STEVE SMITH

Meet Steve at MediaPost Events

• Steve is attending Publishing Insider Summit, October 18, 2021
  
  

Articles by Steve All articles by Steve

• Breaking Through: Nutrabolt Ignites Fit Inspirationals In New C4 Push in Brand Insider on 10/14/2021
  

  Breaking through adversity is a central theme of performance beverage Nutrabolt's new C4 energy drink plan. The "Ignite Your Fire" campaign leverages the personal conquest stories of athletic social influencers in order to expand C4's brand reach globally and beyond the gym rat core. We recently sat down with Nutrabolt CMO and Chief Digital Officer Rajaa Grar to discuss the roots of the campaign and its heavy use of targeted video across everything from social video selective out-of-home. Grar brought to the retail CPG a lot of B2C pure play experience at Snap Kitchen, Paula's Choice, as well as Starbucks and Amazon.

• Foot Locker's 'CMO+': "Take Brand Marketing Off Your Resume" in Brand Insider on 09/24/2021
  

  Jed Berger, CMO of Foot Locker, doesn't really hate marketing. As he tells Brand Insider this week, it is just that he likes a great idea and a great product more. Product development and product marketing are becoming more intimately connected. When the product comes with relevance, with a story, then the marketing can be more authentic and even more efficient. This evolution is clearest at Foot Locker, which will have dropped literally hundreds of new sneaker model tie-ins just in the second half of 2021. When product relevance is put at the center, then marketing moves more towards demand generation. Suddenly consumer goods, like sneakers, come with their own pre-launch trailers, media buzz, press leaks, and a marketing plan that resembles a movie or video game release.

• BI Rerun: Ideal Image MedSpas Build Back Better in Brand Insider on 09/02/2021
  

  Because of the fires threatening Lake Tahoe this week, we have postponed our Retail Insider Summit. But as our planned agenda suggests, there is so much about the omnichannel marketing experience in retail poised for radical change. I find most fascinating the ways in which our expanded digital interactions with a brand will change not only how we shop but how the retail environment itself is built. This struck home with me when talking with Ideal Image's CEO David Prokupek in the Spring. As he discusses here, the virtual face to face consultations that the pandemic accelerated for his MedSpas will fundamentally change the functionality, layout and interactions of the retail experience. It is one example of how the intervention of digital solutions for a retailer may deepen the human interactions with customers.

• Brand Insider Rerun: Re-Engaging Betty Crocker in Brand Insider on 08/25/2021
  

  As we ease back into hybrod and live events this season I recall fondly one of my favorite virtual sessions from this past year of online-only Brand Insider. General Mills' then-CMO Ivan Pollard was thoughtful about how the current buzzword "engagement" is nothing new. Decades ago, Betty Crocker taught us all we need to know.

• After 20 Years, Vivid Seats Makes Its Brand Move in Brand Insider on 08/16/2021
  

  Here at MediaPost, we have known of Vivid Seats for years. Its team has been invaluable to many of our Email, Search and Performance Insider Summits.

• Reintroducing The Illy Brand You Already Know in Brand Insider on 08/09/2021
  

  You've seen the Illy brand before. You just may not know it. But with a new and very stylish campaign titled "Welcome on the Road to Happiness," Illy is going direct to consumers with a high concept branding effort aimed at the super-premium coffee buyer.

• Visible Leans On Its Site, Not Media, To Convert in Brand Insider on 07/30/2021
  

  As brands contemplate a post-cookie future, many rely on their own site dynamics and UX to render more, deeper first-party data. But as we discussed with Visible Wireless's Digital Marketing and Analytics Team Lead, Sarah Baker, this has implications for media buying and creative strategies. Typically, a DTC like Visible would optimize media towards performance. But as Baker explained at last week's Summit, Visible made a deliberate pivot away from that approach to shift more of the conversion work away from media and to its own site and more product-focused marketing.

• You Don't Have to Be... JewBelong's Judaism Rebranding Project in Brand Insider on 07/23/2021
  

  Even a crusty, jaded critic of the advertising industry like me can be a sucker for a great ad concept like JewBelong out-of-home campaigns on New York streets.

• Degree Partners Widely to Make 'Move Again With Degree' Message Un-Missable in Brand Insider on 07/16/2021
  

  Post-pandemic marketing campaigns continue to roll out messaging that allude to lockdown experiences while underscoring a positive future focus. Grounded in pandemic and post pandemic behavior research, Rexona/Unilever's Degree deodorant brand's Move Again effort is as you'd expect from the CPG giant, a massive multimedia rollout leveraging every imaginable channel. One of their new buzzwords is "un-missable," says Kath Swallow, Global Brand VP for Rexona at Unilever. But that doesn't mean relentless TV spots and billboard coverage. As she tells Brand Insider this week, it's as much about creating critical partnerships: from a famous drag celeb to video games. It even includes a Degree branded "Pit Mobile" making neighborhood stops with truly un-missable pit-related imagery.

• Mission's Mission: Making Produce A CPG in Brand Insider on 07/09/2021
  

  If Millennials have a signature food, then surely avocados would be it. But herein lies the opportunity, says Mission Produce head of marketing and communications Denise Junqueiro. Mission is a farm-to-grocery avocado brand that is both b2b and increasingly b2c. By focusing on creative product development, especially around Millennial lifestyle needs, Mission is working a different lane of produce branding and trying to de-commoditize this trendy fruit. If like me, avocado minis or even the prospect of avocado baby food sounds even zanier than avocado toast, think again, Boomer.

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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