STEVE SMITH

Articles by Steve All articles by Steve

• Gem Studios Puts Philanthropy In a Silversmith's Setting in Brand Insider Podcast on 04/11/2025
  

  Most retailers enhance the "IRL experience" with engaging store design, CX and occasional events. Gem Studio puts solder and a blowtorch in your hands. Created by Matt James in order to finance a Ugandan schoolhouse he had founded, this high concept retailer sells silver and turquoise jewelry, but only after the customer makes it herself. Matt and his co-founder (and wife) Lauren explored the lessons learned - about marketing, staffing and scaling - extreme experiential retail.

• Barry's Bold Brand Bedfellows in Brand Insider Podcast on 04/04/2025
  

  Why is a high-intensity workout gym chain partnering with a tequila brand, let alone Dyson, Netflix, lululemon or Christina Aguilera? Barry's has gone all in on the art of strange brand bedfellows. It is a deliberate effort to weave the company identity into customers' everyday lives. And to that end, the 90 Barry's locations have also become social centers, even party zones. Vicky Land, SVP of Brand & Comms explains how global brand initiatives and local activations reinforce one another.

• Playboy Is Back: No, Really This Time in Brand Insider Podcast on 03/21/2025
  

  I think I have written this story ten times before. Playboy was one of the first magazines to go "Dotcom" on the "World Wide Web" in 1994, which is when I started covering Internet media. Since then, I have written about so many Playboy relaunches, pivots, near-deaths and mis-fired salvage operations in the past 30 years, it is a miracle the brand persists at all. And here we go again.

• Hot Sauce With That Bubble Tea?: Gong Cha's Strange Bedfellows in Brand Insider Podcast on 03/14/2025
  

  What is a chain of bubble tea shops doing partnering with Frank's Red Hots, let alone Charles Schulz's Peanuts or the Final Fantasy game series? Those unlikely combinations have paid off for the Gong Cha beverage store chain. Brand partnerships have become a popular marketing hedge against the fragmented attention economy and brand invisibility. Gong Cha's Missy Maio, VP of Marketing, explains how hot sauce and tea made a surprising brand win.

• The Brandformance Approach to Planning in Brand Insider Podcast on 03/13/2025
  

  "Full Funnel" has joined the glossary of hackneyed marketing cliches we have added to the bingo cards at our Insider summits this year. But at MediaPost's recent Planning and Buying retreat, two different parts of the Hasbro media team joined to discuss walking the walk of full funnel. This great back and forth between Kristina Fields, Sr. Director, Global Media & Operations and her colleague Jennifer Burch, Sr. Director, Global Brand Media dug into how they are using solid metrics to chart "Brandformance" across the collage of media in the plan.

• Potbelly Plans to Scale Its Cozy Vibe in Brand Insider Podcast on 02/28/2025
  

  Potbelly Sandwich Works is noted for its on-premise experience. As CMO David Daniels tells us this week, the company has its roots in an antique store. And it retains that folksy feel to this day with actual potbelly stoves and loads of wooden beams to create rustic ambience.

• Robeks Tries to Blend the Stand-Out Smoothie in Brand Insider Podcast on 02/21/2025
  

  As younger consumers swear they will be economizing any minute now, the challenge for many marketers is how to target an emerging customer base with changing attitudes towards being consumers. In fact, we at MediaPost think this is such an important concern that we have put it at the center of our own upcoming Brand Insider Summit - QSR on April 7-10 in Austin. The Diner of Tomorrow will be our central theme. Smoothie chain Robeks is making a special effort to court younger customers, and their Mitch Baker, VP of Marketing join us this week to explore their approach.

• Refer a Friend?: How Ally Turns Customers Into Influencers in Brand Insider Podcast on 01/31/2025
  

  We all know that word of mouth, influencers and off-hand advice from friends are some of the most common ways people come to new brands. But what happens when the company you work with tries to goose this organic channel with incentives? ALLY's Executive Director, Head of Product and Lifecycle Marketing David Hixon tells us this week about the financial brand's Refer a Friend program that in just a few months is responsible for 14% to 17% of new deposit customers.

• Marketer Of The Year: Lisa McKnight in Agency of the Year on 01/27/2025
  

  Under Lisa McKnight's leadership of both the Barbie brand and as chief brand officer for all of its franchises, Mattel is pioneering a deeper understanding of post-media branding. You can't just surf culture; you have to make culture.

• The Yankee Peddler, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and the Social Cost of Segmentation in Brand Insider Podcast on 01/20/2025
  

  In trying to sell to us effectively, are marketers also inadvertently helping to divide us socially and politically? Could seemingly benign techniques like audience segmentation and profiling, demographic targeting and personalization have unintended consequences for our ability to connect and communicate with one another? Annenberg's Joe Turow has been exploring the rise of direct marketing techniques, from the 19th Century traveling Yankee peddler to the focus on performance and behavioral targeting in the digital age. He raises important questions about the social and ethical implications of letting advertisers define us.

