a cathedral because a cathedral is only in one place. So I thought this is a 1,000-year-old marketing campaign in front of me. So this is when it started clicking even more.
Andrew Mitrak: It’s, and you mentioned medieval art almost looks like a cartoon sometimes because it’s a little more two-dimensional, they didn’t quite have the same sense of perspective and lighting and depth that you convey that you’d later see in the Renaissance. But and then also medieval art sometimes you see it in memes today. Like you see it in internet memes and you see it kind of translates kind of because it’s cartoon-like. And in a way memes are such a huge part of internet culture and the way people communicate now. And this artwork, this tapestry kind of reminds you of a comic book almost, or a frame by frame and it sort of takes that type of visual storytelling and it seems like it communicates that to the masses who mostly would be illiterate but would still appreciate a story.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: If you walk in front of it and you just go, it takes half an hour to see the whole thing. And there’s action scenes in there and little jokes in there. There’s a warrior showing his bare ass to another warrior, things like this. So it’s also made to entertain. And I think that’s beautiful actually. It’s not just, this is history, this is also, also very interesting fact: the guy who made it gave himself a very prominent role in the history as well. But he was the guy who commissioned it right? So he could embroider himself into history.
Andrew Mitrak: Okay, yeah, so sort of the marketer, the marketers being a little self-promotional in a sense, or at least the patrons being self-promotional. That’s great.
Inspiration Everywhere: Learning from the Past
Andrew Mitrak: So I originally heard about your work from my conversation with Rory Sutherland, and he mentioned that he loved your presentation on medieval branding. Which is a very high compliment. I mean, take that win because if Rory Sutherland complimented my work, that would be wonderful. So very cool. So that was my initial spark for reaching out to you. And you’ve already talked a little bit about medieval history or medieval artwork and how it relates to branding. So was this part of that presentation? The Bayeux Tapestry, was this part of the presentation or could you just share what the presentation was that Rory was speaking about that seemed resonated with him?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, the insight that, so this was not about the Bayeux Tapestry. This was about some tactics that some brands do today that you can also see that kings and queens did in history. So it was actually, I think the title was ‘Medieval Marketing Lessons for Modern Marketers‘. That was the thing. And it all starts from this, the reason that if you are in power, you need to stay in power. And there are several ways that you can stay in power. And one of them is fighting. But that’s not a good thing for your resources, because you will lose a lot of men and you will lose the belief of your people if you lose too many men. So for efficiency reasons, the kings and queens looked for different ways to keep their power or make sure no one started fighting them. If people believed that it was not worth fighting you because you were stronger, because you had better allies, or you would end up in hell because this guy has the blessing of God. That’s also an important one. So they started making up all these stories. And what I did in this talk was picking apart some of those stories and translate how they are actually being used today. Just to show, not to tell people this is the way you should do marketing, but more to tell people, like, if you’re in marketing, if you’re in branding, open your eyes. Ideas are everywhere. That was more, and I look for them in history. Other people can look for them in kindergartens or whatever, because I assume a lot of real human behavior also happens there.
Andrew Mitrak: It is one of the professions where I feel like you can become a better marketer by opening your eyes to just about anything.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yeah, I really like Rory’s point. He said if you’re a, what was it, not an attorney, but something else...
Andrew Mitrak: An accountant.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: An accountant.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, this was actually coming back to the Rory presentation. He said if you’re an accountant, I doubt that you can get much better at your job sitting at a coffee shop looking at the world. But if you’re a marketer, you certainly can. Of course Rory said it in a more eloquent, witty way than I did, but...
Andrew Mitrak: He does.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: But also what he also did, like after he referenced me, he immediately started talking about Attention Deficit Disorder. So that started to worry me as well.
Andrew Mitrak: Oh yeah. Who was that guy who was all over the place at that conference? I’m sure that was just a coincidence.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: But he brought of course the example of Charlemagne to the topic. Like he was the first king to be coronated by a pope. That was a masterful move. No one would attack him after that, or you end up in jail or in hell of all places. Yeah.
The Medici Family and the Power of Storytelling
Andrew Mitrak: Great. So yeah, that’s right. So let’s talk about some of the specific examples in your presentation. You mentioned Charlemagne and being coronated by the pope and sort of a, I don’t know what you call that, a partnership marketing or influencer marketing or just aligning yourself, positioning... it’s a lot of elements of marketing to that. What were any other examples from that presentation from the medieval presentation?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, we talked about the Medici Family. The Medici Family, if you walk... have you been to Florence? If you walk around in Florence, you see a lot of marble statues. And if there is a common theme among most of those marble statues that the Medici Family has commissioned, they liked their Greek heroes who liberated cities. Like how Hercules won against the monster Cacus, or The Rape of the Sabine Women. Also a story about how Rome came to power. So they really liked those stories. And one of the stories I like most about them, and this is the one that I put in the presentation as well, is the story of Judith, which is actually a biblical story from the Old Testament. And Judith was this woman who, her city was besieged by General Holofernes. And no one was doing anything about it. And Judith went to the tent of the general. He was drunk. She seduced him and then she beheaded him. That’s actually a very horrific story. Now I’m telling it.
So they had this statue with a lot of stopping power, actually, because there is a woman and she is beheading a man. So this was in the middle of their garden where all the rich people came, where all the influencers came. They were... by seeing this, there was a plaque on the bottom of the statue telling the people, this is Judith, this is what she did, and she is a bit like us, because we also freed the city. So they used all these stories of Hercules, of the Sabine women, of Judith, to remember the people that they were the ones who freed the city. The funny thing is, however, when other people took over Florence, they used the same statue and just changed the inscription on it. They said, the Medici are like Holofernes and we decapitated them. Right. The Medici, of course, they came back and they put the statue again in the middle of the square with another inscription: We freed the city from the revolutionaries, whatever it was. So yeah.
Andrew Mitrak: The danger of how you position your enemy is that later you could be positioned as the enemy by your replacement.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yeah.
Recontextualizing Art: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith
Andrew Mitrak: And on Judith slaying Holofernes, I was always more familiar... when I took art history class, this one, the Artemisia Gentileschi, I think painting of this one. And I always find it interesting to see the same scene compared in two different ways, right? The Donatello statue Medici one. It’s big, it’s public, it’s proud of it. And this one, it’s this painting, it’s happening kind of in darkness and it seems almost more secretive when it happened. And it’s funny to just kind of compare similar scenes and how they’re represented.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: But I get the chills when I see this painting. Because this painting was painted by Artemisia Gentileschi. And she paints a completely different Judith than all the others did. Because actually, if you want to know, and this might be a triggering subject, the guy that Judith is beheading here is actually a portrait of the guy who raped Artemisia Gentileschi when she was younger. So this is not a biblical story. This is a true story, or at least how it happened in the head of Artemisia Gentileschi.
Andrew Mitrak: Oh wow. I never knew that background to this. That brings a new perspective on it.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yeah, she is one of the biggest Baroque painters, and maybe the only female one we know of. And in a lot of her paintings, she brings a female perspective to a topic that was painted by a lot of men. So, but that’s going off topic, of course, but it’s...
Napoleon Bonaparte: Master of Public Relations
Andrew Mitrak: One of the other figures of history that you’ve spoken about or written about is Napoleon. And he is sort of a widely recognized figure in history. And I’m wondering what could Napoleon teach a modern marketer?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Also to learn from history. Because Napoleon also had himself coronated by the Pope as the Emperor. He brought in Pope, who was it, Pope Pius VII. I’m not sure. To witness him coronating himself. That was the big difference. But he brought in the Pope. So that’s one thing. So he took a trick from the old books. And he did that a lot. Because he brought in all the neoclassical style, like the Roman coding of power he did. So he used a lot of old coding of power. He used a Pope for his coronation. He also, and this I think is the most interesting thing, not the most interesting, but the thing that I find very interesting about him, is during the French Revolution, there was this painter, you might have heard of him, Jacques-Louis David. And he is the guy who painted the coronation of Napoleon. It’s a really big painting. It’s huge, it’s detailed, it’s amazing, it’s theatrical, it’s...
However, Jacques-Louis David was maybe the star entertainer of the moment. Having your portrait painted by Jacques-Louis David was like having your face on Person of the Year on the Time (magazine) cover. So that was the impact that that guy had. This guy was commissioned a lot by Napoleon. He painted Napoleon over eight times. A lot of people when they think of Napoleon, they see Napoleon on a stud riding his horse over the Alps with the big wavy cape in red in the background. That’s the image that a lot of people have of Napoleon. That was also painted by Jacques-Louis David. So he painted him over and over and over again.
And what was so interesting, why the Pope was there, and this is not confirmed by academics, this is just my thought. One year after the coronation of Napoleon, Jacques-Louis David painted Pope Pius VII. So that Pope that was there. So probably that was part of the deal. I’ll catch you on the cover of Time (magazine) if you attend my party.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. So there’s kind of who you choose to be painted by is another layer of status that a figure like Napoleon or the Pope in this case would think about. Is sort of obviously there’s a lot of stature, you’re an Emperor or you’re Pope, but even further cementing it is I’m being painted by the most popular artist of the day. And therefore kind of I’m assigned a certain stature. I’m trying to think of who the equivalent would be today. Like who you choose to have your portrait painted by or your photograph taken by. I guess there’s Annie Leibovitz or somebody like that.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: But maybe you should take it in modern ways. It’s not having your portrait painted by, but maybe imagine having your biopic done by Ridley Scott. Or Steven Spielberg doing your biopic, you know?
Andrew Mitrak: Although I don’t think Ridley Scott’s biopic was the most flattering or frankly even the best movie he’s done.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, there were statues made by Napoleon trying to flatter him that he had destroyed or put away in closets and stuff like this. There’s a lot more artwork of Napoleon going around that he didn’t want us to see.
Investigating the Money Behind the Masterpieces
Andrew Mitrak: So you said that when you stand in front of a painting, you’re asking different questions. You’re asking who paid for this? Why did they pay for this? And so could you talk about, we were talking about the artists behind the paintings, but could you talk about the money behind the paintings and sort of what were the motivations of patrons and how is that akin to funding a marketing campaign?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yeah. So when you are standing in front of a painting that is like a murder scene or something, then it’s a very healthy question to answer who wanted this made and who wanted to have this above the fireplace. Because by today’s standards, that would not fly. Your wife would say, “Andrew, no, we will not have this above the fireplace.” Right? So that’s the kind of dialogue that goes around in my head when I look at a painting that has a big murder scene. But I made a little series about horrific paintings and who wanted them painted and why. And Spanish kings were very good at collecting horror paintings and that had more to do with telling people something about yourself. Like if you believed in violence, because the stories you pick are the ones that you associate with. So people would see, damn, this guy, Philip IV, I think, he had Rubens paint Jupiter devouring his son. Why would you want to have that? It’s about power, it’s about destroying future power, it’s about punishment, it’s about all that. You don’t mess with a guy who hangs that above his fireplace. And he had this hunting lodge and it was full of these horrific paintings. Just telling the people that came into his place, this is how I look at punishment, this is how I look at power, and this is how I look.
Andrew Mitrak: Was this the Goya one, the Goya with Saturn devouring his son, or was this a different one?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: No, no, no. The Goya one was painted for private reasons because he was a bit mad. It’s the Rubens one. The Goya one is true horror. Rubens is still better actually, I guess.
Andrew Mitrak: That is pretty horrific too. But yeah, that is funny because when you think of Rubens, this is not what you think of, right? You think of full-figured women and happier scenes than this. I guess there is eating in this one, so there is that.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yeah, that’s true. But there’s also, this was Baroque time, right? So it was stopping power, shocking people, and whatever it took to get people’s attention was okay. Naked women, cannibalism, it was all good.
Andrew Mitrak: And just for comparison, the Goya one is also truly horrific. When I’m sharing these, sometimes art history really takes you to very dark places.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: It does. And that’s maybe why it’s good to ask why it was painted. You know, about, I think, there is this painting by Caravaggio. It is David beheading Goliath.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: And the reason why he painted that was because he wanted to get pardoned for a murder he did by a cardinal. So he painted that as a gift for a cardinal to get pardoned. And actually, he uses his own head. So the head of Goliath is actually a self-portrait of Caravaggio. And on the knife, there is an inscription on humbleness. So this was painted as an apology for a man in power. So imagine if you’re one of the most popular painters of the time to get something from a cardinal, a pardon, you send him a biblical story in this format.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. So if I’m ever in trouble as a marketer, I’ll see if I can do a marketing campaign for someone. You make a free campaign to get out of it. I’ll feature you on my podcast. I don’t know if that will work. I’ve got to get more sway.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: They need to pardon you. Yeah.
The Separation of Art and Commerce
Andrew Mitrak: So one of your arguments that you talked about is how the separation of art and commerce is actually sort of a recent invention, that it’s only from the last hundred or 200 years maybe that most of art history that art was commercial and that there’s a very clear relationship between the patron and the artist and the commercial nature of the art. So when did you come to this realization that for most of human history that art was a marketing department, so to speak?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, it becomes very obvious, for instance, during the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. When painters like Cranach the Elder was painting biblical stories but from this reformist point of view for Martin Luther, right? And you see a completely different way of looking at things like Adam and Eve or a completely different interpretation of the Three Graces, stuff like this. And then it goes back to Rubens again, who was a Counter-Reformist, and he paints it completely different, the same story, and when the same story gets told in a very different way, then there is someone who wants to sway you in one way or the other. So this is just one example of when it becomes very obvious you can put two times the same theme together right next to each other, and it becomes a completely different story because another brand is telling the story, the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation.
So that’s one thing. But it’s just like what I told you before with Judith or with Charlemagne, it’s all been marketing. It was the biggest visual thing that you could hang somewhere. People would look at it, you could tell a story about it, it was a conversation starter. So it had attention, and where there was attention, there are people wanting to do something with that. When there is a point in time where art freed itself from advertising in a way, or from marketing or branding in a way, I think that was at the point of the Secessionists in the turning of the 19th into the 20th century. You had artists in Munich, in Berlin, in Vienna, in Paris, in Brussels, and they were kind of fed up with how the powerful, the kings and the princes and the regents, were actually deciding what was art and what was not. And they wanted to paint because everyone was commissioned by those people. So you could only paint what you were commissioned for to paint at that point, or you could only show what the prince allowed you to show in the salons of that time. So you had the Munich Secessionists, the Vienna Secessionists, and the Berlin Secessionists, and they basically made a new business model around art because they lost their funding. They made a new business model, and that’s actually the point in time when art freed itself a lot from branding influences. But anything before that, the person who paid for it had a motive. And that motive was a lot of the time in the statue or in the painting or even in the architecture.
Addressing Skeptics: Is connecting art history and modern marketing too much of a stretch?
