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. In advance of EIS, this week's Brand Insider calls on two of the EIS veterans (Chester Bullock at RentPath and Scott Cohen at Purple) to reflect on how the pandemic and looming changes in digital tracking will bring email back to the center of marketers' planning.

Steve chats with David Prokupek, who is the CEO of Ideal Image Med Spa, a medical aesthetics company with well over 150 locations in the US. Their services include laser hair removal, cool sculpting and botox, all administered by medical professionals. It also uses a virtual consultation system to leverage the digital channel in preparation for the engagements. The company has seen growth this year as it quickly pivoted to a telehealth consultation platform that now serves over 25,000 people a month. 
Prior to Ideal Image, David himself helped build both the Smashburger QSR brand and Jackson Hewitt tax service brands.

As the oral care upstart SmileDirect grows its brand into new product lines and customers, the company is bringing its performance-oriented media to every screen. CMO John Sheldon explores how a CPM-centric approach continues to perform across linear, CTV and social. Likewise, highly modular creative and leveraging shorter formats are giving SmileDirect the flexibility to grow despite the opaque outlook for 2021 media.

Steve chats with Ulli Haslacher, President and Founder, Pour Moi

Kayla Rochkin is the VP of Marketing at TREC Brands, a purveyor of cannabis based products in the Canadian market. TREC is only a few years old, but has already established several cannabis brands and we'll discuss how the company targets distinct consumer segments, with different branding and packaging.

Steve chats with Stephanie Synclair, most recently, founder of the luxury tea and accessories brand LaRue 1680. But this is just the latest project for the serial entrepreneur, author, and business coach. Her book ‘Shut Up and Do the Work: The entrepreneur's guide to creating massive success’ was published in 2016.  This discussion with Stephanie will focus on the topic of building a new brand. 

Helix Sleep has refocused a lot of its data-driven strategy to LTV and launched several new brands, among them the AllForm sofas. Director of CRM at Helix, Laur Fiatoa, tells us how emphasizing an LTV strategy for growth involves changes to messaging, the channels you use, and even the internal “data culture” that drives it all.

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.

McGowan is a longtime evangelist of digital marketing in Democratic campaigning, as she also ran digital advertising for the massive Priorities USA PAC during the 2016 cycle. Political wonks will want to lean back for this full podcast version, where McGowan reflects on how the consultancy/agency structure in political campaigning skews media allocation and stifles innovation. It echoes eerily sentiments we hear increasingly in the general consumer brand world.

Matthias Paisdzior is the Head of North America for GOT BAG, a Germany-based company that makes backpacks and bags out of recycled ocean plastic.  It was a passion project that started in 2016, and has become a business and the mission. Matthias’s job is to bring that brand over the plastic-choked Atlantic to the US shores and launch here.