As you likely know, I’m a huge exponent of cause marketing, corporate philanthropy, and charitable giving. I truly believe that companies can “do well by doing good.” And while I’d count myself as having been successful realizing many such projects over the years, there’s always more to learn.

That’s why I was glad to sit down with Joe Cerbo, Managing Director of On Brand and independent Social Impact Advisor & Strategist. Joe works with businesses, brands, and entrepreneurs to create innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social, cultural, and environmental challenges by creating and implementing social impact strategies.

I wanted to learn about Joe’s own journey into cause marketing, and learn about issues facing corporations considering their own journeys. For example, how should they decide on which cause(s) to support? “When I advise a company or if somebody just asks me what I think about supporting a different cause, for me it always starts with what’s important to you,” noted Joe. “Because if it’s not authentic to who you are, it’s just not going to work. Consumers see right through it all the time.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s no secret that the crypto industry has had a bad couple of years. Prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum plunged steeply in 2022, followed by the spectacular flame-out of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Today, regulators in the EU and the U.S. are scrutinizing crypto platforms, token issuers, and traders with renewed fervor, chilling enthusiasm for investments in the crypto industry.

Given this environment, marketing crypto has major challenges, and so I wanted to catch up with crypto industry expert Jeremy Epstein to get his POV on what’s ahead for the crypto industry and how its marketing might change in the future. As he notes, “the crypto industry has not done itself a great service in communicating what the values are. Too often we talk about things like decentralization and removal of intermediaries and automation of smart contracts. Those are all fantastic things but — you talked about cause marketing — really, behind crypto, is the idea that there’s a cause here, and this cause is that of self-sovereignty, of self-reliance, of liberty, of freedom, of all these sorts of eternal American/Western values that people really, really care about.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Walker is CEO, Co-Founder, and Chairman at Direct Digital Holdings, a Houston, Texas-based media buying agency that’s been growing rapidly in the past several years and recently went public on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker symbol DRCT.

I wanted to catch up with Mark to learn about how his agency works, and why bridging the gap between ad spending and multicultural buying power is important. Interestingly, Direct Digital Holdings runs both a DSP (Demand Side Platform) and an SSP (Supply Side Platform), which gives it the opportunity to optimize both sides of the media buying/selling process, allowing advertisers and publishers to mutually benefit. “Because we have such a large population of multicultural publishers and have a focus and interest in making sure that we add those audiences to our stack, it attracts those marketing budgets that are geared to those audiences, and with 40 percent of the United States population falling into those buckets or into those segments, more and more brands are trying to reach them in authentic ways, and through authentic publications." 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I caught up with Kate Brady, PepsiCo’s Global Head of Next Gen DTC Connections & Innovation, to discuss what Pepsi is doing in terms of using next gen technologies and data to strengthen relationships with consumers and grow consumer LTV.

I wanted to learn about what Kate’s new role entails and how she sees the challenges of marketing in today’s fragmented, multi-screen digital marketing environment. “My specific remit is driving connections and innovations,” explains Kate. “So we are looking to grow consumer lifetime value by identifying, developing, and scaling new solutions that will enhance and enable two-way conversations, or connections, across all of our consumer touchpoints, and that’s what we’re really trying to do: stop being as much of a broadcast medium and really building relationships with our consumers.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I recently had the great pleasure to catch up with Simeon Siegel, Managing Director at BMO Capital Markets. Simeon is a leading analyst of retail who has been dubbed “one of the more intellectual students of retail on Wall Street” by Women’s Wear Daily and also named a Top Retail Influencer by RETHINK Retail in 2022 and 2023.

Simeon recently presented at Shop Talk 2023 in Las Vegas, and I wanted to get his POV on the mood of attending retailers. Were they concerned about a recession, and, if so, what were they doing about it? Our discussion begins on the topic of price elasticity — a basic Econ 101 concept — and why, in my experience, so few retailers appear do any kind of price elasticity testing. Our conversation turns to supply chain disruption and the role it’s been playing in retail pricing. Our discussion concludes with a deep dive into whether the advent of retail media represents an opportunity or a hazard, for retailers, and the retail trends that Simeon is excited about for 2023 and beyond.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing DeAnn Campbell, of AAG Consulting, an Atlanta-based firm providing strategic advice for B2B companies. DeAnn is an experienced business strategist who’s written widely on the future of retail and e-commerce and spoken at many retail- and ecommerce-focused events.