Andrew Mitrak: I’m sure there are listeners who’ve enjoyed this conversation like, oh, that’s really interesting perspectives on art, but maybe they’re still a little skeptical. Like, is this really marketing? Is it a bit of a stretch to call that marketing? Have you ever encountered anybody who pushed back on this or said, this is all interesting, Peter, I like your ideas, but marketing requires a market. And this is pre-capitalism, this is pre-mass production, and that there’s something different about a patron funding a work of art prior to that era versus somebody commissioning an advertisement today. Maybe there’s lessons, but it’s just too much of a stretch. Like, have you ever encountered that or how would you respond to somebody who had that perspective?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, I have not encountered that question, but probably people were thinking that. A lot of people. First of all, I would always say don’t take it too serious, it’s a game you play in your head and you can learn a thing or two from the game that you’re playing in your head. So don’t take it too serious. But on the other hand, the need, like I said, marketing is one of the oldest professions. Even before capitalism, there were moments when people needed to gain trust of other people to get something done. Like the Tapestry of Bayeux, when William the Conqueror was taking over England, he did not spit out the Anglo-Saxons that were already having thriving businesses there. He embraced them. And actually, when you look at the tapestry, you would think that they would make fun of the enemy. No, no, no, the Anglo-Saxons are very much respected in the tapestry. So that’s kind of proof that this is a piece that was there to sway people into your way of thinking, into your direction actually. So as long as someone had to influence masses to get something done, I think this counts as branding. And this could count as marketing. Even though there was not a market, then it will have another word. Then call it public relations, which is basically maybe also fits in the marketing realm, right?
Andrew Mitrak: No, that’s right. I think it’s public relations. I think there is sort of a funny line when I did my episode on this man named Edward Bernays. He wrote a book called Propaganda and he also coined the term public relations counsel. Or, sorry, counsel on public relations. And he kind of popularized, I’m not sure if he invented the term public relations, but he definitely cemented and popularized public relations and sort of positioned it against propaganda. But there is a very fine line between the two. And if I was to think of the political advertisements of this, most of the ones that you cite are somebody in power cementing their power and reclaiming their power. But it’s different than when you think of a political ad today, like vote for me because I want the power, right? It’s more of an asking permission for the power, it’s helping anoint me to the power, and I guess it’s sort of pre-democracy somewhat, or sort of pre-political campaigns as we think of them today. So I’m sure there were political ads that were older, but it seems like a lot of them are more an authority figure confirming their authority, sort of persuading the masses so otherwise I don’t have to use violence to persuade you and less of used on their rise to power to build consensus.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Or think of Napoleon who basically promised Pope Pius VII to be on the cover of Time magazine if he attended his coronation. So Napoleon also needed funds for his wars and people also needed to pay for those wars. So a lot of what he was doing was campaigning to get the power as well, but it had a bit of a different mechanism.
The Dangerous Myth of Progress
Andrew Mitrak: One of the essays that I think encapsulates maybe not your entire worldview, but a certain perspective that you bring is this dangerous myth of progress. I think this is something we fall into a lot, where, and this might be why marketing history is underappreciated by modern marketers, is that we think, “Oh, we’re so wise and know so much more today, and people back then, they have nothing to show us.” And so I think this essay really resonated with me. Can you talk about the dangerous myth of progress?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yes. It’s a big topic, because it’s also a dangerous topic. Because it’s all based on John Gray, which is a British political philosopher. And he just claimed that there is no such thing as human progress. We’re not better than the people in history. We’re just the same, in his words would be the same barbaric animals. We have lust and everything we do is motivated on lust, on gaining power, and this is John Gray’s way of putting it. It’s a very pessimistic way. I find it easier, I accept the idea that there is no such thing as real progress. I think that we are exactly the same human beings like our ancestors. I’m a romantic and I believe that people fall in love and people want to be loved and those are very strong drivers for people to do stuff, to get together, to make groups and stuff like that. So I also believe that, by just the idea that those people in history were just as complex as us, we don’t throw away history just like that. We don’t think of medieval people as people who were praying all day and being dirty all day. No, they also wanted to be someone and they also wanted to express themselves. They’re just as complex as you and me, which makes you look different at the people in history, which that strategic thinking was not invented in the 50s. It’s way older. It’s just a pair of glasses you put on, look at history like this, and then you start learning because those are just not previous versions of what we are. We are not the beta to their alpha, they’re the same. We’re just the same but we have Google and we have OpenAI.
Andrew Mitrak: And so the idea is that technology compounds, our ideas compound on each other. There are things that grow, there are systems that grow, there’s culture that grows. But we as individuals are sort of born at square one and have the same fundamental flaws or the same underlying desires that somebody from a previous era has.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yes. And John Gray would then argue that everything compounds. So we might have better health, we might live longer because of science. But then again, in the year 1000, there was no way to push on a button and to kill an entire city of people. So not only our wisdom compounds, but also our ways to destroy compounds as well. So to him that’s a bit of an equalizer. And maybe that’s why he has more of a pessimistic view on the whole thing.
Embracing the Messy Reality of Human Nature
Andrew Mitrak: I think that part of this myth could describe why marketing becomes more sterilized and almost too reliant on data, that maybe we think of consumers as rational actors, that we optimize for efficiency, and that sometimes we forget that human nature is irrational, it’s messy, we have desires, we want meaning, we want connection. And some of that gets lost. And is that kind of why you partly bring up this idea of, because when you look at some of the examples of artwork we’ve seen, they’re so primal, right? They’re violent, they’re lustful, there’s naked people, you know, there’s all these things. And...
Peter Van Wijnaerde: And that’s a bit of a different thing. But as soon as you start to embrace the fact that good things are messy, the world becomes way more beautiful. I was going through this personal crisis, I think, walking through Berlin and I went to the Berlin Wall. I’ve been in Berlin, I cannot count how many times I’ve been in Berlin. But at that point I was, no, no, Peter, you’re going to walk to Checkpoint Charlie, you’re just going to look at it. And there it struck me that I was very angry about all the noise in the news that I hear every day and all the opinions that you read everywhere, even about marketing, about our profession. It’s going to be ruined because of this and it’s going to be ruined because of that. And then I thought, like, you’re standing at Checkpoint Charlie and then you know that when you’re standing on the US side of Checkpoint Charlie, you know you’re standing on the good side. That’s what we learned to think, and that’s still true. You’re standing on the side where you are free, and that’s the noisy side. When you step over and you cross the no man’s zone and you go to the other side, that’s the silent side. And we think that peace should be silent. But peace is messy. We think that people should be structured, but people are messy. They have desires, it’s what drives them.
And as soon as you start looking at people as messy beings, then it becomes way more fun. You don’t look at people as a data set. That’s, I guess, it helps when you’re looking at a lot of people at the same time. But in most cases, you’re making a billboard not to address a thousand people, you’re making a billboard to address that guy in that moment or that woman in that moment. And it should appeal to them, and then it should also appeal to their lowest common denominator. Like, what is it that drives these thousand people? And that’s going to be something very primal. And that’s also the same with art history. You see cannibalism, you see naked flesh, you see the things that attract our eyes. We are attracted to two things. Pure biologically, we’re attracted to beautiful things, and we’re attracted to horror because when somebody yells “tiger”, you better pay attention and run, right? And that’s about it. And that’s why I think that primal is good, and messy is good, and this idea that we are progressed does not help us a lot, I think.
Andrew Mitrak: Well, thanks for talking about that visualization of being at Checkpoint Charlie and going from point A to B. I only visited Berlin for the first time in my twenties, but I remember when I first learned about the Berlin Wall, probably early in high school, I think. So I was probably 14 or 15 years old.
And when I saw pictures of it or I saw a video of it or I saw slide projectors in class and that there was a side with all the graffiti on it, where all the people had spray painted, and I thought, “Oh gosh, that was their side.” Then I learned, “No, that was our side. That was the side of freedom.”
That was probably the first time that I realized, “Oh yeah, that graffiti, that messiness, that thing that’s undesirable at times, that’s a sign of freedom and liberty and personal choice.” For all of the downsides of that, I think it’s still the choice that I’d make. I choose to live in, and the place I’d prefer to be is the side that has some of those downsides where people can spray paint a wall and not get executed for it. And that’s good.
I think that was among the memories I have in a classroom, probably among the bigger ones that actually stuck with me in a way. So I think it’s an important, instructive lesson somewhere.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: I remember also next to Checkpoint Charlie, there is a McDonald’s. And the other day I would think, “Did they really have to put a McDonald’s here?” But I think that’s the most important McDonald’s there is in Europe. So I went in and I got myself a burger, and I think it was the best burger ever.
Andrew Mitrak: You know, there is something about McDonald’s. McDonald’s in Europe are usually actually a little nicer than the ones in the US. Because I’ve gone to a McDonald’s close to midnight and had a coffee in Europe, and you don’t do that here. Pulp Fiction has a whole riff on that.
Applying Art History to Modern Marketing Campaigns
Andrew Mitrak: You personally, aside from your Substack, which is great, have you applied this historical perspective to your work? Are there pieces of art history or broader themes that you as a marketer or as an advertising person have brought to your commercial work that you can speak to?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: I think yes. I bring it up every day, I guess, because we work with a lot of people that bring in all the modern stuff, and I like to be a bit of a contrary. So I bring in the old stuff. And I will be the one that addresses that this is people first. That we should be talking, if you make an ad, are we listing the features, or then I’m going like, “Maybe we should talk about the aspirations of the people, and what are the aspirations of the people?” That’s one side, the subject you talk about, this is what you bring in from the old. What you also bring in from the old is make sure you keep having stopping power. Because if you would look at some people, they would put three USPs with a little V sign next to it. It has no stopping power. So what you also learn by looking at art is that you look for stopping power. So inherently it’s been baked in always. But I remember it was before Corona somewhere, I was working on a campaign to promote the Masters of Belgium, and those are Peter Paul Rubens, Jan van Eyck, and Hieronymus Bosch. Which is technically not a Belgian, but at least a lot of paintings in Belgium. And I was trying to promote Rubens museums and places where you can see Rubens in Belgium on Facebook. But my campaign got banned by Facebook because of nakedness on there.
Taking on Facebook: The Rubens Museum Campaign and “Titty Riot”
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Andrew, I got so angry. I remember I was in a meeting with the client, and it was the third time that we had to report no results because Facebook kept banning our campaigns for Rubens. And I got so angry, and I remember in the meeting just saying, “You know what we need? We need a titty riot.” In Dutch I said “tittenrel,” which is basically a titty riot. “Guys, we need a titty riot, and we’re going to do it.” And I took my stuff, I stepped out, and that was that meeting. A few weeks later we were at the office, we were like, “Okay, now we need to think of something.” And we thought of a campaign. Basically very simple because we were angry, right? We wanted it to be very simple. If you had a Facebook account, we banned you from certain rooms in our museums where there was naked people. If you were an American, you were banned. If you had a Facebook account, you were banned. Because according to your rules that you signed, this is inappropriate, you shouldn’t be looking at it. And we made videos of that. There was even an old woman flashing her boobs out of protest against the gatekeepers of the room. That really happened. And we released that video.
We made a statement with the museums, and Fox News picked it up. They actually sent a delegation to Belgium. We talked about it, and the rules were changed about naked paintings on Facebook. So I think that’s the closest that art and my daily job came together at that point.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s incredible. That’s a great example. By the way, this podcast has a clean rating, so I have to bleep. With Rory Sutherland, I bleeped a lot of his profanities. I’m going to keep in “titty riot” though. I’m going to see whether “titty riot” gets us an explicit rating or not.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Sorry for the profanity.
Andrew Mitrak: That story though also is just incredible, that you kind of take something where nothing creates scarcity or gives you more desire than saying you can’t come in, and turning what could have been a failure into a big public relations win, and actually a great content win, and actually changing Facebook’s policies, which is a pretty rare thing to do. That’s just incredible. So that’s great. I was thinking though of when you bring in, if you’re riffing on ideas with other people on an advertisement, on a campaign, sometimes I feel old school bringing up the Pepsi Challenge or a campaign from 20 to 50 years ago. Or I feel very old school if I bring up a David Ogilvy quote or something. But I imagine you sometimes bringing up medieval art as a reference point in a brainstorming session and getting strange looks from your colleagues. I’m just wondering if those kinds of things ever come up.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: They are quite used to that. They are quite used to me. I also know, I have developed a skill that I can quickly see when people’s eyes are glossing over when I’m doing another of the medieval stories, yes.
Why Marketers Ignore History and Chase Trends
Andrew Mitrak: So I think we have a lot in common that we’re both unusual for marketers. I think we both take different types of looks at history and marketing and certainly try to learn from the past. But the industry overall is very obsessed with what’s trending at this moment right now. Most marketers don’t look to history. In fact, as I was making this podcast, one of the reasons I made it is that there wasn’t really one that was a podcast dedicated on marketing history. And I also do love what’s recent, but the fact is there’s a thousand podcasts or more just about marketing and artificial intelligence. And it’s a topic that I like, I just think that it’s so saturated that it would be difficult to break through. And I thought let’s look at history, because it’s important and nobody’s talking about it. But why do you think it is that nobody talks about it? Why do you think it is that we’re rare for marketers? What could it be?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, first of all, the marketeers are the weird people here. Because if you look at the non-fiction book sales, history is always on top of it. Not like number one, but like for sure number three, number four. People just love history. And it’s just marketeers that don’t, I guess. So we are not the weird ones, we’re actually the normal ones, and all the other marketeers are weird. Let’s just agree on that.
Andrew Mitrak: On that point actually, Apple for 2025 named a podcast called The Rest Is History as their number one podcast of the year. And it’s a history podcast, right? A lot of people listen to podcasts. So you’re definitely right on that. Anyway, I didn’t mean to interrupt, but just wanted to reinforce your point.
The Shift to Digital Channels and the Loss of Historical Context
Peter Van Wijnaerde: So normal people love history. Marketeers are not normal people. And I think it’s normal, right? In the last 20 years, marketing has changed so much. So the internet came up, digital marketing came up. And marketeers were, instead of sitting next to your old creative director and learning from that guy, because sadly it was mostly a guy, learning from that guy how advertising worked, how it was to be appealing, how it was to be desirable, what people were desiring, right? So you would learn that skill from someone you were working with. But in the last 20 years, we were a bit distracted by learning about new channels and how to master those new channels. And there was new, new, new. First there was internet, then there was Facebook, then there was Twitter, then there was Instagram, then there was influencer marketing, which is basically, as we already agreed, a very old concept but that is happening again. So you have all these marketeers who actually just needed to handle a few channels, but a lot of thinking about people, and now they flipped it around. They have to think about channels. They have to think about technology. That’s one thing. It’s always the new thing, the new thing to follow. Also, marketeers are very biased to putting “new” on something. And putting “new” on it makes it important, right? Pay attention, this is new. And this is just how marketeers are trained to function in the last 20 years. And it’s not that it’s a bad thing. A lot of good things have come from it. A lot of things are more efficient now. But if you ask why marketeers are not busy with history, it’s that they’re always very busy with something that is possibly tomorrow or missing out on today. There is nothing more exhausting than trying to follow AI trends, right? But that’s what they are doing.
