Mobile First

Katrina Craigwell is VP, Global Marketing Innovation at GE Digital, where she leads brand and digital marketing for the new business unit. Her team is responsible for driving innovative storytelling and generating commercial impact for GE Digital across visual and digital mediums. Prior to that, Craigwell was Director of Global Content & Programming for GE Corporate, where she spearheaded new programs at the intersection of technology and brand, including GE’s work on Instagram, YouTube and across virtual reality platforms.

Prior to GE, she was Associate Director at social media agency Attention, working with clients including CNN, HLN, WE tv, A&E and The Guardian. Craigwell began her career in public relations at the Independent Film Channel, working on some of IFC's first social media campaigns.

She was named to Adweek’s Most Influential Women in Marketing and Media in 2016 and Young Influentials and Creative 100 in 2015, Forbes' 30 Under 30 in Marketing & Advertising in 2014, and AdAge's Creativity 50 in 2012.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Katrina came from Canada and went to New York right off college as she wanted to work in television. She was very interested in media and had been in the city for more than a decade now. She is passionate about the way information flows over the net and the value that we can drive out of that. On the human side, she passionate about diversity and leadership and how much it serves as all.

As a 10-year-old, Katrina was always been a sci-fi nut so she has dreamt of creating things which never existed before. She was very curious about the future and just how far we, and the technology we built can, get. The older she gets, the more she appreciates the impact that she is creating.

She started as a marketing intern at The Independent Film Channel in their video department so departing for GE seemed to be a very different side. As she understood what GE does though, she realized that it was a very good playground as the brand has so many rich stories to tell. About a year ago, she joined their software business (GE Digital) dedicated to the internet industrial of things. There is an opportunity here to build your brand and talk about what you are doing.

Katrina’s focus is building the connection between brand and business becoming more and more tangible. She also constantly thinks about brand strategy and how they can continue to evolve GE, who is known and trusted for industrial work, to be a brand viewed as digital as well. Getting this right and delivering on this is really essential so the look at the data and think about the customer first.

Mobile, for Katrina, is another way which we can think about utility and which forces us to stop bad behavior. So when she thinks about connection and connectivity, she aims for the results which it should garner: to be faster, to be more efficient, and be more productive.

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!

Jeff serves as CMO for Yext, the company that puts business on the map with the award-winning Yext Knowledge Engine. Prior to joining Yext, Jeff served as Vice President of Marketing Insights for Salesforce and ExactTarget where he built the content marketing and thought-leadership teams.

Jeff’s first book, AUDIENCE: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans and Followers (Wiley 2014), has been lauded by marketers and executives alike as a must-read for those interested in the rise of proprietary audience development as a core marketing responsibility. A Clevelander now working in NYC, he continues to bask in the afterglow of the Cleveland Cavaliers NBA Championship.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Jeff is passionate about, foremost, his family and friends; and after that, learning about growing and challenging himself. He is a communicator at heart but went to law school and at the end, realized that reliving the worst moments of people’s lives was not his cup of tea. He quickly gravitated towards the internet and before he knows it, his marketing materials are syndicated in his company in a national level. He was tapped to do paid search advertising and had a blog, about bacon, which drove about seven figures of revenue. He forged partnership with ExactTarget before joining Yext.

He developed the knack for marketing because of the different skillset he gained from being pushed out to the audience at an early age. Being placed in a position where you are nervous in front of strangers forces you to think on your feet and drives you to empathize with your audience. He had also delved in different things to test his creativity, such as sketch comedy, which gained him the skill of being able to quickly assess a situation; hone in on what’s important, funny and meaningful; and then figure out how to turn and communicate that into something of value.

Jeff’s main focus, as a CEO, is growth and managing towards it. Hiring and managing internal teams, empowering his team to make decisions and execute campaigns and projects, creating opportunities and paving career paths, and instituting internal events where they bring in thought leaders and influencers to motivate their teams are things which he continuously work on.

Together with HR, he works on implementing initiatives which drive culture change and celebrate people through Yext Talks and other engagement activities for different resource groups, which how their marketing team gives value to their organization. These are usually low cost but bring pride to their team.

The challenge that they find as of this time is nurturing talent. You will see a wide gap between the students out of marketing school and the cream rises up to the top very quickly. In a market like New York, there is too much competition for creative talent and the challenge in attracting talents is a real one.

Jeff shares that AI and machine learning are freight trains which are bearing down in many industries and people are viewing them with mixed emotions: excitement and trepidation. For Jeff though, he looks at this with a sense of excitement and exploration and with an understanding that these concepts must be built upon accurate information and deep knowledge. Their vision is being that source of truth for data needed for these technologies.

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!

Billy Collins jumped at the opportunity to join the SoapBox team to continue building on all of their success. The brand mission, high quality products, startup culture and impressive team made it exciting for him to join SoapBox on their journey to create a movement behind the SoapBox brand. Here, he leads the marketing team, working to raise awareness of their high quality natural product line that makes an impact in our world with every purchase.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Billy is most passionate about having the ability to meet someone and solve their problem, and amazed at how powerful changing someone can be. He is fascinated by humans and helping them benefit from changing their habits to a more effective one will ultimately grow the business.

He didn’t know much about the business world before and he didn’t want to do investing or consulting so he took a job in HR because he liked people. He thought of communicating, interacting, motivating, and leadership combined with understanding on how to make an investment profitable is what fueled his passion for what he does.

