A History of Marketing

A History of Marketing / Episode 51
My guest Tod Johnson, a market research pioneer who was among the first people to measure the Internet. He’s an inductee to the Market Research Council Hall of Fame and former chairman of the Advertising Research Foundation. Tod is President and CEO of the Board of the Metropolitan Opera and is a member of the board of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
Tod led The NPD Group for over 50 years, building it into one of the largest consumer research firms in the world. NPD became the company retailers like Mattel and Hasbro relied on to understand what was selling. In 1995, he founded Media Metrix, essentially the Nielsen ratings of the early internet.
In this conversation, we dive into:
* The era of pencil-and-paper diary panels, when consumer research meant tracking grocery purchases by hand and mailing the booklets back every month
* Why Tod’s analysis showed that brand loyalty is mostly a myth, long before anyone in advertising wanted to admit it
* How he accidentally discovered the internet was about to change everything
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Special thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. And to Bill Moult, whom you may remember from episode 23 of this podcast, for introducing me to Tod.
Why spend a career in market research?
Andrew Mitrak: I watched a speech you gave while accepting a lifetime achievement award. And at the start of the speech, you quipped that you’re tempted to aim for a second lifetime achievement award and do it all over again. I take that as a sign that you spent your career really doing something you love, and your career was in market research. So, what do you love about market research?
Tod Johnson: Well, I’ve always been a very quantitative-oriented person. I’ve loved numbers, I’ve loved facts supported by numbers, and I’ve always had an interest in psychology as well. In fact, I taught what today would be called cognitive psychology when I got out of graduate school for a while. Market research just puts those two pieces together very, very naturally. So it fit into what I really found exciting and wanted to do. I have to say, I never started out thinking market research was my career objective. I kind of fell into it by accident, but once I got into it, it was where I wanted to be.
Innovation and Innovation Models in Early Market Research
Andrew Mitrak: You were an academic doing quantitative analysis, and these were real-world business practitioners. Was this seen as new pioneering research that they could apply to their business? What was that dynamic like with them?
Tod Johnson: Well, the dynamic was interesting and different in those days. These companies had their own staffs oriented to innovation and development, and they were always open to new ideas. Today, that’s not so easy to get into a company with a new idea because there’s just too many of them out there. But back then, it was kind of open arms, wanting to explore new ideas. We were solving real problems like new product introductions with trial and repeat models, which hadn’t really been focused on much before, market structure work, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies had a curiosity to want to learn that.
The Era of National Purchase Diaries
Andrew Mitrak: Can you set a scene of what market research looked like at the time? Was it ever influencing a certain product launch, or a certain product strategy, or messaging or positioning type?
Tod Johnson: In those days, virtually every new product launch would go into a test market. We would set up a diary panel of consumers to record purchases in the appropriate category. We would do the trial and repeat analyses that would predict the long run success or failure of the particular product. That would be the most common application. On a national basis it would be more about consumer trends in those categories uh and how they were structured and what was changing.
The other thing that was very good, I’m now jumping ahead to when I became involved in developing NPD, was in the mid70s, General Mills started to diversify from CPG into a lot of other categories like food service, toys, apparel, jewelry, and I was fortunate enough to be the person they looked to to set up how to track those industries similar to how CPG had been tracked.
Andrew Mitrak: Amazing. They embraced the general in their name and kind of not so much the mills part of their name.
Tod Johnson: Well, the general went away about 10, 15 years later.
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned National Purchase Diaries. What was the actual purchase diary? You mentioned like purchase diary panels and what does it look like? Walk me through the nuts and bolts of what a purchase diary panel would look like.
Tod Johnson: Well, it would be a booklet which was about 20 pages and each page had a couple of categories on it like toilet paper, facial tissue, and paper towels might all be on a page, and they’d be structured in a way that if you bought one of those items, you answered some questions.
The panelists would get a new booklet every month and mail the old booklet back in to us, which we would code up. Back then, it was pretty easy to get good representative samples because women typically weren’t working. They were interested in doing projects and interested in helping, and we made it clear how they were helping manufacturers make better products for them by providing this kind of information. That relationship with the consumer in market research just doesn’t exist anymore, but it was what a lot of the industry was based on in the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s.
Measuring Product Success and Consumer Loyalty
Andrew Mitrak: The consumers were part of the panel who had these diaries. They would kind of punch in their purchases for the week?
Tod Johnson: No, they’d fill them in by hand with pencil.
Andrew Mitrak: Do you have any favorite examples of how this data was used? Especially in the early years of these manual diary entries.
Tod Johnson: New product introductions, which were elaborate test markets for the most part back then, was perhaps the most common use. The other use was it was a way to track demographics. It was a way to track loyalty. I can remember in the ‘80s, I did a lot of publishing about how consumers weren’t very loyal because we’d see their purchase patterns. That was at a time when advertisers and advertising agencies believed in loyalty. You were always talking about their loyal buyers. It didn’t really exist, but that was the basic premise. I know I was swimming upstream for a while with those publications, but today, everybody accepts that as the truth and the fact, and that there’s enormous brand shifting and much less loyalty than once was thought to exist.
The Growth and Diversification of NPD
Andrew Mitrak: You joined when it was a $300,000 revenue company.
Tod Johnson: $400,000. Give me the full credit.
Andrew Mitrak: sorry, I also want to give you credit because it grew to a lot more than that. How did the small kind of regional firm that was doing 400,000 revenue a year over the course of your next 30 years? It became a global market research firm that the world’s largest retailers rely on. What were the major inflection points as far as it growing? How did you grow it?
Tod Johnson: Well, I mentioned one, and that was General Mills taking us into a bunch of general merchandise and food service categories. Our toy clients encouraged us to get into Europe. We worked with everyone in the toy industry, whether it was Mattel, Hasbro, or Lego—all the big players, all the smaller players. Mattel had a huge variety of products; it owned Fisher-Price, so that was a whole different set of products. They were a great client, are a great client, and had a wonderful mix of products. The toy industry has evolved a lot—electronics came along, how kids use time, and the definition of toys has evolved quite a bit from there.
Managing Industry Rivalries in Market Research
Andrew Mitrak: It’s interesting because advertising companies or advertising agencies have this concept of conflict. So, if I work with Mattel, I can’t work with Hasbro—that’s a competitor. But a market research firm actually could be more neutral and work with everybody in that, right? Do you ever run into things like conflicts where, if we’re doing this survey for Mattel, that might lead to some conflict of interest to do it for Hasbro? How does that work?
Tod Johnson: That’s a very interesting question because in the CPG world, that conflict orientation tends to exist even today. If you work for Coca-Cola, you don’t work for Pepsi. If you work for General Mills, you didn’t work for Kellogg’s typically. Now, the company might work for both of them, but the individual people don’t.
When you got into general merchandise, the client was much more interested in being sure that they were working with someone who really understood their industry. To understand an industry, you don’t learn an industry just by working with one company in that industry. Each of those general merchandise industries—whether it’s toys or consumer electronics or office supplies, which all have very different distribution structures—also had very different product structures. It took a lot of learning to understand it, so they viewed it as a benefit to work with someone who really knew their industry.
The Birth of Media Metrix and the Internet Lightbulb Moment
Andrew Mitrak: Can you tell me about Media Metrix and the introduction of software meters?
Tod Johnson: What happened was one of the categories NPD was tracking was software. This is in the early ‘90s, and software back then was shrink-wrap that you bought in a store. Our software clients were saying the purchase data is really interesting, but we’re wondering if you could get us usage data.
So, we developed a piece of software which we had 300 panelists download onto their PCs to see if we could track their usage. After a couple of months, they all sent us back that database. And of those 300, literally three of them had really strange data included on it, which it took us a couple of months to figure out what it was. But what it was was their internet surfing, which we were capturing frankly by accident.
In other words, this is 1994. 1% of consumers were on the internet—three out of 300. That was the lightbulb moment—the internet is really going to grow and this is a way to measure it, just like television was being measured then or radio or magazines. That led us to say there was a bigger opportunity to measure the internet than there was to understand software usage.
The Digital Landscape of 1996: Universities and Search Engines
Tod Johnson: We kind of switched our focus and published our first internet ratings data in January 1996. Just to give you a feeling for what the internet was like then, the top five sites were AOL, WebCrawler, Netscape, Yahoo, and InfoSeek. In the top 20 sites, actually four of them were universities. The internet was a very, very different place, and we developed Media Metrix and what we called the PC Meter to track the evolution of that business.
Andrew Mitrak: It’s amazing. You shared a slide with me of just these top 20. So, you mentioned the top five. The EDU ones are the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Why were universities ranked so highly?
Tod Johnson: This is a little embarrassing answer to me because of my involvement with Carnegie Mellon, which not only was I a student and teaching there, but I’ve been the longest-serving trustee and vice chairman.
Starting with the University of Michigan, my understanding is that NOAA published its weather data through Michigan.edu. So, back then, you went to the University of Michigan to get weather data.
Carnegie Mellon is my embarrassing answer. It was sort of the leading porn site on the internet back then. A graduate student, who I won’t name because he’s well-known right now, developed a methodology of mousing over something on your screen and moving it. He demonstrated that methodology by letting you mouse over a picture of himself and removing all of his clothes.
I’m not sure what MIT was, and University of Illinois, I think, related back to the history of Netscape, if I’m not mistaken.
Andrew Mitrak: Oh right, yeah, that would track. Interesting. It wasn’t like the CMU.edu homepage.
Tod Johnson: Some website that wanted people to see the technology. I don’t think CMU stayed in the top 20 for very long, but it was ahead of Penthouse Magazine, which was number 18 back then.
How the Internet Transformed Market Research Operations
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. I was going to say there’s a couple that was not safe for work websites that I saw on there. It’s funny. We all know it’s like a big part of the internet, but it kind of usually doesn’t make these top lists these days too often anymore. But it’s out there, that’s amazing.
You saw this three-in-300 moment where it was like, “Wow, that’s strange.” And you see that they’re presumably using some web browser or spending a large number of hours using software. I imagine you had an early view into seeing this growth where it wasn’t three-in-300; it then went to six and then 12 and then 30, and you saw some of the exponential.
Tod Johnson: I think if I remember right, by the time we published the first report in January, it was up to about 35%. It really just skyrocketed during that period.
Andrew Mitrak: What did NPD’s clients do with this information? How did they respond to seeing this and getting an early view into “Hey, the internet’s going to be big”? Do you feel like they heeded the call and got on quickly, or do you feel like there was still some skepticism? Or how did people react? Because I’m always interested in when there is something new and somebody has compelling data that says something is coming but it’s not quite here yet. Do companies make the switch and start to act on it soon enough to really capitalize on the opportunity?
Tod Johnson: The key initial application was to sell advertisers on using your website. So you needed a currency or data to do that. Back then, the PC Meter data—Media Metrix data—became that currency which the websites used to show the size of their audience and the demographic profile of their audience as well. It was trying to make your internet site competitive with a television program or a radio station or radio program and things like that. That was the primary application.
The secondary application was understanding how consumers were surfing the internet and what you had to do as a website to both get someone to come to your site and stay in your site. People would look at competitors, how they were doing it, and adopt strategies that way.
Andrew Mitrak: I will ask broadly: How did the internet and this explosive growth change market research and change NPD?
Tod Johnson: At the time, NPD had two businesses: one was the diary panel business and the other was what was called a mail panel back then, or was really a survey research business. Starting around 2000, you had to become online interactive to be a successful business.
The first change it made is I made the decision that if we were going to make that transition, we weren’t going to make it well if we tried to transition both businesses simultaneously. So I sold one of the two businesses and just concentrated on the diary panel business at the time. Clearly, timing changed. You didn’t have a month to deliver information; you had to deliver it much more real-time. The presentation of the information changed; it was now presented on a screen much more often. It was more interactive and analytical, and you had to have the capabilities to do that. Pulling together disparate pieces of information, rather than just providing independent separate pieces, became much more critical and required a lot of investment and a lot of change.
A Legacy in Arts Patronage and Andy Warhol
Andrew Mitrak: I want to shift gears and ask you about the arts, because you’re also a major patron of the arts. You’re on the board of Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera, where you also serve as the president and CEO of the board there. You alluded to your background, which I noticed were a couple of Andy Warhols, which I imagine are original. It’s really impressive that you have such great taste on your wall. When did you develop your interest in the arts?
Tod Johnson: I grew up with it. My family collected art. My aunt was a major art dealer—in fact, she was one of Andy Warhol’s primary dealers. So I was always exposed to contemporary art.
Andrew Mitrak: Warhol was from Pittsburgh, right?
Tod Johnson: Yes, he went to Carnegie Tech.
Andrew Mitrak: Oh wow, okay, I just put that connection together.
Tod Johnson: One of the benefits of having offices like NPD is I have lots of walls for art. There were like 40 Warhols in the NPD offices at the time I sold the company.
Andrew Mitrak: So when you sold NPD and the Warhols were on the wall, does that show up as a line item on the balance sheet or?
Tod Johnson: Oh no, I got all of them. It wasn’t part of the sale; it was an exclusion.
The Intersection of Entrepreneurship and Marketing
Andrew Mitrak: As you’re working with visual arts institutions like the Met and Lincoln Center, do you feel like you bring your marketing expertise to the table there on how they’re marketing themselves?
Tod Johnson: Marketing to some extent; probably entrepreneurial business acumen to a greater extent.
Andrew Mitrak: Do you distinguish between entrepreneurial business acumen and marketing a lot? Because when I think of actually a lot of the best entrepreneurs, they’re also talented marketers. What part of their success is marketing instinct or intuition and prowess versus entrepreneurial business fundamentals? It seems like they overlap a lot. Do you distinguish between those two?
Tod Johnson: I kind of think they go together. Marketing doesn’t necessarily mean entrepreneurial. I think entrepreneurial is more likely to mean marketing directionally.
Andrew Mitrak: To be a great marketer, you don’t necessarily have to be an entrepreneur as well, but to be a great entrepreneur, you have to be a great marketer.
Tod Johnson: I think you said it better than I did.
The Future of Data: AI and Real-Time Insights
Andrew Mitrak: I know this is kind of a history podcast, but I want to talk to you about the future because you’re the co-founder and managing director of Duo Partners, and that firm invests in and consults with early-stage information and data companies. Do you have a vision for the future of market research when it comes to investing in companies? Can speak behind your investment thesis and what do you look for when you invest in information and data companies, but presumably also companies that will impact the future marketing as well?
Tod Johnson: Well, my partner Karen Schornbard and I are looking for really disruptive technologies to measure things in new ways—to measure things more accurately that isn’t dependent upon what a consumer recalls or says. To do it much more in real-time, continuous types of measurement.
I can give you a couple of examples. One of our investments has developed really physical AI technology where you can attach a tag to a product. You can see when the product is moved, you can see how much of it is used at each usage. You know when that happens so you can contact the consumer at the exact moment that they’re doing something rather than being dependent on “can they recall what they did two days ago?” You just get different information that way.
Another has built a fabulous database of food trends by scraping over the internet various restaurant menus and delivery service recommendations, seeing what’s changing, what’s growing real-time, and just things like that. These are going to lead to new ways of getting better information, particularly since the old methodologies are starting to be constrained by consumers not really having the time to think about it.
Andrew Mitrak: When you find a company that has the right underlying technology and product, where does marketing fit in on your calculation as to whether to invest or not at an early stage? Does marketing and their ability to tell a story and find a market and take this to market, does that play a part or do you kind of assume “Hey, these founders will hire the right marketers and they’ll figure it out if we invest in them”? How does that enter your calculus?
Tod Johnson: People who are developing products like that are developing them to take to a particular market. They usually know where the clients are by the time we get involved. There’ll at least be enough of a business that they’ve proven that clients can respond, so it’s built into the organization at that time.
Andrew Mitrak: Tod Johnson, thanks so much for your time. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, and I’m grateful for all of your wisdom and your stories. It’s just such a great pleasure to hear about how market research has evolved over all the years. I had a lot of fun.
Tod Johnson: Andrew, I’ve enjoyed doing this with you as well. Thanks for inviting me.