The Democratization of History and Storytelling
Andrew Mitrak: Sometimes I feel cautious about where I step as a historian because I don’t have academic credentials as a historian. And I in some ways am even more cautious than you are because I mostly just ask questions. I haven’t published too much of my own opinions on marketing history so much, at least not yet. But I’m always cautious to do so just because I know that there are academics out there who really study the history. And I don’t want to in some ways undermine their credentials or feel like anybody can be a historian. Because I don’t necessarily know if it’s true that anybody can be. But I guess I wonder if you have any feelings or thoughts on academia as gatekeepers of historical records and how you react to that, or why you felt brave enough to say, “Hey, I’m just going to step out and talk about history and that’s fine.” What’s your overall perspective on this?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: History is something, if you live where I live, I live in a medieval city called Ghent. History, first of all, is everywhere. So you grow up with history. There is a medieval castle in the center of my town. And you know that little boys, they all adore knights and fights with knights on horses and all that stuff. Well, we had the set for that in the middle of the city. So first of all, that’s already something different, that you like grow up with history. That’s one thing. So history is not just a thing that lives in books, it’s a thing that lives around you. However, academics are very boring because they list facts. And that’s good. There should be someone who’s listing facts. But the problem with facts is as soon as you start chaining facts, you create a story. And it becomes a curation of facts becomes a story. And there is this old saying that history is written by the victors. That was kind of happening. That was happening all of the time. Now today, thank you Google, thank you the internet, everyone has access to research papers. Everyone has access to a lot of stuff. Also, a lot of people who studied history have a place to tell their story. They’re not in dark rooms anymore with a lot of dust. No, they can tell their story on the internet and they have been doing that. So people have been chaining these facts into more interesting stories. And when only academics are doing it, you get a very clean version of history, which is true. But for instance, did you know that Belgium, where I live, once had a king that was a bigger monster than Adolf Hitler? A lot of people don’t know about it. At least, I never learned about it in school. I only learned about it maybe 10 years ago. That’s maybe being very generous to myself, maybe it was only five years ago. When other people who were not in the dusty rooms, but people of minorities were doing their own research in history, and they had means to make those stories popular. And telling them, “Hey guys, we have a very dirty colonial history in Belgium and we should know about this.” So this is not to roast the people at the academies, but this is just to tell that more people can tell the stories now based on the facts. Because whatever you do, it should be true. You can’t say that Jesus was sitting on a dinosaur, right? That’s just simply not true. But as long as you work with the facts, you can give parts of history that people were not thinking of. Just like what I did with you with the perspective on the Artemisia Gentileschi painting. By just giving you five more facts, your whole image of that painting changed.
Confronting Colonial History and the Power of Hidden Stories
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s right. You bring up Leopold II and sort of the Belgian Congo. It is something where I knew that story and I kind of knew it, but I had to look it up. Because I read Heart of Darkness back in the day. But in some ways that story hasn’t been told in the same way that resonates in the same ways that, say, so many stories about World War II. It’s sort of the defining global moment of the 20th century where that really influenced sort of the second half of the century’s media and art and film. And some of the best films of all time are World War II films or talk about The Holocaust. But because the stories that are written about the Congo, of course Heart of Darkness is a great work of literature, but it’s not sort of a popular book in the sense that even the adaptation of it is Apocalypse Now, which isn’t about the Belgian Congo, right? And not about Leopold II. So it’s kind of a story that because of the era or because of the documentation of it, or I don’t even know exactly why, it just hasn’t translated completely. But it just because the story is not told, people don’t know that history as well. So it is sort of incumbent on not just the fact-finders, but also the storytellers who can create something that really resonates with people, is that’s how the story becomes better known and how people better know their own cultural history.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: That more people can start telling history stories, and I think that’s amazing. That’s just more perspective on life.
The Future of History and Where to Find Peter’s Work
Andrew Mitrak: Any other thoughts on sort of the future of history?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: The future of history. You know what would be amazing? If let’s just assume that fact-checking will become more easy, and searching for facts will become more easy. Then I think a lot of history will be more personal. Because when people find themselves or recognize themselves in history, it gets a certain validation. “I’m here because I was always here,” or “I have a right to be here because I was always here,” you know? For instance, immigrants. History tells the story about the value of immigrants in a certain country. It validates them. So I think history can cure a lot in the future.
Andrew Mitrak: I think that’s a good note to wrap up on. Peter, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Where would you point people online to read more of your work?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: I would love it if they took the time to check my Substack. It’s peterVW.substack.com. That’s where I release my stories. They’re quite long sometimes. You have experienced that, but yeah.
Andrew Mitrak: They’re well-researched, well-articulated, and they’re full of great pictures as well.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: One of the things that I try to do on my blog since a year was never use artificial images, only art. And that’s a fun way because sometimes you have to look for a long time to find the right picture. But that’s also how I always get to the other subject that I want to write about.
Andrew Mitrak: Absolutely. That’s great. Well, yes, I will link to peterVW.substack.com in the blog that accompanies this post as well. So I hope listeners check it out. If you’ve listened to this podcast, I’m sure you’ll appreciate Peter’s work. So Peter, thanks so much. I had a lot of fun with this conversation, so I really appreciate your time.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Thank you. This was also for me a lot of fun to do.


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A History of Marketing / Episode 48
This week, I’m joined by Scott McDonald, who spent three decades in the research trenches of America’s biggest magazine publishers before becoming president of the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), an organization now celebrating its 90th year of trying to separate marketing science from marketing spin.
Scott led consumer research departments during the Golden Age of Magazines. His insights helped launch Martha Stewart Living, tripled The New Yorker’s subscription price, and he saw the internet disrupt the business model he’d spent years optimizing.
Along the way, he picked up insights that still resonate. Including:
* The Strength of Weak Ties: How a core sociological concept explains networking and provides a framework for go-to-market efforts.
* The Power of Print: Why Steve Jobs insisted that every new Mac launch campaign include an ad in Time Magazine.
* Cultivating Authentic Brands: Behind-the-scenes stories of using qualitative focus groups when launching Martha Stewart Living.
* Scientific Marketing via the ARF: Including the empirical rule that cutting your share of voice during a recession will reliably cost you market share.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Now here is my conversation with Scott McDonald.
Special Thanks:
Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
And thank you to Bill Moult, whom you may remember from episode 23 of this podcast, for introducing me to Scott.
Connecting Sociology with Marketing Research
Andrew Mitrak: You got your PhD in sociology from Harvard University, and then you got into a career in media and advertising. Sociology is such a fascinating topic. I always enjoyed my sociology classes in college. At a broad level, how did sociology influence your career?
Scott McDonald: Well, my interest in sociology went back to undergraduate days really, where I was mostly in the historical comparative wing of sociology and interested in social movements and things like that. And then when I graduated, I graduated from University of California, Berkeley and was totally broke by the time I got out of school. I needed a job. I went to the job board and found a job that involved program evaluation, just kind of project work, evaluating educational programs for the California Department of Education. And it ended up being quite fascinating because it was the first time I’d actually thought about how you would address structured applied problems using the skills of social science. So I cut my teeth on that, doing projects for the Department of Education, for Bay Area Rapid Transit, for all these sort of public entities. And that drove my desire to go to graduate school in sociology to learn the quant side, which I had not really studied as an undergraduate.
So that’s really the main throughline to the work that I’ve had in advertising and media because I approached it very much through a background in studying statistical modeling, pattern recognition. I was particularly interested in graduate school in demography. And so demography sits at the border between sociology and economics. There are other borders in anthropology and psychology and other things like that. But I was mostly interested in the border between sociology and economics. And that carried through, I’d say, through my entire business side career. But also I had really fallen in love with doing applied work as opposed to sitting around theorizing at a university. So I was much more receptive to those job offers.
And one came to me when I was just rehearsing for doing job talks, going around to campuses and presenting myself as a soon-to-be graduate of a PhD program. And quite randomly, a good example of the sociological theory of the strength of weak ties, that a job at Time (magazine) came up where they were looking for an academic social scientist to try to crack a problem that they found intractable. Because a guy at Sports Illustrated in the Time Inc. portfolio had gone to high school in Chicago with the wife of my thesis advisor. The weak tie led to the referral. I went to New York and hit it off and decided to move to New York and work for Time Magazine instead of joining the faculty at the University of Arizona as a starting tenure track professor.
Andrew Mitrak: Can you define more so the strength of weak ties? Like what is that idea? I haven’t actually come across it.
Scott McDonald: It was popularized as the six degrees of separation concept. That it isn’t so much who you know immediately, but it’s who people that you know know. That’s one degree of separation or two. So most jobs actually come to people through those kinds of referrals. Not exactly the person that I know, but someone else that I might be able to help them actually discover an interesting job. The exception usually in sociology is recent immigrants. Why do you have Haitian taxi drivers or Indian newsstand owners or something like that? Because their networks are small and they’re very specific to immigrant communities. But once you kind of move out of that, and of course universities themselves are super important as drivers of social networks, and they allow people to expand their networks a whole lot. There’s a whole field of economics now that has to do with the life chances that come to someone just as a function of whether they grow up in a well-networked place like say Austin or a poorly networked place like Waco. Geographically they’re not that distant, but they have very different social networks and different opportunity structures. So sociology, you know, again this is like demography, pattern recognition. When you think of the way that you would discover some of these theories and test them, they’re similar to analyzing the influence of say a magazine compared to a social media influencer. You can graph that stuff.
Andrew Mitrak: It sounds like a concept that’s really applicable to marketing in a lot of ways. And we tend to as marketers think of it as just social networking or your second-degree LinkedIn connections or your alumni network, or how you might build an audience through reaching out to influencers and connectors. But it seems actually useful to look at concepts from sociology that have probably studied this in a more rigorous way and come up with things like the strength of weak ties to frame some of your go-to-market efforts.
Scott McDonald: I’ve always thought of sociology as being very, very flexible partly because it overlaps with all these adjoining fields. And it’s always scrambling to try, it doesn’t have one unifying theory as economics does. It’s got a bunch of theories. So—
Andrew Mitrak: Sounds kind of like marketing.
Scott McDonald: It is, exactly. Exactly.
The Golden Era of Magazine Publishing
Andrew Mitrak: So you got to Time.
Scott McDonald: My first big post-graduating job.
Andrew Mitrak: And this was in the early 80s or so?
Scott McDonald: Yeah, 1982.
Andrew Mitrak: So what was the portfolio of Time magazines? Obviously everybody knows Time Magazine, and you mentioned Sports Illustrated...
Scott McDonald: Yeah, so the big moneymakers were the weekly magazines. It was Time, Sports Illustrated, and People (magazine). And they all made boodles of money. It was sort of the heyday of the magazine publishing industry. There were also a bunch of monthly magazines as well. And of course, Time Inc. owned a bunch of other things. Book of the Month Club, a publishing imprint. I forget exactly which ones they had, but they had a lot of things. And importantly, HBO. And so there was already kind of a media empire. They owned some cable systems and stuff like that. And then a couple years after I joined, they merged with Warner Communications, which brought them a movie studio, a music company, and a bunch of other of those assets, the Turner Broadcasting System, and CNN, and all that. So it became more and more of a media conglomerate while I was there. A very interesting place to work.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, we’ll talk about your time there, your work there, and how it evolved while you were there. But before we get into that, I thought this might be an opportunity to talk about magazines more broadly. You kind of called this the Golden Era of magazines. And they were such a huge part of American media and culture in the 20th century. And we haven’t really discussed magazines at all on this podcast aside from occasionally we reference an iconic ad that would have appeared in a magazine. And iconic ads are so critical to the medium of magazines. Do you have any thoughts on the rise of magazines in the 20th century and how it impacted the way brands marketed themselves?
Scott McDonald: Well, a lot of magazines are aspirational. And people kind of put themselves into that. Many are vertical. Time was an example of a fairly broad magazine, and it competed with other leading news sources. But it was much more in-depth than say what you would get from broadcast television news or something like that. Much more the middle-brow intellectual version of news. It wouldn’t be The Wall Street Journal necessarily, but something that was very, you know, they broke stories and competed in news. So a high-brow, well-heeled audience at a reasonable amount of scale that provided, say financial companies, any company that was trying to influence opinion would be a reasonable target. So like Microsoft when it launched, Apple Inc. when it launched. As a matter of fact, Steve Jobs always insisted that any new campaign had to include Time Magazine. So he was from a generation that viewed this as a super important, influential medium.
And magazines actually were that. They were criticized sometimes as being gatekeepers. Editors had a lot of power in setting agendas or anointing. I worked for Condé Nast. Vogue (magazine) is famous for anointing a new designer. Someone that Anna Wintour likes gets featured in Vogue and they’ve made it. It’s like they’re on the blotter. That’s less true now because you have competing sources of influence, but the appeal to advertisers in part was always that. And when you do consumer research, you would see that very often the readers of those magazines believed that the ads were really part of the value of the magazine. So a September Vogue was evaluated partly by how thick it was. Well, the thickness wasn’t editorial copy. It was a lot of ads for September Vogue, and consumers would actually think that Anna hand-selected the ads.
How Brands Measured ROI on Magazine Advertising
Andrew Mitrak: Can you take us behind the scenes of who are the players when it comes to marketers at a brand? Let’s say Apple, Steve Jobs wants his ads for a new Mac launch in Time Magazine. There’s Time, there’s the publisher, there’s advertising agencies, there’s Apple and the in-house company. What is sort of the relationship between how an ad actually gets into a magazine?
Scott McDonald: Okay. So the publishers, and of course since I worked for Time Inc. and then WarnerMedia and Condé Nast across 30 years, my view is a bit, the lens that I apply is from the publisher side more than anything else. Publishers very much wanted to have a direct relationship with the brand, with clients. And a lot of the communications were direct there. So at Condé Nast, I would go present directly to L’Oréal, for example, one of the bigger cosmetics advertisers for the house. And this was somewhat in conflict with the agencies. Agencies were supposed to be planning media across the board, but they often were really confined more to managing the television side and later on the digital buying. So the publishers preferred that because sometimes they didn’t compete with more mass media like TV on reach, but they were more influential. Very similar to what we look at research now, podcasts don’t usually have the same amount of reach as some other media, but they’re much more influential. They’re persuasive to the people who listen to them. And so they have a traction that is in some ways very reminiscent to me of what you would emphasize in conversations with publishers about the value, why they needed to be in Vanity Fair (magazine) or whatever.
Andrew Mitrak: How were the brands measuring their Return on investment on their magazine advertising? As we’ve looked at this era of marketing metrics and analysis, a lot of it tends to be around TV, and it feels like there was a lot more scanner panel data and things like that that were almost tied to television sets and stuff. But I haven’t actually heard it brought up on how it applied to magazines and such.
Scott McDonald: It was harder to justify magazines in terms of bottom-of-funnel metrics because they don’t work that fast. They are much more about building Brand equity and upper funnel. So the big studies of that era needed to take a pretty long timeframe. They needed to be in field for a year or more to actually be able to demonstrate the value, and the value often was a brand equity value. It wasn’t pushing product. Newspapers worked fast. You know, that form of print media, you’d have the inserts before the weekend. It was mostly promoting sales, so eroding your profit margin in the same way that other in-store promotions would, and ultimately undermining brand equity. The point of good magazine advertising was to build brand equity and pricing power.
