Mobile First

Our Guest

Jeanniey is Mercer’s Global Chief Marketing Officer, focused on building a more agile and transparent marketing operation accountable for driving revenue growth through demand creation and strong brand reputation. She believes in leveraging innovative and digital initiatives to help achieve her goals, and her background in education fuels her passion to inspire both consumers and the teams she works with.

Prior to her role at Mercer, Jeanniey was Head of Marketing and Growth for Barnes & Noble, where she drove the transformation of the NOOK business from hardware to app based. Her previous experience includes launching the world’s first digital newsstand for Zinio, growing the business to more than 20 million active consumers. She also launched and ran the global Digital Dialogue business for Ogilvy and Grey Direct’s Global Email Marketing business, establishing the world’s first email marketing practice inside an advertising agency.

Jeanniey holds a master’s degree in teaching from the University of Pittsburgh. A recognized “Woman in Business” and an entrepreneur, she has authored three books and launched five companies, including Ringblingz and the Email Experience Council. Jeanniey was recently named Networker of the Year by the Internet Marketing Association and is the Chairwoman of their Women’s Leadership Group. She also serves on the board of MarketingEDGE and as an advisor for select high-potential start-ups.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Jeanniey shares that she is at her happiest when she inspires people. She enjoys teaching new tricks and help people in general thereby she constantly finds innovative ways to do this. She mentions about a story when she was in 7th grade when she pitched the idea to create homemade fortune cookies for a bake sale. It was a smashing success (and a grand team effort) which revealed her entrepreneurial approach.Jeanniey shares how she loves problem-solving, looking at ways she can bring improvement, making people happy, reach an end goal or changing the world for the better. She is also a very practical person and is always excited in getting involved in anything new. This speaks as to why she had five businesses in the past.Mercer makes a difference in the lives of more than 110 million people every day by advancing their health, wealth and careers. This focus creates more secure and rewarding futures for their clients and their employees — whether designing affordable health plans, assuring income for retirement, or aligning workers with workforce needs. They are like the Intel Inside of HR companies. It is a phenomenal company in terms of impact as it drives organizations to provide employees a better life. Jeanniey is Mercer’s Global Chief Marketing Officer and her job focuses on two areas: increasing brand visibility and driving growth. They market themselves as strategic partners to their clients rather than a vendor or a solutions provider. Part of her role is to look at possibilities of digital transformations in marketing. They look at how they can integrate digital strategies, best practices and the coolest initiatives they see into what they are doing in a daily basis and how it can impact user experience.Their focus for growth for product and services is in user experience and how it is happening in all relevant channels. What they are seeing making a bigger impact is understanding user journey and how it starts the search for answers in those various channels. Time is currently their only challenge right now as they are now on their last five months in putting all of their initiatives together. They are now analyzing impacts and after that, they’ll go back to their CEO to share the results and see how they can leverage on this data for their growth. A few months ago, they had launched a new initiative called Mercer Digital where they are marrying all the incredible insights that they have in the people side of their house with consulting services and everything related to HR, technology and the future of work. They are creating an ecosystem which places companies ahead of the curve as far as solutions are concerned.

Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!

Our Guest

As CMO at Art.com, Sullivan-Cross oversees all marketing, communications, and analytics initiatives for the company, working to position Art.com as a prominent lifestyle brand in the e-commerce space, while creating an engaging narrative to inspire consumers to make a personal connection to art. Prior to Art.com, Sullivan-Cross was Vice President, Growth at Pandora where she strengthened the Pandora brand and developed marketing programs that contribute to the company’s active user and revenue growth, as well as its customer retention gains. With over 20 years marketing experience, she is an innovative data-driven marketer with a track record building and growing businesses at companies such as Lucasfilm, Warner Bros., Dictionary.com, Evite, Billboard and Adweek.   

