STEVE SMITH

Meet Steve at MediaPost Events

• Steve is attending Email Insider Summit, April 20, 2021
  
  

Articles by Steve All articles by Steve

• The In-Box Renaissance: Purple, RentPath Prepare For Email's Next Star Turn in Brand Insider on 04/09/2021
  

  Email is 50 years old this year. Its resilience is so familiar that we don't even bother joking about the many "Email is Dead" eulogies.

• Baking Engagement Into The Brand Cake With Betty Crocker in Brand Insider on 04/02/2021
  

  General Mills CMO Ivan Pollard brought us back a century to the invention of the Betty Crocker persona to illustrate how the company is trying to reassert the basics of consumer engagement by digital means. He demonstrated how a social interaction with a Saudi Arabian boy led to a massively successful Ramadan campaign that promoted men trying their hand at baking.

• The Simple 4th Ave. Market Equation: Don't "Leverage" Community -- Invest In It in Brand Insider on 03/26/2021
  

  4th Ave. Market is a two-year-old D2C grounded in a century-old tradition and business model. The e-retail platform for hair, beauty and personal care products for consumers of color is recreating digitally the Black-owned and supported business districts that ran parallel to and in the face of Jim Crow. The model is simple: give and get support from your own community. Co-founder and CEO, Salim Holder, brings to the venture years of experience with legacy brand building while bringing out of history a very simple lesson: Don't "leverage" community, invest in it.

• Ideal Image MedSpas Build Back Better in Brand Insider on 03/19/2021
  

  Do I really look like that? Staring at our imperfect mugs on ZOOM meetings for the last year drove many to seek professional cosmetic help. The problem for the medical aesthetics Med Spa retail chain was a ton of demand and no supply during lockdowns. But as Ideal Image's CEO David Prokupek tells us, the company quickly accelerated its emerging virtual consultation system that primed customers for the eventual return of physical engagements. The telehealth platform now serves over 25,000 people a month. And as retail slowly reopened, Med Spas are already performing 75,000 procedures a month. It is a good case study in building back better.

• SmileDirect Aligns Brand/Performance Mix With Every Video Screen in Brand Insider on 03/11/2021
  

  SmileDirect has a lot of explaining to do. The maverick D2C smile straightening product is a long, involved sell, where leads can take up to two years to convert. And so CMO John Sheldon is expanding mindshare on every TV, CTV, Social video screen that can tell a good video story. It is a big brand play that remains anchored in D2C obsession with performance, by keeping CPMs tethered to the bottom line.

• Show-And-Tell And Sell: Pour Moi Has Breaking News for TV Advertisers in Brand Insider on 03/02/2021
  

  Founder and CEO of climate-oriented skincare Pour Moi, Ulli Haslacher, has always been a show-and-tell marketing purist. She built the D2C brand via shopping channel appearances. And she is a walking demo herself - keeping one hand treated with traditional products and the other moisturized with a Pour Moi mixture tuned to her current climate. But during the pandemic, Ulli turned the limitations of remote video to an advantage by marketing Pour Moi into countless local TV news segments.

• From Cheerios to Weed: TREC Plans Pot's CPG Future in Brand Insider on 02/19/2021
  

  Branding breakfast is not that far removed from marketing a better cannabis buzz.

• LaRue 1680 Serves Up The Cure For A Rough 2020: How About Some Tea? in Brand Insider on 02/01/2021
  

  After a year of pandemic and social unrest, America could use a cup of India Street Vanilla Chai, preferably served in a single- serve ceramic pot and cup combo. Business coach and serial entrepreneur Stephanie Synclair's second D2C startup, LaRue 1680, launched in October fueled in part by her existing social media base of followers. But then, Bridgerton happened, and Netflix's hit period, softcore series seems to find time for a lot of tea between those infamous trysts.

• Helix: A D2C Uncovers the ROI of CRM and LTV in Brand Insider on 01/22/2021
  

  Helix Sleep has refocused a lot of the data-driven strategy to LTV and launched several new brands, among them the AllForm sofas.

• Truman's: A Sustainable D2C Brand Needs a Sustainable Model in Brand Insider on 01/19/2021
  

  Alex Reed, co-founder and CMO of D2C cleaning product brand Truman's, is one of the only marketers to give an honest and nuanced answer to my cynicism about "brand love." He gets it. There really is no love lost between most of us and the spray we use to clean our counter top. Nevertheless, Truman's is trying to build a different kind of CPG relationship with consumers without ad-bombing Instagram.

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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