Welcome. Today, I'm here interviewing Professor Jan Slater

who is the former Dean of College of Media now the Chief Marketing Officer of

the College of Business and who was

a very successful industry leader who operated a agency,

a branding agency for many years,

an expert in branding and a professor of advertising,

and in many, many leadership positions.

So I'm here mainly to talk about Jan,

about how marketing and marketing

communication and advertising and branding all of those things tie

together and particularly in the world of

the traditional media and how the media world is changing all this landscape.

So I'm very happy to have Jan here,

so thank you Jan for coming.

Thanks Mike. Great to be here.

Yeah. So just very quickly I know you

played many roles in marketing, advertising, branding.

You were very active in advertising education,

marketing and advertising practice,

as well as doing research in branding.

So in your opinion how do these things tie together?

Because oftentimes we get questions from students.

What's the difference between advertising,

marketing, marketing communication, branding.

How are media and how do different kinds of

media platform play a role in this process? We love to hear your thoughts on that.

So I think they're all interconnected but they're not interchangeable.

I think that that's really a key.

I think what concerns people,

and I think this is especially true for students who can't decide whether they

want to do advertising or marketing or something else,

is that the brand always comes first.

So the brand is the foundation of everything.

And it is really about the quality, the values,

the structure, the delivery,

everything about the company or the product.

And that really is the essence,

that is really where things start and you can't do marketing or advertising or

direct marketing or sales promotion or social media or

anything until you really have figured out what is that brand.

And you know the old definition I don't know that

it's old but it's the one I continue to use in my classroom

is that you know a brand has functionality

and added value that consumers care enough to buy.

Every product has some sort of functionality.

It does something.

So a brand has that functionality but a brand unlike

just a straight product has this layer of

what we call added values and that's the emotion,

the attitude, the feelings,

all the things that you believe and care about that brand.

And so soap you don't quite have the same affinity for as you might have for Dove.

And so what Unilever has built around Dove is this,

not only is it a wonderful product,

it's a very functional product in that it has,

you know, lotion and everything keeps your skin soft.

But they've built a brand around your way to be yourself with Dove.

That it doesn't matter,

beauty is everywhere and Dove is there to help you be beautiful in your own way.

So it all starts with the brand and

then the rest of the stuff kind of just builds around that.

So we always consider the brand,

the pull strategy, the old push and pull strategy of marketing,

the brand is really the pull strategy.

It's what brings people in and the marketing side is

what pushes the messages about the brand out.

And so the brand is constant.

It doesn't change.

It's entity, it's values all of that remain the same.

But how do you market it may change

and how you position it with other consumers may change.

So marketing of course as we know is about all those things it's about the product,

what it looks like, what it feels like,

how it smells, what the package looks like, all those things.

It's about how you price it.

Are you an exclusive price,

are you a low price,

are you a medium competitor.

It's about where you're delivering it.

Are you only delivering it in certain areas and then it's about who

are you targeting this to and how are you going to promote it?

And so the promotion part is then where the advertising piece comes in.

So advertising is a piece of marketing.

And then now we talk about marketing communications and that

involves everything from direct selling to sales promotion

to direct marketing to how it looks on the shelf

to advertising public relations

and now of course how you're doing social media and those kinds of things.

So it starts here and then these kind of things just kind of get layered on.

But the brand always drives everything else.

So in a way the brand is more it's in essence identity.

It is.

The personality of a product or a business that it has to stay consistent.

It is. I always look at the brand is a promise.

It is what we are going to deliver both

functionally and psychologically to the consumer at every moment.

So I always use Jif as a great example in my classroom because Jif

functionally does have more peanuts in its peanut butter than anybody else.

That's a functional value.

So you get that great peanutty taste but the brand itself has been built around this kind

of quality product from

others so they're positioning statement has always been choosy mothers choose Jif.

So it's not about,

oh my gosh, I have to feed my kids peanut butter.

It's, if I'm going to feed my kids peanut butter,

I'm going to serve them Jif because I am a choosy mother so it's

positioning the functionality as

a really incredible choice to do what's best for your family.

So once we strategize the marketing mix and develop the brand.

As a communications scholar and a researcher I'm always

concerned and sort of argue for the need to say well how do you let other people,

how do you let the audience or the consumer know your brand identity or brand message?

So how do you send out.

And then in what way do you think media both traditional and digital media

play a role in this process of pushing out that message to the audience you're targeting.

Oh it's critical.

I will say I think that we are doing much more

now than we ever did about brand experience.

I mean brand is about the lived experience you have with the product.

Brand engagement and we're really trying to hone in on how people use the brand,

how it fits within their life.

What are the assets of the brand that the consumer takes with them elsewhere?

And we really think of them as brand advocates not so much as consumers.

So we know exactly who

we want or who is buying the brand or who we want to buy the brand.

Communicating with them and getting those messages to them,

I think with the digital explosion it makes strategy and

content development even more critical than it's ever been because not everybody has,

no one has unlimited money.

Everybody thinks Procter and Gamble do but they don't.

So it's really then thinking about how your advocates,

your champions, are interacting with the brand and where are they interacting in media.