So like a classic campaign that ran for over 20 years, the Absolut Vodka ad, was to me a great example of what’s different about print advertising compared to television or digital in most cases because it’s not interruptive. It works by invitation rather than shouting. It’s like, you want to put yourself in the picture? Oh, I want to be on that beach. I want to take that vacation. Or by being clever and witty, there’s a puzzle to solve. What have they done with that damn vodka bottle now? And, I mean, vodka is vodka, you know. But to be able to charge a couple of extra bucks because it’s Absolut is hugely valuable to that marketer. And so the game is a long-term game there. It’s not, and thus much harder to measure. And I think to the disadvantage of many advertisers that rely upon that kind of pricing power, it’s harder to sustain those forms of marketing these days because there is such a pull toward transactional bottom-of-the-funnel short-term metrics because they’re easier to measure. And they tend to be misattributed sometimes to shorter-acting forms of media that might have been, why did I search for that brand? But the search engine will get more credit than the advertising that made me type that brand’s name in the first place when I decided I wanted to buy something.
Driving Brand Equity and Subscription Growth
Andrew Mitrak: I want to come back to where we were in the story. You joined Time in the early 80s, and you continued to work at Time Warner and Condé Nast, and always in consumer research and insights leadership roles. And so what was your role in doing market research for major magazine publishers? Was it more looking at their own metrics, or was it looking at metrics for the advertisers, or what was your job there?
Scott McDonald: I set up the first consumer research department at Time Inc. And so the focus was almost exclusively on the demand side, on stimulating demand for magazines, working with the consumer marketing function and with the editors. And so a lot of work in magazine development, starting titles like Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple. Those were some of the ones that I worked on at Time Inc. And then there was a lot of magazine development work at Condé Nast as well, along with cover testing and developing forecasting models. You know, you have a couple different ideas for what you might run on the cover of Vanity Fair, which one will sell more. And so that was a key part there.
Condé Nast also had The New Yorker probably, a super influential magazine, one I still read all the time, very loyal to it. But the job there involved reducing its dependence on ad revenue and building up the consumer side of that business. So it really involved gradually getting people used to paying $150 a year for it instead of $50. And that was strategically vital to a magazine like The New Yorker, which isn’t a behemoth in terms of reach. And so it requires kind of a different mix in the business model. But yeah, at Condé Nast I had responsibility for the advertising side, but they hired me primarily because of my reputation doing work on the editorial and consumer side.
Andrew Mitrak: I make a lot of The Simpsons references on this podcast because I grew up watching The Simpsons. And I remember one of the first ways I ever heard of The New Yorker was a Simpsons joke where Marge is going through her mail and one of the envelopes was a rejection letter from The New Yorker subscription department. And I was basically a little kid, I was like, I didn’t even know what The New Yorker is.
And I looked it up like, oh yeah, seems like it’s this magazine for rich smart people. And it’s funny to think of how a magazine sort of segments itself. The New Yorker is different than Time, but there are some overlaps, right? That Time is on every newsstand, it has broader reach, it seems like it’s more ubiquitous, and The New Yorker wants to be big and everybody wants to know the name, but not everybody necessarily reads it or pays for it or subscribes to it. And I guess can you speak to the different approaches you had for how growing market share and maintaining market share for a very large widely circulated publication versus increasing the brand equity and justifying price increases and higher subscription costs for a more niche publication like The New Yorker?
Different Approaches to Managing Print Media Brands
Scott McDonald: Well, to some extent, I mean, some of it really is respecting the editors that you’re working with and trying to find a way to help them with the particular problems that they face. So a demand problem for Time (magazine) really involves something like newsstand. The New Yorker didn’t depend upon newsstand sales; it was a subscription magazine. So it’s partly just kind of understanding the differences in those businesses. And Time was probably in more need in some ways of the kind of research help that I could make because it did depend on newsstand sales. And that’s something where the forecasting tools can be of greater use and a testing program, particularly if you’re out every week, you get a lot of data points that you can then reconcile to how it actually sold and refine your forecasts.
So, but then a whole lot of times there’s a lot of news that happens. It’s not debatable what will be on the cover. It’s like what was the big story of the week. So your point of influence is more a slow news week where there’s what we would lovingly call a thumb sucker article. Just something that’s a bigger, in-depth piece that’s been cooking for a while and they’re looking for the right opportunity to run it. And for those they would really want to know some, it’s risk management. Like, how much will this appeal to people?
Andrew Mitrak: Did the business interests of increasing reach of say Time Magazine for instance influence editorial decisions as like who would be on the cover? Because I could imagine that there might be certain figures that you put that person on and it’s more likely to buy news, more people will buy it, right? Or you might have data like, oh when we put handsome people on the cover, we get more than... Did that ever...
Scott McDonald: It always is the editor’s choice. I’m just giving information. So there never was pressure from the corporation to, you know, just do what Scott says. It wouldn’t work well. It wouldn’t be good for the working relationship with the editors. It’s their remit. And so the principle of church and state was pretty much intact all the way along, and that would be, that wasn’t something that it was useful to challenge.
But there’s a lot of financial, a lot at stake. Or at least there was during that golden era. I mean the advent of this thing, completely changed the game because attention moved entirely to the phones. It hasn’t really left there yet. And people were no longer killing time at a checkout stand kind of browsing a magazine rack to figure out something to amuse themselves for the three minutes, the 2.7 minutes that they were in line waiting to be checked out at the grocery store. Yeah, so the forecasting became less valuable as newsstand just as a category declined.
Surprising Insights From Magazine Cover Testing
Andrew Mitrak: Are there any general insights or truisms that you’d be able to share about what are the markers of like, say who’s on the cover of a magazine and like this type tend to lead to a larger spike? Like what’s the type of insight you would share with an editor that they would choose to use or ignore or...
Scott McDonald: I’d say the things that are sort of durable truths, they didn’t need me for. I mean, put a Kennedy on the cover of People (magazine) and you’re going to sell. You can still, you can run JFK’s assassination 40 years later and it’s still going to sell. So I mean they don’t need me. They know that. But of course, if People magazine does this all the time, it’s not a good thing. They’ve got to find new things. So and Princess Diana, same thing. So there are cover subjects that for People or Vanity Fair (magazine) are pretty timeless.
The I’d say the better examples would be the ones that were surprises. Where they had some other strong options, but there would be a surprise that came out that they wouldn’t have automatically assumed. And so a test that would highlight that would encourage an editor to take a chance on something. And this would be true even for just an unusual shot that doesn’t look like the usual cover of Vogue (magazine). So a model or an actress in an unusual yoga pose or something, would be, or pregnant. Just something that is startling and feels a bit like a risk. And then you give the editor some idea of what is the level of risk and the probability of success for something that is out of box. And so I think it was used more for encouraging innovation and risk-taking than moving always back to something that was kind of a hardy perennial or too predictable.
Andrew Mitrak: So there were the truisms that were obvious, the JFKs and Princess Diana’s of the media. And then the things that were non-obvious that were unique insights that you were providing, were those sort of more temporal where you do that trick and then it sort of fades? I’m kind of almost likening it to people who analyze what’s trending on TikTok and social media trends and sort of seeing what are the types of stories that are this week. But you can’t, you kind of gotta hop on it now and it’s, this isn’t necessarily useful advice five years from now. Was it kind of like that type of thing?
Scott McDonald: One example I can think of from Vanity Fair was Heath Ledger. So it was like a year after he died. And they put him into the mix on a cover test. It wasn’t my idea, it was the editor’s idea, but it was against some other things that going into the test you plausibly would say, well these other ones have a pretty good chance as well. There’s no particular reason to think that people are still that interested in Heath Ledger. But they were, and it was quite evident. Now doing it a year later, it probably wouldn’t be the same. So these are kind of timestamped and the value of them is in being able to do that probe at the moment and fit it to a model where you’ve got other data on other covers and you’ve studied the competition and you know what their newsstand sales were. And so you can get that data back from the distributor. So you’re able to build a more sophisticated model because you’ve accumulated more data. And it was all great until the whole newsstand business collapsed in response to this more transformative launch of a smartphone and major change in consumer behavior. It’s part of what interests us right now on AI of course, and trying to get an early bead on this next transformative change.
Building Martha Stewart’s Brand with Consumer Research
Andrew Mitrak: I’m going to ask you about the smartphone and the internet and AI. I have one more magazine question before I do though. Because you mentioned Martha Stewart Living. And I think Martha Stewart might be one of the greatest marketers of all time. And I actually haven’t discussed her that much on this show yet. And just that there’s a magazine title with somebody’s name, Martha Stewart Living, there’s not that many of those. It’s not that, and to build a whole, and it seems like a unique thing at the moment to build a whole magazine around her brand. And do you have any stories of the creation of Martha Stewart Living or what was that about?
Scott McDonald: It was fun. The most fun part of it really was doing qualitative work, we did Focus groups with Martha in the back room. And it was of a genre of qualitative research where we decided that we really wanted to study the fans. So like this had worked very well for Warner Bros., so my confreres out at the Warner Bros. Studio, had this property Superman, that had been kind of damaged by this campy TV series in the 60s. And it wasn’t, they wanted to bring out a Superman movie that really worked, and they did it by studying the hardcore fans of the comic, of the original thing. So that was the approach with, and they managed to succeed in reviving the franchise for the movie.
That was our approach with Martha Stewart, we really tried to identify the people that just loved her. And that we studied what was authentic about Martha. So my favorite exercise from it was asking Martha to just from her, come from her house in Westport and bring us some stuff that’s in her house, that we mixed in with other things that were expensive, or utilitarian. I was like gardening gloves, or a little trowel, or just stuff that from her house, random stuff, compared to other stuff. And we threw it all on the table and asked people to pick out which things were Martha’s and why they thought that. And they could do it. They could do it. They understood her taste, some of which might be Shabby chic, but it was her taste and they were spot on. And it kind of helped the editors because here was a situation where Martha hadn’t made a magazine before, so she’s contracting with Time Inc. to boot up this magazine. And she’s got some professionals in magazine design and editors and things like that that she’s working with, but it’s a new venture. And that really helped to refine understanding of what the secret sauce was and this sort of passion for Martha. And I think it was a good example of, again trying to provide some information, but respectfully. I’m not a magazine editor, and you just set up the occasion as an opportunity to understand and refine the description of that brand and what’s the flavor of that magazine.
Andrew Mitrak: Right. Yeah, it seems like part of the core insight is really doubling down on the core fan base because if you’re making a magazine, you could sort of take it in different directions. And you can expand, if you have a lot of pages to fill, you could sort of dilute it and add a lot more stuff in. But instead, be like no, let’s really focus on what does this core group care about and try to get it to be the essence of Martha.
Scott McDonald: You know, and it’s interesting too because as we discussed before, the ads in a magazine are a pretty important signal of who’s in the room, who’s allowed into this club. So if you’ve got tasteless ads in a Martha Stewart Living or in any Condé Nast publication, you’ve got a problem. And it’s an editorial problem. I remember once at Condé Nast, the corporate sales department did a big deal with McDonald’s. And they ran McDonald’s in like all of the Condé Nast publications. And we got consumer complaints. “This doesn’t belong in my magazine. How dare you.” So there is an interesting balance that takes place that just has to do with the signaling about what’s appropriate for this particular environment.
The Early Days of the Internet
Andrew Mitrak: When did you first realize that the internet was going to be a big deal?
Scott McDonald: Right off the bat. The World Wide Web itself, which became I know was invented in 1989, but the first real operational browsers and effective implementation of the Web was in ‘95. And it immediately created a sensation, even though we were dealing with 300 baud modems and screeching sounds and all this stuff. Just the reality of having that amount of sort of global access to all these documents, was very bewildering. And for about four or five years, there was just a whole lot of experimenting taking place across all media.
Time Warner at that point had already been investing in Broadband and trying to pilot Video on demand. So they basically switched video systems, and it was they were too early. The technology was too expensive still, but I got to sort of play around with that. But there was recognition that something big was afoot, and people just didn’t know exactly what to do about that. And that was, that was a pretty fun ride.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I imagine. It’s quite a ride. And so as a publisher, as the internet comes along, you know it’ll be a big deal, how does that impact your role as a researcher?
Scott McDonald: In some ways it led to just some interesting new things I had to figure out how to do. So again, because I came out of academia, I would constantly look back to see how certain methods, for example, for doing analysis and or forecasts, might apply in this situation. So my job at Time Warner kind of morphed into trying to understand the internet and the effect it would have on businesses. And so part of what I was doing was studying like what there’s a lot of complexity and chaos and difficulty finding things, and there were no good Search engines. So you’d start studying how people were actually using the available tools, AltaVista for example. And so it introduced me a lot to usability testing, user interface diagnostics, because internally people were designing things like more complex remote controls for TV for cable systems. And for proliferating channels of content. You’d start studying the dynamics of search and what led to satisfaction with a search result or not.
Time Inc. was experimenting with a satellite model that said, okay, we’re going to provide simplification, kind of like what AOL was at the beginning, where it was simplified into some aggregate content areas and you relied upon AOL or Time Inc. to filter all this stuff and make it simpler to find things because you’d aggregated content into kind of a hub. And part of my frustration was I wasn’t able to effectively convince the management of Time Warner that that was a mistake, and that that wasn’t actually going to win. That people wanted, they liked the freedom of all of those of being able to pull in documents from everywhere, and they didn’t really place enough value in that filtering design and structure. So Google would win. And as soon as Google showed up, Google didn’t even have a business model yet, but it was clear from day one when you’re studying that space that this is a significantly better search result. And you could see immediately that this is where Time Warner should be focusing its attention and not Pathfinder or something like that that was. Or, and it was the AOL deal, when that was announced, the merger with AOL, that was when I decided I was going to leave Time Warner. Because it seemed to me to be completely contrary to what I’d been learning.
Andrew Mitrak: Seems to have been a prescient choice.
Scott McDonald: Yeah, personally it was fine. I had a lot of options that became very valuable in that transaction and I could exercise them and walk away a happy camper. But it seemed like a very bad business proposition.
From the Walled Garden to The Open Web
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, for sure. And it seems like the Time Warner AOL merger and sort of their Walled garden approach as opposed to sort of embracing the open Internet it seems like it also kind of ties back to their own business interests in being gatekeepers. And that if there weren’t gatekeepers that has sort of knock-on effects that might be bad for the publishing industry that sort of played out over the next couple decades.
Scott McDonald: It’s the Innovator’s dilemma.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, exactly. Did publishers start to see the writing on the wall there or when did that, when did because I’m sure there was a moment where the internet’s like, hey this is a huge opportunity, this is more, you know, free distribution, we don’t have to pay for paper, things like that. But then there seems to be like, oh but what if anybody can blog and what if people stop going through the gatekeepers? Like when did that turn or did you see that turn?
Scott McDonald: That was more in the 2000s. So it was really when I was at Condé Nast, and Condé Nast was wrestling with the same issues. In some ways it had a pretty big portfolio of brands, but it ended up pruning those to the most distinctive brands that could be defended and that could operate as digital properties on a global scale. So they kind of shifted scale and integrated their international, like they used to license Vogue (magazine) in a bunch of different countries, and they kind of consolidated and it became a global brand more. And would be sold, the advertising would be sold on a different basis thus. So there were different forms of adaptation, they all needed to figure out how to do what they were doing on a lower cost basis because the impressions became more commodified in that market. Particularly once Programmatic advertising took place.
