STEVE SMITH

Meet Steve at MediaPost Events

• Steve is attending Brand Insider Summit QSR, June 03, 2024
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• Steve is attending Brand Insider Summit CPG, May 05, 2024
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• Steve is attending Search and Performance Insider Summit, May 01, 2024
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Articles by Steve All articles by Steve

• Satin and Supplements: OLLY and Overnight Beauty Blend Brands in Brand Insider on 04/19/2024
  

  Brand partnering has been a key theme recently at MediaPost's Insider Summits. As customer acquisition costs soar, it makes sense that companies try to draft off of one another's existing customer bases. In fact a few curious co-brand combos have been hatched at our retreats. One of them aligned the sleep, wellness and beauty brand Overnight Beauty, with the vitamin and supplements company OLLY.

• HOP-ing Into The Clutter: HOP WTR Innovates Against the Noise in Brand Insider on 04/19/2024
  

  Americans love drinking, but apparently we will do just about anything to avoid tap water. The soft beverage shelves are overwhelmed with new entrants and ideas - like non-alcoholic "hop-infused water." We explore with category pioneer HOP WTR and its VP of Marketing and Innovation Ryan Haggerty the challenge of explaining an unfamiliar brand and an unknown category in ways that break through market clutter.

• Nerds Gummy Clusters Rides Viral Wave...Into The Big Game in Brand Insider on 04/05/2024
  

  A lot of brands use Super Bowl advertising to launch a new brand or campaign push. In the case of Ferrara's Nerds Gummy Clusters, however, a Super Bowl ad this year culminated a remarkable business growth story that started several years ago at the grass roots of candy fandom.

• Pure Leaf Wants Us To Believe...In Zero Sugar in Brand Insider on 04/01/2024
  

  The Pure Leaf iced tea brand wants to make a believer of me and you. A believer that a zero sugar version of Pure Leaf can still carry the brand's signature brewed tea, subtly sweet flavor. Pure Leaf Zero Sugar Sweet Tea launches this week with an artful campaign that channels both the recent Ghostbusters movie release and old school X-Files fandom. The "Unbelieveably Sweet Files" campaign leads with a video starring Emily Alyn Lind and Celeste O'Connor, who happen to be co-starring in last weekend's box office winner Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Unlike many other drink brands, Pepsico's Pure Leaf is not one to churn out new flavors off of every trend. This was a long and deliberate roll-out. And to talk about this we have someone is really knows the beverage market. Julie Raheja-Perera, General Manager, Vice President, North America of the Pepsi Lipton Partnerships.

• ZIPs Has New Reasons to Take Us To The Cleaners in Brand Insider on 03/15/2024
  

  It's not just about getting missing buttons replaced and taking that pet hair-infested suit jacket out for a refresh. ZIPS Cleaners is a national franchise of dry cleaners that hopes to break out of the narrow range of services associated with the category. We spoke with CMO Mary Ann Donaghy this week about how a new generation of consumers is looking for someone else to do their laundry, among other chores. It turns out that sending customers a drop-off laundry bag is often more effective just advertising new services.

• Managing the Hotness: Can Dave's Hot Chicken Scale Authenticity? in Brand Insider on 03/07/2024
  

  When Dave's Hot Chicken outlets open in a new city, it feels more like a blockbuster movie premiere or iPhone launch days, circa 2013. Earned media buzzes for weeks, and long lines form early. Which raises a lot of good-to-have marketing questions about how a brand leans into and maintains cult status as it aspires to expand quickly. And how does it maintain that buzz well after launch?

• Rite Aid Bending the Adoption Curve in Brand Insider on 03/01/2024
  

  New digital features are useless to your brand unless patients are actually using them. On MediaPost's recent Brand Insider Summit: Pharma & Health, Rite Aid's Dustin Humphreys shared how the company built a business case around digital adoption and how to measure utilization. By focusing on usage, not just features, the company has learned how to bend the adoption curve, so that "digitization" of the user base is adding real value to patient experience and brand investment

• Q Mixers Wants an Informed Impulse Buyer in Brand Insider on 02/23/2024
  

  Q Mixers can be found in thousands of outlets nationwide. It promises to upgrade the typical flat and overly sweet drink mixer with better ingredients and more fizz. But of course, mixers typically are last minute add-on, low-consideration purchase. The brand needs to be at the point of inspiration and sale, but it also has a specific story to tell. Which is one of the problems Nick Wooten, their CMO tries to solve in part with an evolved out of home ad strategy

• Bonin Bough's New Mission Is Deeper Than Media in Brand Insider on 02/16/2024
  

  Bonin Bough doesn't just want major advertisers to support Black-owned media. He wants them to support communities. Bough famously led digital at Pepsi then media at Mondelez. But in recent years as co-founder of Group Black he is incubating, financing and selling advertisers into a mushrooming portfolio of black-owned businesses. He will be appearing next week at MediaPost's Publishing Insider Summit in Bonita Springs. But this week on Brand Insider we dug into Bough's vision for bringing brands beyond media and into the lives of more diverse communities.

• Turning Red Blue: Learning from the Beshear Win in Brand Insider on 02/12/2024
  

  As polarization of the electorate seems to escalate, political campaigns engage in an existential question. Can media move minds...and votes anymore? At last month's Marketing Politics event in Washington D.C., Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear's Campaign Manager Eric Hyers outlined how locally focused messaging, careful data analysis, and targeting helped drive a Blue candidate's re-election in a deep Red state. The win also demonstrated the simple power of a heartfelt, authentic campaign ad...that didn't even include the candidate.

Comments by Steve All comments by Steve

• 'B2B Marketing Is Dead': NI Rebrands In D2C Style by Steve Smith (Brand Insider 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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