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A History of Marketing / Episode 50
My guest Tod Johnson, a market research pioneer who was among the first people to measure the Internet. He’s an inductee to the Market Research Council Hall of Fame and former chairman of the Advertising Research Foundation. Tod is President and CEO of the Board of the Metropolitan Opera and is a member of the board of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
Tod led The NPD Group for over 50 years, building it into one of the largest consumer research firms in the world. NPD became the company retailers like Mattel and Hasbro relied on to understand what was selling. In 1995, he founded Media Metrix, essentially the Nielsen ratings of the early internet.
In this conversation, we dive into:
* The era of pencil-and-paper diary panels, when consumer research meant tracking grocery purchases by hand and mailing the booklets back every month
* Why Tod’s analysis showed that brand loyalty is mostly a myth, long before anyone in advertising wanted to admit it
* How he accidentally discovered the internet was about to change everything
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Special thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. And to Bill Moult, whom you may remember from episode 23 of this podcast, for introducing me to Tod.
Why spend a career in market research?
Andrew Mitrak: Tod Johnson, welcome to A History of Marketing.
Tod Johnson: Hey, thank you. Glad to be here.
Andrew Mitrak: I watched a speech you gave while accepting a lifetime achievement award. And at the start of the speech, you quipped that you’re tempted to aim for a second lifetime achievement award and do it all over again. I take that as a sign that you spent your career really doing something you love, and your career was in market research. So, what do you love about market research?
Tod Johnson: Well, I’ve always been a very quantitative-oriented person. I’ve loved numbers, I’ve loved facts supported by numbers, and I’ve always had an interest in psychology as well. In fact, I taught what today would be called cognitive psychology when I got out of graduate school for a while. Market research just puts those two pieces together very, very naturally. So it fit into what I really found exciting and wanted to do. I have to say, I never started out thinking market research was my career objective. I kind of fell into it by accident, but once I got into it, it was where I wanted to be.
Innovation and Innovation Models in Early Market Research
Andrew Mitrak: You were an academic doing quantitative analysis, and these were real-world business practitioners. Was this seen as new pioneering research that they could apply to their business? What was that dynamic like with them?
Tod Johnson: Well, the dynamic was interesting and different in those days. These companies had their own staffs oriented to innovation and development, and they were always open to new ideas. Today, that’s not so easy to get into a company with a new idea because there’s just too many of them out there. But back then, it was kind of open arms, wanting to explore new ideas. We were solving real problems like new product introductions with trial and repeat models, which hadn’t really been focused on much before, market structure work, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies had a curiosity to want to learn that.
The Era of National Purchase Diaries
Andrew Mitrak: Can you set a scene of what market research looked like at the time? Was it ever influencing a certain product launch, or a certain product strategy, or messaging or positioning type?
Tod Johnson: In those days, virtually every new product launch would go into a test market. We would set up a diary panel of consumers to record purchases in the appropriate category. We would do the trial and repeat analyses that would predict the long run success or failure of the particular product. That would be the most common application. On a national basis it would be more about consumer trends in those categories uh and how they were structured and what was changing.
The other thing that was very good, I’m now jumping ahead to when I became involved in developing NPD, was in the mid70s, General Mills started to diversify from CPG into a lot of other categories like food service, toys, apparel, jewelry, and I was fortunate enough to be the person they looked to to set up how to track those industries similar to how CPG had been tracked.
Andrew Mitrak: Amazing. They embraced the general in their name and kind of not so much the mills part of their name.
Tod Johnson: Well, the general went away about 10, 15 years later.
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned National Purchase Diaries. What was the actual purchase diary? You mentioned like purchase diary panels and what does it look like? Walk me through the nuts and bolts of what a purchase diary panel would look like.
Tod Johnson: Well, it would be a booklet which was about 20 pages and each page had a couple of categories on it like toilet paper, facial tissue, and paper towels might all be on a page, and they’d be structured in a way that if you bought one of those items, you answered some questions.
The panelists would get a new booklet every month and mail the old booklet back in to us, which we would code up. Back then, it was pretty easy to get good representative samples because women typically weren’t working. They were interested in doing projects and interested in helping, and we made it clear how they were helping manufacturers make better products for them by providing this kind of information. That relationship with the consumer in market research just doesn’t exist anymore, but it was what a lot of the industry was based on in the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s.
Measuring Product Success and Consumer Loyalty
Andrew Mitrak: The consumers were part of the panel who had these diaries. They would kind of punch in their purchases for the week?
Tod Johnson: No, they’d fill them in by hand with pencil.
Andrew Mitrak: Do you have any favorite examples of how this data was used? Especially in the early years of these manual diary entries.
Tod Johnson: New product introductions, which were elaborate test markets for the most part back then, was perhaps the most common use. The other use was it was a way to track demographics. It was a way to track loyalty. I can remember in the ‘80s, I did a lot of publishing about how consumers weren’t very loyal because we’d see their purchase patterns. That was at a time when advertisers and advertising agencies believed in loyalty. You were always talking about their loyal buyers. It didn’t really exist, but that was the basic premise. I know I was swimming upstream for a while with those publications, but today, everybody accepts that as the truth and the fact, and that there’s enormous brand shifting and much less loyalty than once was thought to exist.
The Growth and Diversification of NPD
Andrew Mitrak: You joined when it was a $300,000 revenue company.
Tod Johnson: $400,000. Give me the full credit.
Andrew Mitrak: sorry, I also want to give you credit because it grew to a lot more than that. How did the small kind of regional firm that was doing 400,000 revenue a year over the course of your next 30 years? It became a global market research firm that the world’s largest retailers rely on. What were the major inflection points as far as it growing? How did you grow it?
Tod Johnson: Well, I mentioned one, and that was General Mills taking us into a bunch of general merchandise and food service categories. Our toy clients encouraged us to get into Europe. We worked with everyone in the toy industry, whether it was Mattel, Hasbro, or Lego—all the big players, all the smaller players. Mattel had a huge variety of products; it owned Fisher-Price, so that was a whole different set of products. They were a great client, are a great client, and had a wonderful mix of products. The toy industry has evolved a lot—electronics came along, how kids use time, and the definition of toys has evolved quite a bit from there.
Managing Industry Rivalries in Market Research
Andrew Mitrak: It’s interesting because advertising companies or advertising agencies have this concept of conflict. So, if I work with Mattel, I can’t work with Hasbro—that’s a competitor. But a market research firm actually could be more neutral and work with everybody in that, right? Do you ever run into things like conflicts where, if we’re doing this survey for Mattel, that might lead to some conflict of interest to do it for Hasbro? How does that work?
Tod Johnson: That’s a very interesting question because in the CPG world, that conflict orientation tends to exist even today. If you work for Coca-Cola, you don’t work for Pepsi. If you work for General Mills, you didn’t work for Kellogg’s typically. Now, the company might work for both of them, but the individual people don’t.
When you got into general merchandise, the client was much more interested in being sure that they were working with someone who really understood their industry. To understand an industry, you don’t learn an industry just by working with one company in that industry. Each of those general merchandise industries—whether it’s toys or consumer electronics or office supplies, which all have very different distribution structures—also had very different product structures. It took a lot of learning to understand it, so they viewed it as a benefit to work with someone who really knew their industry.
The Birth of Media Metrix and the Internet Lightbulb Moment
Andrew Mitrak: Can you tell me about Media Metrix and the introduction of software meters?
Tod Johnson: What happened was one of the categories NPD was tracking was software. This is in the early ‘90s, and software back then was shrink-wrap that you bought in a store. Our software clients were saying the purchase data is really interesting, but we’re wondering if you could get us usage data.
So, we developed a piece of software which we had 300 panelists download onto their PCs to see if we could track their usage. After a couple of months, they all sent us back that database. And of those 300, literally three of them had really strange data included on it, which it took us a couple of months to figure out what it was. But what it was was their internet surfing, which we were capturing frankly by accident.
In other words, this is 1994. 1% of consumers were on the internet—three out of 300. That was the lightbulb moment—the internet is really going to grow and this is a way to measure it, just like television was being measured then or radio or magazines. That led us to say there was a bigger opportunity to measure the internet than there was to understand software usage.
The Digital Landscape of 1996: Universities and Search Engines
Tod Johnson: We kind of switched our focus and published our first internet ratings data in January 1996. Just to give you a feeling for what the internet was like then, the top five sites were AOL, WebCrawler, Netscape, Yahoo, and InfoSeek. In the top 20 sites, actually four of them were universities. The internet was a very, very different place, and we developed Media Metrix and what we called the PC Meter to track the evolution of that business.
Andrew Mitrak: It’s amazing. You shared a slide with me of just these top 20. So, you mentioned the top five. The EDU ones are the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Why were universities ranked so highly?
Tod Johnson: This is a little embarrassing answer to me because of my involvement with Carnegie Mellon, which not only was I a student and teaching there, but I’ve been the longest-serving trustee and vice chairman.
Starting with the University of Michigan, my understanding is that NOAA published its weather data through Michigan.edu. So, back then, you went to the University of Michigan to get weather data.
Carnegie Mellon is my embarrassing answer. It was sort of the leading porn site on the internet back then. A graduate student, who I won’t name because he’s well-known right now, developed a methodology of mousing over something on your screen and moving it. He demonstrated that methodology by letting you mouse over a picture of himself and removing all of his clothes.
I’m not sure what MIT was, and University of Illinois, I think, related back to the history of Netscape, if I’m not mistaken.
Andrew Mitrak: Oh right, yeah, that would track. Interesting. It wasn’t like the CMU.edu homepage.
Tod Johnson: Some website that wanted people to see the technology. I don’t think CMU stayed in the top 20 for very long, but it was ahead of Penthouse Magazine, which was number 18 back then.
How the Internet Transformed Market Research Operations
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. I was going to say there’s a couple that was not safe for work websites that I saw on there. It’s funny. We all know it’s like a big part of the internet, but it kind of usually doesn’t make these top lists these days too often anymore. But it’s out there, that’s amazing.
You saw this three-in-300 moment where it was like, “Wow, that’s strange.” And you see that they’re presumably using some web browser or spending a large number of hours using software. I imagine you had an early view into seeing this growth where it wasn’t three-in-300; it then went to six and then 12 and then 30, and you saw some of the exponential.
Tod Johnson: I think if I remember right, by the time we published the first report in January, it was up to about 35%. It really just skyrocketed during that period.
Andrew Mitrak: What did NPD’s clients do with this information? How did they respond to seeing this and getting an early view into “Hey, the internet’s going to be big”? Do you feel like they heeded the call and got on quickly, or do you feel like there was still some skepticism? Or how did people react? Because I’m always interested in when there is something new and somebody has compelling data that says something is coming but it’s not quite here yet. Do companies make the switch and start to act on it soon enough to really capitalize on the opportunity?
Tod Johnson: The key initial application was to sell advertisers on using your website. So you needed a currency or data to do that. Back then, the PC Meter data—Media Metrix data—became that currency which the websites used to show the size of their audience and the demographic profile of their audience as well. It was trying to make your internet site competitive with a television program or a radio station or radio program and things like that. That was the primary application.
The secondary application was understanding how consumers were surfing the internet and what you had to do as a website to both get someone to come to your site and stay in your site. People would look at competitors, how they were doing it, and adopt strategies that way.
Andrew Mitrak: I will ask broadly: How did the internet and this explosive growth change market research and change NPD?
Tod Johnson: At the time, NPD had two businesses: one was the diary panel business and the other was what was called a mail panel back then, or was really a survey research business. Starting around 2000, you had to become online interactive to be a successful business.
The first change it made is I made the decision that if we were going to make that transition, we weren’t going to make it well if we tried to transition both businesses simultaneously. So I sold one of the two businesses and just concentrated on the diary panel business at the time. Clearly, timing changed. You didn’t have a month to deliver information; you had to deliver it much more real-time. The presentation of the information changed; it was now presented on a screen much more often. It was more interactive and analytical, and you had to have the capabilities to do that. Pulling together disparate pieces of information, rather than just providing independent separate pieces, became much more critical and required a lot of investment and a lot of change.
A Legacy in Arts Patronage and Andy Warhol
Andrew Mitrak: I want to shift gears and ask you about the arts, because you’re also a major patron of the arts. You’re on the board of Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera, where you also serve as the president and CEO of the board there. You alluded to your background, which I noticed were a couple of Andy Warhols, which I imagine are original. It’s really impressive that you have such great taste on your wall. When did you develop your interest in the arts?
Tod Johnson: I grew up with it. My family collected art. My aunt was a major art dealer—in fact, she was one of Andy Warhol’s primary dealers. So I was always exposed to contemporary art.
Andrew Mitrak: Warhol was from Pittsburgh, right?
Tod Johnson: Yes, he went to Carnegie Tech.
Andrew Mitrak: Oh wow, okay, I just put that connection together.
Tod Johnson: One of the benefits of having offices like NPD is I have lots of walls for art. There were like 40 Warhols in the NPD offices at the time I sold the company.
Andrew Mitrak: So when you sold NPD and the Warhols were on the wall, does that show up as a line item on the balance sheet or?
Tod Johnson: Oh no, I got all of them. It wasn’t part of the sale; it was an exclusion.
The Intersection of Entrepreneurship and Marketing
Andrew Mitrak: As you’re working with visual arts institutions like the Met and Lincoln Center, do you feel like you bring your marketing expertise to the table there on how they’re marketing themselves?
Tod Johnson: Marketing to some extent; probably entrepreneurial business acumen to a greater extent.
Andrew Mitrak: Do you distinguish between entrepreneurial business acumen and marketing a lot? Because when I think of actually a lot of the best entrepreneurs, they’re also talented marketers. What part of their success is marketing instinct or intuition and prowess versus entrepreneurial business fundamentals? It seems like they overlap a lot. Do you distinguish between those two?
Tod Johnson: I kind of think they go together. Marketing doesn’t necessarily mean entrepreneurial. I think entrepreneurial is more likely to mean marketing directionally.
Andrew Mitrak: To be a great marketer, you don’t necessarily have to be an entrepreneur as well, but to be a great entrepreneur, you have to be a great marketer.
Tod Johnson: I think you said it better than I did.
The Future of Data: AI and Real-Time Insights
Andrew Mitrak: I know this is kind of a history podcast, but I want to talk to you about the future because you’re the co-founder and managing director of Duo Partners, and that firm invests in and consults with early-stage information and data companies. Do you have a vision for the future of market research when it comes to investing in companies? Can speak behind your investment thesis and what do you look for when you invest in information and data companies, but presumably also companies that will impact the future marketing as well?
Tod Johnson: Well, my partner Karen Schornbard and I are looking for really disruptive technologies to measure things in new ways—to measure things more accurately that isn’t dependent upon what a consumer recalls or says. To do it much more in real-time, continuous types of measurement.
I can give you a couple of examples. One of our investments has developed really physical AI technology where you can attach a tag to a product. You can see when the product is moved, you can see how much of it is used at each usage. You know when that happens so you can contact the consumer at the exact moment that they’re doing something rather than being dependent on “can they recall what they did two days ago?” You just get different information that way.
Another has built a fabulous database of food trends by scraping over the internet various restaurant menus and delivery service recommendations, seeing what’s changing, what’s growing real-time, and just things like that. These are going to lead to new ways of getting better information, particularly since the old methodologies are starting to be constrained by consumers not really having the time to think about it.
Andrew Mitrak: When you find a company that has the right underlying technology and product, where does marketing fit in on your calculation as to whether to invest or not at an early stage? Does marketing and their ability to tell a story and find a market and take this to market, does that play a part or do you kind of assume “Hey, these founders will hire the right marketers and they’ll figure it out if we invest in them”? How does that enter your calculus?
Tod Johnson: People who are developing products like that are developing them to take to a particular market. They usually know where the clients are by the time we get involved. There’ll at least be enough of a business that they’ve proven that clients can respond, so it’s built into the organization at that time.
Andrew Mitrak: Tod Johnson, thanks so much for your time. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, and I’m grateful for all of your wisdom and your stories. It’s just such a great pleasure to hear about how market research has evolved over all the years. I had a lot of fun.
Tod Johnson: Andrew, I’ve enjoyed doing this with you as well. Thanks for inviting me.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org

A History of Marketing / Episode 50
Fifty episodes felt like a milestone worth marking. So I wanted a guest who was, well, obviously awesome.
April Dunford is the authority on positioning for B2B tech companies and the author of the updated and expanded edition of Obviously Awesome. I’m a huge fan of April’s work and frequently reference her book, her blogs, and her frameworks in my daily work as a marketer.