And you know the, I mean the big change, the biggest change in my view was that advertising was severed from editorial content. Ads came from Ad serving. Advertisers bought an audience, they didn’t buy a placement inside a medium. And so the whole model and the kind of special relationship that I described where I’d be going over to L’Oréal and talking about our view of their customers, trying to share insights about customers that are gleaned from studying them in the context of Condé Nast magazines, was irrelevant because everything was much more commodified through that digital model of advertising insertions. The same issues are with us now with AI and you have different companies trying to decide do I license, do I make a deal with OpenAI right now or do I try and sue them, you know like The New York Times is doing, and require a different payment model for access to my content. And these are still commercial and legal questions that are not yet resolved but they feel familiar because they’re just a different iteration of the same business issues that developed in response to the Web.
Applying Lessons from the Internet to the AI Era
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah absolutely. Are there any other lessons that you’re drawing or thinking about from having navigated the internet’s disruption to the publishing industry and as we’re now entering or in the midst of this AI era, what that means for advertisers and marketers? Like are there any lessons that you’re thinking about that apply?
Scott McDonald: Yes and no. I mean I think the in some ways this feels somewhat different. And I don’t know, you know the question of whether AI dramatically changes the consumer the labor market, and the ability of people to earn incomes that supports the advertising system is a fair question. Even though the history of all these tech innovations is that they generate enough new jobs to replace the ones that have been rendered obsolete. But I don’t know at this point whether whether I believe that this time around. So that’s a fairly big unknown that would be different in terms of the consequences of the innovation.
If I was still working at a magazine publisher and or a publisher in general, it could be a TV channel that calls itself a publisher now, or any content engine, then I’d still be wary of how I monetize that content when it becomes Disintermediation. My advice still would be pay a lot of attention to trust and pay a lot of attention to the shifts in consumer behavior because advertisers always follow the consumer behavior. And consumers don’t always do what we as publishers want them to do. So you’ve got to be realistic about that and keep your eye on the consumer. That’s certainly a lesson I think from my Time Warner days where I don’t think they did that sufficiently. So.
Andrew Mitrak: I don’t know if this is a lesson, but something to draw from the golden era of publishing is editorial taste, that as a marketer that uses AI products, the AI products don’t always have good taste, right? Or they kind of have sort of a median internet quality taste and like, you know, obviously they’re very powerful and all that but like there is an element of if everything kind of looks the same, and you can’t differentiate your AI output from my AI output, somebody’s editorial taste on refining and coaching and directing it kind of becomes more important. And I wonder if there’s sort of people embracing their inner editor and developing taste to sort of know what’s good and not...
Scott McDonald: You know, this remains to be seen but it’s my observation that as AI improves, which it continues to do with breathtaking speed, it depends partly on you as the user to tell it what you want. It wants to please. So if you, so like in the context of say marketing applications or insight extraction, if you just ask a simple question, you’re going to get a pretty simple answer. If you actually feed it say peer-reviewed academic articles that you want a theoretical framework to be incorporated into the answer, you’ve raised the bar a lot. If you tell it that you want it to pretend that it’s a McKinsey & Company consultant, it’ll do it. It knows what you mean, and it will change the answers in response to your inputs. So I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t do that with regard to some matters of taste. If you could train your chatbot to be like those focus group respondents in the Martha Stewart Living example. And it seems in principle that you should be able to cultivate that.
The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF)
Andrew Mitrak: So I want to ask you about the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). You’ve been president of the ARF for about ten years or so. What is the ARF for people who have are not familiar with it already and how has it evolved over the years?
Scott McDonald: Okay. So the ARF is the Advertising Research Foundation. It is celebrating its 90th birthday right now. It was founded in February of 1936. As at the behest of the two founding members, the Association of National Advertisers, the ANA, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies, otherwise known as the 4A’s. And it was set up from the beginning as an independent foundation dedicated to furthering through research the scientific practice of marketing and advertising.
So from the beginning days it wrestled with the kind of public facing questions of how advertising works. What’s the best way of measuring the audience of a Life (magazine), you know? Of not just the circulation but all the readers per copy and the people who look at it in barbershops and whatever, you know. What’s the best way of measuring the audience for a radio program? We know how many radio sets are in American households, but how many people actually heard a particular show? And then in terms of advertising, what makes some ads successful and others not? What’s the optimum frequency? How long does it take to burn in or to burn out? Those questions have been with us from the beginning, and they’re still with us today, it’s just a much more complex and fragmented media landscape.
And so to some extent you need to update that all the time. And that’s still the kind of role of the ARF. It’s the power according to its bylaws, the power over the organization is distributed among marketers, ad agencies, media companies, and service providers, which would include all the measurement companies and everybody from Nielsen Holdings to little Neuroscience consultancies or brand consultancies or attention measurement companies, any of those things. And so ARF is kind of the Switzerland in the middle of that ecosystem that conducts research on basic questions of how advertising and marketing work, trying to stay as close as possible to the values of scientific inquiry. And that means, that doesn’t mean anything goes. And you’re in an environment where people make a lot of claims. All these campaigns do really well. You go to a lot of conferences and they’re all just like success story after success story. And you know not everything works, you know? And so trying to separate wheat from chaff and kind of build a body of knowledge about how to think about these things is the mission. To try to improve practice through the application of scientific methods. So.
Andrew Mitrak: How do you, how do you deal with that at a conference or just in marketing in general? Because I think every marketer wants to say that they’re scientific. They want to say that they’re data-driven, but also every they want to say that their campaigns are working, right? They want to say yes and our campaign was great and there’s sort of a grading their own homework type thing. And there are ways where you can cherry pick your numbers, like “oh, our reach was great,” even if your conversion was bad. Or “conversion was great,” even though you paid too much. And I guess how do you sort out navigate that?
Scott McDonald: Yeah, it’s difficult. Partly because, you know, the association itself, it’s a membership organization. So you don’t really want to offend your members. But on the other hand, at some level you might have to because not everything can be equally true. So that’s why the north star remains. And you try and set up... I mean a classic ARF study, we just did it around different aspects of attention measurement. This is a growing field. And you have different approaches, some of which rely upon academic understandings of cognition and memory and things like that. And others that really kind of just follow the development of tools that might plausibly be used as proxies for attention. So eye fixations, because we have Eye tracking and good cameras on our digital devices, on our phones, on our laptops. You’ve got information that’s used for ad verification purposes that would indicate that yeah, there’s a human there. There’s a hand on the mouse. You know? So that’s a proxy for some level of attention that is a signal not very expensive to collect because you’re already doing all this ad verification work, but how closely can we establish that that relates to any sort of formal definition of what we mean by attention? And by that are we talking about, you know, just eye fixations and Saccades? Are we talking about evidence of memory and recall around an ad?
So there’s a lot of tests around that. And the ARF exists kind of to help sort out the quality of those. We have an academic journal. We connect to people who have, you know, where they’re peer reviews. There’s competition to get on the stage for our events. So people have to compete before a jury to even get a slot. And so it’s, it’s sort of through that process, which is similar to how it works in the other sciences. I mean, the best examples, if someone really wants to make a strong claim for their research, then they would, we’ll do an audit for them. We’ll run through and see whether we can replicate their numbers. We’ll see whether they did cherry pick. We will, and then we’ll take their data and host it on our website and make it available for anyone in the world who wants to have a go at it, to anonymize the data and, which is the same like if California Institute of Technology wants to make a big claim in the physical sciences, they got to make their data available to the team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build legitimacy around it. It’s a very similar concept. So that’s the space that we operate in. It’s geeky but it has some value in this ecosystem.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. If I was to draw an analogy back to earlier in this conversation of you and your publishing days recognizing “hey there’s truisms that JFK assassination and Princess Diana, that always sells magazines at newsstands.” But like the real insights are sort of the non-obvious things that are more unique or maybe more time-bound. Could you draw parallels and find like what are sort of the truisms that the ARF has helped establish or that you’ve sort of recognized over the years in your role there, versus some of the more unique, non-obvious things that research is uncovering?
Scott McDonald: There are a lot of them, I would say. We codified some of them in our, so the ARF acquired the Marketing Science Institute, which is a more academically oriented entity. We did this a couple of years ago. And MSI has published something they call the Empirical Generalization series, which only will, so it will formulate like “X causes Y.” And here are the estimates of effects, within this range and these categories, you know that might be covariates. But it’s reduced down to things that we think there is compelling enough evidence. And their filter on it is wherever there’s been a meta-analysis in like the top three or four marketing journals. So very high level of peer review scrutiny. And only where there have been 60 or more studies confirming this generalization that would allow you to talk about say the if you’ve got like a budget to spend and you need to spend some of it on advertising and some of it on price promotion, for example, in-store promotion, like what are the trade-offs and how do we think about that?
So but I think for the ARF itself, probably the thing we’ve studied the most over the years, is anytime there’s a recession or a big disruption in the economy, the pandemic, September 11 attacks, any of these things that suddenly just have a big dramatic effect on markets and consumer behavior, there’s a tendency to cut marketing spend. Short-term marketing spend gets cut. So what’s the effect of that? Since we’ve studied it like from the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, any of these things that have these kinds of shock effects. And you’ve got a pretty good record of it. And the answer to it, I call it an empirical generalization, is that when you cut your share of voice, so you withdraw from the advertising market and don’t spend, so you’re not really getting a share of voice within a category, you lose share. And you lose it fairly quickly, and it takes about five years to recover, if you can recover. We have had whole brands that just kind of go away because they lost their position within a category.
That’s connected to another generalization and truism that I think is there and is likely to remain there for a long time, that being the dominant brand in a category, which usually involves at least 20% share of market, although in some cases it’s a lot more, leader in the category. That leads to all kinds of benefits. Any advertising that’s done for the brand leader in a category has stronger coefficients of impact, both short term and long term. And to the dismay of the second and third or fourth participants in a category, their advertising is probably going to actually benefit the category leader. It’s an unfair world, but people just mistake it. And a lot of, it’s another sort of truism that I think remains, a lot of creative ads that are so creative that they don’t tell you who the brand is, people love the ad and they assign credit for it to the wrong brand. Because that truism was ignored. It might have won an award somewhere in an ad creative competition, but it didn’t really work for the brand because they didn’t integrate the brand, make it clear enough to the consumer what brand was being advertised. So there are a lot of regularities and it’s hard to not be like a broken record sometimes when you’re responsible for the catalog of those things. But there are mistakes that we shouldn’t be making over and over again. And I think MSI in its most recent iteration of the Empirical Generalization series had like 175 things that rose to the level of, okay these are generalizations. There’s like enough evidence, there is consensus around it. And that’s kind of how in my view science works. It still doesn’t mean that those won’t change and evolve over time as other situations develop, but you build it on the back of a lot of evidence that’s been objectively evaluated and critically evaluated. So.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. That’s great. It’s great that your foundation is able to advocate for this research, make it available and share it. So let’s learn from science, let’s learn from history and not repeat the same mistakes over and over again. So Scott, I really enjoyed this conversation. For listeners who have enjoyed it as well, where would you point them to online so they could find out more about your work and more about the ARF?
Scott McDonald: thearf.org and msi.org.
Andrew Mitrak: Scott, thanks so much. It’s been a real pleasure.
Scott McDonald: Thanks Andrew.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org

I have an unusual update this week: I made a game! It’s called The CMO Game.
You have 12 months and $5M to launch your product and climb from Director of Marketing to the C-Suite. But your CEO has aggressive goals and if you don’t meet them, it’s game over.
It’s like The Oregon Trail, but for marketing (and with less dysentery).
You can play it right now at cmogame.com.
Why Make a Marketing Game?
One thing I keep coming back to is how hard it is to teach marketing. Books, lectures, and podcasts are great resources, but I really learned marketing by doing.
By making bets with incomplete information. By investing in long-term brand while hitting this quarter’s target. By navigating pressures from sales, finance, and the CEO.
I designed The CMO Game with this in mind, creating an active simulation that complements other resources for marketing education.
Like this podcast, it’s free and designed for marketers who want to get better.
How The CMO Game Works
You start by picking a product: soda, shoes, skincare, or software. Then you lock in positioning: premium, value, lifestyle, or disruptor. Each combination has unique marketing channels and tactics that work best.
Next, you hire your team and make your pre-launch investments. And every single choice is a trade-off.
Skip PR, and you’ll be caught flat-footed when a crisis hits later in the year. Over-index on data, and you’ll get great insights and better projections—but you’ll have way less money to actually run campaigns.
Then comes the launch itself. You have to decide your strategy: Do you go for a massive, splashy launch to grab immediate market share? Or do you hold back, preserving your budget for a steady drumbeat of campaign spending over the next 11 months?
Over the next 12 months, you face unexpected challenges, respond, and adjust your budget. Every decision has tradeoffs.
The game models the tension between brand and performance marketing.
Brand equity grows like compound interest, it’s invisible early but pays dividends late in the game. Performance marketing is efficient and immediate, but growth is linear and lacks long-term payoffs.
Strategy, Luck, and the Messy Reality of Business
Not everything is in your control. Some months you get lucky. Other times you face a crisis. How you respond matters as much as how you plan.
Premium skincare, value sneakers, and enterprise software all require different approaches. The game rewards players who grasp this, and penalizes those who treat marketing as one-size-fits-all.
And yes, the CEO can fire you. If revenue stalls, if brand equity craters, if you make too many bad calls in a row... you’ll end up #OpenToWork.
What Marketers Are Saying
I shared early builds of The CMO Game with marketers, professors, and friends who work in gaming.
Elton X. Graham, CMO of Sur La Table, put it well:
“Mitrak’s game sparks the right conversations by not giving you marketing answers, but better questions to ask... which is where real learning starts.”
Brian Marr, a marketing executive and professor, plans to use it in his Advanced Marketing course, describing it as a “great way to break the ice in the first class.”
This is what excites me most: that people might learn timeless marketing principles while having fun playing a game.
Play It and Share It
The CMO Game is 100% free. No login. No email capture. No in-app purchases. Just cmogame.com.
A full playthrough takes 10-20 minutes, depending on how much time you spend considering your strategy.
If you’re happy with your results, you can submit your score to the “Hall of Fame” leaderboard. If you think you can do better, play again with a different strategy.
If you like The CMO Game, the best thing you can do is share it with someone: a colleague, a student, or a friend who’s curious about marketing.
If you’re a professor, you are more than welcome to share the game with your class.
I’d love to hear what you think, and I appreciate feedback on how to improve The CMO Game. Email me at hello [at] marketinghistory.org or find me on LinkedIn.
Thanks!-Andrew


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org

A History of Marketing / Episode 47
In 1967, a 30-second spot at the very first Super Bowl cost roughly $37,500. This Sunday, for Super Bowl 60, brands are paying upwards of $8 million. That is a price increase of over 20,000%.
So… Is it still worth it?
For Professor Tim Calkins, who’s spent 22 years studying this exact question, the answer is an emphatic, ‘Yes.’
