Getting Creative with Brand and Demand

B2B has to invest more. It simply does. Second thing b two b needs to do, it’s gotta keep pushing on the creative aspect of this because it connects to what makes that brand investment effective in the first place. The third thing that we have to do is unify brand and demand. That’s all we need to do. It’s those three small things. This will indeed be the b to b decade and maybe a lot more than that. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by six cents investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Saima, today is a day I’ve been looking forward to for a while because we have gone Hollywood here at Revenue Makers. Yes. I was at a film premiere in Cannes, France. It was pretty darn special. And we have the star of that film today, Tom Stein, who’s actually the founder and CEO of Stein, a, brand creative agency. But the film is everybody’s business. It was created by, Academy Award winning documentarian, Ben Proudfoot. It was brought to life by LinkedIn. You know, they financed it, and it was their creation. But, ultimately, we now have a film out there that’s sort of the definitive documentary about b to b and b to b marketing. And Tom is here to talk about certainly the that experience, but then we get into a really powerful bit of work and content and sort of all things that his agency does about brand to demand. It’s really, really exciting and a big shift going on. Yeah. And I think it’s he’s such a great person to talk to about this because he’s so passionate about b to b and then just making b to b better. And we don’t have to be boring. We need to be thinking broadly about brand. Investment in brand will always yield Hollywood as a Hollywood as a listener and and listen about the movie or whether you wanna take some really interesting strategies about how and when to invest in brand, I think there’s a little bit of something for everyone. And I didn’t wanna stop asking questions. I couldn’t this could have been a three hour episode. We will spare you three hours, but, again, really great. Let’s dive in. Let’s do it. Tom Stein, thank you so much for joining Revenue Makers today. Last time I saw you, you were on a high. You were referred to as the godfather of b to b multiple times on a big stage, and you were a movie star. So have you now come down back into the real world, or are you still on that high? Definitely, so I’m a I am back in the real world in a very intense way. So I think our world of beauty marketing and our businesses are such that you don’t get to kind of, revel too much in things. You have to get back to it, but in a good way. Our business is thriving, and so our engagement with b two b brands is keeping me very, very busy. But thank you for bringing up the whole godfathers. You know? It’s like I’m not feeling old enough as it is, and now I have to be a godfather. At least at least I’m not the grandfather yet. I’m gonna avoid my bad godfather impersonation as well. Nobody’s gonna wanna hear that. So Tom, let’s just for the audience that that may not have insight on this, which I at this point, I don’t know how they wouldn’t. But you’re in a movie and a documentary from an Academy Award winning documentarian. So LinkedIn commissioned a documentary. It’s directed by Ben Proudfoot who won an Oscar this year for The Last Repair Shop, which is a great documentary about the Los Angeles School District and instrument repair, which is kind of an interesting topic, but it worked out. So how did that happen? And, like, the movie opens and it’s you. So can you, like, tell us how that happened? And we can get into all the other great content we have, but I just wanna love to hear this story. You’re our first movie star on the podcast, so so we’re very excited. Yeah. Well, I’m not the lesson. Hopefully, the next one will be a real movie star and not me. But the how it happened is, I’ve been involved in b two b, and I’ve been an advocate for it, an evangelist for it. And a lot of what I’ve always tried to do, and particularly the last few years, is do what I can to keep our industry moving forward. And so I use the word elevate, but that sounds a little bit presumptuous. But the fact that I do that puts me in contact with a lot of fellow travelers in b2b and in the world. And when LinkedIn had the bold vision to do the film, and at the time, the head of marketing the vice president of marketing for LMS at LinkedIn is Jim Habig. And this was Jim’s vision to do a documentary, to tell a story about b two b. And, you know, that story had never been told. And Jim and some other folks that that he knows in the business and in the world thought that I would be a good protagonist in this film because of the fact that I’ve I have been a strong and consistent force for good and b two b. And so, typically, these things occur at bars. And so Jim and I were having a drink, and he popped the question. I thought about it for a few minutes. Would I be in this documentary? And I couldn’t find a good reason to say no, and so I said yes. And that’s kinda how it happened. And he introduced me to Ben Proudfoot, who’s a brilliant director, a brilliant storyteller. And we fell in love, Ben and I. And Ben actually thought that b two b, as he learned more about it, was a fascinating