You know where do they want to get their messages from?

Where do they want to engage with the brand other than at

their dinner table or in the shower or you know with their kids?

Where do they want to interact with that.

And some of that has moved into social media,

obviously from the traditional piece.

But I think everything is probably media now whether you're putting

your brand logo on a baseball cap or you're buying television or whatever.

But I think of them more as channels of delivery that we're having platforms,

we have multiple ways now to deliver messages.

And some of those are more engaging and interactive than others.

And so you really,

I think now more than ever,

have to understand the the consumer who is buying this product and

how does it fit in their lives and that then builds out how you connect with them.

Because think about it,

we used to, you know,

sell tide and we used to buy television ads and magazine ads.

So we were really hitting the masses.

But now there's so many different kinds of tide and not everybody

wants all those kinds of tide and it's still a very popular,

it still controls the marketplace.

But we might not need to talk,

we might not talk to the mothers who are trying to keep their kids' soccer clothes

clean the same delivery system or

even the same message as we do to the mothers who are sending their kids off to school,

to college for the first time and making sure they have tide.

Or the college age student or the new, you know,

24 year old that's got a job and out in the business goes

to the grocery store and has to buy detergent for the very first time.

What do they buy? So all of those things are different.

So that's why all of our messaging now I think is much more personal.

You know we call about addressable attitudes,

we talk a lot about that where we can really look at

all the different attitudes of the consumers

that we're targeting and we try to address those

much more in very personalized media ways.

Great. So I want to just pursue a little bit further on this line of thinking,

particularly from, you know,

the concept of omni channel communication, a multichannel communication.

In the past we have these communication channels,

or mediums, determining the strategy.

Otherwise, because it's on television you have to

develop television ads for that particular medium.

But now with the digital media space with mobile communication,

the computer, seems that the device becomes more important.

Touch points, there are fewer touch points but there are more communication channels.

That's right.

So all the messages come in different formats you

can watch video on television or on YouTube.

So how does that impact from a sort of

a branding strategy and branding used to, you know,

so closely tied to the advertising strategies because you create

certain brand on television

using television commercial as a vehicle to communicate brand will be very different.

But here it requires the overall strategic thinking to

include all these communication channels and keep

the consistency of the brand across all these channels.

So what's your take on this changing in

the media ecosystem and how that impact the

strategy side of things. Planning side of things.

I think one of the things that has borne out of our hefty use of

30-second television commercials is that video plays

a much more important role today than it ever has and it's not 30 seconds.

It's three minutes or it's a 10 minute film or it's something.

So there's teaser messages happening kind of

to get into your mobile or whatever to get you to say,

oh look, and then you can engage here with a much longer video.

Everything is mobile we know for a fact that people are using their mobile phones,

mobile devices for pretty much everything including how they access news and information.

And that's what they expect from their brands as well.

And there's a lot more, you know,

we are not purchasing the same way we used to purchase.

We don't necessarily have to go to a store any more we can you know

just order you know diapers off of our Amazon app.

So it's a much different kind of mentality.

But I think the storytelling that is we're seeing much more in journalism now

is really happening a lot more in advertising

and in the video pieces and we're using the channels,

the appropriate channels, to get people there.

So here's the posting on Facebook go here and then look at this video.

Every strong brand I should say has some sort of

YouTube channel where it's also user-generated content.

So the brand advocates are creating their own content around the brand and posting that

on their own Facebook pages or

the brand's Facebook pages or the YouTube channels or that.

So I think the old advertising, you know,

somebody said we went from 60 seconds to 30 seconds to

15 seconds to in some cases

10 seconds and now we're getting on the other end now we're going to a minute,

we're going to two minutes to five minutes.

And those you know we've really taken a lot from the film industry about how we capture.

We're just doing it in smaller bites, I think.

And then the art of storytelling is coming back.

In the art of storytelling is critical.

And what I think is becoming even more critical is the messenger.

So we used to hire, you know,

nobody's to be the housewife in an advertisement.

Now it's very critical about who you put in there

that especially for the younger generation.

They want authenticity.

They want to know that person is really a user and

they really want to know that person's opinion.

So how we message things is much

different and who we use as that messenger is much more critical.

Great. So it's sort of the mediums and then

the media is impacting the way we tell stories and coming in messages.

Absolutely.

One thing that I think,

the other hat you wear has been an educator and I know that the department advertising,

Charles Sandage, has been the leader and,

you know, one of the first institutions that established advertising.

So how do you think from the,

in this kind of changing environment and

where the industries are changing so fast the technologies are changing so fast.

How do we sort of train and

teach and develop the future leaders in marketing and advertising to see

these not as traditionally separated spaces in industries

but increasingly see them as an integrated space where communication media,

knowledge about media, knowledge about marketing strategy,

will come together in order to truly develop the marketing strategy of the future?

Well I do think strategy becomes critical in this environment.

What I always say is we,

when all this new technology came about everybody just said oh we're going to live in

this age of disruption and we just thought we were

going to kind of live in it for a short time.

I think the perfect example of that is journalism.