Since 2005, Calkins has led the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review, where MBA students evaluate every ad that airs during the big game. It’s easy to say which ads are funny. It takes more work to determine which ads will be effective.
In this conversation, we dig into how Super Bowl advertising has evolved: why brands now release their spots weeks early, why the creative has gotten safer as the stakes have climbed higher, and what the tone of these ads reveals about the American economy and political climate.
If you’re planning to watch the game this Sunday (or just the commercials), this conversation will deepen your appreciation for the work that goes into making every second worth $266,667.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
We also talk about Tim’s years managing Kraft Mayo and Miracle Whip (two surprisingly different marketing challenges), and the most common mistakes that marketers make when delivering business presentations. As you’ll hear, Tim is an excellent speaker.
Now here is my conversation with professor Tim Calkins.
Special Thanks:
Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
The Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review
Andrew Mitrak: Professor Tim Calkins, welcome to A History of Marketing.
Tim Calkins: Well, thank you. It is great to be here.
Andrew Mitrak: We will be publishing this right before the 2026 Super Bowl, which is Super Bowl 60. I had a lot of fun preparing and researching some of your work and also watching some old classic Super Bowl ads. The reason I wanted to have you on for this conversation is that you started publishing the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review in 2005, so over 20 years now. Can you introduce this project for listeners?
Tim Calkins: This is our 22nd year doing this event. Back in 2005, we began the Super Bowl Ad Review, the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review as we call it. I teach at Kellogg, I teach marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Before I was at Kellogg though, I was at Kraft Foods, and I worked in marketing at Kraft Foods for a number of years. When I was at Kraft Foods, now Kraft Heinz, with my team I would sometimes do an exercise where we would look at Super Bowl ads and try to think about what we could learn from what had happened on the Super Bowl.
When I came over to Kellogg, I thought there was a similar opportunity there to do something around the Super Bowl where we get the Kellogg students evaluating these Super Bowl spots. So the event has now been running for 22 years. The format is always the same. We pull together a panel of Kellogg MBA students. Nowadays it is about 70 or 75 students. As the Super Bowl unfolds, as it plays, the students evaluate all the ads that run.
What makes our panel different from a lot of other panels that are out there is that we are very focused on efficacy. We are trying to think about: will these spots, will these Super Bowl ads, build the business and build the brand? Ultimately that is what Super Bowl advertising is all about. A lot of panels, and a lot of Super Bowl rating things—there are lots of these—they will look at likeability, humor, which one did you like the best, which one was funniest. Our panel, we don’t really do that. That’s not really the question. The question really is, using sort of an analytical framework and process, how do we think about which ones of these will be most effective?
Every year we come up with our ratings. We give a handful of advertisers As, and then Bs, Cs. On occasion, we give out an F if somebody really misses the mark. It is a really fun event, but it also is a lot of work because what you realize being part of it is that there are so many ads that will run on the Super Bowl. There are probably 75 official Super Bowl spots, but then there are all these other things that show up. You have local spots, you have network promo spots for different shows. It is a lot of evaluation that the students do. It ends up being a very draining experience.
Andrew Mitrak: Can you walk me back to the beginning? You mentioned Kraft, which later became Kraft Heinz, which I will follow up on because I want to ask you about that too. When you first started paying attention to Super Bowl ads there, this might be an obvious question, but what stood out to you about Super Bowl ads? Why did you want to pay special attention to Super Bowl ads?
Tim Calkins: Super Bowl ads are really unique things in the world of marketing. What is amazing is they become more and more unique as time has gone by. Even if you go back 25 or 30 years ago—so we are now at Super Bowl 60, so you go back to Super Bowl 25 even—the advertising that was running was really different than normal advertising. What happens on the Super Bowl is a few things. Number one, it is expensive, so the investment is high. Number two, you have a huge audience, so there is a lot of people who are watching it. But also, the expectations are different for a Super Bowl spot.
You can’t turn around and run an ad that you are running on Survivor. You can’t turn around and run that ad on the Super Bowl. For most advertisers, you are creating a special piece of creative just for that event. People expect to see amazing Super Bowl spots. That is the expectation and companies are under a lot of pressure to deliver.
The Framework Behind Super Bowl Advertising
Tim Calkins: The reason it is really interesting to study is that you know that for each one of these advertisers, they are putting forward their best thinking, their best creative talents. This is the pinnacle of their work. So much scrutiny is on these things. Given that, it is fascinating to see what they decide to do. Sometimes they do brilliant things and other times they really miss. But to understand what is happening there and really think about it as a marketer is a really unique opportunity and you can learn a ton.
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned how Super Bowl ads are kind of this unique thing. They are a little different than other ads. When you think about this project of analyzing Super Bowl ads, how does it connect to your broader work in brand and marketing strategy? Do you see these as really closely related where a Super Bowl ad is just the epitome of a brand and a marketing strategy wrapped into 30 or 60 seconds? Or do you feel like this is just a little bit of a different, kind of like a fun side quest that’s related to a brand, but it is a slightly separate, unique, different thing than the rest of the brand itself? How do you frame this work?
Tim Calkins: I think a Super Bowl spot is very much at the heart of everything that I teach. I teach marketing strategy, I teach biomedical marketing, I teach influencer marketing, branding. Across all of those classes where I really spend a lot of time is trying to think about the strategy. What are the choices that companies and brands are making? Are they going after new consumers, for example, or are they going after their current consumers? Are they trying to skew younger? Are they trying to go older? Is it about repositioning a brand, getting people to think differently about it? What are all the choices that companies are making?
So when we look at Super Bowl spots, and I look at a Super Bowl spot, I am really interested in pulling apart the choices that the companies have made. Your first choice: the decision to run an ad on the Super Bowl. Well, that’s a big decision. How is it that the company reached that decision and decided that was a good use of 8, 10, 20, 30 million dollars? That begins there. Then the question is, okay, well what products are they talking about and who do they seem to be going after and what’s the message they are putting forward? All of those are sort of strategic choices that the company is making.
Ultimately it does get down to some creative execution things, and those are fun too. But I think a lot of the heart of a good Super Bowl ad comes from the strategic choices that are made in the development process.
Andrew Mitrak: What is the first Super Bowl ad you yourself remember watching? Were you always interested in Super Bowl ads?
Tim Calkins: Oh, I’ve long followed the Super Bowl. Like everybody, I watched the Super Bowl. As I was growing up and came through college and all of that, I would watch the Super Bowl and you’d watch the advertising, of course, a big part of the event. It was really only when I got to Kraft that I began to look at it with a marketing lens. That is a very different way to evaluate a Super Bowl spot. Beforehand you might be looking at, you know, what’s one of the early ones I remember... the Coke Mean Joe Greene ad that ran, which was one of the great spots.
Or, of course, Apple’s spot that ran back in 1984, these old spots that ran.
But it was very different for me when you begin to think about these as marketing investments and marketing tools. That is where all of a sudden it begins to change how you watch a Super Bowl ad. It is one of the things I try to do as I talk about the Super Bowl, is to get people to look at them a little bit differently. It is so easy for people to pass a quick judgment on a Super Bowl spot. “Oh, that was funny. That was great. That was stupid.” People are very quick to pass judgment on it and nothing to stop them from doing that.
But when you really pull back and try to think about what is happening there, it totally changes how you evaluate it and how you think about it. You just have a lot more respect for the risk of these pieces of advertising and you have a lot of respect for how difficult it is to do. I think to do a great Super Bowl ad is really tough. It is a really difficult thing. So when somebody does it well, you have to have a lot of admiration for that team and really salute them.
When they miss, it’s not for lack of trying. It’s not for a lack of intent or trying and effort. It is something went wrong. Sometimes your heart goes out to them because you are like, “Shoot, I don’t know exactly the people who were working on this, but it did not go well for them.” So I guess it makes you much more empathetic about this advertising when you really understand what is happening.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it is good to be empathetic. It is also kind of fun to dunk on the people who miss and all that, but you got to look at everybody trying their best, marketers taking a high-risk bet and kind of good on them for trying whether it’s a win or a bit of a dud.
Evolution of the Super Bowl Commercial Landscape
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned a few famous ads that I want to ask you about because you mentioned Mean Joe Greene, the Coca-Cola advertisement, which is a lot of fun. And then of course the classic 1984 ad, which is probably the single ad that’s come up on this podcast more than any other advertisement. I kind of see that as sort of a watershed moment for the Super Bowl ad where it was a 60-second spot, big budget, directed by Ridley Scott, released in 1984 and obviously has the tie-in to 1984.
Do you see any other milestones beyond that one in Super Bowl advertising? If you look at moments as the stakes in the Super Bowl have gone up, the prices of an ad have gone up beyond 1984, do you see any other major milestones or inflection points for Super Bowl advertising?
Tim Calkins: People often ask, what turned the Super Bowl into this marketing extravaganza? I think what happened is that it has been a step-by-step process over the years that have really led to this. There have been iconic spots that have run over the years. Mean Joe Greene back in 1980. Apple, that was 1984. Then of course 1993, that was one of the great spots for McDonald’s with Larry Bird and Michael Jordan shooting baskets for a McDonald’s meal. That was one of these great iconic spots, celebrity, the whole thing. That was a really big spot people remember.
The Budweiser Frogs in ‘95. That was another spot that people remember that sticks in the mind.
What really happens here in the Super Bowl is that it is a step-by-step growth and increase in the importance of Super Bowl advertising. Part of what is happening with the Super Bowl growing, what is happening at the same time is that all the other media properties out there are sort of fragmenting. So if you go back 20 years ago, the Super Bowl was a big deal, but a lot of other things were a big deal too. The Academy Awards were huge and people would watch those. The Baseball World Series was huge and people would watch that. The Olympics was huge.
What has happened over the decades is that so many of the other big events, viewership has declined as audiences have fragmented and we have so many choices of things to watch. The one thing that has held up and even grown as the years have gone by is the Super Bowl. Which makes it then more and more important when it comes to companies and brands and when it comes to the advertising because now if you want to reach everybody in the US or a good chunk of people in the US, really the only way you can do that is on the Super Bowl.
The Surging Costs of Super Bowl Spots
Andrew Mitrak: I looked up the price of a Super Bowl ad when they started. A 30-second spot at Super Bowl I (1967) was $37,500 back in 1967 dollars. By the way, that’s from Wikipedia, so I don’t know if it’s 100% accurate, but let’s say that’s the ballpark cost of an ad at that time. Inflation-adjusted about 10x that is $360,000, so more expensive. But that said, today in 2026 the reported cost is about $8 million. So that delta between $360,000 to $8 million, that’s the increase in cost.
That would mainly be attributed to there being no other option. If you want to reach all of America, there are not many other places where you could do that. Would you say that scarcity and the breadth of that reach is what justifies the higher costs that advertisers are paying now versus then?
Tim Calkins: There are a lot of things that go into the price, but certainly the price escalation has been extraordinary for Super Bowl spots. But you know, if I could today buy a Super Bowl spot for the 2035 Super Bowl, if I could do that, if there were a market that would allow that, I would do that because I don’t think the Super Bowl is declining anytime soon.
Why do companies pay so much money? Partly it is the sheer reach of it. It is, if you want to get to a big chunk of the population, the only place you can go. But it is not just that. The other thing that has happened is that a lot of people when they are watching the Super Bowl, they are there, they are watching the advertising. Viewership of the Super Bowl, you might have 110 million people watching the Super Bowl, but the vast majority of those people, they don’t care about the teams and they, in many cases, don’t really care about football either. You just have to watch the Super Bowl though because that’s what everybody’s doing that night.
Nobody counter-programs against the Super Bowl. You are not going to have a piano recital on the night of the Super Bowl. People would say, “What are you doing? You can’t have like a Scrabble party on the night of the Super Bowl. You are not going to do that.” No, everybody’s got to watch it. So people show up there, they are looking forward to seeing the advertising. That’s what they are paying attention to.
The other thing though that is happening is that Super Bowl ads are very symbolic. That is an important aspect of this. If you are a company and you are going to go buy a Super Bowl ad, what happens now is you are going to put of course a big PR push around that and you are going to do all these other activities. You want everybody to know that you are buying a Super Bowl ad. Because what does that say? Well, that says that you believe in your business, you are investing in the business, you are an important company, you’ve got resources. All of that is really valuable for branding and it’s got this symbolic nature to it that is hard to quantify but is very real. So there is lots of stuff that brings people to this moment.
You know one other thing that helps Super Bowl advertising is that the Super Bowl is early in the year. It’s in February. Which you would think, well who cares? But in a way that is really important because most companies, if you are on a calendar year fiscal year—January and February, what do you have? Budgets. You’ve got money. At the beginning of the year. In November, your money was either spent or cut or something happened to it, the money might not be available. But at the beginning of the year, all these companies have big budgets. In many cases they say, “Let’s get the year off to a good start. Let’s get on the Super Bowl. Let’s run this advertising, really give the business a jump start.” And that is going to propel us through the year. That is another factor that kicks in here to make it so valuable for firms.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s a really good point, that timing within the year itself. Because also it sets up a campaign or an idea that you can build on throughout the year as well. If I think of the 1984 ad, at the start of the year, that’s great, 1984. If it was at the end of the year, maybe 1984 is kind of a lame pun. Like, “Oh, we’ve heard 1984,” it just happened over and over. So I think the ads themselves are fresh, it’s a new year, it’s a new idea. This is a campaign that you launch big and can iterate on or call back to throughout the year. So it’s kind of a nice big upfront investment in your brand spend.
Tim Calkins: Well, and you’ll see that a lot of advertisers will use the Super Bowl to launch new campaigns. So that is when they bring out the new advertising. And then they follow it up. Either they take that Super Bowl spot and run it again, either as is or in a shorter format, or they extend the campaign idea and bring other executions around the same creative look and feel. You sort of put it in the mind originally on the one Super Bowl, the one big event, and then come back to reinforce that and to get some repetition. They do that in the subsequent months.
Andrew Mitrak: Do you think that companies measure the impact of their Super Bowl ads differently than they do other ads? Do they measure ROI in terms of different types of uplift versus some other type of ad? Any thoughts on, you know, they spent $8 million on these ads, how are they measuring the ROI on that?
Tim Calkins: Measurement of Super Bowl ads is really tough. It is really difficult to do. What happens is that every company is measuring the impact. You are not going to go invest 8, 10, 20 million dollars and not try to figure out the impact. The problem is that it is not easy to measure the financial impact of a Super Bowl spot. Some things are easy to measure. You can measure website traffic and you can figure out if anybody came to your website. You can look at search terms, did anybody do that. If you are selling an app, you can look at how many downloads did you get and what happened there. If you’re relying on influencers, you can see what kind of activity. So you can look at a lot of these diagnostic metrics.
You can also ask people, do they remember your Super Bowl ad, did they like it? All of those, that’s all easy to measure. But financially, it is very hard to put numbers around it. The big problem is that valuing a brand financially is... people try to do it, but it is a very imprecise science. So in theory, if you get out there and run an ad on the Super Bowl, and if it’s a great piece of advertising, at the end of the day people will think better of your brand than they did before. They will have more positive associations with your brand and they might either know of it for the first time or have some... but it helped the brand.
