STEVE SMITH

Meet Steve at MediaPost Events

• Steve is attending Brand Insider Summit Pharma & Health, February 18, 2024
  Hyatt Regency Coconut Point Resort And Spa
  
• Steve is attending Publishing Insider Summit, February 21, 2024
  Hyatt Regency Coconut Point Resort And Spa
  
• Steve is attending TV + Video Insider Summit, March 17, 2024
  The Scottsdale Resort @ McCormick Ranch
  
• Steve is attending Digital OOH Insider Summit, March 20, 2024
  The Scottsdale Resort @ McCormick Ranch
  
• Steve is attending Brand Insider Summit Retail, April 22, 2024
  
  
• Steve is attending Marketing: Politics, January 18, 2024
  Washington Marriott at Metro Center
  

Articles by Steve All articles by Steve

• Jack in the Box's Strategy for Staying Hip in Brand Insider on 12/08/2023
  

  "What a fun industry this is," said Sheena Dougher, Jack in the Box's VP, Marketing Communications as she kicked off a presentation showing exactly that during MediaPost's Brand Insider Summit: QSR last month. Staying culturally relevant, trendy, edgy and fresh is what a good social influencer program like hers is all about. But behind some of the madcap, creator-driven content is a well-structured social listening and strategy team that maps memes and campaigns against the right roster of authentic voices. Hip is no accident. It takes a plan.

• Knorr's Diaspora Marketing Brings 'Taste of Home' to Global Emigrees in Brand Insider on 12/01/2023
  

  Multicultural advertising is more discussed than executed. Knorr recipe mix brand's 'Taste of Home' effort is unique in that it targets the localized Knorr brands to those same populations as they migrate worldwide. This truly global brand recognizes the diversity within diaspora communities and recruited artists from a range of Asian-American/Canadian identities to create murals in select cities. They amplified their work with highly targeted digital media, a docuseries, and eventually a merchandise collection. Lan Trieu, Head of Marketing for Nutrition and Ice Cream at Unilever International explained how "authenticity" in multicultural marketing runs deeper than casting decisions and language choices.

• Marketing Peter Piper's Bigger Pie in Brand Insider on 11/24/2023
  

  To understand the marketing challenge for Peter Piper Pizza, it is important to know that their physical locations are enormous. It is not just booths and pizza ovens. As CMO Genaro Perez explained at last week's MediaPost Brand Insider Summit: QSR, they run several different businesses out of this plant. We explored with Genaro how the brand builds these different market targets and goals into a pie that is larger than the sum of its slices.

• Just Friends?: Good Feet's Doug Zarkin Offers Brand Love Advice in Brand Insider on 11/20/2023
  

  Do consumers really "love" their brands? According to Havas' ongoing Meaningful Brands surveys, most of us believe that three quarters of the brands we use could be easily replaced tomorrow. So what does this "brand love" mean, really? Longtime brand leader at Luxottica's Pearle Vision, and newly installed Chief Brand Officer at Good Feet Holdings Doug Zarkin has been thinking hard on the topic and even wrote a book. Moving Your Brand Out of the Friend Zone came out last month just two days after he was named CBO at Good Feet. He joined us this week on Brand Insider to make his case for "love."

• FanDuel Doubles Down on Differentiation in Brand Insider on 11/10/2023
  

  The betting apps have been carpet-bombing every imaginable media channel for years. Many of them have deep VC-filled pockets that are buying up every nook and cranny of CTV terrain especially. Can anyone distinguish among all of these competitors and make any sense of the white noise they have created on our TV screens?

• The Hungry Girl Menu Still Sees Email As the Main Dish in Brand Insider on 11/03/2023
  

  Hungry Girl is one of the most enduring email newsletters online. Founder Lisa Lillian was a "social influencer" doing "native advertising" before we had digital labels for either. She reflects on more than 20 years of zigs and zags that keep leading back to the essential, enduring power of the in-box.

• Yadda, Yadda: Verizon's Value Brands Navigate a Sea of Sameness in Brand Insider on 10/30/2023
  

  The mobile market is cluttered...even within a giant provider like Verizon. That company's portfolio of value-oriented products includes Total by Verizon, Visible, TracFone, Simple Mobile, SafeLink, Walmart Family Mobile, Straight Talk and Verizon Prepaid, among others. And so when we sat down with Verizon Value President Angie Klein, the main topics had to be brand differentiation and building in a saturated market.

• Tracking the Athletic Hunter: MTN OPS' Unique DTC Target in Brand Insider on 10/21/2023
  

  MTN OPS produces a wide range of energy, workout and nutrition drinks, which makes it sound like any number of trendy DTC brands. Not so. This is a brand with a very specific and different target in mind: the hunting and sportsmen segment. The hunting and sportsmen segment. As MTN OPS CEO and co-founder Trevor Farnes tells us this week.

• Wendy's Takes DOOH's Measure...One Frosty At a Time in Brand Insider on 10/19/2023
  

  When the Bucks win, you win...a Wendy's Frosty. It was a great localized promotion idea that required near-real-time media execution. Digital Out of Home screens allowed franchisee Manna Hospitality Group / Bridgeman to beat even the traditional TV and radio channels for the promotion. At MediaPost's Digital Out-of-Home Insider Summit, Gina Sisk, Media Director, Manna Hospitality Group and Kristy Schlepp, CEO, Outdoor Nation, brought the receipts to show how the effort directly impacted local sales.

• The Sweet Art of Candy Marketing: Bit-O-Honey Gets a Makeover in Brand Insider on 10/06/2023
  

  Who knew that candy marketing success could hinge on the age profile of a honey bee mascot, the amount of yellow and red on a package, small changes in texture? When Spangler Candy recently acquired and relaunched Bit-o-Honey it was thinking hard about all of those nuances that make a choice pop on the shelves.

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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