April’s premise is provocative: positioning cannot live in the marketing department alone.
She argues that if the CEO, sales, and product leads aren’t in the room providing input, marketing is left guessing about what makes the product special and who it is actually for. Without their buy in, marketing will inevitably lose the “battle of opinions.”
In this conversation, we discuss:
* Building on Ries & Trout: The positioning pioneers defined the concept in their 1981 book, but they didn’t give a how-to manual. April does.
* The death of the “positioning statement”: Why filling out a template is not a methodology.
* Blind men and the elephant: How sales, product, and marketing departments each hold a different piece of the puzzle.
* Skip the parts people don’t read: April discovered that CEOs don’t finish books, so she cut her manuscript in half.
April is one of the most persuasive and grounded thinkers in the field. Here’s my conversation with April Dunford.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Special Thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
The Origin of April Dunford’s Positioning Framework
Andrew Mitrak: I have a confession to make. Every time I join a new company, among the first things I do is I visit aprildunford.com and I enter my new email address and I download one of your positioning templates. You probably have several of my old corporate email addresses cluttering your mailing list. Sorry about that.
April Dunford: I appreciate you jacking up my newsletter subscription numbers.
Andrew Mitrak: And a big fan of your work and I want to say congrats on the updated and expanded edition of Obviously Awesome.
April Dunford: Thanks. I’m super excited to get it out there.
Andrew Mitrak: For this conversation, I wanted to start back before you became the go-to expert on positioning, and when you were coming up in your career, when did you first encounter the concept of positioning?
April Dunford: That’s a good question. Pretty early, actually. My first real job in tech was at a little startup and I was brand new and junior, they assigned me to a product and the thinking was that product wasn’t doing very well and the plan was to shut it down. This is why I got assigned to it as the product marketer.
We didn’t end up shutting it down. What we ended up doing was looking at gathering some feedback from people that were using the product, and then we got an idea to reposition it. We didn’t know it was called positioning, we thought we were doing, we’re just doing a Hail Mary thing to see if we can make this unsuccessful product successful doing something slightly different.
We repositioned it, relaunched it, and it was super successful. Revenue started going up to the right, everybody’s happy, we’re making a lot of money on that product.
And then we got acquired by a big company in California and the big parent company assigned us a couple of products that weren’t doing very well and then said, hey, do that thing you did with the other one. I didn’t have really any idea what we did with the other one. I was worried about getting fired, I thought, okay, I better figure this out.
I did a deep dive into positioning. I figured out, A, this is what it’s called. B, I had a lot of conversations with smart marketers asking them about, how do you do positioning? If you were in this situation, what would you do? Do you have a strategy for that or a methodology for that?
I also read a bunch of books. There’s the classic positioning book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by these guys Ries and Trout, written in the early 80s, but even back then was considered the book on positioning. And then I took a couple of courses and some post-grad stuff at a couple of universities just learning about positioning.
I dumped into this whole positioning thing pretty early in my career, and I was really interested in this idea, could we get a way to do positioning in a really repeatable manner so that we wouldn’t have this problem of, we launched the thing and it didn’t work and then now we’ve got to try and change it. Could I get to a point where there is a process for us to follow to, first of all, maybe do a better job guessing at what the positioning should be in the first place, and then secondly, if we do need to change it, is there a nice repeatable step-by-step thing we could follow to do that.
Is Product Positioning Intuitive or Learned?
Andrew Mitrak: You initially positioned or repositioned a product without even knowing what positioning was or knowing that it was called positioning that you were doing. And then you went to look at the literature. What’s your takeaway from that? Does that reveal to you that the fundamentals of positioning are somewhat intuitive or can be learned, or do you feel it was just dumb luck really? Or do you feel there were parts of it where this is just obviously the right thing to do for the product? How do you overall think about, can positioning sort of just be an intuitive thing, or is it best to look at the literature that’s out there?
April Dunford: Sometimes it is really intuitive. I would say that’s true. I would say a lot of the time when I talk to founders, they’ll talk about how they built the product in the first place, and they’ll be, we saw this need, we had this idea, we could do this in a different way than the existing products that are out there.
And we looked at it, we understood what the competition was, we built a thing that was demonstrably different, we understood what the value of that thing was because it was solving our own pain, we understood what kind of customers would want to buy that, and therefore what market we position in. It’s just, it is what it is, it’s super easy. And I think that happens a lot in the early stages of a company. Not for everybody, but I do think it happens a lot.
However, what also happens a lot is if you fast forward two or three years, the market’s changed. Maybe your competitors caught up with you and the thing that made you really different isn’t different anymore. Or maybe the way people buy or what they want to do has totally changed. Or maybe your competitors did an acquisition and that changes the whole way everybody thinks about this market.
Or maybe you and your product have changed, and you now do a whole bunch of other stuff that you didn’t originally do, and that enables you to get at a different kind of customer to deliver a different kind of value. Now how do you position it? That’s where people get messed up. Sometimes it can be quite intuitive at the beginning, but then a whole bunch of things change and it’s, okay, now the positioning needs to shift. How do we do that? Because we didn’t do anything the first time, it was just obvious. I think that happens a lot.
The other thing that happens a lot is you have this thesis when you launch the product and you said, okay, we saw this problem and this is what it’s gonna be and these kind of people are gonna love us for these reasons and here’s the competitor. Then we launch it, and it turns out our thesis was incorrect.
We get out there and we’re, man, we launched this thing and we thought banks were gonna love it, but it turns out we’re selling to insurance companies, we didn’t really build it for that, but they’re buying it like crazy. Now we’re in the insurance business, hello. And they love it, but there are some things they don’t love so much, and they’re comparing us to competitors we never really thought about. How do we position this thing because we thought it was gonna be something else.
And this is not unusual, to be honest. We call that a pivot in lean startup language. It’s not unusual for a company to build something for one market and then get in the market and find out, whoops, the market’s a little bit different than we thought. People are looking at our product a little bit different than we thought. We’re getting pulled into another market, so how do we position for that? And again, that’s when having a methodology for this would be helpful.
The B2B vs. B2C Divide in Positioning
Andrew Mitrak: You did your positioning exercise initially and then went to the books, went to Ries and Trout and the others. Do you find yourself as you’re reading the literature on positioning, was it confirming what you did, oh, that’s what we did was called, or was it saying, oh, were there things that you’re, oh, I wish I had known that to start, or what was the discovery process for reading?
April Dunford: No. And I was so mad about this. Here’s how this went. I went and I’m having all these conversations with people, I’m talking to all these smart heads of marketing, right? And I’m saying, how do you do this positioning thing? What do you do? And everybody’s doing it the way we did it, which was a little bit of trial and error, a little bit of getting some feedback from customers, a little bit of, let’s try this and if it doesn’t work we’re gonna adjust. A bit of messing around until you get something that works.
And that feels terrible when you’re the head of marketing because your head’s on the block, man. And if you don’t figure it out fast enough, everyone’s gonna get mad and you’re gonna get fired. And that was unsatisfying.
And then I took some courses and read the Ries and Trout book, which does an amazing job of defining here’s what positioning is, here’s why it’s important. And then they give you a whole bunch of examples. But the examples aren’t tech, this thing was written before the internet, man. I think they have printers, HP printers or something is the closest thing in there, not even software. And I’m selling databases, and they’re talking about repositioning the country of Jamaica, and I’m, this is different.
Andrew Mitrak: It is also very B2C oriented. I think the examples are Avis or Coors or beer. Do you find that both because of the tech gap with it and maybe the B2C bias that you as a B2B tech company...
April Dunford: The B2C bias is killer in this stuff. I took a bunch of courses too, and it was the same thing in the courses. All the examples were shampoo and toothpaste and makeup, and I’m, again, I’m selling 200 grand worth of database stuff to really smart technical people. I don’t think this is the same. It’s selling a vacuum cleaner. And I thought the B2C bias is terrible.
The other thing that you get in B2B tech that you don’t get in consumer is think about it. If I got toothpaste and I’m selling that toothpaste or hair shampoo to people that have dry hair or people that have dyed hair or something like that, right? And then if I decide I’m going to do a shampoo for babies or a shampoo for old ladies or a shampoo only for people with very, very curly hair, usually what you’d do is you wouldn’t take the same product and try to evolve it into that market. You would launch a whole different product and say, I’ve got this other thing, and that’s for the curly hair people, and this one’s for babies, and this one’s for people that dye their hair, whatever.
Whereas in tech, it is very normal for us to launch a product in one market and then reposition it a whole bunch in the future. Let’s take Salesforce. When Salesforce first launched, they were aimed at the very, very bottom end of the market. Their initial deal was they were focused on companies that had sales teams of less than 10 people and the first three seats were free. And why were they doing that? Because the top part of that market was absolutely dominated by a great big competitor, and they didn’t want to go compete there. So they started at the bottom.
But guess what? They inched their way up, and by the time they got to the mid-market, the big competitor had self-destructed and they were gone, and the top end of this market was wide open. And if you look at Salesforce right now, would you say that’s a product for very, very small businesses? No way, man, too expensive, too complicated, too everything. We just don’t have that in consumer products where you’re, it used to be this thing and now it’s this other thing and now it’s this other thing.
The other thing that you’ve got in B2B is that the positioning matters a lot because the stakes are really high. Especially if I’m looking at enterprise software, the stakes are huge. You’re going to make a recommendation to your boss to buy 200 grand worth of software. You make a shortlist. You don’t just walk into the store and pick the thing off the shelf and say, oh well, if I got it wrong, I just won’t buy that one again. You’re going to get fired if you make the wrong choice. You got to make a shortlist, and it’s positioning that makes or breaks whether or not you’re going to get on that shortlist.
And then once you’re on the shortlist, you got to survive long enough for them to take a real good look at your stuff. And if you get eliminated because often the shortlist is five, six companies these days or more, depending on whose data you believe. But let’s say there’s a shortlist of six, seven companies, you got to make it to top two. Otherwise, you don’t get considered. Your positioning is really important in that because the company hasn’t done a big deep dive into all your stuff yet. We just don’t have this in consumer. We don’t go out and buy a pair of shoes and make a shortlist and have a six-month process to figure out which one we’re gonna buy. We go out and we buy it and if it stinks, we just don’t buy that one again.
Navigating the B2B Buying Committee
Andrew Mitrak: One of the other elements as well from B2C versus B2B is often in B2B the buying decision maker or the buying committee is not the end user of the product, right? And there’s this abstraction between that. And that’s the other element is how do you market to both the end user and the decision maker.
April Dunford: Yeah, that happens a lot in B2B. The economic buyer is often distinct too, right? What you have is this committee of people and you’ve got someone who’s what we would describe as the champion. And that champion, usually it’s their boss or someone that said, look, we gotta buy a new accounting package, buddy, go figure it out. You go figure it out, look at all the accounting packages and tell us which one to build, which one to buy. And then that champion is gonna go do their homework, so your positioning really matters for that person.
But the champion also has all of these stakeholders around them that have to agree, otherwise the deal doesn’t get done. If the champion, let’s say the champion is on the business side and we’re buying technology, usually they got to go to IT and make sure IT is okay with it. IT can’t make the deal happen because they’re not in charge of selecting, but they can kill a deal by saying, oh I don’t like it, it’s too hard to manage, it doesn’t integrate with the stuff we have now, it doesn’t meet our compliance regulations, whatever, whatever, right?
Same thing with end users. Often the end user is not an end user making this purchase decision, but they can have a big influence in that. If they look at it and say, well the UI is this and this is terrible, we’re never going to get people to be able to use this thing, we’re going to kill it. Or sometimes they’ll do a pilot with some end users, and if the end users give it the thumbs down, then it’s no good.
And then you got to run it up to the economic buyer, which is generally another person too. And a lot of companies get really messed up with that and they’ll say, well the person that signs the check is the CRO, so that’s the buyer. And it’s, yeah, but the CRO assigned the whole purchase process figuring out who to buy to somebody underneath them. So you better figure out who that is because the CRO just says yes to whatever that other person suggests.
We don’t have that again in B2C. This isn’t it. Sometimes in B2C stuff where it’s complicated, let’s say you’re buying insurance or you’re buying a car or you’re buying a house. Maybe there’s a spouse involved, maybe there’s a financial planner involved, maybe you get a little advice, but it’s nothing like what a typical enterprise B2B purchase process looks like. It is way more complicated.
The Critical Distinction Between Branding and Positioning
Andrew Mitrak: When you write about positioning, you make a hard distinction between branding and positioning, and you’ve written that you’re not a fan of the term brand positioning, which is a phrase you hear sometimes. Why do you draw a line between the two or how do you make this distinction?
April Dunford: Well, here’s what I think. I think marketers like to make stuff up. I think marketers like to just redefine something for the sake of redefining it. And branding is probably the most poorly defined marketing term I can think of. When you say branding, you really gotta say, okay, what do you mean when you say branding?
At most of the enterprise B2B companies that I worked at, when we talked about branding, the brand of the company was a lot about how we showed up in the market in terms of, what was our tone of voice? What was our iconography look like? It was a bit like what was the vibe of us when we showed up? What were the fonts and the colors and the pictures we used, and the way we did messaging and text, tone of voice stuff. That was all kind of branding, which is very different from positioning.
Positioning is an input to that. If the big value of, let’s say I sell security software to banks, right? My branding should convey a lot of trust and solidness and authority because that’s what we’re trying to convey. If I’m selling software for daycares, maybe I can get a bit more playful because I’m talking about kids and moms and things. And I could use different colors and more playful images and maybe a bit more casual tone of voice and all that kind of stuff.
And so in my opinion, positioning should inform what the branding looks like. But now I’ve seen other people define branding in a way that it includes all the things that I would call branding, and it also includes positioning, and we’re going to just kind of munge those two things together. That’s okay, if that’s the way you want to define it, but I still see those two things as being distinct. You got to do the positioning thing first, and then the branding thing flows from that.
Why Positioning Must Go Beyond the Marketing Department
Andrew Mitrak: And is this somewhat related to how you argue that positioning should not just be a marketing exercise? That if the CEO and sales leads aren’t in the room, that the positioning won’t stick. Is that tied to why positioning is different than branding, is that it’s beyond marketing?
April Dunford: Definitely, it’s definitely not just marketing, right? What we’re trying to do with our positioning is we are trying to define why should a customer pick us versus the other guys. And we need to think about, first of all, who are the other guys? What’s the alternative to what we do? And we should all be in agreement on that. Sales should understand that, marketing should understand that, CEO, product should understand that. We should all understand what makes us distinct and the value we can deliver to a business that no one else can.
We need to get that in marketing, product management needs to understand that, sales needs to understand that. And then we all need to understand who’s a good fit for that, which is what are the kinds of companies we’re trying to target and therefore what’s the market that we intend to dominate. That is a strategic set of decisions in a way, and it’s very easy for teams to get out of alignment on that.
It’s very easy for sales to decide, we’re just going to sell to these big companies because we like doing these big deals, man. We need to decide, is it worth chasing those big deals? Are we actually going to win them? Or are we more likely to win if we’re chasing a deal in the mid-market, for example? Again, I think this is, we get this distinction between B2B and B2C. In B2B, when I’m selling a big ticket thing and there’s a shortlist of companies to look at, we really need to understand what makes us stand out and what makes us different so that we can help the whole buying team understand what that is and move this deal along.
If I’m just selling toothpaste, or makeup or a T-shirt, it often has nothing to do with the product and it has more to do with pure branding, right? This thing is going to make you look rich or, the Kardashians wear this thing so you should too or something.
Whereas, it’s not like it’s all totally rational when we’re buying enterprise software, we don’t, there’s often quite a bit of irrationality in there in that the champion is worried about making a bad choice. The champion will often default to a really safe choice because it’s not going to get them in trouble. Or if the champion has an opportunity to look like a hero, they might take that too because it’s good for them personally.
It’s not like it’s all totally rational, but at the end of the day, they do have to make a case to their boss. And that case has to say, look, we looked at the other things and we picked this thing for these reasons, and the reasons are narrow. This is either going to help you make money or is going to help you save money and that’s about it. We got to make that stuff super, super clear. Whereas, you’re buying a T-shirt with your own money, it’s fine. Maybe if you’re a teenager you gotta complain to your mom, but… [Laughs]
Andrew Mitrak: [Laughs] Totally.