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Lisa loves the combination of art and marketing, forging new grounds and marketing a product that she is passionate about. This is why she had worked in the movies or music because if it is not something that she can connect to or have an impact on, she will find it difficult to market. Lisa started out her college career in business but she shifted to communications about halfway through as she felt that a career with the latter is more in line with her passions. She then set her sights on advertising and marketing and started her career on the ad agency side for a start-up. She handled Amazon as her account for three years and learned from the company’s data-centric approach. She then moved to the client side because of her love for data. Lisa joined Newline and Warner Bros. then made her way to Lucasfilm by cold calling their Head of Digital for about 15 times to pitch him the idea about having an e-commerce division. She took a risk in joining as a contractor but it paid off. She then made her way to Pandora as she was attracted in starting the growth discipline from scratch as they didn’t have anyone in the company in the growth role. Performance marketing can also be called direct response marketing so you have strict KPIs that you are working under. In here, everything needs to be evaluated on return on ad spend and ultimately, LTV. In brand marketing, KPIs are different as you are trying to change hearts and minds. Increase in brand awareness, preference for the brand so that people will ultimately use the product. These two are both equally important and they work together. In Pandora, Lisa helped set up the infrastructure to help track and measure all their marketing activities. They had high level business goals so they set specific KPIs to each piece of what they did. 80% of the usage was on mobile app and, since this was 4 years ago, the biggest marketing challenge was tracking view through and click conversion all the way through to LTV. Art.com aims to make art accessible to everyone and they are doing this by transforming the way the world discovers art. There are lots of pain points in choosing an art piece and bringing it home so they are working on alleviating this. Help people express themselves and connect to others and as CMO, her main focus is to diversify their performance marketing channels to attract higher value customers. Their biggest constraint in this area was their lack of focus in mobile and right now, that is where they are establishing their presence as their customers are in mobile. They have been able to optimize mobile experience and inject growth mentality to the team.

Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!

As Senior Vice President of Presence and Commerce at GoDaddy, Lauren Antonoff oversees the development and operations of our website builder and e-commerce solutions for small business around the world.

Prior to GoDaddy, Lauren spent eighteen years at Microsoft, where she was most recently Director of Program Management for SharePoint, leading the effort to make the SharePoint a tool that people love to use to get work done. Her leadership was instrumental in building one of the most successful products and businesses at Microsoft, and helping SharePoint navigate the shift to the cloud.

While at Microsoft, she founded the Step Up Program, designed to increase the number of women in senior management roles by helping women become stronger candidates for these roles. Lauren studied Rhetoric and Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Lauren has surprised herself when she ended up in software as she thought she was going to be a civil rights lawyer. But as she thought about the problems that we encounter in technology, she felt that she can make the world a better place if she can solve these problems so people can use technology to get things done in their lives. She attributes her attitude of going out there in the world, taking on the challenges as you can and fight for the things you believe in to her mother, fighting for what was right.As Senior Vice President of Presence & Commerce at GoDaddy, the job was supposedly pretty straightforward: they help people make websites. But when she got there, it was way more than that. The group had a whole portfolio of tools designed to help customers establish their businesses online. Website builder, online store, SEO products, listings product, etc. Immediately she learned the disparate teams were stretched too thin. A key change she implemented was to address the platform it as a singular customer experience rather than a portfolio of products. One experience which helps people get online and create a holistic experience to guide them through their journey.GoDaddy is known for domains but they are more than that. They can present a whole range of solutions that they are likely looking for and this is what they are trying to showcase in their project, GoCentral. It’s a suite of capabilities which include a website, but just as importantly, also the things which come after making a website: managing your social profiles, engaging customers through email marketing and the whole nine yards.Bringing individual pieces which are currently in silos to work in concert together is one of the challenges that their company is currently facing and making use of data to understand what is working and what’s not is key. If you can use data to measure whether something is effective, you have the most powerful tool.How do you know which hypothesis to prioritize, how do you know which one is worth testing or not? You can use inputs to get ideas and use an agile methodology which is hyper targeted and placed in a controlled testing environment before rippling it out to other areas and environments. Dip your toe in the water and if it works, double down on it.

Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!

Our Guest

Ben Parr is the author of the best-selling book Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention-- named the top marketing book of 2015 by Strategy+Business Magazine and Small Business Trends. He is Co-Founder and CMO of Octane AI, the CRM for Messenger marketing. He sits on the board of directors of Samasource, the global non-profit dedicated to impact sourcing and giving work and is a member of the advisory board of Lufthansa Airlines. Previously, Parr was a venture capitalist, a columnist and commentator at CNET, and Co-Editor and Editor-at-Large of Mashable. He is a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Ben is passionate about two aspects: solving a complex problem which he has not solved before and creating a scalable solution to that problem. He believes it’s never enough to just solve a problem then move on, what excites him is scaling the solution to the entire planet. He started with this inclination in college and this got crystalized when he became an editor in Mashable. He believes that he has the ability, thus, the responsibility to change the world for the better. It’s part of the reason why he does a lot of the things he does.

From editor to VC, to being an author and starting a company, he shares that the rudimentary skillsets needed in each of these roles are the same. It is the switching that’s hard because people can be super focused in one thing and be great at that but when you change roles, your primary focus will shift and you need to exercise those muscles that you have not flexed that much.

Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention is a book that Ben has written and he shares that it is a deep dive into the psychology and science of attention. He wrote it because lots of companies come to him for him when it comes to items such as press, marketing, user acquisition that he realized all these areas fall around the same thing, which is attention. Thereby, going deeper in this subject could be helpful. He went through years of research, interviewed about 50 experts to understand the key things which trigger attention, the seven stages of attention and how to capture attention in each of those stages.

The seven stages of attention go in the order of how early in the stages of attention they happen:

1 - Automaticity – automatic sensations and how certain colors captivate our attention automatically versus others.

2 - Framing – we use framing to decide which things to pay attention to or not.

3 - Disruption – we pay attention to the things which violate our expectations of the world.

4 - Reward – certain types of rewards and the way they are delivered change the way we behave.

5 - Mysteries – the right kind of storytelling captivate our attention for a lot of psychological reasons.

6 - Acknowledgment – we pay attention to the people and things which pay attention to us and provide us validation, empathy and understanding.

7 - Reputation – triggers our attention based on reputable sources of information, the power of experts, and the power of the crowd.

About Octane AI: Messenger marketing is the new email marketing. Billions of people used messaging apps and if you need to reach the younger demographic, you need a software which could communicate to build campaigns to reach this audience to do all that but it is yet to exist. This is where Octane AI comes in. It’s built as a CRM using bots and AI in order to automatically communicate with customers starting with Facebook Messenger and eventually to other platforms. Their target market is companies and brands which are already established. Octane AI can be used for awareness but it is especially ideal for lead generation and conversation. Their biggest challenge right now is writing content for conversation. Writing for newsletters or blogs is one thing but writing content for conversation is another. It’s different and you have to script out what you are going to say and what you want your audience to respond. Once you get the hang of it, the possibilities open up so it’s a new thing that we have to learn.

Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!

Seasons Hospice & Palliative Care engenders hope in the lives of its patients and their family members. A community-based organization, Seasons Hopsice is on an ongoing mission to find creative solutions which add quality to life. Through the firm belief that individuals and families are the experts in their own care, we focus on the patient and family experience and empowerment.

Our Guest

Balu Natarajan, M.D. is a graduate of Northwestern University Medical School and has been the Chief Medical Officer of Seasons Hospice since 2005. He served in various capacities for Seasons from 2000 until 2005, including holding the position of Medical Director of the Illinois program.

Board-certified in internal medicine, hospice and palliative care, and sports medicine, Dr. Natarajan has authored book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals. He has also lectured across the United States and around the world, including at the Annual Meeting of the American College of Physicians. He won the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee in 1985.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Dr. Natarajan loves helping people and he learned early in his career that he is one of those physicians who can inspire other physicians to be better or to improve their workday to be able to do more for people. His current role in Seasons Hospice allows him to support 4700 patients a day through hundreds of physicians, hospice aids, social workers, nurses, chaplains and other team members who work together. He loved technology as he was growing up and thought he would be doing computer or software work. When he was 16, he went to a science show and one of the sessions featured a cardiologist who passed around an artificial heart after talking to them about it. He was hooked to science the moment he held that heart in his hand.His accidental journey to Hospice started when he needed a job for a year when his wife needed to go somewhere for school.  He became a hospitalist for a year taking care of hospitalized in patients. He found himself referring patients to Hospice then did a talk one night during a team meeting, and it involved from there.Hospice is based in Chicago, Illinois and had just turned 20 years old. They are a joint commissioned Medicare certified hospice and their job is to take care of patients with life expectancy of 6 months or less. They are the largest employer of music therapists across the country and have a foundation which supports their patients non-medical needs. The communities they serve are generally urban and sub-urban markets. They serve 4700 patients a day in 29 cities from coast to coast.Dr. Natarajan’s focus is patient experience and he has all the support of all the doctors as well as the Nursing and Education and Quality Support of Care departments.  His team takes this incredibly seriously and what they have been working on right now is getting the right person to the right patient at the right time, given the backdrop of short length of stay. Basically, this pertains to how they can serve to those who are acutely in need who just came into the program, and at the same time, getting to the people that they have been taken care of for months now. It’s not an easy thing to do and they are hoping that technology can have a huge impact on their ability to do this.He believes that the areas where technology can really make an impact on in their field is acuity scale, patient perceptions and developing a tool which can take all the triages and determine which patients need to be prioritized overlaid with geography. The challenges they are encountering right now in applying technology include connectivity (which is the biggest), rules and regulations which clarify which is a visit or not, and other logistical, legal and technological barriers.

Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!