story. Imagine that. Instrument repair and b two b are both fascinating stories and thought that he could build a story and a BB category launching at can. So it kind of all came together in the serendipitous way based on relationships, which is such a b to b thing. So tell us about obviously, the movie premiered at Cannes b two b line festival. You’ve been there many, many times. You’ve had involvement for many years. Can you tell us a little bit about the event and why b two b was now part or how many years it’s been part of it now? So, actually, Sam, I’ve only been to Cannes three times Oh, interesting. Which connects to your question really well. I’ve been there three consecutive years because three years ago was when b two b lions, the creative b two b lions launched. So at that point in time, Cannes had been the festival, but it is in a few different incarnations, but the number one advertising marketing festival for sixty nine years. And it took sixty nine years for b two b to get there the first year. And so I had been, and this is kind of part of the the film story in that I’ve been pushing for this, advocating for this with a number of other people, CMOs, agency creative leaders, agency leaders for some time to get Cannes to accept that b to b belonged on that main stage at the Palais. And so the fact that that happened is what drew me to Cannes. I was on the inaugural jury, but also it drew other people from b to b, and and I had never thought that Cannes was a natural place to be in the b to b cycle of activities and valuable involvement. And so when that occurred, it brought me to Cannes. And, you know, you go to Cannes the first time, and you see how amazing it is and, you know, over the top for sure, but also in a very good way. And as b two b has gained traction there, I’ve now been there three years, and that’s an amazing story too. And I think tying that to the film, and the film is about that journey to a large extent, it feels full circle to me. And I I I’m gonna ask a question back to you. You were there was this your first time? It was my first time. What was your feeling about b two b’s place at Cannes? It’s interesting because I walked into it not knowing what to expect. And I walked out of the festival thinking, how have we not been here before? This is absolutely where we need to be. And one of the taglines was, it’s the place to be to be. And it’s true. The brands are there. A lot of even the companies and the agencies and the events, even if they were targeted to a b to c company that might be traditionally considered b to c, there was a b to b component there. And I don’t remember the stat, Tom, and maybe you can remind me. But there was this crazy stat around the impact of b to b on the economy. And just even in the room, I think, at the Palais, just the sheer volume of power that b to b drove in terms of just impact on the market and being in Kin. And so I walked away really with my eyes open, and we need to be going back. I agree with that. And similar, it happened to me year one, and it’s been increasingly feeling that way year two, year three. I’m gonna come out to something that’s, I don’t know, maybe a little bit of a controversy in b to b right now that connects to what you said about b to b, b to c. But the stat that you’re looking for, b to b represents fifty percent of the global economy, which also has a lot to do with the film. And before I get into the b to c thing, the film, and particularly what I was endeavoring to express and what others in the film were endeavoring to express is the role that b two b plays in the world and the fact that a lot of folks in the world, a lot of folks that we know, probably our parents, don’t really understand what the heck it b to b is. They don’t understand what we do. No. No. And I think that the film did a great job of expressing that b to b has such an important role to play in everything. And from the prosaic to the profound, it has a really important role to play. And, you know, in terms of commercial endeavor, in terms of economic growth, in in terms of social progress and social growth, and all of the things that something that is as systemic as b to b can drive. And consumer, if you think about something like sustainability, most of us think about sustainability. And trying to change consumer behavior one consumer at a time is a really, really, really hard job. But b two b can have a huge role systemically in driving renewable energy or driving sustainable agriculture or water safety and things of this nature that are so hugely important. And b two b is right right there at the core of these things, and which is why I always love to be in the b two b world. And I think that I saw a post recently where someone’s actually reacting to the film and having this moment and thinking about I’ve always felt a little bit like my consumer marketing counterparts were looking down their nose at me a little bit. And this film is like stand tall, b two b. We’re doing what we’re marketing, what we’re selling, what we’re creating compared to the next packaging size for something that’s on a supermarket shelf. It feels good. So let’s zero in a little bit. Right? Because the b two b line, it’s about creative, talking about b to b. There’s been this ongoing, I