The Conflict Between Sales, Product, and Marketing in B2B Tech
Andrew Mitrak: So I’ve also spent most of my career in B2B tech and on marketing teams, and whenever I run through positioning, I do find that there’s this issue where we have a number of stakeholders in product, and they tend to be biased towards product-led growth or if there is some land-and-expand model or some freemium model, they are biased towards what product can influence as far as growth is. And sales almost always is not interested in land-and-expand. They want big-ticket deals. They don’t hit their quota—
April Dunford: I think it feels good to land a big deal if you’re in sales. I think that feels good.
Andrew Mitrak: Exactly, exactly. And they want marketing to support that positioning. Marketing, we have our own ideas and customer research as well on what we think.
April Dunford: Well, we like the ones—we like the market that’s the easiest to respond to our marketing stuff, which is often terrible leads too.
Andrew Mitrak: Right. That’s an issue.
April Dunford: We love time waster leads. We love those. It looks good in our metrics and we’re like, I don’t get what’s wrong in sales. They don’t ever convert any of our beautiful leads.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, exactly. I feel like a lot of dynamic can be summed up to either: Sales wants more leads, okay, then marketing will get more leads.
But then sales says, “No, not those leads. We want better leads. Those aren’t high quality enough.” And then marketing adjusts and then gets fewer leads.
I feel like that’s a cycle that a lot of companies find themselves trapped in.
April Dunford: It really helps to have a clear definition of what a best-fit customer is and why. Not just that we think this is a best-fit customer because we wish we were doing deals like that. It should be: “This is a best-fit customer for us because we are the only ones that can deliver this specific value.” If you look at us versus the other things that a customer is going to compare us with, we are the only ones that can deliver this specific value, and these are the kind of people that really care a lot about that. That’s what we really need to get at the root of. And it shouldn’t just be that we like those companies because they’re bigger and they have bigger budgets. Well, guess what? If they’re bigger and they have bigger budgets, then that means we’re going to run into these competitors that can handle that. Do we actually serve that customer better, or are we better at something else? And so getting everybody together in a room to get really clear on that is going to help us with all those problems when sales says, “Well, we don’t like these leads.” It’s like, let’s sit down and talk about what an excellent lead looks like and why. It should tick these boxes because we are very likely to win those deals for these reasons.
Andrew Mitrak: In the dozens or hundreds of companies you’ve consulted with that have implemented positioning successfully, is it an equal split between partly marketing, sales, and product? Are they all like equal one-third owners of the process? Is it usually best if one is the owner of it and the other two are stakeholders? Does it need to be the CEO who is on top of it on the exercise? What’s the best model, or is there one right solution or ways to make multiple versions work?
“Marketing Never Wins the Battle of Opinions”
April Dunford: This is actually a great question. So I’m a big fan of doing a cross-functional exercise because, just in my own experience when I was in-house and working as a head of marketing, if I didn’t get everybody in the room together, I couldn’t go have a conversation with sales and think I had it and then take it to product because then they’d rip all that stuff apart and say, “No, that’s all wrong, it’s this.” Then you take it to the CEO and the CEO has got their own opinions and you end up with something else. So it’s just way more efficient to get everybody in the room together.
But if you’re going to get everybody in the room together, we can’t just have everybody in the room together just say, “Okay, why does everybody love our stuff?” then that’ll just be a battle of opinions, and marketing never wins the battle of opinions. So the way my process works is we start with this conversation around competitive alternatives. Now, what’s funny about that is the question is: if we didn’t exist, what would a customer do? At that step, I think sales’ opinion on this matters more than anybody else’s. But it doesn’t stop everybody else from having an opinion, but everybody else’s opinion is generally wrong.
Sales vs. Product Perspectives on Competition
April Dunford: So I’ll give you an example. Often what we’ve got, like when you go to product management and you say, “Who do we compete with?” they generally give you a way longer list of companies than sales does. Because product management is living a little bit in the future, right? They’re thinking about the roadmap, they’re thinking about where we’re going, and they’re looking at the superset of who could compete with us and who should compete with us. What they are not looking at is who does. Sales knows that. Sales knows that.
Now, if I go to sales and I say, “If we didn’t exist, what would a customer do?” they can tell me exactly who lands on the short list. They can tell me who’s causing us pain out in the market right now. They generally won’t consider the status quo as a competitor because a good salesperson, if they lose to status quo, they will say, “We lost to no decision.” And in the minds of a good salesperson, that is not a no; that’s a “not yet.” We’re going to get them someday, just not this week, man. And so if you’re doing this exercise, you have to pull that out of the sales team, but it’s very important for the product team to hear what the sales team has to say. Because the product team is thinking about a different set of competitors, which is fine, by the way. Because they’re building for the future, they need to be looking at that.
But when we’re talking about positioning right now, if the competitor is not causing us any pain, they may never cause us any pain. We don’t do a very good job of predicting the future that way. And the reality is if they do cause us pain next year or the year after, we’re going to adjust the positioning to take that into account. So step one, when I’m talking about competitors, I think sales’ opinions matter more.
And then we didn’t even talk about marketing. Marketing, if you say to marketing, “Who do we compete with?” they’ll list the people that are spending the most money on marketing. That’s who they worry about because that’s who they’re fighting for keywords and everything else. And they go, “Oh my god, these guys, they’re everywhere! We see them everywhere. Oh my god, they have the biggest booth. Oh my god, they’re all over the place.” But again, if they’re not causing us any pain in sales, well, maybe you’ve got some competitors burning a lot of money on pretty s**t marketing that isn’t doing anything.
The other thing you get is the CEO will have this opinion. Often the CEO was really involved in sales at some point, but maybe it’s been a couple of years. Or maybe they only see certain kinds of deals in certain situations, so they’re biased towards that. Again, sales understands the reality on the ground. So when we go to step one, personally, sales’ opinions matter more, but we’ve got to get everybody on the same page.
Then we get to step two: okay, if we didn’t exist, this is what a customer would do, this is what we’ve got to position against. Now we get to step two, and step two is all about: what have we got that the other guys don’t have? Who knows that the best? Product management, by a mile. Sales doesn’t know. They don’t even pitch stuff they don’t understand. Marketing doesn’t know because there’s lots of stuff the product does that marketing thinks is useless or they don’t understand or whatever. The only people that can really give you the straight deal on “what have we got that the other guys don’t” is product management. A good product management team knows all about that. So again, other people in the group might think they know the answer to this; product management knows the answer to it.
Then we get to the third step, which is value. This is where marketing comes in a little bit because only marketing understands even the concept of what value is. So they’re helpful in that respect. But here it’s a little bit interesting. Sales knows what a customer thinks is valuable and what they don’t. So they’re a good litmus test. If we come up with a value prop, sales is a good litmus test: does this sell? Sales can tell you generally because they know customers, they’ve been selling to customers, they know what flies and what doesn’t. Marketing understands what value is, so they know what a good value prop looks like and what it doesn’t. So this is where we see a lot of sales and marketing. But again, everybody’s got to agree on what this is.
Then we’re going to get to this segmentation, which is: okay, we’re the only people on the planet that can deliver this value, but not everyone cares the same about it. So what are the characteristics of a good-fit account? And that is kind of a little bit of everybody chiming in on: okay, if the value looks like this, what needs to be true about the account in order for that to resonate? Are they bigger accounts or smaller accounts? Is there something in their tech stack that makes them more likely to make that more appealing to them or not? Is there something about their business model or something about the team we’re selling into that’s different? That’s a group conversation with everybody. So we have this team together. We obviously need the CEO in the room, and the CEO needs to believe that this is important work and sponsor this thing. But when I run one of these exercises, everybody needs to chip in, and everybody’s opinion is important at different steps in the exercise. This is why this is so difficult to do when it’s not a team exercise. It’s like that old picture of everybody wearing a blindfold and they’re all touching a different part of the elephant. The guy on the tail says, “It’s a snake,” and the guy on the leg says, “It’s a tree.” It’s a bit like that. Sales knows something, product management knows something, marketing knows something, the CEO knows something, support knows something. We’ve got to pull all of that out together and then synthesize it into something we can all agree on, and we’re all singing the same song, and then we move forward.
Evaluating Positioning Success from the Outside vs. Inside
Andrew Mitrak: As an outsider, I like to evaluate a company’s positioning or try to understand their positioning. But if positioning is this strategic foundation and it’s not branding, it’s not messaging, it’s not even just marketing, how do you go about evaluating somebody’s positioning from the outside? How do I tell if a company’s positioned well or if they just have a really talented copywriter?
April Dunford: I’m glad you asked this because sometimes what I’ll see—and this bugs me a lot—I think I’ve been guilty of doing this in the past when I didn’t know any better. But sometimes what I’ll see, and I see this a lot on LinkedIn or social media, a random person like me will pull up some B2B website and say, “Isn’t this terrible? Who could understand what this is? Look at all that jargon! Look at all that stuff. Oh, this is terrible. This should be more B2C-like. This should be really easy and it should be exciting.”
And the first time I saw one of these that I thought was really funny, this was a company that was growing 200% year-on-year on about $100 million revenue. And I’m like, my dudes, it is working just fine. So here’s the thing: it is very difficult for you to assess how good copy on a homepage is working if you are not the target buyer and you don’t even know who the target buyer is. If I’m selling something to—I was working with a company that does this stuff with airlines and I’m selling a very technical thing to people that do maintenance on airplanes—like yeah, man, you’re not going to understand what that website is talking about. And that’s okay. What really matters is: is it working with a customer, and is it doing the job we want the website to do? So that’s one thing.
The second thing is, like you say, there’s copywriting and there’s positioning. If I look at a company’s copy, I don’t necessarily understand the strategy behind it. I don’t know exactly how they’ve defined a best-fit customer, for example. So I don’t know exactly who they think their competitors are. Therefore, I can’t tell: is it doing a good job of differentiating them from those competitors? Because I don’t know them, I don’t know their competitors, I don’t know who their buyers are. It would be very hard for you from the outside to figure this out. And so I don’t think doing a homepage teardown is a particularly good way to understand someone’s positioning. I get this a lot where a company will send me a link to their homepage and they’ll say, “Can you just tell us if our positioning sucks or not?” and I’m like, “No! Because I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know who your target market is, I don’t know who your competitors are, I don’t know anything.” And so it’s really hard from the outside to assess that.
Identifying the Signs of Weak Positioning
April Dunford: Now, on the inside, poor positioning shows up in a set of very distinct ways. So the way I used to assess it—let’s say I got hired as the Vice President of Marketing and then everybody wants me to just spin up a bunch of campaigns, and I’m like, “Okay, but let’s make sure the positioning is good before we do that because otherwise I’m pouring water into a leaky bucket.” So let’s have a look at positioning.
How I would assess that is I would walk over to sales—because I’m always working with enterprise companies that have sales people—and I’d be listening in on first-call conversations. Now, this is really easy because everybody records it with Gong, so you just listen to the Gong calls. But first-call conversation, weak positioning shows up like this: the customer shows up, the rep is there, and the rep’s doing their thing and they’re saying, “Hey, let me tell you something about us, and we’re this, that, and the other thing, and we do this and that for companies like you, blah blah blah.” And you can see the customer just getting super confused, like making this face: “What the heck are you talking about, man?” And usually what you’ll get is a few minutes in, and the customer will go, “Stop, stop, stop. Just back up. Back up. Go back to the beginning. I’m not sure I got it. Go back, say it again.” And the rep’s got to go back and repeat it again. Or they’ll get halfway through and the customer will ask a question, and the rep will be like, “Oh my god, the customer didn’t understand a thing I was talking about.” If you’ve got happy existing customers but a new customer is coming in that confused, that is usually a positioning problem.
The other one you’ll get is prospects comparing you to things they shouldn’t be comparing you to. That is a clear sign of bad positioning. So they’ll come in and say, “So you’re like a CRM, right?” and you’ll be like, “No, no.” Or they’ll be like, “Oh, so you’re just like Workday?” “No, we’re nothing like Workday, what are you talking about?” And then the rep has to back up and do it again. So this idea that the customer thinks they know what box to put you in, but you’re actually living in a different box, that’s a sign of weak positioning.
And then the other one you’ll get is a customer coming in and saying, “I get it, I get what you do, I get it. But I just don’t get why anybody would pay for that. Can’t I just do that with my accounting package? Can’t I just do that in a spreadsheet? Why would I just hire a couple of teenagers to come in and do that? That doesn’t seem...” and then in that case, what the problem is, your value is not clear and compelling. So inside we can assess it; outside, I don’t know.
The Pitfalls of Tech-Forward Positioning
Andrew Mitrak: It’s very tempting to be one of those LinkedIn people from the outside, but on the other hand, I was at a unicorn B2B freight tech startup. It was in the trucking industry and won a bunch of awards, raised a whole lot of money, and our marketing was great—everyone thought our marketing was great. But at the underlying thing, the positioning was often wrong. It was very tech-forward: AI, automate your freight, Uber for trucking type messaging. Everyone was like, “Oh, this is a no-brainer, let’s do this.” And I’d listen to Gong calls in sales and hear somebody pitching all this tech to a supply chain manager at a company in the Midwest, and it’s like speaking two different languages. The startup ultimately folded in a pretty dramatic way. But underlying it, there was just the wrong positioning. It’s easy to say this looks bad or great from the outside, but really you have to get inside the company before you really pass judgment on it.
April Dunford: Fundraising’s not revenue, right? Fundraising’s not revenue. But we are in crazy times right now where there’s so much excitement about certain parts of the market where things are emerging, like all this AI stuff is so cool and the potential for this stuff is so big. We see this with pricing models changing, and now we’re looking at usage-based pricing versus subscription pricing. It makes it a lot more difficult to figure out if this company is actually successful or not.
Positioning During Rapidly Changing Markets
Andrew Mitrak: Do you have principles for running a positioning exercise through a period of rapid change? It can feel like you’re building the foundation with positioning, but it’s moving so fast it’s like building the foundation on quicksand.
April Dunford: I have some opinions about this. Stuff is changing really quickly, but I think companies are going to have to be very clear in their messaging and positioning about what’s real and what we can deliver today versus what is vision and a direction, and where we want to go, and frankly, hype. We’re building the market. Because I think if you’re building an AI company right now, you’ve got to do both. You’ve got to hype the hell out of stuff that doesn’t entirely work today, that doesn’t do exactly what we know it’s going to be able to do in the future—and we might not even be sure when—but we also have to sell what’s on the truck that a customer can buy right now.
Those two things are often different. If you look at the one I think is the most remarkable to look at, it’s the vibe coding tools. If you look at what influencers from these vibe coding tools are talking about on LinkedIn and social media, it is super inspirational. You’re like, “Wow, that is so cool. Look at all the stuff we’re going to do.” Right now, there’s a bit of panic in the markets, like, “Oh my gosh, are we just going to be able to vibe code accounting software? Why should we even have accounting software? We’re going to vibe code a CRM. Sell Salesforce, man, that stuff’s just going to go away.” But then you go to their website, and their website doesn’t say they do that at all. Their website says, “Build a nice prototype,” because that’s what they’re actually selling today.
Now, they’ve got investors and whatever, and right now it’s very difficult to be heard in the noise without being super hypey about this stuff, so they’ve got to do the other piece too. They’ve got to show the vision. They’ve got to show where this is going. They’ve got to show it in order to justify the valuations. They want people to be mucking around with it now with the idea that we should start doing some stuff with this now because in the future we’re going to do way more stuff with this. So there’s this balance, I think, between where you’re at and what you can sell today, and being clear about that when you’re in a sales process. You’ve got to balance that with this other half, which is hyping the hell out of it. When I say it, I mean the future, So, I’m hyped hell out of where this is going and what it’s going to be able to do and what’s happening in the future and all that stuff. The hype stuff changes very rapidly. What we’re selling and what customers are actually doing with it changes about the same as everything else. You’re going to have to check in on it in six months and see if it’s different or not, but in less than six months, your positioning’s probably okay. If I look at the vibe coding tools, those sites haven’t changed much at all in the last year.
Andrew Mitrak: So overall, the act and the role of positioning doesn’t change in a period of rapid technical change. There might be new vectors for positioning; there might be new ways you can position within a new category.