The problem is you can’t quantify the financial value of that. I can quantify how many people came to my website and things like that, but that’s a very small part of it. You are never going to justify a Super Bowl ad based on those kind of metrics. You are going to do it for the brand value and for the long-term impact that it is going to have.
I have come to believe there is one way to know though if a company is happy with their Super Bowl ad. The one way you know for sure is whether they come back to do it again. Because you know that if a company runs an ad on the Super Bowl and then the next year they don’t, well then you know that clearly they didn’t think or they had questions about the efficacy of that. But if they come back and they do it again, then you know something.
Sometimes you’ll see advertisers, they will run on the Super Bowl for a number of years and then they don’t. And then the question is, what happens next? Somebody like WeatherTech. They ran for many years, but then they took a year off. And then they came back. What that tells you is that they clearly thought that they were benefiting from the Super Bowl spot. And when they stopped doing it, they saw the problem.
Andrew Mitrak: Sorry, which company was that? WeatherTech?
Tim Calkins: WeatherTech. Yeah, so WeatherTech, they do floor mats. Very strange company. It’s a private company. And they have been running on the Super Bowl though for many years. They are back in 2026. They ran in 2025. I believe they did not run in 2024. But they ran ‘23, ‘22, ‘21, ‘20. But then you know.
Some brands have been back and they have run for just many, many years. TurboTax has run, this will be their 13th year running on the Super Bowl. And you are like, wow. Squarespace, 12th year coming up. Michelob Ultra, 9th year. What you know is that these companies have clearly thought about this and have clearly decided that the Super Bowl is a good investment for their brand.
Why Major Brands Left the Super Bowl
Andrew Mitrak: I’ll keep a closer eye out for WeatherTech; I hadn’t heard of that brand, but I’ll be watching for their ad as well. Are there any certain brands that you’ve noticed that left and stayed out? Do you think there are brands that said, “Hey, the way we win is by not playing,” and just chose to opt out of the Super Bowl? Are there any examples that come to mind of not because they went out of business or aren’t a successful company anymore, but they just choose to opt out of the Super Bowl?
Tim Calkins: Oh sure, a lot of companies have. They come and go as Super Bowl advertisers. One of the great Super Bowl advertisers for many, many years was FedEx. FedEx eventually stopped running on the Super Bowl, and we haven’t seen them in recent years. They made the decision not to do that.
Then there are other brands that really found magic on the Super Bowl and then stopped. Somebody like CareerBuilder. You might remember them; they ran some Super Bowl ads that were really distinctive with chimps. They had these chimpanzees, and it was these very funny spots about the workplace environment and, “Do you work with a bunch of monkeys?” I think was the thing. Maybe you should get a new job, and CareerBuilder was going to be a place to go find your new job. They eventually stopped running on the Super Bowl. There were a lot of reasons why.
It is interesting, though, for a brand like that, you stop running on the Super Bowl, and then you do begin to see an erosion in brand awareness. Clearly, I haven’t seen their numbers, but clearly, that brand was top of mind when they were a big Super Bowl advertiser, and that is not the case at this point.
Andrew Mitrak: I wonder which one preceded which. For CareerBuilder, it’s interesting because others have taken up the space, like Monster.com or obviously LinkedIn and other tools are massive within it. I wonder if CareerBuilder, if they don’t advertise in the Super Bowl because their budgets went down because of their impact, or if they stopped advertising in the Super Bowl and then therefore they kind of lost some market share and it was sort of a downward spiral from there. I wonder which one preceded which.
Tim Calkins: My understanding of the story on that was actually sort of interesting. They were using the chimps, which were super memorable and distinctive Super Bowl ads, but then they got a lot of pushback from the animal rights activists who said it’s totally inappropriate to be using the chimps. They were very targeted. Some of the activists were very targeted and went after some of the senior executives at the company. The company eventually said, “We can’t really use the chimps. We’ve got to do something else creatively.”
When they did that, though, what they found was that it was very tough to come up with a great Super Bowl spot. So they ran a couple of years, but they did not get anywhere near the distinctiveness or the lift that they had before. Then I think they said, “It’s a lot of money, the creative doesn’t seem to be working here, doesn’t make sense to keep doing this.” And then they backed away.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I guess if you’re going to use the animals, use something like frogs that work better as puppets or CGI or whatever Budweiser uses versus the real chimps.
Tim Calkins: Yeah. I mean, the good news now, I guess, is Generative AI can create whatever we want right now.
From Single Super Bowl Spots to Integrated Campaigns
Andrew Mitrak: Exactly. Aside from the advertisements getting more expensive, over the course of the last 20 years since you’ve been—22 years now since you’ve been running this—have you noticed the ads themselves change themselves or the nature of Super Bowl advertising? How has the nature of Super Bowl advertising evolved since you’ve really started paying attention to Super Bowl ads?
Tim Calkins: So it’s changed a lot. One of the big things that has changed is that more and more Super Bowl advertising isn’t just about the Super Bowl ad; it is about the whole integrated campaign. I think there are two factors behind this. One is the investments have become enormous, and so companies want to maximize the return on investment to make the most of the opportunity. The other thing, though, that’s available is now there are so many other digital tools that are available.
You go back 20 years ago, and we didn’t have Instagram and Facebook and TikTok to play with. All of that has emerged over the years. Now what you see is companies put forward incredibly elaborate, integrated marketing campaigns around the Super Bowl. For most of these companies, it becomes a three-week—really a two-to-three-week—marketing push where they try to hit every lever during those two or three weeks. They pull out the PR campaigns and the influencer efforts and all of this different activity to try to make the most of it. So that’s, I think, really different. That’s one thing that’s changed.
Why Brands Release Ads Before the Game
Tim Calkins: Related to that, another change that we’ve seen is that more and more of these companies now release the spots ahead of time. It used to be that the vast majority of Super Bowl ads would run on the Super Bowl, and that was the first time you would see them. Now, the majority of advertisers—the vast majority—will release the ads ahead of time. They’ll release them either the week before the Super Bowl or maybe two weeks in advance, but they get those spots out there ahead of time. There are lots of reasons to do that, by the way. That is the best practice. That’s a big change that we have seen. There’s a lot behind that we could go into.
Andrew Mitrak: What are the reasons you would release your Super Bowl ad before the big ball game? You’d think like, “Hey, I want to make a big splash all at once. Let’s kind of hold the dry powder and go big all at once.” But is there some strategy to releasing beforehand?
Tim Calkins: Oh, there are a lot of reasons to release a Super Bowl ad ahead of time. One of the big ones is that there’s just more time. So if you put your spot out there a week in advance, you’ve got a lot of time to generate viewership and to get views of it before the Super Bowl even happens. The Super Bowl goes by really quickly.
The other thing that happens is as an advertiser, the Super Bowl is very unpredictable. You don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe it’ll be a blowout and you’re running in the third quarter and nobody’s watching anymore. Maybe what happens is a different advertiser runs a spot right in front of you that is uproariously funny, and that overshadows your spot. Maybe the creative idea that you’ve embraced is copied by another company, and they’ve got the same sort of idea.
These are all unknowable, unpredictable things. How do you hedge that? You get out ahead of time and try to get some viewership before the game even begins.
Another big one, and maybe I think the most important one, is you know ahead of time if you have a problem. So on the Super Bowl, there is so much attention and viewership that it’s terrifying for companies because if you make a mistake and you run a spot that people find—even a small group of people—if they find it inappropriate or offensive or something like that, it can turn into a massive problem for the company. How do you avoid, how do you minimize that risk? If you release the spot early, there is time for people to come back and say, “Wait, that doesn’t look right,” and then you can fix it before the Super Bowl goes and before you offend millions and millions of people.
So there are lots of reasons at the end of the day to get that spot out there. Holding it back for the surprise, you’ll see some advertisers do that, but that is not a common approach anymore. The stakes are too high. It’s too risky. There’s too much money involved. It makes a lot of sense to release it ahead of time.
The Rise of QR Codes and Digital Calls to Action
Andrew Mitrak: The other change that I’ve seen probably in the last 5 to 10 years or so is the ads themselves having more distinct calls to action or digital experience within it. The QR code... I can’t remember which company it was that just had a kind of bouncing QR code on their ad for 30 seconds.
Or ones where there’s also one from a year or two ago where it was just a big long URL or some secret code to enter in an app, and you had to find all the letters and type it all in.
So it seems like there are more and more—in addition to being aware of the digital surround or pre-releasing on social media or on YouTube in advance—there’s also on the ad itself having more direct calls to action and making the ad more interactive itself. Is that kind of a trend you’ve been paying attention to?
Tim Calkins: Well, there’s no question that companies are trying to leverage technology and take advantage of that. Whether it’s the QR codes that you see on some of these spots or on other platforms, you see that I think more and more.
Super Bowl Ads as a Mirror of the US Economy and Politics
Tim Calkins: There are two other really interesting things to watch for, though, on the Super Bowl. One thing is who shows up and who advertises. And that’s a really interesting question. It tells you something about the economy. Because to go on the Super Bowl and run an ad, that means that you’ve got resources and money and you have a certain amount of optimism about the future. If you’re worried about saving money, if you think your company is going to be having some hard times, you wouldn’t run a Super Bowl ad. Those are the companies that are feeling good. So it’s very interesting to watch that and to see who shows up.
The other thing is to watch the tonality of the Super Bowl spot. I think you can really learn something about the US economy and how people are feeling if you really look at Super Bowl ads. Because all of these companies, they study the environment, they study how people are feeling, they come up with creative design to resonate with people. So what these companies see is a really interesting look at what’s happening within the country. And you can really see that happen in many ways.
You know, actually if you look even when it comes to politics, you can see trends develop there. So if you go back, what was it now, a year and a half ago to the... Was it a year and a half ago? Before the election. Yes. But if you go back and if you... The question was who was going to win? Would Joe Biden pull it off and his group and the Democrats, or would Donald Trump come back?
But you go back and you look at the advertising that was running on the Super Bowl that year, and there was a real tone to some of the spots around people feeling that it was tough in the economy, it’s tough to move forward, it’s tough to get ahead. What you could see there, there was a real sentiment that people were not feeling good about how things were going. They weren’t feeling good about their futures.
And when you look at that in hindsight, you’re like, “Shoot, there it is.” If people are really feeling that way, that is a very difficult time for an incumbent or an incumbent administration, an incumbent party, to get the win. And you just look at it and you’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s interesting.” So it’s always fun to watch what’s the tonality.
Last year on the Super Bowl was interesting. We saw a lot of traditional values on the Super Bowl. What did we see? People in traditional families. People at the cul-de-sac. What did we not see? You don’t see people at the club. You don’t see people in an urban environment. You don’t see super diverse groups of people. Last year we saw this real sort of pivot to these traditional kind of values, which again, I think just reflected a little bit of where the country is at the moment. So the Super Bowl, it’s really fascinating to watch what people run and what’s the tonality.
Are We Past the Era of “Peak Super Bowl” Creative?
Andrew Mitrak: Do you think that we’re past peak Super Bowl at all? I mean, you mentioned how you’d still... if you could buy an ad for 10 years ago at today’s price, you would do it. But also if I look up lists of the greatest Super Bowl ads of all time, there aren’t that many that are from the last five years or so that make the list. Like I looked up one that had a hundred or so ads, and the most recent ones were kind of clustered around 2010.
There was “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like“ from Old Spice.
There’s “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry,” the Snickers one that really revitalized the last decade or so of Betty White‘s career.
Then there’s “Parisian Love” from Google, which is an ad that I love.
And those were all from around 2010, I think, which was 16 years ago at this point.
Do you think that’s maybe just bias against recent ads and they just need more time to sort of marinate and be part of the culture? Or do you think there was something from, you know, 15, 16 years ago that made ads more memorable than they might be today?
Tim Calkins: So I don’t think we’re at peak Super Bowl because the trends that have made the Super Bowl so powerful are still very much intact. You’re seeing the Super Bowl as an event remain incredibly important, and viewership is solid—viewership has been up in the past few years—and other options are beginning to fragment.
It is true that some of the most memorable Super Bowl ads are older ones. I think that’s true, though, for a couple of reasons. One, I think, is that there’s no question that Super Bowl advertisers have to play it pretty safe. And more and more it’s become true that taking a big risk on the Super Bowl, creatively or otherwise, is really pretty dangerous to careers. And not sure you want to do that. So that may be one reason.
But the other reason, I think, is that the overall standard of the Super Bowl spots is getting better and better. So when we began our whole journey on the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review, each year there would be some that were just really not good pieces of advertising. And now that seems to be less the case. It just feels like the overall average quality of this advertising is getting better and better.
But I will say one thing you can be very confident of—I’m going to make one prediction for the Super Bowl this year—afterwards, people will say, “You know, the advertising just not as good as I remember.” And they’re going to say that. But they always say that because what happens? In our minds, we remember a few iconic spots. We remember Larry Bird. We remember the first of the E-Trade babies. We remember that Apple spot.
What we forget is that there were like 500 other pieces of advertising that ran over that period. So our memories, we’re picking out the highlights of the past 20 years and comparing this year’s collection of advertising to the highlight reel. That’s not a fair comparison. It’s a little bit like having a football team play the All-Star team. I mean, it’s just not...But people will say that because they always say that.
The one thing that might be a problem though for Super Bowl uh as a as a platform I think is streaming and how that unfolds. So you know right now there’s sort of the network broadcast you can stream the Super Bowl. The interesting thing is it’s not a given. My understanding is it’s not a given that the same advertising will run. And if I were in charge of the Super Bowl as a media property, I would insist that the same spots run on both because that way the advertising is seen by everybody and it can be the basis of conversation.
Where the Super Bowl begins to lose its punch to fragment like everything else is fragmented. And then instead of getting this big pop of a hundred million viewers, you start getting, you know, 20 million that maybe saw your spot on streaming or 60 million that maybe saw your spot on the network broadcast. And then I think you begin to ruin the Super Bowl as a big event that advertisers are worth really focusing on. That’s the biggest watch out. I have to think people will be smart enough not to get caught in that, but I do I do wonder if that could be a problem longer term.
Are High Costs and Risk Aversion Killing Creativity?
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned a lot of great points there, and one that I want to come back to is that advertisers are somewhat risk-averse with a Super Bowl ad, that you want to avoid being too controversial. I wonder if that’s partly just because of getting more expensive as well? Or it also is somewhat mirroring the phenomenon that we’ve seen in the movies, where movies are more and more—as movie budgets get more expensive—you see more Avengers type movies that try to appeal to everybody. You try to see the superhero movie that appeals to everybody, relatively inoffensive.
In the meantime, comedies—there’s almost no comedies in theaters anymore. What is comedy? It’s somewhat controversial in a way. And if I think of “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” the Old Spice ad, kind of a weird ad. Really funny, but kind of a strange ad and pretty risky too. Or “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry.” People tackling an old 90-year-old Betty White, also a pretty risky ad in some ways, pretty funny. And I don’t know if that ad would get greenlit today or get approved today in the same way because it’s kind of weird. It’s kind of risky.