don’t wanna say, maybe bad rap for b to b creative and that it’s boring. And that b to b is always b to boring. For a little while, I realized, like, no, it doesn’t have to be boring, and there’s been envelopes have been pushed. A lot of things have changed or are continuing to change. What do you think is happening in b two b creative? Where are we? Where we’ve been, and where do you think we’re going? Because, I mean, this is a beefy topic. I would love, love, love, love to go into that. Yeah. Well, we may not get to the other content because off I go. And and, again, I’d love to hear from you guys on this as well, but I’ve been doing b two b agency work for a long time. And I’ve seen the ebbs and flows of creativity in the space, and I’ve seen the dynamic change driven by digital to social to everything. And I think that we’re in the middle right now, and I think that we have made quite a lot of progress. I think that a number of brands have a bigger appetite for placing bigger bets. I think a number of brands have a bigger appetite to be more ambitious creatively at any budget level. And I think that that momentum has been created around this. And there are a lot of us, a lot of CMOs, and a lot of senior marketers that who I know, as well as the agency folks, are all rowing in this direction and rowing really hard. That’s not to say that they’re still not current against us, but it is a movement, Adam, to your point is that I don’t think it’s reversible at this point in time. And so the forces of consensus, the forces of conservatism, the forces of b to b orthodoxy, if you will, all of these forces, they don’t go away like that. But I think that the concerted effort of folks like Suzanne Kunkle, the global CMO of of Deloitte or Tony Clayton Hein, to be fair, the America’s CMO of of agencies like ours, I’m proud to say, and other agencies as well. Paul Hirsch, who runs creative and is one of the real leaders at Doremus and on and on and on. We are all pushing for this very hard, not because we wanna win it can. We all want win it can, by the way. But not because we wanna win it can, but it’s because it’s more effective. You know? It simply is more effective. There’s a huge body of evidence, a huge body of data that says better work has better results. And so, you know, you see work from the b two b institute research, etcetera. You see from any number of quarters, system one, whomever you wanna look at as a source of data, source of truth. There’s a lot of truth out there to this. And so I think we have a long way to go before it becomes a universal thing, and it’ll never become that probably. Look at consumer. What percentage of consumer marketing is great when you consider great work? It’s a relatively small percentage, so I don’t think you can just look at b two b and say, b to boring. There’s plenty of CPG work out there that’s dry as toast. So but I think we made great strides. When I was a president of the jury last year, a career moment, so the three winners were Earth. So that was by ELMAP, BBDO, on behalf of the UN Global Compact, then the b three Brazilian leading Brazilian stock exchange, Workday, rock stars from Workday, and then Intel for the amazing work that they’re doing around preventing deepfakes at scale in a hotly contested global and political environment. So you think about systemic as I was saying earlier, but Workday, rock stars, funny as hell, great advertising by any dimension, great craft in there, just fantastic, lovely, cool, whatever. Something like Earth, which was so emotionally brilliant but also profound. And then the intel was was a a marker of how AI and innovation can save the world as well as put us in peril. So think about all of those kinds of things, and these are great stories. And this is what b two b is about and what b two b creativity increasingly will be about. Yeah. And at the end of the day, it’s all the same core principles of marketing. Right? You still gotta make get in front of the right people, give them a message that resonates, and why not make it fun and make it entertaining? We as a brand, I think, sixth sense and Adam leads our brands team, so he’s very passionate about this. But we do try to inject fun. We poke fun at ourselves at the save the market. Like, it it really is about cutting through the noise and delivering a compelling message. I’m sure you know Mimi Turner from the the b two b Institute, and, she’s great and what a great speaker, great thinker. And I saw her give a talk where she’s talking about creativity in B2B and the adoption of creative strategies that go beyond some of the B2B not creative strategies that have been a bit the norm. And she said it comes down to three things, like memory structures, what you actually remember, and then what you act upon. You follow the ninety five five rule and all that, you know, or the first day effect and so on, the day one effect. Tell me a story, paint me a picture, draw me a picture, sing me a song. So if you think about those things, very simple things, and apply them to our b two b world, that’s what people remember, and that’s what cuts through. And I think that we’re getting better and better at at applying those very simple strategies, but maybe does it in a very funny way. But I think it’s wisdom. I had the