Balancing Today’s Reality with Future Vision
April Dunford: What you should expect is to be very careful, and you should be watching your positioning, and you should be very ready to adjust it when it needs to be adjusted. In a normal market, when I was in-house as the VP of Marketing, we would do a check-in on positioning every six months. That was more than enough, and it was rare that we would check in and have to change it if the positioning was less than a year old or even less than two years old. It’s pretty rare we would do the six-month check-in and say, “Whoops, need to adjust something”. These days, especially if you’re in this AI world, you might want to do that quarterly, and you should be very ready to make the adjustment if you think that it’s needed. But do I think your positioning’s going to change quarterly? No, I don’t. But it wouldn’t surprise me if you changed it within a year. That wouldn’t surprise me at all.
Applying Positioning Principles to Your Career
Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask about how you’ve positioned yourself and positioned your own book. It feels like you’ve been very deliberate about your own positioning. You focus primarily on B2B tech, which is where you have your experience. Do you think that marketers should be applying these same positioning rules to their own careers?
April Dunford: Maybe. I don’t know if I’m a great person to give career advice, but it certainly worked out for me. When I was working in-house, you’re applying for jobs as the VP of Marketing and you’re up against everybody else, and you’ve got to answer the question, “Why me and not the ten other people you’re interviewing?” In order to have a clear answer to that, you have to be able to say, “What am I better at? What have I done more than the other people? What’s my edge over everybody else?”
For me, because I had done a lot of positioning stuff early, that kind of became my edge. I could talk about that in a deeper way. By the time I was at a company and then we got acquired, I had positioned a bunch of things at the acquired company. So by the time I came out of that one, I had positioned five or six products. That’s a lot, really. A senior marketer could go their whole career without repositioning anything if the positioning is working. So I thought I had that as an edge. In the later part of my career, if you hired me as the VP of Marketing, you hired me because you thought maybe you had a positioning problem. I could talk intelligently about how we were going to fix it, and that’s why you brought me on.
I wouldn’t be applying to jobs where what they were really looking for was something really outside of that and it wasn’t really in my deep skill set. Yeah, I know a lot about lead generation, and yeah, I know a lot about email marketing. Yeah, we’re doing SEO and whatever; I know a lot of stuff about that. But am I going to get that job versus the person that comes in and says, “I managed this ginormous Google Ad budget at the last thing and all we did was SEO and I’ve been doing SEO for 15 years, I’m going to yak your ear off on that”? I’m not going to win that job. So I’m trying to focus on applying to jobs that are a fit for my stuff and then making sure I’m positioned in there as the best person for that job.
That’s worked out pretty well for me. As a consultant, I’m trying to do the same thing. I’m trying to stay in my lane. I get tons of calls from companies that are B2C, or they’re B2B but they don’t have a sales team, or what they actually do is professional services. I’ve done a few services companies, but only if they tick the boxes. I’m pretty serious about who makes it through my filter, and that’s because I want to make sure we’re really, really successful. If it’s outside of my wheelhouse, I don’t know, I’m just kind of guessing. So I try to stay right in my zone of excellence so that if you make it through all my filters, then I feel pretty confident that we’re going to get a good result because I’ve done 300 other companies that look just like you. And you’re probably going to pay me more money to do that because I’ve done 300 companies that look just like you. Everybody else you’re talking to has done a little of this and a little of that, and it’s not like they don’t know what they’re doing, they do, but they don’t quite have the experience level in the little box that I do. So I try to stay in my little box where I can look you in the eyeball and say, “I’m probably the best person in the world to do this.” Not this, not this, not that, not this other thing—just in this little box right here. I think I’m the best in the world.
The Strategy Behind Positioning “Obviously Awesome”
Andrew Mitrak: Did you apply your positioning frameworks and methodology to your own book, Obviously Awesome, and could you share a little of that process?
April Dunford: Yeah, so I was really clear when the book came out on what I was positioning against. What I was positioning against was, first of all, the old positioning book, which is the book that came out in the ‘80s by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Again, I love that book, and I think that book’s really good at defining positioning. What it doesn’t do is give you a how-to: step one, step two, step three. So I positioned mine against that and said, “Look, we are very much in alignment, Ries and Trout and my stuff. We agree on the definition of positioning, we agree what it is, we agree why it’s important. I’m giving you the how-to; they are not.” That’s why you need my book and not theirs.
I was also positioning against the “positioning statement,” which was a common sort of folklore way of doing positioning inside a company. A lot of companies, if I went and said, “Have you done positioning?” and they said, “Yes,” what they’d done is filled out a positioning statement, which isn’t a methodology at all. But it was just kind of the thing that everybody did. So I was positioning against that as well. In the book, there’s a mention of the Ries and Trout book and the reason why I was frustrated that it didn’t have a how-to, and then it talks about the positioning statement and why I think that’s not a good way to do positioning. So I’m positioned against that.
When I look at what I’ve got that the other guys haven’t, it’s a methodology. It’s one, two, three, four, five, six. Nobody else has a methodology. I’m going to give you a methodology. I am sure there are other ones now but one, two, three, four, five, six. The value of that is being able to do it in a repeatable way. Even if you’ve got to muck with the process, even if this is just a starting point, you at least got something.
Designing Content for the CEO Mindset
April Dunford: Then the “who it was aimed at” was primarily CEOs of companies, but also, I would say my primary audience was the CEO of a tech company, but also at a secondary level, heads of product or heads of marketing. I did a lot of research with CEOs as I was writing the book about how they buy books, how they find out about books, and how they read books. That was super fascinating. The actual product of the book looks and feels the way it does because of that research. I talked to 50 or 60 founders, and here’s what I found out.
How do you find out about books? You find out from your friends, other CEOs. It’s all word of mouth. Nobody goes to the bookstore and says, “What am I going to read today?” and browses the stacks. That never happens. They get a recommendation, people start talking about it, it’s word of mouth. So you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to spark some word of mouth on this book.
The second thing that I thought was surprising is the CEOs don’t actually read books; they read half-books. Almost everybody told me this. I said, “How do you read?” and they’ll say things like, “Well, I’ll get on the plane, I’ll do my email for an hour, and then I’ve got two or three hours left in the plane ride, I’ll pull the book out and I’ll read and get to the end of it.” They’ll basically say, “I pull the book out and I read.” And I said, “But wait, you only got two or three hours, that’s only half a book. What happens?” And they say, “Well, if there’s bits I can skim, I’ll skim it and skip forward. You know, these business books are full of fluff. Sometimes there’s a whole chapter I can skim, or if they have a case study or something, I’ll skip that. You more or less get the gist of it in the first half of the book anyways because these books are so fluffy. So basically, I never read the back half of a book.”
So I decided, “All right, I’m not writing a typical business book that’s 80,000 words or 90,000 words that takes you six, seven, eight hours to read. I’m writing a book that’s half that, and you can get through it in three or four hours.” Then I’m going to make the bits that you could skim, like the case studies and things like that, very obvious. I’m going to put them in a shaded box so that if you want to skip it, skip away. So it’s obvious what the core stuff is and what the stuff is you could skip. We’re going to make it like In-Flight Magazine—that’s what I kept telling the book guys “This is the inflight magazines”. I thought that worked pretty well. The number one feedback I got on the book after I put it out was CEOs would come to me and they’d say, “Oh my God, it was so good. I finished it in one sitting.” And I loved that. Part of the reason they finished it in one sitting is my original manuscript was like 70,000 words and we hacked at that thing until it was half the size. So yeah, I did use my process for that book.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s so cool. Well, thanks for taking me behind the scenes of that. Congrats on the book and its success, and congrats on the updated and expanded edition of Obviously Awesome. I hope listeners, if any listeners enjoyed this conversation, they definitely enjoy the book; it’s available to order right now. Also, I highly recommend your podcast, Positioning with April Dunford. I’ve been listening to it to catch up and research prior to this interview and enjoyed it a lot. It’s super inspiring. I already mentioned your website, aprildunford.com, which has a lot of great resources as well. Is there any other place you’d recommend where people should connect or follow you? It seems like you’re everywhere.
April Dunford: I feel like I used to be everywhere and now I’m not. I don’t do a lot of social media these days, for example. Occasionally I’m inspired to post something on LinkedIn, but it’s not very often. The best way to follow my stuff is the newsletter, the podcast, the books—these are the main things. If you go to aprildunford.com, you see links to all that stuff.
Andrew Mitrak: They’re all great. I’ll link to it in the blog that accompanies this post. April Dunford, thanks so much and congrats again.
April Dunford: Okay, thanks.


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A History of Marketing / Episode 49
Have you ever stood in front of a 500-year-old painting of a father devouring his son and asked yourself, “Who paid for this?” Me neither. Until I met Peter Van Wijnaerde.
Peter is a CMO based in Ghent, Belgium, and the writer behind a Substack that connects art history to modern marketing.
Rory Sutherland recommended I speak with Peter (which is as high a compliment as you can get in this field) after seeing his presentation on medieval branding.
Peter’s premise is provocative: art was the original marketing department.
Patrons funded paintings, statues, and tapestries not for beauty’s sake, but because they needed to project power, build legitimacy, and sway public opinion. The separation of fine art and commerce is a relatively recent development.
Peter brings a perspective that’s part art aficionado, hobbyist historian, and marketing strategist. He shows us that “stopping power” has been central to persuading the masses for a thousand years.
Here is my conversation with Peter Van Wijnaerde.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Quick Update: Thank you to the thousands of marketers from around the world who have played The CMO Game! It’s been amazing to see the response and I’ve had a few marketing professors reach out to request using it in their classes.
Special Thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. And thank you to Rory Sutherland for introducing me to Peter.
The Intersection of Art History and Marketing
Andrew Mitrak: You’ve written about so many topics connecting history, marketing, mythology, and art, and branding, and merging the past with the present in our work as marketers today. So how would you describe the content of your Substack and your perspective that you bring?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: I like to stretch out the history of marketing a little bit to before the 1950s. And I love art and I love looking at art and I love using those art pieces that were made to compel people to have stopping power. I use those to explain how marketing is really one of the oldest professions there is and what we can learn today of marketing. So not that there’s no surprises anymore in the current time, but my blog is about widening the scope of the time frame of marketing.
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned one of the oldest professions. It is funny when Pompeii was uncovered – the ancient city that was covered by Mount Vesuvius. They discovered brothels but also they discovered artwork that would point people to the brothels. Right. So if prostitution is the oldest profession, there seems to be types of advertising to get people there. So they were very interconnected. So advertising does seem like an old profession.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Exactly.
Andrew Mitrak: So what was your initial spark? How did you start connecting the past to the present?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: I was always a very visual person, liked to engage with things that are visual. But I think the spark happened my first time in Vienna in the Belvedere. I started to appreciate medieval art. And normally medieval art is something we laugh about. You have the memes with the medieval cats and there is full Instagram feeds full of that. But actually we should not laugh with medieval art, because it’s very communicative. Because it’s very symbolic. It says there are two guys and a child and the child is just a little human and this is happening, right? And so it’s basically like a cartoon. I started to appreciate it, started to look at it and then started wondering, that must have been expensive and difficult to make. Why were people making this?
Uncovering Medieval Marketing in the Bayeux Tapestry
Peter Van Wijnaerde: The moment that it clicked was when I was doing medieval travels through Europe. And I was in France and I was in Bayeux. Have you ever heard about the Bayeux Tapestry?
Andrew Mitrak: I don’t know about the Bayeux Tapestry. I’m not too familiar with tapestries in general.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, it’s a 70-meter long tapestry that was embroidered in the year 1080, let’s say. They don’t know precise but it was embroidered there. And it’s a tapestry about the Battle of Hastings, about William the Conqueror kicking out the Anglo-Saxons out of England and putting in Nordic rule in England. And this guy, his brother, yes, this one.
Andrew Mitrak: For listeners, most people listen to the audio, but I am going to, because this is a visual conversation, I’ll pull them up on the screen, because I find it useful to hear and see what you’re talking about. So I’m sharing my screen and showing the Bayeux Tapestry.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: So what’s so interesting about the Bayeux Tapestry is that it’s a scroll of 70 meters, it’s about 40 centimeters high or something. And it tells the story about why William the Conqueror thought he had the right to conquer England and what the deal was and how they prepared for it and who they talked to and the whole story from beginning to end is on that tapestry. And it was made...
Andrew Mitrak: So it’s a really wide tapestry. Cause it’s like frame by frame. Cause it’s... wow, okay. Yeah.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: And you can roll it up too. And it was made by his brother, the Bishop Odo of Bayeux. And what’s so interesting about it, it was not a painting, it was not a statue, it was a tapestry. And there is actually really no other tapestry of that kind. But if you think about it, it was mobile, you could roll it up easily, you can transport it easily and put it out somewhere else also as easily. So it was actually a bit of a prop of a PR tour for William the Conqueror by his brother the Bishop of Bayeux. And then it clicked. And I thought, oh my god, they should give this Odo guy an Effie Award or something because he invented a completely new way of storytelling to convince the people that this king is their legitimate ruler. And you don’t do that by building a cathedral because a cathedral is only in one place. So I thought this is a 1,000-year-old marketing campaign in front of me. So this is when it started clicking even more.
Andrew Mitrak: It’s, and you mentioned medieval art almost looks like a cartoon sometimes because it’s a little more two-dimensional, they didn’t quite have the same sense of perspective and lighting and depth that you convey that you’d later see in the Renaissance. But and then also medieval art sometimes you see it in memes today. Like you see it in internet memes and you see it kind of translates kind of because it’s cartoon-like. And in a way memes are such a huge part of internet culture and the way people communicate now. And this artwork, this tapestry kind of reminds you of a comic book almost, or a frame by frame and it sort of takes that type of visual storytelling and it seems like it communicates that to the masses who mostly would be illiterate but would still appreciate a story.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: If you walk in front of it and you just go, it takes half an hour to see the whole thing. And there’s action scenes in there and little jokes in there. There’s a warrior showing his bare ass to another warrior, things like this. So it’s also made to entertain. And I think that’s beautiful actually. It’s not just, this is history, this is also, also very interesting fact: the guy who made it gave himself a very prominent role in the history as well. But he was the guy who commissioned it right? So he could embroider himself into history.
Andrew Mitrak: Okay, yeah, so sort of the marketer, the marketers being a little self-promotional in a sense, or at least the patrons being self-promotional. That’s great.
Inspiration Everywhere: Learning from the Past
Andrew Mitrak: So I originally heard about your work from my conversation with Rory Sutherland, and he mentioned that he loved your presentation on medieval branding. Which is a very high compliment. I mean, take that win because if Rory Sutherland complimented my work, that would be wonderful. So very cool. So that was my initial spark for reaching out to you. And you’ve already talked a little bit about medieval history or medieval artwork and how it relates to branding. So was this part of that presentation? The Bayeux Tapestry, was this part of the presentation or could you just share what the presentation was that Rory was speaking about that seemed resonated with him?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, the insight that, so this was not about the Bayeux Tapestry. This was about some tactics that some brands do today that you can also see that kings and queens did in history. So it was actually, I think the title was ‘Medieval Marketing Lessons for Modern Marketers‘. That was the thing. And it all starts from this, the reason that if you are in power, you need to stay in power. And there are several ways that you can stay in power. And one of them is fighting. But that’s not a good thing for your resources, because you will lose a lot of men and you will lose the belief of your people if you lose too many men. So for efficiency reasons, the kings and queens looked for different ways to keep their power or make sure no one started fighting them. If people believed that it was not worth fighting you because you were stronger, because you had better allies, or you would end up in hell because this guy has the blessing of God. That’s also an important one. So they started making up all these stories. And what I did in this talk was picking apart some of those stories and translate how they are actually being used today. Just to show, not to tell people this is the way you should do marketing, but more to tell people, like, if you’re in marketing, if you’re in branding, open your eyes. Ideas are everywhere. That was more, and I look for them in history. Other people can look for them in kindergartens or whatever, because I assume a lot of real human behavior also happens there.
Andrew Mitrak: It is one of the professions where I feel like you can become a better marketer by opening your eyes to just about anything.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yeah, I really like Rory’s point. He said if you’re a, what was it, not an attorney, but something else...
Andrew Mitrak: An accountant.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: An accountant.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, this was actually coming back to the Rory presentation. He said if you’re an accountant, I doubt that you can get much better at your job sitting at a coffee shop looking at the world. But if you’re a marketer, you certainly can. Of course Rory said it in a more eloquent, witty way than I did, but...