Comments by Steve All comments by Steve

• 'B2B Marketing Is Dead': NI Rebrands In D2C Style by Steve Smith (Brand Insider Podcast on 09/09/2020)
  

  So true, Bart. I would love to heare about more b2b brands that are taking a b2c approach. 

• 'Mad' Magazine's Famed Cartoonist Mort Drucker Dies At 91 by Melynda Fuller (Publishers Daily on 04/09/2020)
  

  Drucker's style was our childhood entryway to American TV and film for many of us. Everyone both at MAD and at all of its imitators tried to imitate Drucker. But even as a kid I could tell the real thing from the copycats. No one tutored us more effectively in how not to take these media industries too seriously. Like Jack Davis, Wally Wood, John Severin, Drucker's pemcil and brush had an outsized power in our lives and culture. Thanks Mort.

• Obit: Pioneering Magazine Publisher Hugh Hefner, Dead At 91 by Joe Mandese (Publishers Daily on 09/28/2017)
  

  Malcolm X, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Jimmy Carter, Alex Haley (who originally interviewed Malcolm X for Playboy), Erica Jong, Germaine Greer, Bella Abzug, David Bowie - just a few of the interviews that still resonate for me decades later becasue they went deeper.and got closer to the figure's voice than anything else available. All of it sat within a package that was also irredeemably sexist and unapologetically wedded to the shallowest material pleasures of consumer culture. Somehow they were all of a frightening, contradictory, delusional, brilliant, craven, dazzling, piece that was America itself in the last half of the 20th Century.       

• GenerationVexed by Bob Garfield (Garfield at Large on 04/10/2017)
  

  This is the fake news we need more of.

• The Trump-ification Of 2016: The Super Bowl Implodes by Steve Smith (Mobile Insider on 02/08/2016)
  

  Luke. Thanks for that. Nice evolution of the argument. Although post-mass culture is more manageable than post-mass politics. Democracy still demands majorities to move forward. Mutli-party systems worldwide have long had to rely on coalition-building among varied three and four parties. One argument goes that the American two party system is already now based on coalitions of unlike-minded segments, and have been since the late 60s and the original Nixon Southern Strategy. Reagan's coalition of the blue collars, evangelixals and country club has always been an uncomfortable marriage. We are now seeing the seams show.  

• The Trump-ification Of 2016: The Super Bowl Implodes by Steve Smith (Mobile Insider on 02/08/2016)
  

  Thanks Jon, Peter and both Georges for your comments. But take heart. I may sound depresssed, and this may all seem very depressing. But I think there is a real hunger for creative thinking in both commercial and political fields. History shows (American Renaissance, Civil War, Progressive Era, Great Depression, Modernism, post-WWII pop and high art in America) that it takes a loss of faith in old institutions to make us receptive to new ideas.  

• Remembering A Legend We Lost In 2015: Joe Franklin by Adam Buckman (TVBlog on 12/15/2015)
  

  The WOR TV show was integral to my own passion for pop culture and respect for the troupers who hoofed, crooned, astonished and touched us from the stage. Joe had a humbling envy/respect of performers. His hospitality to performers of all stripes was an object lesson for budding media critics like myself that the people we wrote about were putting themselves out there in ways we never would. 

• A Mass Medium Without Mass Media: Live TV Losing Default Status by Steve Smith (Data and Targeting Insider on 07/27/2015)
  

  Hi all. I agree with your reticence over trusting self-reported data, which is why I mentioned that caveat. The research is a tracking study of 1200 US TV viewers with broadband access, so there is a skew built into the sample. But what I found most interesting in this research was the attitudinal implications - the ways in which users admitted to watching TV with different levels of engagement and attention according to situation and source. This part of the research I find very recognizable in my and my household's own behavior has to do wil how and why we choose different sources. OTT video is chosen much more deliberately I think and is my default source for content I am ready to pay attention to. On the other hand, most live TV is on because I have made a choice not to pay close attention while I peruse books or a second screen. 

• Verizon's 'No Cord Required' Mobile Video Service Launching Soon? by Steve Smith (MoBlog on 07/26/2015)
  

  @JS Oops. Missing work. The phrase should read "an OTT video market that will not lack players." Corrected. 

• A Modest Proposal: Truly 'Native' Mobile Advertising by Steve Smith (MoBlog on 07/16/2015)
  

  DanielYes some vendors tried on their own to do this, which is why I am suggesting it needs to be done at the OS level or as a common standard within the infrastructure. Single players trying to make it happen won't 

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