At the Brand Innovators Women in Marketing livecast event, female leaders from AB InBev, P&G, Shutterstock, Archer Roose Wines, SAP & The XX Project talked about leadership, creativity and the future of advertising.
Archer Roose Wines is currenting running an ongoing campaign starring actress Elizabeth Banks, the company’s new Chief Creative Officer, as part of the brand’s mission to reshape its legacy. The campaign has received positive engagement, counting more than 120 million impressions and driving a 152% increase in Instagram followers.
“We talk a lot about the new tradition at Archer Roose,” said Marian Leitner-Waldman, Co-Founder and CEO, Archer Roose Wines. “The last 100 years in wine have been dominated by the male, white collector. The whole industry has been oriented that way. When we think about the daily wine drinker who’s just looking to have a glass of wine at the end of their day, that’s a really wide tent. As we’re building out our portfolio we’re really focused on how we can make sure that the people who are making our wine, also look like the people that drink our wine.”
Ioana Tanasa, Senior Marketing Director at Non-Alcoholic Beverages AB InBev (Global), Anheuser-Busch InBev said that an openness to different cultures and experiences with different managers helped her develop her managerial style.
“One thing that we have to do as we become more senior, as female leaders, is to help women and minority groups within and external to the organization,” said Tanasa. “This is why we are doing a lot of different programs at AB Inbev, which will help with confidence for women, sisterhood, understanding imposter syndrome and how that affects your confidence. We are putting these types of programs in place, so that we can really help the more junior women who have joined this type of male-dominated industry.”
Kimberly Doebereiner, Vice President, Future of Advertising, Content and Brand Communication, Procter & Gamble, advises that it is important to consider how you spend your time as it is a more valuable resource than money. With this in mind, she says that creating ways to connect with consumers in more authentic ways will help them spend time with your brand.
“At P&G, we believe in advertising,” said Kimberly Doebereiner, Vice President, Future of Advertising, Content and Brand Communication at Procter & Gamble. “We believe advertising works. Honestly, the way that social media, influencers and word-of-mouth works is powerful. There’s never a one-size-fits-all for a brand, although these tools are just the right tools at the right time depending on what you’re trying to say. As I look at the future of advertising, and say “What are we focused on?”, we’ve actually narrowed it down to something that’s pretty simple. We believe the future is all around being useful and being interesting. If you can figure out as a brand how to be more useful or more interesting, you’ll win.”
Michelle Edgar, Founder & CEO at The XX Project said that community and support from other women can be a very important resource for women in marketing.
“I think bringing women together – sharing intel on how to get that dream job or if you’re at a halt, how to get out of that pattern – to see bigger and better is key,” said Edgar. “A lot of women are very into supporting one another; that’s just the culture and environment that we strive to create to foster authentic relationship building, to help one another. A lot of the time, some women don’t know how to ask or negotiate and that’s what I really want to offer, I want them to have a safe place to ask for help. Finding the best-in-class women that can help you is crucial. It’s friendship and a tribe that you can take along with you.”
Women in leadership can have a big impact on the diversity of talent within their organization by advocating for hiring people from different backgrounds.
“We need to use our influence to advocate for diverse talent in our organizations,” said Sandra Moerch, Chief Content Director, Purpose & Sustainability Marketing, SAP. “The data proves it time and time again that our organizations will be more successful when there is diversity across the board, from the top to the bottom of the organization. We need to have an equal split of gender, and have representation of minorities and marginalized communities. It is our responsibility as leaders who have that information and knowledge, to change that and to ensure that the people that we hire help reflect these diverse organizations that we know will also be more successful for it.”
Storytelling can help empower women in the marketplace when consumers see themselves represented in creative. For Shutterstock, content marketing is key to engaging consumers on this level.
“To me, content marketing lives at the intersection of what your brand wants to say, what your customers want to read and what is going on in the world right now,” said Jennifer Braunschweiger, Senior Director, Content Marketing at Shutterstock. “So if we are picturing a venn diagram of what you are trying to say as a brand, what your customer is interested in and really the context in which that message is landing, that is where you can create any kind of story. In that overlap for Shutterstock, there is a lot of stuff up and down the marketing funnel. We have a recent piece right now about an African 3D artist; we have another piece about making photo collages in InDesign. This really runs the gamut from varied thought leadership-oriented toward a more how-to tutorial.”