Andrew Mitrak: He does.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: But also what he also did, like after he referenced me, he immediately started talking about Attention Deficit Disorder. So that started to worry me as well.
Andrew Mitrak: Oh yeah. Who was that guy who was all over the place at that conference? I’m sure that was just a coincidence.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: But he brought of course the example of Charlemagne to the topic. Like he was the first king to be coronated by a pope. That was a masterful move. No one would attack him after that, or you end up in jail or in hell of all places. Yeah.
The Medici Family and the Power of Storytelling
Andrew Mitrak: Great. So yeah, that’s right. So let’s talk about some of the specific examples in your presentation. You mentioned Charlemagne and being coronated by the pope and sort of a, I don’t know what you call that, a partnership marketing or influencer marketing or just aligning yourself, positioning... it’s a lot of elements of marketing to that. What were any other examples from that presentation from the medieval presentation?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, we talked about the Medici Family. The Medici Family, if you walk... have you been to Florence? If you walk around in Florence, you see a lot of marble statues. And if there is a common theme among most of those marble statues that the Medici Family has commissioned, they liked their Greek heroes who liberated cities. Like how Hercules won against the monster Cacus, or The Rape of the Sabine Women. Also a story about how Rome came to power. So they really liked those stories. And one of the stories I like most about them, and this is the one that I put in the presentation as well, is the story of Judith, which is actually a biblical story from the Old Testament. And Judith was this woman who, her city was besieged by General Holofernes. And no one was doing anything about it. And Judith went to the tent of the general. He was drunk. She seduced him and then she beheaded him. That’s actually a very horrific story. Now I’m telling it.
So they had this statue with a lot of stopping power, actually, because there is a woman and she is beheading a man. So this was in the middle of their garden where all the rich people came, where all the influencers came. They were... by seeing this, there was a plaque on the bottom of the statue telling the people, this is Judith, this is what she did, and she is a bit like us, because we also freed the city. So they used all these stories of Hercules, of the Sabine women, of Judith, to remember the people that they were the ones who freed the city. The funny thing is, however, when other people took over Florence, they used the same statue and just changed the inscription on it. They said, the Medici are like Holofernes and we decapitated them. Right. The Medici, of course, they came back and they put the statue again in the middle of the square with another inscription: We freed the city from the revolutionaries, whatever it was. So yeah.
Andrew Mitrak: The danger of how you position your enemy is that later you could be positioned as the enemy by your replacement.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yeah.
Recontextualizing Art: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith
Andrew Mitrak: And on Judith slaying Holofernes, I was always more familiar... when I took art history class, this one, the Artemisia Gentileschi, I think painting of this one. And I always find it interesting to see the same scene compared in two different ways, right? The Donatello statue Medici one. It’s big, it’s public, it’s proud of it. And this one, it’s this painting, it’s happening kind of in darkness and it seems almost more secretive when it happened. And it’s funny to just kind of compare similar scenes and how they’re represented.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: But I get the chills when I see this painting. Because this painting was painted by Artemisia Gentileschi. And she paints a completely different Judith than all the others did. Because actually, if you want to know, and this might be a triggering subject, the guy that Judith is beheading here is actually a portrait of the guy who raped Artemisia Gentileschi when she was younger. So this is not a biblical story. This is a true story, or at least how it happened in the head of Artemisia Gentileschi.
Andrew Mitrak: Oh wow. I never knew that background to this. That brings a new perspective on it.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yeah, she is one of the biggest Baroque painters, and maybe the only female one we know of. And in a lot of her paintings, she brings a female perspective to a topic that was painted by a lot of men. So, but that’s going off topic, of course, but it’s...
Napoleon Bonaparte: Master of Public Relations
Andrew Mitrak: One of the other figures of history that you’ve spoken about or written about is Napoleon. And he is sort of a widely recognized figure in history. And I’m wondering what could Napoleon teach a modern marketer?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Also to learn from history. Because Napoleon also had himself coronated by the Pope as the Emperor. He brought in Pope, who was it, Pope Pius VII. I’m not sure. To witness him coronating himself. That was the big difference. But he brought in the Pope. So that’s one thing. So he took a trick from the old books. And he did that a lot. Because he brought in all the neoclassical style, like the Roman coding of power he did. So he used a lot of old coding of power. He used a Pope for his coronation. He also, and this I think is the most interesting thing, not the most interesting, but the thing that I find very interesting about him, is during the French Revolution, there was this painter, you might have heard of him, Jacques-Louis David. And he is the guy who painted the coronation of Napoleon. It’s a really big painting. It’s huge, it’s detailed, it’s amazing, it’s theatrical, it’s...
However, Jacques-Louis David was maybe the star entertainer of the moment. Having your portrait painted by Jacques-Louis David was like having your face on Person of the Year on the Time (magazine) cover. So that was the impact that that guy had. This guy was commissioned a lot by Napoleon. He painted Napoleon over eight times. A lot of people when they think of Napoleon, they see Napoleon on a stud riding his horse over the Alps with the big wavy cape in red in the background. That’s the image that a lot of people have of Napoleon. That was also painted by Jacques-Louis David. So he painted him over and over and over again.
And what was so interesting, why the Pope was there, and this is not confirmed by academics, this is just my thought. One year after the coronation of Napoleon, Jacques-Louis David painted Pope Pius VII. So that Pope that was there. So probably that was part of the deal. I’ll catch you on the cover of Time (magazine) if you attend my party.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. So there’s kind of who you choose to be painted by is another layer of status that a figure like Napoleon or the Pope in this case would think about. Is sort of obviously there’s a lot of stature, you’re an Emperor or you’re Pope, but even further cementing it is I’m being painted by the most popular artist of the day. And therefore kind of I’m assigned a certain stature. I’m trying to think of who the equivalent would be today. Like who you choose to have your portrait painted by or your photograph taken by. I guess there’s Annie Leibovitz or somebody like that.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: But maybe you should take it in modern ways. It’s not having your portrait painted by, but maybe imagine having your biopic done by Ridley Scott. Or Steven Spielberg doing your biopic, you know?
Andrew Mitrak: Although I don’t think Ridley Scott’s biopic was the most flattering or frankly even the best movie he’s done.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, there were statues made by Napoleon trying to flatter him that he had destroyed or put away in closets and stuff like this. There’s a lot more artwork of Napoleon going around that he didn’t want us to see.
Investigating the Money Behind the Masterpieces
Andrew Mitrak: So you said that when you stand in front of a painting, you’re asking different questions. You’re asking who paid for this? Why did they pay for this? And so could you talk about, we were talking about the artists behind the paintings, but could you talk about the money behind the paintings and sort of what were the motivations of patrons and how is that akin to funding a marketing campaign?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yeah. So when you are standing in front of a painting that is like a murder scene or something, then it’s a very healthy question to answer who wanted this made and who wanted to have this above the fireplace. Because by today’s standards, that would not fly. Your wife would say, “Andrew, no, we will not have this above the fireplace.” Right? So that’s the kind of dialogue that goes around in my head when I look at a painting that has a big murder scene. But I made a little series about horrific paintings and who wanted them painted and why. And Spanish kings were very good at collecting horror paintings and that had more to do with telling people something about yourself. Like if you believed in violence, because the stories you pick are the ones that you associate with. So people would see, damn, this guy, Philip IV, I think, he had Rubens paint Jupiter devouring his son. Why would you want to have that? It’s about power, it’s about destroying future power, it’s about punishment, it’s about all that. You don’t mess with a guy who hangs that above his fireplace. And he had this hunting lodge and it was full of these horrific paintings. Just telling the people that came into his place, this is how I look at punishment, this is how I look at power, and this is how I look.
Andrew Mitrak: Was this the Goya one, the Goya with Saturn devouring his son, or was this a different one?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: No, no, no. The Goya one was painted for private reasons because he was a bit mad. It’s the Rubens one. The Goya one is true horror. Rubens is still better actually, I guess.
Andrew Mitrak: That is pretty horrific too. But yeah, that is funny because when you think of Rubens, this is not what you think of, right? You think of full-figured women and happier scenes than this. I guess there is eating in this one, so there is that.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yeah, that’s true. But there’s also, this was Baroque time, right? So it was stopping power, shocking people, and whatever it took to get people’s attention was okay. Naked women, cannibalism, it was all good.
Andrew Mitrak: And just for comparison, the Goya one is also truly horrific. When I’m sharing these, sometimes art history really takes you to very dark places.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: It does. And that’s maybe why it’s good to ask why it was painted. You know, about, I think, there is this painting by Caravaggio. It is David beheading Goliath.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: And the reason why he painted that was because he wanted to get pardoned for a murder he did by a cardinal. So he painted that as a gift for a cardinal to get pardoned. And actually, he uses his own head. So the head of Goliath is actually a self-portrait of Caravaggio. And on the knife, there is an inscription on humbleness. So this was painted as an apology for a man in power. So imagine if you’re one of the most popular painters of the time to get something from a cardinal, a pardon, you send him a biblical story in this format.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. So if I’m ever in trouble as a marketer, I’ll see if I can do a marketing campaign for someone. You make a free campaign to get out of it. I’ll feature you on my podcast. I don’t know if that will work. I’ve got to get more sway.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: They need to pardon you. Yeah.
The Separation of Art and Commerce
Andrew Mitrak: So one of your arguments that you talked about is how the separation of art and commerce is actually sort of a recent invention, that it’s only from the last hundred or 200 years maybe that most of art history that art was commercial and that there’s a very clear relationship between the patron and the artist and the commercial nature of the art. So when did you come to this realization that for most of human history that art was a marketing department, so to speak?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, it becomes very obvious, for instance, during the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. When painters like Cranach the Elder was painting biblical stories but from this reformist point of view for Martin Luther, right? And you see a completely different way of looking at things like Adam and Eve or a completely different interpretation of the Three Graces, stuff like this. And then it goes back to Rubens again, who was a Counter-Reformist, and he paints it completely different, the same story, and when the same story gets told in a very different way, then there is someone who wants to sway you in one way or the other. So this is just one example of when it becomes very obvious you can put two times the same theme together right next to each other, and it becomes a completely different story because another brand is telling the story, the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation.
So that’s one thing. But it’s just like what I told you before with Judith or with Charlemagne, it’s all been marketing. It was the biggest visual thing that you could hang somewhere. People would look at it, you could tell a story about it, it was a conversation starter. So it had attention, and where there was attention, there are people wanting to do something with that. When there is a point in time where art freed itself from advertising in a way, or from marketing or branding in a way, I think that was at the point of the Secessionists in the turning of the 19th into the 20th century. You had artists in Munich, in Berlin, in Vienna, in Paris, in Brussels, and they were kind of fed up with how the powerful, the kings and the princes and the regents, were actually deciding what was art and what was not. And they wanted to paint because everyone was commissioned by those people. So you could only paint what you were commissioned for to paint at that point, or you could only show what the prince allowed you to show in the salons of that time. So you had the Munich Secessionists, the Vienna Secessionists, and the Berlin Secessionists, and they basically made a new business model around art because they lost their funding. They made a new business model, and that’s actually the point in time when art freed itself a lot from branding influences. But anything before that, the person who paid for it had a motive. And that motive was a lot of the time in the statue or in the painting or even in the architecture.
Addressing Skeptics: Is connecting art history and modern marketing too much of a stretch?
Andrew Mitrak: I’m sure there are listeners who’ve enjoyed this conversation like, oh, that’s really interesting perspectives on art, but maybe they’re still a little skeptical. Like, is this really marketing? Is it a bit of a stretch to call that marketing? Have you ever encountered anybody who pushed back on this or said, this is all interesting, Peter, I like your ideas, but marketing requires a market. And this is pre-capitalism, this is pre-mass production, and that there’s something different about a patron funding a work of art prior to that era versus somebody commissioning an advertisement today. Maybe there’s lessons, but it’s just too much of a stretch. Like, have you ever encountered that or how would you respond to somebody who had that perspective?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, I have not encountered that question, but probably people were thinking that. A lot of people. First of all, I would always say don’t take it too serious, it’s a game you play in your head and you can learn a thing or two from the game that you’re playing in your head. So don’t take it too serious. But on the other hand, the need, like I said, marketing is one of the oldest professions. Even before capitalism, there were moments when people needed to gain trust of other people to get something done. Like the Tapestry of Bayeux, when William the Conqueror was taking over England, he did not spit out the Anglo-Saxons that were already having thriving businesses there. He embraced them. And actually, when you look at the tapestry, you would think that they would make fun of the enemy. No, no, no, the Anglo-Saxons are very much respected in the tapestry. So that’s kind of proof that this is a piece that was there to sway people into your way of thinking, into your direction actually. So as long as someone had to influence masses to get something done, I think this counts as branding. And this could count as marketing. Even though there was not a market, then it will have another word. Then call it public relations, which is basically maybe also fits in the marketing realm, right?
Andrew Mitrak: No, that’s right. I think it’s public relations. I think there is sort of a funny line when I did my episode on this man named Edward Bernays. He wrote a book called Propaganda and he also coined the term public relations counsel. Or, sorry, counsel on public relations. And he kind of popularized, I’m not sure if he invented the term public relations, but he definitely cemented and popularized public relations and sort of positioned it against propaganda. But there is a very fine line between the two. And if I was to think of the political advertisements of this, most of the ones that you cite are somebody in power cementing their power and reclaiming their power. But it’s different than when you think of a political ad today, like vote for me because I want the power, right? It’s more of an asking permission for the power, it’s helping anoint me to the power, and I guess it’s sort of pre-democracy somewhat, or sort of pre-political campaigns as we think of them today. So I’m sure there were political ads that were older, but it seems like a lot of them are more an authority figure confirming their authority, sort of persuading the masses so otherwise I don’t have to use violence to persuade you and less of used on their rise to power to build consensus.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Or think of Napoleon who basically promised Pope Pius VII to be on the cover of Time magazine if he attended his coronation. So Napoleon also needed funds for his wars and people also needed to pay for those wars. So a lot of what he was doing was campaigning to get the power as well, but it had a bit of a different mechanism.
The Dangerous Myth of Progress
Andrew Mitrak: One of the essays that I think encapsulates maybe not your entire worldview, but a certain perspective that you bring is this dangerous myth of progress. I think this is something we fall into a lot, where, and this might be why marketing history is underappreciated by modern marketers, is that we think, “Oh, we’re so wise and know so much more today, and people back then, they have nothing to show us.” And so I think this essay really resonated with me. Can you talk about the dangerous myth of progress?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yes. It’s a big topic, because it’s also a dangerous topic. Because it’s all based on John Gray, which is a British political philosopher. And he just claimed that there is no such thing as human progress. We’re not better than the people in history. We’re just the same, in his words would be the same barbaric animals. We have lust and everything we do is motivated on lust, on gaining power, and this is John Gray’s way of putting it. It’s a very pessimistic way. I find it easier, I accept the idea that there is no such thing as real progress. I think that we are exactly the same human beings like our ancestors. I’m a romantic and I believe that people fall in love and people want to be loved and those are very strong drivers for people to do stuff, to get together, to make groups and stuff like that. So I also believe that, by just the idea that those people in history were just as complex as us, we don’t throw away history just like that. We don’t think of medieval people as people who were praying all day and being dirty all day. No, they also wanted to be someone and they also wanted to express themselves. They’re just as complex as you and me, which makes you look different at the people in history, which that strategic thinking was not invented in the 50s. It’s way older. It’s just a pair of glasses you put on, look at history like this, and then you start learning because those are just not previous versions of what we are. We are not the beta to their alpha, they’re the same. We’re just the same but we have Google and we have OpenAI.
Andrew Mitrak: And so the idea is that technology compounds, our ideas compound on each other. There are things that grow, there are systems that grow, there’s culture that grows. But we as individuals are sort of born at square one and have the same fundamental flaws or the same underlying desires that somebody from a previous era has.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Yes. And John Gray would then argue that everything compounds. So we might have better health, we might live longer because of science. But then again, in the year 1000, there was no way to push on a button and to kill an entire city of people. So not only our wisdom compounds, but also our ways to destroy compounds as well. So to him that’s a bit of an equalizer. And maybe that’s why he has more of a pessimistic view on the whole thing.
