Jeff MacDonald is the Social Strategy Director here at Mekanism. A born teacher, we’ve been learning from him ever since he joined the Mekanism team in 2015 as our first Experience Designer.
Jeff has been named one of the 15 advertising executives leading the charge into generative AI by Business Insider and he’s our in-house AI guru. He currently works alongside strategists and creatives to bring as many innovative social firsts to clients like Adobe, AT&T, Cricket Wireless, Q-tips, and Lenovo. Jeff uses creative prototyping and social listening to inform the creation of experiences that bring people together for shared moments of wonder. Today we’re talking all about AI and what it might mean for the future of creativity, marketing, and much more.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• Adoption of early tech including AI and generative content creation services is key to staying ahead of the curve
  
  
• The long-lasting impression augmented reality, generative AI, and applications of Web3 technologies can have on your audience
  
  
• How AI can work for us and help us bring even more humanity into our creative work

Brought to you by Mekanism.

Julia Perez, CMO at OWYN, is a New York born, Miami-based marketing executive with a deep understanding of high-growth, healthier-for-you food and beverage startups. With more than 10 years of experience working for brands like Red Bull, Hain Celestial, RSP Nutrition, and CORE Water, it’s actually kind of her superpower. Her continued success in the health and wellness space led her to the role of Chief Marketing Officer at OWYN, which stands for Only What You Need, a plant-based nutrition company best known for its ready-to-drink protein shakes. OWYN is currently the #1 best selling plant protein shake in the US.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• How OWYN is cleaning up the sports nutrition industry with transparency, education, and an empowering message
• Where Julia stands on the Ozempic trend and how OWYN fits in
• Why you shouldn’t forget about the big picture when looking at segmented data
• The value of being an early adopter and in love with your industry

Brought to you by Mekanism.

Lisane Basquiat is an entrepreneur and growth champion in addition to being the older sister of artist Jean Michel Basquiat. After a successful corporate career in staffing and operations at financial institutions like American Express and Prudential, she decided to pivot her experience into helping shape individuals’ personal growth. She’s now the Founder and CEO of Shaping Freedom, a personal growth company that trains individuals to strengthen and amplify their personal power through internal congruence. With her family, she recently developed the King Pleasure exhibit, a retrospective on her brother’s art, which opened in Los Angeles after a successful run in New York City.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• How maintaining the personal and professional balance is key to personal health
• The importance of organic team-building exercises to rebuild and internally scale an organization
• How to best handle a career pivot and transition to potentially see your personal growth
• How she brought personal reflection, remembrance, and insight to the process of honoring her brother, Jean Michel Basquiat, through the new King Pleasure exhibit

Brought to you by Mekanism.

David Mogensen, VP of Marketing at Uber, oversees a global team of marketers responsible for building the Uber and Uber Eats brands across more than 70 countries. Before Uber, David held leadership positions at Google, YouTube, and BMW, giving him extraordinary insight into marketing, brand positioning, and advertising, which he shared with us.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• In marketing, good communication is key. And internal communication is at least as important as external communication.
• Know the user, know the magic, and connect the two. It’s a Google mantra, but it works across the board.
• Good management is ultimately planned obsolescence. Set your team up to work so well, that they don’t even need you.

Brought to you by Mekanism.

Ciara Anfield’s Harvard MBA education led her into marketing roles at big companies like JP Morgan Chase and Johnson & Johnson. Now in her 15th year at Sam’s Club, Ciara serves as the Chief Member and Marketing Officer for Sam’s Club where she oversees a broad portfolio of responsibilities that collectively make up Sam’s Club’s end-to-end member strategy.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• It may sound simple, but by putting the customer first, you can accelerate every other part of your business. Connect in new and interesting ways and meet your customers where they are.
• Carve out the time to be strategic and methodical in your thinking. It’s all too easy to let the urgency of a big project move you forward without deeper reflection.
• Have the audacity. Take risks. Be bold. Marketing is one of the few places in a business where risks are welcome. After all, you’d rather have your marketing team take risks than your finance team.

Brought to you by Mekanism.