opportunity to actually with you back, I think it was in February or March. It was a very intimate brand to demand event at the LinkedIn office where there was some great conversations and great case studies about some really significant brands that said, you know what? We’re going in on this concept of brand being a demand driver. And it was you know, I think one of the things is there are so many companies that are afraid or simply don’t see the value in taking dollars and putting them into brand because it’s, well, you know, we put it into performance marketing, we’re putting it into ads and so forth. And, like, we put money in where you get something out. Brand is all the fluffy stuff. And, ultimately, these case studies were super, super powerful, and I think start to tell that story and start to get people to think differently. But you kinda put a stake in the ground, and you meaning Steiner and your partners and so forth, and put out some really a framework, a brand demand framework that I think really kinda blows open the conversation about the value of brand to drive demand and to stop thinking about them as two separate things. Can you talk a little bit about that framework and kinda I mean, we again, it’s not a five minute conversation by any means. We would love to dive into it. Yeah. Brand and demand, brand versus demand, brand to demand. It’s been a topic in B2B for quite some time and is nothing new. And, you know, the dysfunction about it is not new. And and so separate brand teams and demand teams, Some of the again, going back to b to b orthodoxy and and how boards operate and how c suites operate where b to b, as you say, Adam, fluffy, etcetera. If there are different KPIs, if there are different teams, if there are different organizational structures, if there are different budgets and there’s misaligned ratios and a lack of balance, if there’s a lack of understanding around the role and the that brand can play and the impact that it has, then things are not going to perform as well as they can and should. And, you know, if you put all your money into performance and you put all your investment into bottom of the funnel, you’re basically pounding the five percent of the market that’s in in a buying cycle. You’re pounding the daylights out of it, and at a point, there is no return from that. There’s actually diminished return. And there’s lots of evidence, lots of case studies, lots of data that says that brand and demand when they’re interlocked in a meaningful way and when they’re very well orchestrated by virtue of technology and other things, when they’re sequenced appropriately, the net effect is tremendous. And so there’s one LinkedIn stat that says that high alignment of brand and demand can increase marketing generated revenue by over two hundred percent. Now that’s huge. That’s a huge stat, but I think it’s a marker of of what’s possible with this. And so we released a study, a report. WARC actually created it. So WARC is a terrific organization, and LinkedIn was one of the participants. We were a participant. The event that that you’re at, Adam, they’re actually a a slew of CMOs and senior marketers from that event that contributed their insights into this and their case studies into this. And I think it’s the most important piece of work done to this point in time. So we did it, so take it with a grain. But to really spur positive and constructive conversation and action around what’s possible when brand and demand are unified. And cutting to the chase, what’s possible is sustainable growth and growth at a higher level than is possible by treating the two in isolation and not balancing the two together appropriately. So our report, our playbook, if you will, is actually an operating model, a framework and operating model for how from a channel standpoint, from a creative and content standpoint, from a tech standpoint, from a data standpoint, from a media standpoint, from a strategy standpoint, from an organizational standpoint, how branded demand can be better unified to drive meaningful growth in effectiveness and meaningful growth in revenue. And I know that I believe this podcast has something to do with revenue, so I’m hoping that that resonates with you guys. It resonates. And I have to say it’s a great report because it is a framework, yes, which can sometimes be a little bit separated from an actual kind of day to day running of the business and running of the programs, but it is really a framework. It’s a maturity model. It gives very specific activities that need to be happening at each stage. We’ll link it in the description of the podcast for anybody who’s interested. But, I highly encourage teams to be looking at it because it really is almost just a road map of how to not just think more broadly than capitalizing on demand, but really building brand into those initial programs and also then making sure the people and the process and the technology are also aligned to be doing the same. Exactly. One of the things that I think is a huge opportunity that comes out of brand to demand, and we call it BDX for brand to demand experience. And so omnichannel experience, brand to demand experience, the consistency. And if you agree that a significant part of the buyer constituency is out of market