Well we could ride out the storm and figure out how to get

our content online but they never thought about how

people were going to pay for that content online and advertising and marketing and

branding is I think that it's just always going to be disrupted.

Part of our job in advertising is to disrupt behavior.

It's always been that way.

We have always wanted to put in a message and

stop your inertia from just buying the same thing over and over.

And that's kind of disruption.

We've been disrupted your viewing of the Tony Awards or whatever it is,

we've inserted something there that wasn't really

necessarily supposed to be there and so we've disrupted it.

We're doing that every day now and we're doing it almost every second.

You know there's a great wheel out there about every 60 seconds,

this is what's happening in the media and it's mind boggling.

Not everybody's using all those media channels but there's a lot out there.

And so I think that as an educator and as an industry person you have to just

know that nothing is going to ever be the same

and you're going to have to be ahead of the game in everything.

I like the word agility.

It comes out of the software industry and I think they, you know,

they have to do things that are different than they might want to and

they have to keep current and they have to keep

consumers happy that it's doing the things they want to do.

And so I think we,

I don't think flexibility is quite it,

I think we need to be agile and be willing to change if you're in the industry.

I think you have to change your structure,

maybe your business model,

may maybe who you hire.

You know the industry right now is hiring a lot of

data scientists and a lot of strategists and a lot of content developers.

They're not necessarily hiring a lot of account executives.

The agency business itself is changing.

There's all these small little boutique agencies,

the industry around creative is changing,

video again has become much more important.

We see even a lot of our own students who were broadcast majors are using

their video skills to go to advertising industry because

they know how to tell a video story and that sort of context.

So I think agility is critical and I think always

the not getting so hung up on the platforms but being

really concerned about the strategy and the content and that the the channel that you're

using is the channel that you can tell

the best story on and you can reach the people you really want to.

I think you know years ago when

I was in the business I used to have clients say well I want a brochure.

Well what do you want a brochure for.

Well I don't know but my competitor has one.

Well I'm not going to build you a brochure

if we don't know what we're going to do with it.

So purpose is really important now.

What are you going to do with this.

And I think when social media came about,

oh well we need a Facebook page.

Well why do you need a Facebook page?

Well I don't know but everybody else has one.

You know think about the purpose and how you're going to

use this and how this will connect.

The idea here is to continually keep the brand experience connected.

To who's using it. And so is that a connection? Are they there?

Does it make sense or you have the great opportunity to take a brand that is very

highly regarded and put it in a channel that isn't and that then hurts your brand.

I think one last question I have raised more on the specific strategy side.

So in this kind of digital world as you mentioned

everybody a Facebook account everyone has a Twitter account.

Should businesses and brands not consider or

consider them as less important for these traditional media channels.

I also hear the argument that you know radio is coming back in

time and television is still very much

a medium to stay alive and the only impact is right in the print.

But then the journalism and is space is also recreating and redeveloped,

even though they're a little bit lagging you see some of

the moves made by the publishing industry.

So do you think it's the tension between

a traditional and new media is going to

exist for a while or are we evolving into something

different that we don't we no longer need to talk

about this kind of tension because of the business model the advertising

publishing sort of joined at the hip yet at the same time hating each other kind

of model is changing like you might much of a disruption.

Yeah I think there's always going to be a little bit of tension but I think what's

evolving is that the advertisers, the brands,

the owners of the brands,

are finding that they all moved into

digital thinking you did digital in the same way you did traditional media.

You bought something, you created something, you aired something,

and even, you know,

Procter and Gamble took a lot of their business and put it in digital lots of places do.

I think the difference is we still will have traditional media.

People aren't necessarily not watching television.

And as you say radio is making a comeback and there's a lot of online publishing that's

happening that is very profitable and very good for brands.

But there's other ways to deal with the social and the non traditional media.

And that may not be paid.

So we have the new kind of mentality of paid, owned,

earned, in the media business and not everything has to be paid.

We still have the traditional piece of television and newspaper and print and all that.

But we have this kind of owned,

so we have our own channel we have our, you know,

Hallmark is a perfect example of a company that's owned that, their media.

They've created the Hallmark Hall of Fame which they bought TV time and

only aired their own things but that was their production so they owned that product.

And then we have the earned piece which is

you've done something great that your brand advocates are going to put

back into social media whether it's on

Yelp or whether it's on their Facebook page or your Facebook page.

So it's about building the strategy around all three things.

And I think once brands and the media channels as well realize it's not one or the other,

it's a combination of the paid, owned, earned,

I think you'll see a little less tension and hopefully a lot more interconnectivity.

Thank you I think that's a great point to be tying an earlier point

made by you which is to not think about them as just a delivery mechanisms or

sort of thinking about these media channels as

a specific way of delivering message but rather keep our focus on

why we're delivering this message and what message are we delivering and think of them as

different ways of getting them messages out so I think that's a very important takeaway.

And thank you very much I think I've learned

a great deal and I hope this is a great conversation that our students will benefit from.

Thanks Mike it's great being here.

Thank you.

Interview: Jan Slater - Chief Marketing Officer

Digital Marketing Channels: The Landscape

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