Nate Checketts is the Co-Founder & CEO of Rhone, a premium men's performance lifestyle company founded in 2014, and the entrepreneurial spirit has been with him since childhood. Before the age of 30, Nate had founded four companies, including one of the first iPhone apps Mangia, whose patents were later acquired by the San Francisco 49ers. Nate’s interests have always been broad and ambitious, and over the years he’s learned that there’s more than one way to be an entrepreneur. But when sales and marketing attribution gets tough to decipher, he reminds his team that it’s all about the brand all the time.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• Curiosity and wonder are powerful. Good entrepreneurs, no matter their experience, are always full of questions.
• Use data to find out what crucial subsection is missing in your market, and do your best to fill that gap.
• Product quality is number one for new customers. Gone are the days when you could get away with great branding, great advertising, and a mediocre product.
• When you spend your ad dollars the right way, performance gets much more effective over time.

Brought to you by Mekanism.

Jesse Bongiovi’s Hampton Water rosé is as much a lifestyle brand as it is a Wine Spectator darling. Bongiovi started the company with his Notre Dame college roommate, Ali Thomas, and the brand took off through spot-on social marketing that included Happy Half Hour livestreams during lockdown. There’s another co-founder at Hampton Water, Bongiovi’s famous father, Jon Bon Jovi, whose love of the “pink juice” during their Hamptons summers inspired the brand. A famous parent can help, but Bongiovi, who walked onto the Notre Dame football team, is determinedly building a bartender-referral network, innovating rosé cocktails and creating a year-round lifestyle positioning for Hampton Water.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• Success is not owned, it is leased and the rent is due every day

• After the launch year, you can’t ride the PR train so much

• Why marketers should figure out how to destigmatize traditional categories for new consumers

• No one thinks they're 60 , everyone thinks they are 25

Brought to you by Mekanism.

Before any consumer product or service comes to market, there is a history of B2B activity that’s already taken place. Supplyframe CMO Richard Barnett serves the full range of engineers, manufacturers, supply-chain experts and B2B brand leaderswith a continuous loop of online resources, such as Hackaday for engineers, business connections across manufacturing and supply chains and predictive trends that go on to imbue new applications. Rooted in a Stanford education in political science and international policy, Barnett chose globalization over academia. Now, at Supplyframe, he’s focused on fulfilling the individual’s need to connect, learn and grow.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• Sometimes, what you choose not to do is as strategic as what you choose to do.
• It’s important to be transparent with your team about the roles they play in the grand mechanism of the business. When everyone knows where they fit into the machine, they will be empowered to succeed.
• Keep it simple. Richard and his team tell each other “Piggy Doggy Bunny” as a reminder not to overcomplicate things.

Brought to you by Mekanism.

Magnolia Bakery is a popular destination in New York City, and it's common to find residents and tourists lining up to buy perfectly iced cupcakes and other sweet treats. Now, CMO Eddie Revis is helping turn Magnolia Bakery into a global D2C brand. Magnolia’s Breakfast Loaves video, a remake of comedian Liam Kyle Sullivan’s early YouTube hit, Muffins, went viral, immediately landing with millennial targets. Revis does it, in part, by daring his creative teams to pitch their craziest ideas. It’s no surprise that his career spans agencies, starting with a high-school internship, and big brands, such as Chobani.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• If you have an idea that could be unstrategic but it’s wild and awesome, share it anyway
• The great thing about the agency side is you get to focus on impact
• As a client, you think about impact and the repercussions that making that decision is going to have across the business
• If you really want to learn about the company as a new CMO, share an office with the CFO

Brought to you by Mekanism.

It can feel impossible to express the human condition, so we look to great artists, writers and even advertising creatives to do the job. Pranav Yadav, Founder and Global CEO of Neuro-Insight, saw how inconsistent people were doing field interviews–one memorable study tried to find out why people gamble in Las Vegas. A more innate truth was to be found in neuromarketing, which measures neural signals by electrodes to track emotional responses. Yadav brilliantly reads the data and helps marketers, including TJ Maxx and Anheuser Busch, make ads that both stir emotions and hit the right pitch.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• What neruomarketing is and how it’s innovating the way brands are built.
• What people say in the first hour of a focus group is different from what they say in the second or fourth hour and it really doesn't correlate to actual in-market purchase behavior.
• Creative is an idea that engages people, but an ad has the additional responsibility of associating the brand at the peak emotional moment.
• The beauty of life is that if you are open enough to learning, it teaches you everything you need to know.