and then moves into market at a point in time. And then as they move into market, they move through some form of funnel or some form of progression. So if we are able to dynamically track and follow people from out of market into market, top of funnel, then all the way through, dynamically serve right content at the right time to the right segment, and use technology and orchestration approaches to underpin all of that, I think that there’s magic there, and we can. I think that it’s available to us now to do that in a dynamic fashion, which is, you know, it’s a breakthrough. It really is. And that’s why companies like Sixense exist, but also we’ve seen it again and again. B two b is still selling to people. Right? And you wouldn’t talk to a person who is not interested in what you’re selling in the same way that you would talk to somebody who’s actively in a buying cycle. And so being able to provide the right experience to your point to the individual prospects, these prospects are getting a personalized experience in every other facet of their life. So why not? Where they’re making very big decisions around where to put very large sums of budget and money and, you know, make their own career successful. Exactly. And if b two b brands and b two b agencies so all of us in the b two b marketing community, tech platforms and and enablers and media platform providers and etcetera, etcetera. But for brands and their agencies, there needs to be more investment in brand. There absolutely needs to be more investment in brand. Every time a company does that in the right strategic way at the right times, they do better. They simply do better. And the BDX report is full of case examples of that. There are other case examples, but every time and, you know, we released a report with Brand Finance, the top brand valuation consultancy in the world, and they’ve been doing consumer valuation, consumer brand and B2B brand valuation for more than twenty five years. And two years ago, at our instigation, they did the first b to b specific brand valuation index and report the top hundred b two b brands. And, they expanded it this year because there’s so much interest in this to a hundred fifty. Next year, they’re gonna expand it to two hundred fifty. So the big takeaway is that just the top one hundred B2B brands, these are gigantic companies, of course, but just a one hundred are leaving one trillion dollars of enterprise value on the table by not investing in brand. You’re leaving a trillion dollars. And so forget even about demand metrics and so on and so forth. Talk to the CFO about leaving a trillion dollars on the table, and I think he gets what’s in it. B two b has to invest more. It simply does. Second thing b two b needs to do, it’s gotta keep pushing on the creative aspect of this. There is lots of room to grow and improve, and we’ve gotta keep at it because it connects to what makes that brand investment effective in the first place. The third thing that we have to do is unify brand and demand, and we have to think about it. To your point, Saima, it’s about the customer. It’s not about brand. It’s not about demand. The customer doesn’t care if the brand team or the demand team is sending the message. They care about having a valuable experience that ultimately leads them to choose you as a provider for them. So if we do those three things, that’s all we need to do, Adam, just those three small things, then this will indeed be the b two b decade and maybe a lot more than that. So they have to invest more in brands. So if I’m a marketer listening now, I’m a marketer. I’m, like, bought in on this. I wanna start selling this value. I’m gonna ultimately probably have to move dollar. And I even at the beat of believe event from LinkedIn as well, there were marketers from huge brands standing up saying, I had to sell my digital team or my performance team on the fact that, like, we were taking some of their spend away. How do you think about that in terms of, like, okay, let’s start rethinking the budgeting world for making these types of investments? Yeah. Well, you have to ask the hard question. Right? I mean, this is, like, this is dateline. It’s twenty twenty. It’s, you know, it’s revenue makers. Just just, you know, don’t ask me about my personal life or criminal record or anything. You know, it’s there are a few ways to begin to answer that question. But one way is to think about incrementality. And I think that we as marketers should always be in the business of improving things and trying new strategies and tactics to up the game and to do better and better. Now, a CFO should understand that, but it’s a very basic concept. And CFOs typically are very smart and analytical, But incrementality testing and and so there may be a specific event, a specific thing happening for a company with S and P Global. So my good friend there, Alice Cherry, who’s the CMO, they launched a big, great, big, well funded brand campaign, but they had a there was an event going on with there was this huge acquisition, and S and P Global needed to define itself, redefine itself in the market, and make a strong statement to all its stakeholders, including its its own people. And it also had a huge knock on effect to their pipeline and their business, wouldn’t you know? So, you know, that that could be a driver. But in a lot of instances, that’s not a driver. And so what is more effective marketing? And so I would say that incrementality testing where you you invest and you see the impact and you see the result and then you calibrate and come back to it. And then I’m going to give you an example of this, where one of our clients and, Simon, you’ll know Jean English from Juniper Networks, CMO, outstanding marketer. Juniper, a few years ago, did this. And what they did is they saw an opportunity in the market, greater differentiation between them themselves and their competitors, and they tested the concept of investing in brand to enter the space in a more meaningful way. And they did it in selected markets, and they read those markets against other markets. And they did it did it in a finite way, so what they weren’t betting the farm. And they saw a huge lift. They saw a huge downstream lift. So think about any of the downstream metrics from all the way from MQL to whatever your favorite of those acronyms are. But, you know, every one of them increased hugely without demand increase. The the investment the brand level and had that knock on downstream effect. So then they tripled their budget and they placed a big bet, and it had a massive growth increase driving capability that was really well said on their business. Over the course of fifteen months, they grew revenue in the enterprise category by fifty one percent. They grew revenue by fifty one percent. And so, you know, I think that they saw an opportunity. They tested the waters in a scientific way. They had the evidence to go bigger. They went bigger. It worked. They went bigger. It worked, etcetera. And they’re set to launch a new campaign, continue the momentum literally any moment. You know, there are a lot of stories like that out there. So I think that incrementality Before we end, there’s one thing that I I wanna just quickly interject, if I might, that connects back to something that we were starting to talk about that we didn’t close the loop on that I think is really important. It has to do with Ken. It has to do with b two b. Has to do with the movie. It has to do with, everything that that we’ve just talked about. You’re talking about b two c, Sima and the fact that this year, Cannes Lions B2B category, two of the top three winners were companies that are considered consumer companies. So Coke, Coca Cola and Heineken. So beer and soda somehow managed to win in the B2B category. And it sparked a lot of conversation. There are a lot of b to b folks in our world that are very negative toward this and think that there’s something amiss and somehow can is rigged in favor of those companies or whatever their beef is. But the biggest beef is that it’s not really B2B. And you said earlier that all of these companies have huge B2B component parts to them. And so they do. And we work for Kraft Pines as a B2B agency, and they have a huge growth opportunity in the B2B space. So my response to this is like, this expands the category. This expands how we think about b two b. I think if we go back into our foxhole, you know, our b two boring foxhole, Adam, and think about us ourselves this way when we could think about ourselves this way. And these are companies and brands that have long standing cultures of creativity. I’ll leave it there. I think it’s opportunity. It’s not a negative thing. It’s a positive thing. Makes us all better or at least work harder on it. And who doesn’t like a Heineken from time to time? You know, honestly. So, Simon, are you gonna hit him with the question? I’m gonna hit you with the question, Tom. We ask this of every guest on the podcast. What is the most ridiculous thing that you have been asked to do in your career? And I I mean and let’s not go with be a movie star in a documentary movie because we I know that’s right there for you to take. But what else? It was right there. It’s which it’s actually true. It’s actually true. What’s the most ridiculous thing? It was actually to dress up as a gorilla for a pitch. And it had to do with, of course, the idea and the concept that we were pitching. And the idea of having I was the chief creative officer and and CEO of the company at the time to have me actually do something as ridiculous as that to sell the concept. My team talked me into it and I did it. And did it work? No. Oh, no. But we laugh about it to this day. So she had some fun. Many more. That’s the fun part of this business is sometimes taking a shot, especially when you’re a little bit younger in the business, which I certainly was then. Yeah. Well, we could go on. I have, like, I could just but we won’t because I don’t think anybody wants to listen to a four hour podcast. But, Tom, thank you so much for joining. Great conversation. This is gonna be a resource heavy episode. We’re gonna link out to the film. Everyone should watch it. It’s great. We’re gonna link out to the brand demand framework. Everyone can check that out too. And, again, thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. Well, thank you, Adam, and thank you, Saima. It’s a pleasure always to converse with fellow travelers in our b two b world. So, thanks for having me. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.