Embracing the Messy Reality of Human Nature
Andrew Mitrak: I think that part of this myth could describe why marketing becomes more sterilized and almost too reliant on data, that maybe we think of consumers as rational actors, that we optimize for efficiency, and that sometimes we forget that human nature is irrational, it’s messy, we have desires, we want meaning, we want connection. And some of that gets lost. And is that kind of why you partly bring up this idea of, because when you look at some of the examples of artwork we’ve seen, they’re so primal, right? They’re violent, they’re lustful, there’s naked people, you know, there’s all these things. And...
Peter Van Wijnaerde: And that’s a bit of a different thing. But as soon as you start to embrace the fact that good things are messy, the world becomes way more beautiful. I was going through this personal crisis, I think, walking through Berlin and I went to the Berlin Wall. I’ve been in Berlin, I cannot count how many times I’ve been in Berlin. But at that point I was, no, no, Peter, you’re going to walk to Checkpoint Charlie, you’re just going to look at it. And there it struck me that I was very angry about all the noise in the news that I hear every day and all the opinions that you read everywhere, even about marketing, about our profession. It’s going to be ruined because of this and it’s going to be ruined because of that. And then I thought, like, you’re standing at Checkpoint Charlie and then you know that when you’re standing on the US side of Checkpoint Charlie, you know you’re standing on the good side. That’s what we learned to think, and that’s still true. You’re standing on the side where you are free, and that’s the noisy side. When you step over and you cross the no man’s zone and you go to the other side, that’s the silent side. And we think that peace should be silent. But peace is messy. We think that people should be structured, but people are messy. They have desires, it’s what drives them.
And as soon as you start looking at people as messy beings, then it becomes way more fun. You don’t look at people as a data set. That’s, I guess, it helps when you’re looking at a lot of people at the same time. But in most cases, you’re making a billboard not to address a thousand people, you’re making a billboard to address that guy in that moment or that woman in that moment. And it should appeal to them, and then it should also appeal to their lowest common denominator. Like, what is it that drives these thousand people? And that’s going to be something very primal. And that’s also the same with art history. You see cannibalism, you see naked flesh, you see the things that attract our eyes. We are attracted to two things. Pure biologically, we’re attracted to beautiful things, and we’re attracted to horror because when somebody yells “tiger”, you better pay attention and run, right? And that’s about it. And that’s why I think that primal is good, and messy is good, and this idea that we are progressed does not help us a lot, I think.
Andrew Mitrak: Well, thanks for talking about that visualization of being at Checkpoint Charlie and going from point A to B. I only visited Berlin for the first time in my twenties, but I remember when I first learned about the Berlin Wall, probably early in high school, I think. So I was probably 14 or 15 years old.
And when I saw pictures of it or I saw a video of it or I saw slide projectors in class and that there was a side with all the graffiti on it, where all the people had spray painted, and I thought, “Oh gosh, that was their side.” Then I learned, “No, that was our side. That was the side of freedom.”
That was probably the first time that I realized, “Oh yeah, that graffiti, that messiness, that thing that’s undesirable at times, that’s a sign of freedom and liberty and personal choice.” For all of the downsides of that, I think it’s still the choice that I’d make. I choose to live in, and the place I’d prefer to be is the side that has some of those downsides where people can spray paint a wall and not get executed for it. And that’s good.
I think that was among the memories I have in a classroom, probably among the bigger ones that actually stuck with me in a way. So I think it’s an important, instructive lesson somewhere.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: I remember also next to Checkpoint Charlie, there is a McDonald’s. And the other day I would think, “Did they really have to put a McDonald’s here?” But I think that’s the most important McDonald’s there is in Europe. So I went in and I got myself a burger, and I think it was the best burger ever.
Andrew Mitrak: You know, there is something about McDonald’s. McDonald’s in Europe are usually actually a little nicer than the ones in the US. Because I’ve gone to a McDonald’s close to midnight and had a coffee in Europe, and you don’t do that here. Pulp Fiction has a whole riff on that.
Applying Art History to Modern Marketing Campaigns
Andrew Mitrak: You personally, aside from your Substack, which is great, have you applied this historical perspective to your work? Are there pieces of art history or broader themes that you as a marketer or as an advertising person have brought to your commercial work that you can speak to?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: I think yes. I bring it up every day, I guess, because we work with a lot of people that bring in all the modern stuff, and I like to be a bit of a contrary. So I bring in the old stuff. And I will be the one that addresses that this is people first. That we should be talking, if you make an ad, are we listing the features, or then I’m going like, “Maybe we should talk about the aspirations of the people, and what are the aspirations of the people?” That’s one side, the subject you talk about, this is what you bring in from the old. What you also bring in from the old is make sure you keep having stopping power. Because if you would look at some people, they would put three USPs with a little V sign next to it. It has no stopping power. So what you also learn by looking at art is that you look for stopping power. So inherently it’s been baked in always. But I remember it was before Corona somewhere, I was working on a campaign to promote the Masters of Belgium, and those are Peter Paul Rubens, Jan van Eyck, and Hieronymus Bosch. Which is technically not a Belgian, but at least a lot of paintings in Belgium. And I was trying to promote Rubens museums and places where you can see Rubens in Belgium on Facebook. But my campaign got banned by Facebook because of nakedness on there.
Taking on Facebook: The Rubens Museum Campaign and “Titty Riot”
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Andrew, I got so angry. I remember I was in a meeting with the client, and it was the third time that we had to report no results because Facebook kept banning our campaigns for Rubens. And I got so angry, and I remember in the meeting just saying, “You know what we need? We need a titty riot.” In Dutch I said “tittenrel,” which is basically a titty riot. “Guys, we need a titty riot, and we’re going to do it.” And I took my stuff, I stepped out, and that was that meeting. A few weeks later we were at the office, we were like, “Okay, now we need to think of something.” And we thought of a campaign. Basically very simple because we were angry, right? We wanted it to be very simple. If you had a Facebook account, we banned you from certain rooms in our museums where there was naked people. If you were an American, you were banned. If you had a Facebook account, you were banned. Because according to your rules that you signed, this is inappropriate, you shouldn’t be looking at it. And we made videos of that. There was even an old woman flashing her boobs out of protest against the gatekeepers of the room. That really happened. And we released that video.
We made a statement with the museums, and Fox News picked it up. They actually sent a delegation to Belgium. We talked about it, and the rules were changed about naked paintings on Facebook. So I think that’s the closest that art and my daily job came together at that point.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s incredible. That’s a great example. By the way, this podcast has a clean rating, so I have to bleep. With Rory Sutherland, I bleeped a lot of his profanities. I’m going to keep in “titty riot” though. I’m going to see whether “titty riot” gets us an explicit rating or not.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Sorry for the profanity.
Andrew Mitrak: That story though also is just incredible, that you kind of take something where nothing creates scarcity or gives you more desire than saying you can’t come in, and turning what could have been a failure into a big public relations win, and actually a great content win, and actually changing Facebook’s policies, which is a pretty rare thing to do. That’s just incredible. So that’s great. I was thinking though of when you bring in, if you’re riffing on ideas with other people on an advertisement, on a campaign, sometimes I feel old school bringing up the Pepsi Challenge or a campaign from 20 to 50 years ago. Or I feel very old school if I bring up a David Ogilvy quote or something. But I imagine you sometimes bringing up medieval art as a reference point in a brainstorming session and getting strange looks from your colleagues. I’m just wondering if those kinds of things ever come up.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: They are quite used to that. They are quite used to me. I also know, I have developed a skill that I can quickly see when people’s eyes are glossing over when I’m doing another of the medieval stories, yes.
Why Marketers Ignore History and Chase Trends
Andrew Mitrak: So I think we have a lot in common that we’re both unusual for marketers. I think we both take different types of looks at history and marketing and certainly try to learn from the past. But the industry overall is very obsessed with what’s trending at this moment right now. Most marketers don’t look to history. In fact, as I was making this podcast, one of the reasons I made it is that there wasn’t really one that was a podcast dedicated on marketing history. And I also do love what’s recent, but the fact is there’s a thousand podcasts or more just about marketing and artificial intelligence. And it’s a topic that I like, I just think that it’s so saturated that it would be difficult to break through. And I thought let’s look at history, because it’s important and nobody’s talking about it. But why do you think it is that nobody talks about it? Why do you think it is that we’re rare for marketers? What could it be?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, first of all, the marketeers are the weird people here. Because if you look at the non-fiction book sales, history is always on top of it. Not like number one, but like for sure number three, number four. People just love history. And it’s just marketeers that don’t, I guess. So we are not the weird ones, we’re actually the normal ones, and all the other marketeers are weird. Let’s just agree on that.
Andrew Mitrak: On that point actually, Apple for 2025 named a podcast called The Rest Is History as their number one podcast of the year. And it’s a history podcast, right? A lot of people listen to podcasts. So you’re definitely right on that. Anyway, I didn’t mean to interrupt, but just wanted to reinforce your point.
The Shift to Digital Channels and the Loss of Historical Context
Peter Van Wijnaerde: So normal people love history. Marketeers are not normal people. And I think it’s normal, right? In the last 20 years, marketing has changed so much. So the internet came up, digital marketing came up. And marketeers were, instead of sitting next to your old creative director and learning from that guy, because sadly it was mostly a guy, learning from that guy how advertising worked, how it was to be appealing, how it was to be desirable, what people were desiring, right? So you would learn that skill from someone you were working with. But in the last 20 years, we were a bit distracted by learning about new channels and how to master those new channels. And there was new, new, new. First there was internet, then there was Facebook, then there was Twitter, then there was Instagram, then there was influencer marketing, which is basically, as we already agreed, a very old concept but that is happening again. So you have all these marketeers who actually just needed to handle a few channels, but a lot of thinking about people, and now they flipped it around. They have to think about channels. They have to think about technology. That’s one thing. It’s always the new thing, the new thing to follow. Also, marketeers are very biased to putting “new” on something. And putting “new” on it makes it important, right? Pay attention, this is new. And this is just how marketeers are trained to function in the last 20 years. And it’s not that it’s a bad thing. A lot of good things have come from it. A lot of things are more efficient now. But if you ask why marketeers are not busy with history, it’s that they’re always very busy with something that is possibly tomorrow or missing out on today. There is nothing more exhausting than trying to follow AI trends, right? But that’s what they are doing.
The Democratization of History and Storytelling
Andrew Mitrak: Sometimes I feel cautious about where I step as a historian because I don’t have academic credentials as a historian. And I in some ways am even more cautious than you are because I mostly just ask questions. I haven’t published too much of my own opinions on marketing history so much, at least not yet. But I’m always cautious to do so just because I know that there are academics out there who really study the history. And I don’t want to in some ways undermine their credentials or feel like anybody can be a historian. Because I don’t necessarily know if it’s true that anybody can be. But I guess I wonder if you have any feelings or thoughts on academia as gatekeepers of historical records and how you react to that, or why you felt brave enough to say, “Hey, I’m just going to step out and talk about history and that’s fine.” What’s your overall perspective on this?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: History is something, if you live where I live, I live in a medieval city called Ghent. History, first of all, is everywhere. So you grow up with history. There is a medieval castle in the center of my town. And you know that little boys, they all adore knights and fights with knights on horses and all that stuff. Well, we had the set for that in the middle of the city. So first of all, that’s already something different, that you like grow up with history. That’s one thing. So history is not just a thing that lives in books, it’s a thing that lives around you. However, academics are very boring because they list facts. And that’s good. There should be someone who’s listing facts. But the problem with facts is as soon as you start chaining facts, you create a story. And it becomes a curation of facts becomes a story. And there is this old saying that history is written by the victors. That was kind of happening. That was happening all of the time. Now today, thank you Google, thank you the internet, everyone has access to research papers. Everyone has access to a lot of stuff. Also, a lot of people who studied history have a place to tell their story. They’re not in dark rooms anymore with a lot of dust. No, they can tell their story on the internet and they have been doing that. So people have been chaining these facts into more interesting stories. And when only academics are doing it, you get a very clean version of history, which is true. But for instance, did you know that Belgium, where I live, once had a king that was a bigger monster than Adolf Hitler? A lot of people don’t know about it. At least, I never learned about it in school. I only learned about it maybe 10 years ago. That’s maybe being very generous to myself, maybe it was only five years ago. When other people who were not in the dusty rooms, but people of minorities were doing their own research in history, and they had means to make those stories popular. And telling them, “Hey guys, we have a very dirty colonial history in Belgium and we should know about this.” So this is not to roast the people at the academies, but this is just to tell that more people can tell the stories now based on the facts. Because whatever you do, it should be true. You can’t say that Jesus was sitting on a dinosaur, right? That’s just simply not true. But as long as you work with the facts, you can give parts of history that people were not thinking of. Just like what I did with you with the perspective on the Artemisia Gentileschi painting. By just giving you five more facts, your whole image of that painting changed.
Confronting Colonial History and the Power of Hidden Stories
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s right. You bring up Leopold II and sort of the Belgian Congo. It is something where I knew that story and I kind of knew it, but I had to look it up. Because I read Heart of Darkness back in the day. But in some ways that story hasn’t been told in the same way that resonates in the same ways that, say, so many stories about World War II. It’s sort of the defining global moment of the 20th century where that really influenced sort of the second half of the century’s media and art and film. And some of the best films of all time are World War II films or talk about The Holocaust. But because the stories that are written about the Congo, of course Heart of Darkness is a great work of literature, but it’s not sort of a popular book in the sense that even the adaptation of it is Apocalypse Now, which isn’t about the Belgian Congo, right? And not about Leopold II. So it’s kind of a story that because of the era or because of the documentation of it, or I don’t even know exactly why, it just hasn’t translated completely. But it just because the story is not told, people don’t know that history as well. So it is sort of incumbent on not just the fact-finders, but also the storytellers who can create something that really resonates with people, is that’s how the story becomes better known and how people better know their own cultural history.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: That more people can start telling history stories, and I think that’s amazing. That’s just more perspective on life.
The Future of History and Where to Find Peter’s Work
Andrew Mitrak: Any other thoughts on sort of the future of history?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: The future of history. You know what would be amazing? If let’s just assume that fact-checking will become more easy, and searching for facts will become more easy. Then I think a lot of history will be more personal. Because when people find themselves or recognize themselves in history, it gets a certain validation. “I’m here because I was always here,” or “I have a right to be here because I was always here,” you know? For instance, immigrants. History tells the story about the value of immigrants in a certain country. It validates them. So I think history can cure a lot in the future.
Andrew Mitrak: I think that’s a good note to wrap up on. Peter, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Where would you point people online to read more of your work?
Peter Van Wijnaerde: I would love it if they took the time to check my Substack. It’s peterVW.substack.com. That’s where I release my stories. They’re quite long sometimes. You have experienced that, but yeah.
Andrew Mitrak: They’re well-researched, well-articulated, and they’re full of great pictures as well.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: One of the things that I try to do on my blog since a year was never use artificial images, only art. And that’s a fun way because sometimes you have to look for a long time to find the right picture. But that’s also how I always get to the other subject that I want to write about.
Andrew Mitrak: Absolutely. That’s great. Well, yes, I will link to peterVW.substack.com in the blog that accompanies this post as well. So I hope listeners check it out. If you’ve listened to this podcast, I’m sure you’ll appreciate Peter’s work. So Peter, thanks so much. I had a lot of fun with this conversation, so I really appreciate your time.
Peter Van Wijnaerde: Thank you. This was also for me a lot of fun to do.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org

A History of Marketing / Episode 48
This week, I’m joined by Scott McDonald, who spent three decades in the research trenches of America’s biggest magazine publishers before becoming president of the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), an organization now celebrating its 90th year of trying to separate marketing science from marketing spin.
Scott led consumer research departments during the Golden Age of Magazines. His insights helped launch Martha Stewart Living, tripled The New Yorker’s subscription price, and he saw the internet disrupt the business model he’d spent years optimizing.
Along the way, he picked up insights that still resonate. Including:
* The Strength of Weak Ties: How a core sociological concept explains networking and provides a framework for go-to-market efforts.
* The Power of Print: Why Steve Jobs insisted that every new Mac launch campaign include an ad in Time Magazine.
* Cultivating Authentic Brands: Behind-the-scenes stories of using qualitative focus groups when launching Martha Stewart Living.