Johnson and Johnson was a good environment for Billy as they have a culture of collaboration, respect of opinions and thinking out loud. It was also a healthcare company where you can help other people’s lives and has a credo about making decisions prioritizing customer welfare – all these made J&J very appealing to Billy hence his transition.

As an associate brand manager, he did a lot of execution and worked in the beauty industry. It built his foundation of knowledge on how things worked. His next role was being a Global Marketing Manager where he broadened his sights to a larger audience. What caused him to move to SoapBox was hearing insights from Gary Vaynerchuk which made him ponder on the next steps in his career. To be able to take his training and experience from J&J and the impact that he can make to people in joining SoapBox made it a pretty easy decision to move.

Inside the SoapBox Story: In 2010 founder David Simnick set out to make the best soap in every way when he was inspired to start SoapBox after joining a USAID contractor post college. There he realized that hygiene aid wasn’t being implemented to its fullest potential and wasn’t being paired with an essential item - soap. Dave made the first batch of soap in his college apartment kitchen while still at American University. Six years later our products are available in Wal-Mart, Target and many other retailers across the nation. Even more impressive SoapBox has donated over one million bars in the US & abroad to those who otherwise would go without access to this basic need.

Billy is working on rebranding their new packaging as it wasn’t as effective the efficacy of the product. They are now working with a design agency and being very thoughtful about the process. Their packaging should reflect the effectivity of their product. The second piece that he is working on is marketing their product online more effectively. They are looking at an approach where they will create a lot of different content and this needs to be served to the right audience.

As SoapBox is more than just a personal care product, Billy shares that they are running HopeCode, a way to show consumers exactly how their purchases are helping others. The goal is to provide authenticity and transparency of their aid mission to their consumers.

Ran is Happify’s Chief Data-Scientist. He is an entrepreneur, author, coach, and TEDx speaker. Ran’s debut book: Ride of Your Life – a Coast to Coast Guide to Finding Inner Peace describes his 6,000 mile solo motorcycle ride of from NY to California, meeting with Phil Zimbardo, Deepak Chopra, and others.

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Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Ran is excited about the opportunity in technology to make people’s lives better. He is mostly passionate about this -- making the most advance technology to deliver a more meaning, fuller life. As soon as he saw the overlap between psychology and technology, he left IBM and this had been his passion since then. These two disciplines made him realize that he can make a profound impact in individuals and an opportunity to intervene and create something transformative.

When he turned forty, Ran took off in a motorcycle and drove from New York to California. He was on the road for five weeks and he made lots of stops along the way. During this time, he interviewed a lot of people and eventually published his first book about it called Ride of Your Life. A lot of transformation happened which led him to negotiate the sale of his company while he was on the road and where he came back as a chief scientist for bLife.

When he was introduced to the folks at Happify, he realized that they were way ahead of the curve. It was very close to what he had envisioned building and the built a natural connection. He became the Chief Data Science Officer and has been nothing but happy since he joined as he knows they are building something very unique.

Happify is a set of tools, activities, games, mediation, etc. packaged in an app and a website. Designed to make you happier, you can chose the activity fit for you which can reduce your stress, find your calling or develop you more. It will take you to a sequence of activities catered to your goal and is package in a way that is very rich and can transform your life.

Looking at the whole domain of transforming people’s lives through technology and psychology, what Ran views as a possible hurdle is the fact that people’s psychology is not observable, so to speak.

Ran shares the complexity of the data they are gathering and he describes it as intimate and rich. When people come to the app or the site, they are asked to write the things that they are grateful for or their goals or their challenges and all of these are indicative of their psychological states.

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!

Jack is Vice President and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Digital Trends with focus on Brand & Social Media marketing strategies. A visionary entrepreneur and thought leader with a passion for startups, leadership & technology, Jack has had multiple exits as co-founder & CTO of several companies.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

Jack is passionate about tech, leadership and innovation. It lies in tech in general but he is very much into anything else new and innovative.

Jack’s adventures started when he is just months old when his family left Vietnam as refugees in a boat. En route, they were robbed by pirates and he got kidnapped. His story led him to Portland, Oregon where his father became an entrepreneur and allowed him to see how businesses are run even as a child. He interacted with customers at the early age of 6 and created opportunities for the business which led him to deviate from the path that his parents had set out for him. He founded a start-up company, grew a business and had the chance to invest in other companies.

He started his journey with Digital Trends when he met the founders of the company. With his passion in tech, he found his way in as a mentor and he later on became involved as in Brand & Social Media.

Jack role is the one assessment of the business as far as opportunities are concerned. This includes having their writers’ amazing content get to the right eyes, and as many eyes as he can, for example.

Jack shares that engaging with your audience is a big deal so they work on responding to them as much as they can and finding out what they are really interested in. They use social media, like Twitter polls, Instagram and Facebook, to create conversations and allow people to express themselves.

Facebook is the best platform for engagement as users can engage within comments, they can choose a range of reactions for posts, and it allows them to have the discussions that the company needs.

Jack would love to see the advancement of robotics and artificial intelligence but he also finds it scary what could happen. He thinks that we are not quite there yet but companies are learning from the different AI tools and assistants.

Data gathering tools, such as geolocation, is very important in our mobile society and we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of what that data can do for us.

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!