My conversation with DeAnn was wide-ranging. I first wanted to get her take on go-to-market strategies, a topic she’s written about, and the perils that arrive when companies fail to keep these strategies up to date.

I wanted DeAnn’s thoughts on solving a common problem observed with B2B companies — the failure to align sales and marketing teams. KPIs are part of the problem here (all leads are NOT the same). DeAnn suggests rethinking traditional KPIs and notes that “if marketing worked more directly with sales to really pin down the pain points of a potential client to understand the market that client is operating within, wouldn’t that create a higher-quality conversation and help the sales team get specific about the conversation and be more likely to convert?”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carrie Hutchison is Director, Brand and Marketing, at Re:wild, an organization whose mission is to “rewild” and restore natural environments across the world. Active in more than 80 countries, in 2021 the organization and its partners helped conserve more than 200 million acres and has driven direct conservation efforts for 160 threatened species while leveraging support for an additional 30,000 species.

Carrie recently served on a panel at Advertising Week New York entitled “How Nonprofits Can Meaningfully Engage And Compel People to Take Action,” and I wanted to learn more about it. Partnerships – with brands and nonprofits — are integral to Re:wild’s conservation mission. “We had a really great conversation about how to leverage your brand and also partner to get people to pay attention to your mission,” said Carrie. “I think the big takeaway there was… make sure you’re protecting your constituents first and foremost.”

Carrie and I discuss the role that storytelling plays in branding and whether brand partners make maximum use of storytelling opportunities. We then turn to how Re:wild is using partnerships to promote awareness of its mission, why it’s important for any partners to be “good fits” and also why it’s vital to ensure consumers that there is no “greenwashing” involved in the partnership.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

 had the great pleasure recently to interview Ed Kerr, Co-Founder and CEO of Practis, a company whose patented, automated role-play system helps train customer-facing teams to converse more confidently and effectively.

Ed has a long career as a professional actor, and odds are that you’ve seen him on television or in film (some of Ed’s stints include appearances on “House, MD,” “Snoops,” “Three Sisters,” and “CSI:Miami“). His experience as a working actor led directly to the development of Practis.

As Ed notes, conversational interaction is very much an art; the problem is that too many companies send their frontline forces into the field without sufficient conversational training. The result is that these folks must “practice” on customers, which often leads to suboptimal results. This problem is especially acute for younger people who, unlike their elders, have likely spent more time texting information that conveying it face-to-face. Practis provides an automated way for these folks to come up to speed by providing a framework providing direction and feedback on the way they interact. (Ed calls Practis “a smart mirror” that allows sales and support people to “see themselves as the customer sees them.”)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adina Lichtman, founder of Knock Knock Give a Sock, is amply aware of how difficult it will be to solve the homeless problem, but she remains an optimist. Her good cause startup, germinated in a college dorm, evolved from a very simple idea: the idea that there are plenty of people out there with a surplus supply of socks who wouldn’t mind giving up a few pairs to aid the homeless, who must spend most of their day on their feet.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Linda Bethea is Head of Marketing at Danone, a global brand with a broad portfolio of consumer goods that’s also a “B Corp,” which means it’s one of a number of companies “verified to be meeting the highest standards of social and environmental criteria and using their business as a force for social good.”

I wanted to catch up with Linda to quiz her on her recent appearance on an Advertising Week panel entitled “Changemakers” in which digital transformation and COVID-induced changes in consumer behavior patterns were discussed. I also wanted to get her POV on how brands can build stronger connections with consumers, thus making their brands “stickier.” As Linda observes, “a lot of our brands go back to purpose, and what their role is in consumers’ lives and the broader community."

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices