U.S. Chair at The Talent Business, CMO of Fortune 500s, Lee Ann Daly

Julia Raymond:
Welcome to the show. Our guest today is Lee Ann Daly, she is the U.S. Chairman for The Talent Business, a global leader in executive search for creative businesses and marketing, advertising and communication sectors. She’s also an active investor, and was previously CMO of Fortune 500 companies including ESPN for over 10 years, Thomson Reuters, and Consulting Chief Marketing Officer at Pressed Juicery.

Julia Raymond:
Lee Ann, welcome to the show.

Lee Ann Daly:
Hi, nice to talk to you.

Julia Raymond:
Yeah, it’s great to have you today.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yeah, I am so interested in your business, and how you help to enable companies to modernize their marketing stack, and makes them efficient, and really interested in hearing what kind of questions you have for me today.

Julia Raymond:
Absolutely. I would like to get started, if you could just give us a little bit about your background. You’ve worked with some really impressive companies. Would like to hear about ESPN, and what you did there, and maybe some more content around Pressed Juicery as I know you had some interesting stories there.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yes, and probably some relevant retail stories there. Well, I started off my career in advertising agencies, and did that for about eight years. Then, I left and I started my own company, production company, and in that capacity producing radio programming, and advertising, which I guess you would call now a content company.

Lee Ann Daly:
I got to know ESPN, and ESPN hired me initially as Vice President of Advertising and Program Marketing, which is really a job focused on their TV business. Very quickly because of the moment in time that I got there, I launched a magazine, I launched interactive games business, I launched fantasy sports, I launched ESPN Zones, which were site-based entertainment businesses that tapped into the combined skill set of the Walt Disney Company, which owned ESPN … or owns ESPN, and our own knowledge as ESPN about what sports fans love and want.

Lee Ann Daly:
That was an amazing experience. It was a huge growth period for the ESPN brand. It was between ’97 and 2007, so there was a lot growth, and it was before people were cutting cords, so it was a very robust business, responsible for a big chunk of the free cash flow into the Walt Disney Company at the time.

Lee Ann Daly:
Then, I had two kids. I was on the executive committee of ESPN, and I looked around the room, and everybody in the room had a wife, and I didn’t have a wife. I have a wonderful husband, but he is fully employed, so I thought after almost 10 years, I decided to step back, and try to be a stay-at-home mom. I stayed on as an advisor to ESPN because I had so many years of walking the road with my colleagues. In that time, I realized that while I love being with my kids I’m like a breed of dog that’s supposed to work, I’m a working breed, and that took a little counseling to get to that, to not sit there and beat myself up saying, “Why am I not happy being at home with my kids?”

Lee Ann Daly:
In that time period a really brilliant and well-known recruiter, a guy named Jim Citrin, from Spencer Stuart, asked me to go talk to Tom Glocer, and Devin Wenig at Reuters. I was a journalism major in college, and so I knew what Reuters was, and I really admired how Reuters’ news desk really exists to serve the financial markets in the same way that Bloomberg does. I thought, “Wow, what an interesting model for neutrality in news because the markets just want to know what’s going on. They don’t really care the spin politically in either direction.” Those guys were looking to sort of upgrade their marketing department globally, and so I joined them. I cut a deal where I didn’t have to work five days a week, so I got Fridays with my kids, which was fantastic, and I joined them.

Lee Ann Daly:
About three months in they announced that they were going to merge with Thomson and that was an amazing experience too because it was merging, it was doing a gigantic merger of two powerful media companies, and it was happening right at the very beginning of the world financial market crisis of 2008 and 2009. The wonderful experience was creating a joined-up brand because Thomson and Reuters wanted to rebrand themselves, and taking that out into the world in 140 markets and 9 different languages, so we launched.

Lee Ann Daly:
Initially, when we launched, we were listed on three stock exchanges, and we had to de-list in a couple places, and that was a really interesting learning experience. Then, when all the dust settled around the merger, and we had gone around the world telling everybody in the company about the brand I came back, and I ran the markets’ division, marketing, which was organized in time zones globally around the world with a really strong team of channel marketers who reported up to a woman who is now, I think, running customer relations for Refinitiv, which is the new company that Thomson Reuters markets became.

Lee Ann Daly:
All these experiences had their own kind of unique learning curve, let’s just say. Going from a consumer based sports marketing company to a B2B world financial market company, for me, was a huge leap. I knew I had the fundamental skills of a marketer, and a storyteller, which is fundamentally what they didn’t have at the time that they brought me in. Then, I got to learn the difference between fixed income and foreign exchange, which sounds like I should’ve known what that was, but nobody around me … I grew up around doctors not stockbrokers, and all my friends when I moved to New York after college were artists, and musicians, advertising people, filmmakers, architects. That’s what I always constantly seek. I’m constantly seeking a learning curve, that’s just me.

Julia Raymond:
Yeah, it sounds like it. It sounded like that opportunity almost fell in your lap through your network, and you jumped on it. Then, all of a sudden you join, and it’s in flux, and they’re merging two huge global companies. I can’t imagine.

Lee Ann Daly:
It was really fun. We did things like we worked with a branding agency, Interbrand, to create the joined up Thomson Reuters brand. The logo was and, I think, Reuters news still uses this logo, it was composed of 108 dots. When our Chief Financial Officer went his roadshow to Asia to show the logo off people kept running up to him and saying, “There were 108 dots in that logo, it’s so amazing.” He came back to me and he’s like, “Did you know there were 108 dots in the logo,” and I said, “Yes, I did. We did that on purpose, it’s an auspicious number.”

Lee Ann Daly:
It’s so interesting how when you do this job of marketing, and communicating into cultures, across cultures how you build certain things in, and you make a big deal of those things to the audiences that will appreciate them, and you sort of almost, to save yourself the trouble, don’t mention it to those audiences that won’t get it because they’ll think about it too much. It was so fantastic to have him run up to me delighted that we had, in his mind, accidentally done something that we did very intentionally. That’s what I love about the job of marketing, it’s just this opportunity to go deep, and you don’t have to sell deep always. When you go deep and you’re really thoughtful you can really do some amazing things to create a sincere connection with your internal audience and, hopefully, also with your customer audience.

Julia Raymond:
That’s definitely something I’m hearing a lot of retailers talk about today is how do you go deeper with personalization? What does personalization mean beyond just the buzzword? How do you connect with micro segments in your audience? There’s so much changing that it’s hard to keep up.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yeah. Something that comes forward to me when you say that is I feel like a lot of companies do a perfectly good job at creating the technology stack to gain hunches or insights, but I’m not sure that companies set themselves up to have conversations face-to-face enough. I know that I become aggravated when I’m purchasing a pair of, let’s say, work boots for my 14-year-old son, because he is obsessed with work gear right now and clothes in general, the minute I buy those work boots they keep sending me messages to buy work boots. As opposed to recognizing that there might be a little micro trend happening with this individual customer, and having a broader conversation either face-to-face, or through digital means. It just seems to me a lot of it is very ham-fisted now, and that there’s an opportunity to make it more subtle, and inviting.

Julia Raymond:
Yeah, I think that there’s a little bit of over automation in a sense.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yeah, exactly. The example that you gave when we were talking about Chanel, and some work that you guys have recently done, where the technology is there to enable the human being to have an interaction that is productive, and acknowledges the customer, but it also creates an environment in which two humans can have a meaningful conversation. I think that’s super powerful.

Julia Raymond:
Yes, definitely with the Chanel example what they’re doing is, I think, next level. They, obviously, have a high emphasis on luxury with their brand, but to create this experience that is both personalized, and has a human touch, so it’s not just digital it’s the blending of the two, is really powerful. I think, they’ve seen some really great results so far.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yeah, that’s great.

Julia Raymond:
Tell us a little bit about Pressed Juicery. You said you were the Consulting Chief Marketing Officer for them. Tell us a little bit about the go to market strategy, or what your responsibility was when you came in to help them leverage their marketing, and define their customers?

Lee Ann Daly:
Well, Pressed Juicery is a Southern California based business, they make all of their juice in the central coast of California using super, like just right out of the ground, fresh fruits and vegetables. They had grown like crazy on the West Coast, they were operating all up and down the coast of California, Washington state, Hawaii, and they had launched in … we were launching in Massachusetts and New York.

Lee Ann Daly:
They had really done an amazing job of creating almost like an influencer brand unto itself. They had created a blog called the Chalkboard Magazine, which stands on its own as a media asset actually in terms of creating a conversation around wellness, fitness, new modes of taking care of your body, and your mind, and your spirit, and your diet, and your exercise. They really did an incredible job of kind of putting the right things in place to continuously have a conversation with their consumer. But the technology underlying their point of sale and the gathering of information and data off their website, and even the skews that they could sell off their website, just wasn’t where it needed to be to be as flexible and useful to their consumer, and also to drive a simple path to data-based customer insight.

Lee Ann Daly:
And in addition, the way that they did their marketing was … They didn’t do enough video. It runs the gamut from the enterprise data warehouse issues that needed to be upgraded, all the way over to just the basic skillsets of the individuals conducting the sort of contents of their marketing. And they had amazing relationships, and they did an excellent job of leveraging those relationships. And the people who founded the company are creatively brilliant people. So what my job was to do there really was to focus them on how do you take what I’ll sort of overstate as an enterprise data warehouse and improve it so that it isn’t an individual doing pivot tables until 10:00 at night every night.

Lee Ann Daly:
But it’s something that automatically reveals itself even at the retail point. So each individual manager can look at it and identify local advertising and marketing opportunities, or ways of bundling things to sell them at a higher ticket per transaction kind of thing. And we went in there and did a bunch of research, and talked to a bunch of providers, and ended up doing an abbreviated Adobe Marketing Cloud process. And basically, my job was to find the people who could enable that and hire them.

Lee Ann Daly:
And I hired somebody who was an excellent digital marketer from T-Mobile, and then getting the staff internally to learn how to use those tools, but also to learn how to do stop motion animation for some of the communications that they wanted to do, to do things that would on balance improve their ability to get clicked through, or promotional offers on social media, and as well as on email because email was like one of the most powerful forms of marketing for them. And email anyway is an exciting place to do well because you’re building on your own land. You don’t really have to do anything other than continue a relevant conversation. And if it is a high performing medium for you, it can be easily 80% of how you engage the consumer.

Julia Raymond:
Totally. And really interesting that you talked about the need for a company like Pressed Juicery that already has a really strong and dedicated, it sounds like, consumer following. And then-

Lee Ann Daly:
Yes.

Julia Raymond:
… through their social media, which is then nurtured through the blog and the content on the blog posts, and that they were able to bring in this technology that enables people to have localized, it sounds like, marketing campaigns.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yeah.

Julia Raymond:
We’ve been hearing a lot about the importance for that, but it must be difficult to find people that have the skills in that area. The chief marketing officers are C level execs that you help place. What are the skills that they need to add to their resume today if you’re a CMO looking to work with a retail brand?

Lee Ann Daly:
Yeah. Well, I would say CMO, and even at a level below that, because if you read the books that are coming out and you read articles, it’s predicting again for the umpteenth time, the death of the CMO.

Julia Raymond:
Right.

Lee Ann Daly:
So I’m going to address this to, let’s just call it, people who were in charge of operating marketing in companies at the highest level, whatever that means.

Julia Raymond:
Right.

Lee Ann Daly:
And I think that really understanding how all the kind of mission critical tools of marketing work. It’s kind of like a very basic thing to say, but I think it’s really important to understand what basic tools you need, and at what level do you need those tools? Because honestly, I think that some companies can go a very long time using basic MailChimp or Constant Contact email platforms, and they’re fine. Sometimes you need a higher grade tool, but you do need tools, and you need to be able to evaluate what the differences are between the tools. And you need to be able to implement those tools so that you can do that really inexpensive, let’s call it, marketing, because a lot of times …

Lee Ann Daly:
I’ve invested in a lot of startups, and I of course, as you know, I mentioned at the top I worked in Fortune 500 companies. So I’ve had every budget from nothing to $100 million. I’ve never worked at a telecom, so I haven’t had a billion dollar budget. But I’ve had many millions of dollars to work with. So I’ve kind of seen everything, and some of my investments, frankly, were to inoculate myself against irrelevance because I invested in companies that were serving the marketing community with new marketing technology.

Lee Ann Daly:
So I think that understanding the tools, understanding how to evaluate the horse for the course for your marketing, in other words, figuring out what you need in order to be successful and recognizing that sometimes, particularly with the company that’s, let’s say, five years old that has not been acquired already, figuring out what’s going to last three years, what’s going to last five years, and how much will your head of finance tolerate the investment in a five year solution?

Lee Ann Daly:
I think that being able to have those conversations, and being really clear within yourself, even if you’re a creative marketer, forcing yourself to become clear around this stuff is really important, because particularly for the creative marketer, it enables them to have the tools that they need to operate like a publisher. So you need to understand how the email marketing tools work, and which ones are the correct ones for your business. You need to become a strong kind of operator around the social platforms and the influencer platforms that are relevant to you. And sometimes they’re not relevant at all. Sometimes you need to cultivate your own internal influencers, and you have to figure that out.

Lee Ann Daly:
And then finally, I think you need to be really good at what I’ll call business development, but what really is creative collaborations that have legs. So in other words, figuring out who you want to play with, and figuring out how to get the deals that you make with the people you want to play with out of the lawyers office and into the longterm strategic thinking office of your business, so that you can be successful with partners over time, because what I’ve noticed a lot of times is people get really chuffed about doing a collaboration. And by this I mean like Supreme Times Adidas, those kinds of collaborations. And they think in terms of that one moment in time.

Lee Ann Daly:
And I think it’s really important to, with every collaboration, figure out how do we make this last three to five years? How do we take our culture, and the culture of our partner in this collaboration, and the cultures of our various consumers, and dream collectively about what we can talk about, and what we can do together to make life more interesting, or to educate our consumer, or to just delight them in some way? And I feel like this is an important skill in marketing because going back to my first statement, which is marketers are like publishers now. Every company is a publisher by virtue of the nature of social media and the digital platforms that we can build as marketers.

Lee Ann Daly:
So your website, any blogs that you have, any social accounts that you run, are all opportunities to behave and think like a news generating publisher. And it doesn’t mean you have to be generating breaking news, but it does mean that you have an opportunity to have a conversation. And that conversation can be driven by the culture that you want to operate in. It can be driven to some degree by the insight that you garner from your enterprise data warehouse. But it’s an incredible moment in time to create meaningful conversations with the consumer, and to collaborate in a lively and fun way over time with partners.

Julia Raymond:
Yeah, and I love everything you just said. It makes total sense to look at things from at least the mid to long term and not, I guess, chase the shiny objects as we see a lot of brands do.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yeah. It’s a tough dilemma because most marketers, particularly retail marketers, are sitting around the table every week looking at the numbers at retail, and having meetings with their store managers, or their regional managers, or whatever. And everybody’s wringing their hands that they don’t have data. They’re trying to figure out what to do. So data’s important, and having people around who can create content that fuels conversation is also a really important component.

Julia Raymond:
Yeah. So investing heavily in content strategy now that marketers have taken on that role of also being a publisher.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yeah. And it’s tricky for me to call it strategy, because it’s great to have a strategy. It’s like, I think that what you do is you plan out a strategy and then you gather together every two weeks to have conversations around topical subjects that might intersect with your brand, your product, and make sure that you don’t get too stuck in the plan. You have to be able to be nimble and shift based on what’s going on in the world.

Julia Raymond:
Yes, exactly, and while still staying true to your brand-

Lee Ann Daly:
Yes.

Julia Raymond:
… which is probably the most challenging part to balance the two.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yeah. Yeah, and when I was at ESPN, one of the things I always used to say is a brand is a relationship that you conduct every single day with your customers. It’s a conversation. And your brand doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to every single individual who engages with your customer. You want to keep reminding everybody in the company that they need to every single day ask themselves why do I deserve to invest of the life of this person who’s exchanging their money for whatever it is I have to give them, or sell them, or teach them, or whatever? I think it’s a really important thing that people in the marketing world, and in the operating world too, recognize that you need to figure out a way to put that responsibility in the hands as far into the organization as you can so that you can have as much love as possible flowing between the customer and the brand, because the brand is an atomized thing. It’s as far from experience of the relationship that you have between the customer and whoever’s representing the company.

Julia Raymond:
Yeah. That makes total sense. I love how you said that a brand is a relationship, because I don’t know if that’s always been the sentiment, but definitely, I don’t know, what would you say, over the past decade or so it’s just becoming more and more true as people become less brand loyal.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yeah. I mean, for me, at ESPN, it was very clear that the level of passion that people felt toward ESPN, because it was tied up in sports, right …

Julia Raymond:
Yeah.

Lee Ann Daly:
… so the subject matter is an inherently passionate place, right? What you realize is that, particularly as you grow, because I was there at a very, very rapid growth period where there was a lot of concern, like, “Is this on brand?” It was always the question to me. And I would always say, “If it’s something that you feel like you could talk to a friend about at a cocktail party and they would nod their head and say, ‘Yeah, that’s cool,’ then it’s probably on brand. But if it’s like ESPN, the toothpaste, you’re like a little embarrassed to talk about it. So use that as your guide. Don’t come to me with ESPN the tennis shoe. I’m not probably going to approve of it as the head of marketing here, because it fundamentally is not of service to the fan.”

Lee Ann Daly:
I mean, the beautiful statement at ESPN was, “ESPN is not the world’s biggest sport’s network. It’s the world’s biggest fan, and we exist solely to serve other fans where they watch, play, debate, read about, talk about sports.”

Lee Ann Daly:
That idea of being of service and having earned the right to exist doing what you do is a really important component of being a good marketer and being a good company and brand. It’s like asking yourself, ” What is my humble mission? Why do I deserve to exist?” And if you do that and if you can step into that and live into it as much as possible, you’re in a good place. You may have missteps here and there, but you’ll have more forgiveness from your audience.

Lee Ann Daly:
And especially at ESPN, we started to really sense when we needed to have a conversation about something with our consumer. And it was an incredible experience, because we wouldn’t always get everything right on the programming front, but we had a lot of latitude and forgiveness because of just the ongoing sort of experimentation and conversation that we were having across the board.

Lee Ann Daly:
And, you know, also this is an interesting connection, and it was very true in my time at ESPN. I felt like marketing’s role at ESPN was to make people like us and want to spend time with us, because that was our business. At the time, ratings were our business, and ratings are made up of the number of people watching and the amount of minutes they’re watching.

Lee Ann Daly:
And so this basic formula of, “Is what I’m doing going to make you like me and want to spend time with me?” It’s really durable across almost every industry as an idea. So, you know, that was it. That was it for me. And it was a very powerful thing to go into strategic sourcing at The Walt Disney Company and say, “How does this thing that you’re pushing us … This business that you’re pushing us to extend our brand into, how does it serve the sports fan?” And if they couldn’t articulate it, it wasn’t a business we were going to go into.

Julia Raymond:
Right.

Lee Ann Daly:
Pretty powerful, yeah.

Julia Raymond:
Totally powerful. And I love the stories that you use to support that, because marketing is saying, “Spend time with us,” and the challenge is, I think, to cut through the clutter and create resonance with the audiences through your content, through your people, and like you said, create conversations.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yeah. I mean, another piece that … I don’t mean to go over all my mantras at ESPN, but another mantra which is very relevant is, marketing is programming, and programming is marketing. And fundamentally that was true at ESPN. This was the Sports Center with a campaign that was cultivated and it’s still running, actually, in my time at ESPN, and it’s still on the air today. It’s been running for 20 years. And the value of Sports Center, and aside from the fact that it’s funny and entertaining and topical, is that it keeps people from tuning out of ESPN.

Lee Ann Daly:
People tend to not tune out when the Sports Center spot would come on. And so they stuck around and watched the next commercial in the pod, you know? So, that idea that something that was the marketing unit, that was created by the marketing department was compelling enough to have the audience behave as if it was programming, is a pretty cool thing. And it fundamentally reflects what great marketers are doing today. They’re trying to connect on that same level.

Lee Ann Daly:
And we were just doing it all the time at ESPN because it was part of what I believed kept people watching network. And I have research to back that up from Artie Balgrin who was brilliant head of research at ESPN. He proved that out for me, so I got covered and continued doing it. And it wasn’t just cover, it was the truth, yeah.

Julia Raymond:
I mean, it’s still on today and has a huge following.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yep. Yep.

Julia Raymond:
Yeah, so that speaks to its success. Well, I think we covered a lot of different areas, but I really like what you said about branding. I think that’s the big take away from our discussion today is about how brands can create a discussion and work with marketing, and how to think about marketing, really.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yeah.

Julia Raymond:
So I think that’s all super relevant to retailers.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s more of a conversation than a discussion, actually. It’s a back and forth. Because discussion sounds so formal. And I mean, one of the things we talked about was like, we’re like your buddy who you talk sports with over beers, plural, you know?

Julia Raymond:
Yeah.

Lee Ann Daly:
You know, not to encourage drinking or anything, but this idea of like it is a much more face to face on the ground relationship conversation versus, you know, we are the worldwide leader in sports and you are our subject. It’s like, “No, we’re friends. We’re fellow sports fans. So we get it.”

Julia Raymond:
Yeah. And it’s interesting because like if we talk specifically about retailers, I know some of the ways they’re getting creative is like with the popups, like with Supreme. But sometimes … I was talking to some people at NRF, which is the retails big show in New York, and they were saying sometimes you go and the popup it just isn’t executed on brand, and then it just really changes the experience for someone, especially for these digital first brands that come on line as like Instagram stores, and then they start having popups, but it kind of flops because it just doesn’t match the expectations.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yeah. I mean, I think that the best popups are ones where you have an individual who has a budget, that’s a decent budget, not just the real estate costs, but the actual dressing of the space, and that individual is given the ability to create something that is a sincere expression of the brand. And if you don’t have that, you’re not going to get a good outcome.

Lee Ann Daly:
I mean, Pressed Juicery, The Chalkboard did pop up inside Pressed Juicery stores.

Julia Raymond:
Oh, wow.

Lee Ann Daly:
And they were beautiful because Suzanne Hall, who is the editor-in-chief of The Chalkboard, it was her responsibility. It was not my responsibility, it was her responsibility. And she wanted it to be amazing. And you need to find that person. You have to find that person, and you need to not second guess that person, because all great, creative ideas need that kind of custody. And I think all too often we have the death of a thousand pokes, or we have underfunding. You know what I mean? Too many cooks in the kitchen is the death of a thousand pokes. And not funding things properly. Just don’t do it, you know? Just don’t do it if you’re not going to fund it.

Julia Raymond:
Right. So fund it correctly, find the right person and give them full discretion or at least most of the discussion if they’re super creative type that can execute.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yeah. Because you have the merit to do something you can’t do, so stop bringing your girlfriend in to judge everything that person is doing, or your boyfriend or whoever. Just let them do their job. You trust them if you know that over and over again they’ve delivered or you see their portfolio of work because you hired them from the outside. You’ve got to be careful about hiring the person, but you also have to let them do their job.

Lee Ann Daly:

I think that’s true for a lot of creative activities that companies hire and spend all this money and they basically negate what the person brings to their company. I mean, I have not … I have experienced people being distressed, but they’re not getting good outcomes from creative resources, and probably 90% of the time the problem is they have not permitted those creative outcomes. Big one.

Julia Raymond:
Right. They’re getting in their own way.

Lee Ann Daly:
To happen, you know?

Julia Raymond:
Yeah.

Lee Ann Daly:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Julia Raymond:
That makes total sense. And it’s so important for creativity today, especially with everything being Instagrammable and with social media.

Lee Ann Daly:
Yeah. For sure.

Julia Raymond:
Thank you so much for your time. I know that you’re a super busy person and obviously you have a lot going on all the time. I know you run your own podcast, so just …

Lee Ann Daly:
I do.

Julia Raymond:
… super thankful that you’re able to get on with us today. And I will … Yeah, we’ll have to stay in touch.

Lee Ann Daly:
Okay. Beautiful. Take care.

Julia Raymond:
Awesome. Thanks so much, Lee Ann.

Our listeners can hear more from Lee Ann as she co-hosts the Podcast “Say It Forward,” where you hear inspiring interviews revealing life stories told with heart and from the heart. Say it Forward is available on iTunes.

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