I wonder if some combination of needing to appeal more as the prices get higher, really wanting to avoid too much risk if that kind of is all playing into why some of the ads might be a little less funny today as well. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Tim Calkins: I think there’s no question that companies are very careful with what they’re running right now, and that does impact the creative. It’s partly financial, but I think it goes way beyond the financial aspects. The thing to remember is that Super Bowl ads get so much scrutiny, and everybody knows they’re expensive, and everybody’s got an opinion.
So if you’re the CEO of a company, you know what you don’t want to have to deal with on the Monday after the Super Bowl? Is having to explain to everybody why did your company run that really either offensive, ineffective—call it what you will—piece of advertising. And I think a lot of companies and marketers will say, “We don’t want that kind of scrutiny. That’s a reason not to go on the Super Bowl.” You’ve got to be pretty brave to advertise on the Super Bowl, to be honest. And I think if you are on the Super Bowl, there’s still a desire to play it safe.
I mean, I guess the advertisers, I suppose, it’s not that different than the players on the teams. And the teams always have to balance how risky do you want to play and how conservative do you want to be. And the advertisers are working with that same set of questions.
Andrew Mitrak: It’s a really interesting tightrope to walk because you need to be risky enough that you’re able to break through and justify your spend and not be too boring. But also, if you are too risky, you can wind up really shooting yourself in the foot. I empathize a lot with these advertisers and everybody behind the budget and the approvals on it because you don’t want to make the wrong choice there.
Tim Calkins: Just imagine the process of developing a Super Bowl spot and how tough that is to navigate. Begin with the fact you have all these hierarchies within companies. If the vice president likes something, but the senior vice president doesn’t, you have that dynamic. But then they are all working with the outside firms as well. So an advertising firm will come in and say, “This is going to be just an incredible idea. This idea we have is so creative and unexpected. It’s going to be the best.”
But then the brand leader has to say, “Is that really the case or not?” If they don’t think it is, then you have to tell the creative person that it is not the creative idea they think it is. And the creative person is like, “No, I’m the creative person here, and you are not thinking big enough.” Then the brand person is like, “Yeah, but it is my brand and I don’t want to run something that creative.” But then the senior person says, “Oh, I think we should.” Just the complexity of it all is really tough to figure out. How do you end up with the creative idea that is going to run?
Andrew Mitrak: It’s almost a miracle that anything gets shipped at all.
Have You Ever Purchased A Product Because of a Super Bowl Ad?
Andrew Mitrak: So just wrapping up with the Super Bowl, I wanted to ask you, have you ever made a purchase or changed your buying behavior because of a Super Bowl ad influencing you?
Tim Calkins: The answer to that is yes, of course. Now, if you want me to pick exactly the example that I had, that is more difficult. That is a tough one. What did I buy? I did love the Kia Telluride spot that ran. That was an amazing piece of advertising.
Andrew Mitrak: I was going to bring Kia up because I have an anecdote. I have a Telluride that is sitting in my driveway right over there. I had never heard of a Telluride before, and I had never even considered buying a Kia before. But I saw that super bowl ad and thought, “Wow, that actually looks like a pretty cool SUV. That is a Kia? Telluride?”
I was driving a Prius, and then my second daughter arrived some time after the Super Bowl. I tried to drive my whole family home and thought, “Wow, this car is really cramped. I’ve got to upgrade.” I just started looking at reports of SUVs and I thought, “Oh, Telluride. That is well reviewed. Oh, I remember that Super Bowl ad.”
I didn’t just see the ad and go to the dealer the next day, but it certainly made it cool. It gave Kia a little more brand equity where they used to be a punchline of a car manufacturer in some ways. In fact, I think The Simpsons and Principal Skinner would drive a Kia and it was a joke. It was kind of disparaging.
Now it is a lot cooler. I think part of that—not the only thing, it is not a silver bullet—but part of that is that they advertise in the Super Bowl and they really try to use that as a mechanism to build awareness and reposition their brand.
Tim Calkins: I think it is an example of just a really effective Super Bowl spot they ran. Very risky. That was one, “We are not heroes.” We are an amazing Super Bowl ad. You look at the spot and all of a sudden, shoot, maybe I should think about a Kia. Maybe I should think about a Telluride. That is the power of it.
It is one of the things in marketing that I think people in general have to be careful of. When you ask people, “What brought you here today?” or “Why are you buying this product?” or anything like that, it is important to remember that people will never tell you it was the advertising. They will never say that. Or very rarely they will say that. They will say, “Oh, it was word-of-mouth marketing.” Or, “I saw something else.” Or, “I heard about it on...”
People say that partly because if you say, “Oh, I bought this product because of the advertising,” it makes you look like somebody who is not thinking fully. You can be persuaded by advertising. Who is persuaded by advertising? So people don’t volunteer that. But there is no question that advertising done well has an impact on how we make decisions and how we evaluate products and services. Absolutely.
Lessons from Managing Brands at Kraft Foods
Andrew Mitrak: With our remaining time, I wanted to ask you a few questions outside of just the Super Bowl. You mentioned Kraft Foods. You managed brands at Kraft Foods. I’m wondering just broadly, what did you learn from working at Kraft Foods?
Tim Calkins: Oh, I learned so much about teams, businesses, consumers, and marketing. It was just a terrific training ground for marketing. It really launched my marketing career. Even now when I teach at Kellogg, I look back to those days working on these brands to try to think about it.
What were some of the big things though? One of the things was just the challenge of delivering business results. Until you have been there and see the pressure of it, it is hard to quite understand exactly how that works. Just the need to bring in the results.
The other thing that is really interesting is trying to understand your consumers and figure out great communication—figure out how to talk to them in a way that will resonate. That is just really interesting and complicated. It is really fun because to do that well, you have to get in there and try to think about what is important to people. What are their values? What are the insights that motivate their life? When you do it well, you can come up with advertising and marketing efforts that really are incredibly powerful. They connect with what people value, think about, and care about.
But it is all hard because people don’t necessarily tell you what they care about or what they think about. Often people don’t even know what they really care about. It is interesting; people can’t express it sometimes. So that was fascinating, to understand and think about how you develop great pieces of communication. That was a big one as well.
Then there was a huge piece around working cross-functionally. On all those businesses, there are a lot of different things that have to come together. There is an operations side of things, a sales effort, a finance effort, market research, advertising, and promotions. Pulling together the team and getting the team organized, aligned, and working cohesively is really fun, but also challenging to do. That is the key though for any business. Unless everybody—all the different functions—are working together, it is really hard to get things moving forward in an organized fashion.
Brand Management: Kraft Mayo vs. Miracle Whip
Andrew Mitrak: I noticed on your CV you went from being brand manager on Kraft Mayo to senior brand manager on Miracle Whip. It just seemed like kind of funny consumer bases to market to back-to-back. I’m wondering if there was anything that you noticed jumping from one product to the next, advertising Mayo versus advertising Miracle Whip? Because they are brands that are so familiar. You see them in the grocery store every time. I see these. I imagine that there is probably some passionate consumer bases behind them. So do you want to kind of compare and contrast marketing those two products?
Tim Calkins: One of the great things about working on these products is you realize once you get in there just how different they are. You think about Kraft Mayonnaise and Miracle Whip and you are like, “Well, how different can they be?” They are both viscous products that come in the same jar, sold at a similar price point with similar usage behaviors.
But then you get in there and you realize they are totally different. Kraft Mayonnaise is a decent mayonnaise. But we were going up against Hellmann’s and Best Foods. At the time it was Unilever. Huge company, huge budgets, dominant market share. So we were sort of the scrappy little brand. Didn’t have a lot of resources. We had to find some way to scratch our way to some market share and try to keep that business going well.
But then you move over to Miracle Whip. Miracle Whip is totally different. Miracle Whip is this powerhouse of a brand. In certain parts of the country, it is a super high market share. The big thing about Miracle Whip is that it has no competition to speak of. No direct competition. There is a little bit of private label, but Miracle Whip is Miracle Whip.
So that is a totally different marketing challenge. It is around how do you activate your customer base? How do you resonate with people who really like Miracle Whip? It is a super polarizing product. But people who like it, really like it. So you just have to tap in to that consumer group and try to motivate them and try to get them fired up. That becomes the challenge for Miracle Whip.
It’s a really interesting piece. One of the interesting things about Miracle Whip that really helps that brand a lot is it is very tough to define what it is. What is it? You are like, “Well, it is a mayonnaise.” But then people will be very quick to say, “Well no, it is not mayonnaise.” It is a really different flavor than mayonnaise. If you like mayonnaise, you are probably not going to like Miracle Whip and vice versa. So you can’t call it a mayonnaise.
It is technically a salad dressing. That is the technical standard. But what is a salad dressing? What do you do with salad dressing? You put it on salad. So if you wanted to compete with Miracle Whip, I guess you would launch a salad dressing. But what do you do with salad dressing? You put it on salad. And what do you do with Miracle Whip? Well, you put it on a sandwich. So then maybe you are going to launch sandwich dressing. But what is a sandwich dressing? I don’t even know what that is. So Miracle Whip is just a totally interesting product. Makes a ton of money. No real competition. But so different than Kraft Mayonnaise.
Becoming a Better Business Presenter
Andrew Mitrak: I also want to ask you about presentations. You’ve spoken a lot about this. You are obviously a great presenter yourself. You wrote a book called “How to Wash a Chicken,” all about presenting. My question to you is, what do marketers most often get wrong about business presentations?
Tim Calkins: Presenting well is so important in the world of business because that is how you have an impact. That is how you get your recommendations put forward. What marketers get wrong about presenting, I think, sometimes they make things just way too complicated.
The thing about the world today, especially in marketing, is that there is so much data. There is so much information that is available. So it is very easy to end up with a presentation or a recommendation that is very clunky, full of studies, full of data, full of analytics, full of all of this information. But ultimately, that doesn’t lead to a really strong recommendation sometimes.
I think the challenge today is: How do you take all this information that we have and figure out which information really matters? And then, how do you lay it out in such a way that people can really follow the story? They can see the narrative and they can begin to understand what is happening on a business.
Marketing is all about action, all about moving forward. It is about recommendations: “Here is what we should do next.” To get there, you have to take people on this journey from where we are today to how that plan forward is going to be the best path. To do that, you really have to think about all the results we are looking at today, all the information, all this data, and how does all of that get us to the recommendation of where we want to go forward? That, I think, is the role of the presentation.
Andrew Mitrak: One of my tactics for presentations is I try to keep my presentations themselves pretty short, like 10 slides or fewer, but then I have a really long appendix. I kind of preempt because when I present—especially if I think of ones where I am presenting to a cross-functional team, we might have to influence somehow, or an executive I need to persuade—often they might even interrupt and start asking questions immediately. I want to show that I am prepared and jump to an appendix, but also not have all that information upfront because then, to your point, it becomes cluttered. There are too many different things.
Is my thinking about that the right way? Of just showing my homework in the back end but keeping it tight upfront? Or do you have any other tactics or tips along those lines?
Tim Calkins: The question I would always ask is: What will your audience need or want to see? So anytime you are doing a presentation, one of the first things you have to do is think about who are you presenting to. You think about what do they like and what are they going to want to see. If I am presenting to somebody and if I know that they are going to want to see a five-year P&L for the business, well then I am going to proactively go ahead and put that in because I just know they are going to be looking for that.
So I think that is a really important step, to think about your audience and then make sure you deliver against what they are doing. Ideally, when you are doing a presentation, you don’t end up going to the appendix. Ideally. Because if you have really done it well, I think you have a sense about what is going to be the next question they are likely to ask, and then you try to address it there.
An appendix is good to have though, in case you do get questions from out of the blue. Especially sometimes with cross-functional people who might ask something, and then some of that stuff might end up in the appendix. So I think it can be a really useful thing to have along with you. The bulk of the presentation though, that is always the question about: Okay, what do I need to put in here and what is all the stuff I can take out?
The Importance of Narrative Over Delivery
Andrew Mitrak: In my work as a marketer, I would say I spend more time making business presentations and presenting them than I do on actual creativity or actual strategy on marketing. Sure, there is strategy that sometimes comes up in the course of making a presentation. If you are presenting the strategy, you have to have done the strategy beforehand. But I spend a lot of time in slides and making them and presenting.
But also, if you look at the time I spent in school sort of learning presentations versus the time I spent on all the other stuff, I probably underinvested in learning presentation skills upfront. Is that a pattern that you see as a professor? That generally speaking, we underinvest in teaching marketers presentation skills?
Tim Calkins: Well, I think it goes beyond marketers. I think generally speaking, we do a very poor job in the world of business preparing people to put together good presentations. And there are lots of reasons for that. Part of it is that that doesn’t fall into anybody’s responsibility area. It is not the finance department’s—the finance department isn’t going to teach people to write a presentation. And the marketing department isn’t going to teach that. And the accounting department is not going to teach that. And the leadership group... Nobody really teaches it. Or few people. There are some communications folks you will see who work on it.
The other thing I see is though that very often when we do teach people how to put together a good presentation, we end up focusing very much on the delivery. We spend a lot of time teaching people how do you use hand gestures appropriately, and how do you move around a room, and how do you speak in a forceful voice, and things like that. It is the execution, the delivery. Which in my mind is fine, that is good, I think that is all great stuff.
But the real opportunity is before that. It is: How do you put together the recommendation? How do you lay out the story? How do you work with your data and turn the data into a logical story that leads to your recommendation? That is the part that is not really taught very well, in my experience. And it is something that doesn’t come naturally to people.
It is also something that generative artificial intelligence doesn’t do well. Generative AI will produce a list of pros and cons for you, and it can create a PowerPoint page showing a list of points or bullets, but it doesn’t really build a great narrative that leads you to this recommendation about where we want to go. That is the value add.
I actually think if you write—if you put together a great presentation—the delivery becomes really easy. Because the presentation almost does itself. Back when I was at Kraft, I would remember sometimes we would put together this really complicated recommendation presentation. And then we would send the summer intern up to go deliver the presentation. And the summer intern would be like, “What? I can’t.” You are like, “No, it will be fine.” The slides were good enough and the story basically just goes through it. It is just going to tell itself.
But all that work gets done before the meeting begins. And I think that is the opportunity for people, is to really think about how do you put together these stories, how do you lay out stuff that makes a lot of sense. If you do that well, the rest of it is going to take care of itself.
Andrew Mitrak: Professor Tim Calkins, I really enjoyed this conversation. It was so fun to revisit Super Bowl ads. I know I am much more prepared for the big game on Sunday. And also it inspired me to brush up on my presentation skills as well. So as we wrap up, where can listeners read more and find you online?
Tim Calkins: My website and sort of my blog and my newsletter, timcalkins.com. Also on TikTok, you can find me at marketingprof_tim. So I’m out there posting a little bit on TikTok these days around Super Bowl spots and presenting and all of that.
Andrew Mitrak: That is awesome. We will be sure to paste links to those in the blog that accompanies this post. So Professor Tim Calkins, thanks again so much for your time. I had a lot of fun.
Tim Calkins: All right, Andrew. Thank you. That was great fun.


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