* Scientific Marketing via the ARF: Including the empirical rule that cutting your share of voice during a recession will reliably cost you market share.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Now here is my conversation with Scott McDonald.
Special Thanks:
Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
And thank you to Bill Moult, whom you may remember from episode 23 of this podcast, for introducing me to Scott.
Connecting Sociology with Marketing Research
Andrew Mitrak: You got your PhD in sociology from Harvard University, and then you got into a career in media and advertising. Sociology is such a fascinating topic. I always enjoyed my sociology classes in college. At a broad level, how did sociology influence your career?
Scott McDonald: Well, my interest in sociology went back to undergraduate days really, where I was mostly in the historical comparative wing of sociology and interested in social movements and things like that. And then when I graduated, I graduated from University of California, Berkeley and was totally broke by the time I got out of school. I needed a job. I went to the job board and found a job that involved program evaluation, just kind of project work, evaluating educational programs for the California Department of Education. And it ended up being quite fascinating because it was the first time I’d actually thought about how you would address structured applied problems using the skills of social science. So I cut my teeth on that, doing projects for the Department of Education, for Bay Area Rapid Transit, for all these sort of public entities. And that drove my desire to go to graduate school in sociology to learn the quant side, which I had not really studied as an undergraduate.
So that’s really the main throughline to the work that I’ve had in advertising and media because I approached it very much through a background in studying statistical modeling, pattern recognition. I was particularly interested in graduate school in demography. And so demography sits at the border between sociology and economics. There are other borders in anthropology and psychology and other things like that. But I was mostly interested in the border between sociology and economics. And that carried through, I’d say, through my entire business side career. But also I had really fallen in love with doing applied work as opposed to sitting around theorizing at a university. So I was much more receptive to those job offers.
And one came to me when I was just rehearsing for doing job talks, going around to campuses and presenting myself as a soon-to-be graduate of a PhD program. And quite randomly, a good example of the sociological theory of the strength of weak ties, that a job at Time (magazine) came up where they were looking for an academic social scientist to try to crack a problem that they found intractable. Because a guy at Sports Illustrated in the Time Inc. portfolio had gone to high school in Chicago with the wife of my thesis advisor. The weak tie led to the referral. I went to New York and hit it off and decided to move to New York and work for Time Magazine instead of joining the faculty at the University of Arizona as a starting tenure track professor.
Andrew Mitrak: Can you define more so the strength of weak ties? Like what is that idea? I haven’t actually come across it.
Scott McDonald: It was popularized as the six degrees of separation concept. That it isn’t so much who you know immediately, but it’s who people that you know know. That’s one degree of separation or two. So most jobs actually come to people through those kinds of referrals. Not exactly the person that I know, but someone else that I might be able to help them actually discover an interesting job. The exception usually in sociology is recent immigrants. Why do you have Haitian taxi drivers or Indian newsstand owners or something like that? Because their networks are small and they’re very specific to immigrant communities. But once you kind of move out of that, and of course universities themselves are super important as drivers of social networks, and they allow people to expand their networks a whole lot. There’s a whole field of economics now that has to do with the life chances that come to someone just as a function of whether they grow up in a well-networked place like say Austin or a poorly networked place like Waco. Geographically they’re not that distant, but they have very different social networks and different opportunity structures. So sociology, you know, again this is like demography, pattern recognition. When you think of the way that you would discover some of these theories and test them, they’re similar to analyzing the influence of say a magazine compared to a social media influencer. You can graph that stuff.
Andrew Mitrak: It sounds like a concept that’s really applicable to marketing in a lot of ways. And we tend to as marketers think of it as just social networking or your second-degree LinkedIn connections or your alumni network, or how you might build an audience through reaching out to influencers and connectors. But it seems actually useful to look at concepts from sociology that have probably studied this in a more rigorous way and come up with things like the strength of weak ties to frame some of your go-to-market efforts.
Scott McDonald: I’ve always thought of sociology as being very, very flexible partly because it overlaps with all these adjoining fields. And it’s always scrambling to try, it doesn’t have one unifying theory as economics does. It’s got a bunch of theories. So—
Andrew Mitrak: Sounds kind of like marketing.
Scott McDonald: It is, exactly. Exactly.
The Golden Era of Magazine Publishing
Andrew Mitrak: So you got to Time.
Scott McDonald: My first big post-graduating job.
Andrew Mitrak: And this was in the early 80s or so?
Scott McDonald: Yeah, 1982.
Andrew Mitrak: So what was the portfolio of Time magazines? Obviously everybody knows Time Magazine, and you mentioned Sports Illustrated...
Scott McDonald: Yeah, so the big moneymakers were the weekly magazines. It was Time, Sports Illustrated, and People (magazine). And they all made boodles of money. It was sort of the heyday of the magazine publishing industry. There were also a bunch of monthly magazines as well. And of course, Time Inc. owned a bunch of other things. Book of the Month Club, a publishing imprint. I forget exactly which ones they had, but they had a lot of things. And importantly, HBO. And so there was already kind of a media empire. They owned some cable systems and stuff like that. And then a couple years after I joined, they merged with Warner Communications, which brought them a movie studio, a music company, and a bunch of other of those assets, the Turner Broadcasting System, and CNN, and all that. So it became more and more of a media conglomerate while I was there. A very interesting place to work.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, we’ll talk about your time there, your work there, and how it evolved while you were there. But before we get into that, I thought this might be an opportunity to talk about magazines more broadly. You kind of called this the Golden Era of magazines. And they were such a huge part of American media and culture in the 20th century. And we haven’t really discussed magazines at all on this podcast aside from occasionally we reference an iconic ad that would have appeared in a magazine. And iconic ads are so critical to the medium of magazines. Do you have any thoughts on the rise of magazines in the 20th century and how it impacted the way brands marketed themselves?
Scott McDonald: Well, a lot of magazines are aspirational. And people kind of put themselves into that. Many are vertical. Time was an example of a fairly broad magazine, and it competed with other leading news sources. But it was much more in-depth than say what you would get from broadcast television news or something like that. Much more the middle-brow intellectual version of news. It wouldn’t be The Wall Street Journal necessarily, but something that was very, you know, they broke stories and competed in news. So a high-brow, well-heeled audience at a reasonable amount of scale that provided, say financial companies, any company that was trying to influence opinion would be a reasonable target. So like Microsoft when it launched, Apple Inc. when it launched. As a matter of fact, Steve Jobs always insisted that any new campaign had to include Time Magazine. So he was from a generation that viewed this as a super important, influential medium.
And magazines actually were that. They were criticized sometimes as being gatekeepers. Editors had a lot of power in setting agendas or anointing. I worked for Condé Nast. Vogue (magazine) is famous for anointing a new designer. Someone that Anna Wintour likes gets featured in Vogue and they’ve made it. It’s like they’re on the blotter. That’s less true now because you have competing sources of influence, but the appeal to advertisers in part was always that. And when you do consumer research, you would see that very often the readers of those magazines believed that the ads were really part of the value of the magazine. So a September Vogue was evaluated partly by how thick it was. Well, the thickness wasn’t editorial copy. It was a lot of ads for September Vogue, and consumers would actually think that Anna hand-selected the ads.
How Brands Measured ROI on Magazine Advertising
Andrew Mitrak: Can you take us behind the scenes of who are the players when it comes to marketers at a brand? Let’s say Apple, Steve Jobs wants his ads for a new Mac launch in Time Magazine. There’s Time, there’s the publisher, there’s advertising agencies, there’s Apple and the in-house company. What is sort of the relationship between how an ad actually gets into a magazine?
Scott McDonald: Okay. So the publishers, and of course since I worked for Time Inc. and then WarnerMedia and Condé Nast across 30 years, my view is a bit, the lens that I apply is from the publisher side more than anything else. Publishers very much wanted to have a direct relationship with the brand, with clients. And a lot of the communications were direct there. So at Condé Nast, I would go present directly to L’Oréal, for example, one of the bigger cosmetics advertisers for the house. And this was somewhat in conflict with the agencies. Agencies were supposed to be planning media across the board, but they often were really confined more to managing the television side and later on the digital buying. So the publishers preferred that because sometimes they didn’t compete with more mass media like TV on reach, but they were more influential. Very similar to what we look at research now, podcasts don’t usually have the same amount of reach as some other media, but they’re much more influential. They’re persuasive to the people who listen to them. And so they have a traction that is in some ways very reminiscent to me of what you would emphasize in conversations with publishers about the value, why they needed to be in Vanity Fair (magazine) or whatever.
Andrew Mitrak: How were the brands measuring their Return on investment on their magazine advertising? As we’ve looked at this era of marketing metrics and analysis, a lot of it tends to be around TV, and it feels like there was a lot more scanner panel data and things like that that were almost tied to television sets and stuff. But I haven’t actually heard it brought up on how it applied to magazines and such.
Scott McDonald: It was harder to justify magazines in terms of bottom-of-funnel metrics because they don’t work that fast. They are much more about building Brand equity and upper funnel. So the big studies of that era needed to take a pretty long timeframe. They needed to be in field for a year or more to actually be able to demonstrate the value, and the value often was a brand equity value. It wasn’t pushing product. Newspapers worked fast. You know, that form of print media, you’d have the inserts before the weekend. It was mostly promoting sales, so eroding your profit margin in the same way that other in-store promotions would, and ultimately undermining brand equity. The point of good magazine advertising was to build brand equity and pricing power.
So like a classic campaign that ran for over 20 years, the Absolut Vodka ad, was to me a great example of what’s different about print advertising compared to television or digital in most cases because it’s not interruptive. It works by invitation rather than shouting. It’s like, you want to put yourself in the picture? Oh, I want to be on that beach. I want to take that vacation. Or by being clever and witty, there’s a puzzle to solve. What have they done with that damn vodka bottle now? And, I mean, vodka is vodka, you know. But to be able to charge a couple of extra bucks because it’s Absolut is hugely valuable to that marketer. And so the game is a long-term game there. It’s not, and thus much harder to measure. And I think to the disadvantage of many advertisers that rely upon that kind of pricing power, it’s harder to sustain those forms of marketing these days because there is such a pull toward transactional bottom-of-the-funnel short-term metrics because they’re easier to measure. And they tend to be misattributed sometimes to shorter-acting forms of media that might have been, why did I search for that brand? But the search engine will get more credit than the advertising that made me type that brand’s name in the first place when I decided I wanted to buy something.
Driving Brand Equity and Subscription Growth
Andrew Mitrak: I want to come back to where we were in the story. You joined Time in the early 80s, and you continued to work at Time Warner and Condé Nast, and always in consumer research and insights leadership roles. And so what was your role in doing market research for major magazine publishers? Was it more looking at their own metrics, or was it looking at metrics for the advertisers, or what was your job there?
Scott McDonald: I set up the first consumer research department at Time Inc. And so the focus was almost exclusively on the demand side, on stimulating demand for magazines, working with the consumer marketing function and with the editors. And so a lot of work in magazine development, starting titles like Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple. Those were some of the ones that I worked on at Time Inc. And then there was a lot of magazine development work at Condé Nast as well, along with cover testing and developing forecasting models. You know, you have a couple different ideas for what you might run on the cover of Vanity Fair, which one will sell more. And so that was a key part there.
Condé Nast also had The New Yorker probably, a super influential magazine, one I still read all the time, very loyal to it. But the job there involved reducing its dependence on ad revenue and building up the consumer side of that business. So it really involved gradually getting people used to paying $150 a year for it instead of $50. And that was strategically vital to a magazine like The New Yorker, which isn’t a behemoth in terms of reach. And so it requires kind of a different mix in the business model. But yeah, at Condé Nast I had responsibility for the advertising side, but they hired me primarily because of my reputation doing work on the editorial and consumer side.
Andrew Mitrak: I make a lot of The Simpsons references on this podcast because I grew up watching The Simpsons. And I remember one of the first ways I ever heard of The New Yorker was a Simpsons joke where Marge is going through her mail and one of the envelopes was a rejection letter from The New Yorker subscription department. And I was basically a little kid, I was like, I didn’t even know what The New Yorker is.
And I looked it up like, oh yeah, seems like it’s this magazine for rich smart people. And it’s funny to think of how a magazine sort of segments itself. The New Yorker is different than Time, but there are some overlaps, right? That Time is on every newsstand, it has broader reach, it seems like it’s more ubiquitous, and The New Yorker wants to be big and everybody wants to know the name, but not everybody necessarily reads it or pays for it or subscribes to it. And I guess can you speak to the different approaches you had for how growing market share and maintaining market share for a very large widely circulated publication versus increasing the brand equity and justifying price increases and higher subscription costs for a more niche publication like The New Yorker?
Different Approaches to Managing Print Media Brands
Scott McDonald: Well, to some extent, I mean, some of it really is respecting the editors that you’re working with and trying to find a way to help them with the particular problems that they face. So a demand problem for Time (magazine) really involves something like newsstand. The New Yorker didn’t depend upon newsstand sales; it was a subscription magazine. So it’s partly just kind of understanding the differences in those businesses. And Time was probably in more need in some ways of the kind of research help that I could make because it did depend on newsstand sales. And that’s something where the forecasting tools can be of greater use and a testing program, particularly if you’re out every week, you get a lot of data points that you can then reconcile to how it actually sold and refine your forecasts.
So, but then a whole lot of times there’s a lot of news that happens. It’s not debatable what will be on the cover. It’s like what was the big story of the week. So your point of influence is more a slow news week where there’s what we would lovingly call a thumb sucker article. Just something that’s a bigger, in-depth piece that’s been cooking for a while and they’re looking for the right opportunity to run it. And for those they would really want to know some, it’s risk management. Like, how much will this appeal to people?
Andrew Mitrak: Did the business interests of increasing reach of say Time Magazine for instance influence editorial decisions as like who would be on the cover? Because I could imagine that there might be certain figures that you put that person on and it’s more likely to buy news, more people will buy it, right? Or you might have data like, oh when we put handsome people on the cover, we get more than... Did that ever...
Scott McDonald: It always is the editor’s choice. I’m just giving information. So there never was pressure from the corporation to, you know, just do what Scott says. It wouldn’t work well. It wouldn’t be good for the working relationship with the editors. It’s their remit. And so the principle of church and state was pretty much intact all the way along, and that would be, that wasn’t something that it was useful to challenge.
But there’s a lot of financial, a lot at stake. Or at least there was during that golden era. I mean the advent of this thing, completely changed the game because attention moved entirely to the phones. It hasn’t really left there yet. And people were no longer killing time at a checkout stand kind of browsing a magazine rack to figure out something to amuse themselves for the three minutes, the 2.7 minutes that they were in line waiting to be checked out at the grocery store. Yeah, so the forecasting became less valuable as newsstand just as a category declined.
Surprising Insights From Magazine Cover Testing
Andrew Mitrak: Are there any general insights or truisms that you’d be able to share about what are the markers of like, say who’s on the cover of a magazine and like this type tend to lead to a larger spike? Like what’s the type of insight you would share with an editor that they would choose to use or ignore or...
Scott McDonald: I’d say the things that are sort of durable truths, they didn’t need me for. I mean, put a Kennedy on the cover of People (magazine) and you’re going to sell. You can still, you can run JFK’s assassination 40 years later and it’s still going to sell. So I mean they don’t need me. They know that. But of course, if People magazine does this all the time, it’s not a good thing. They’ve got to find new things. So and Princess Diana, same thing. So there are cover subjects that for People or Vanity Fair (magazine) are pretty timeless.
The I’d say the better examples would be the ones that were surprises. Where they had some other strong options, but there would be a surprise that came out that they wouldn’t have automatically assumed. And so a test that would highlight that would encourage an editor to take a chance on something. And this would be true even for just an unusual shot that doesn’t look like the usual cover of Vogue (magazine). So a model or an actress in an unusual yoga pose or something, would be, or pregnant. Just something that is startling and feels a bit like a risk. And then you give the editor some idea of what is the level of risk and the probability of success for something that is out of box. And so I think it was used more for encouraging innovation and risk-taking than moving always back to something that was kind of a hardy perennial or too predictable.
Andrew Mitrak: So there were the truisms that were obvious, the JFKs and Princess Diana’s of the media. And then the things that were non-obvious that were unique insights that you were providing, were those sort of more temporal where you do that trick and then it sort of fades? I’m kind of almost likening it to people who analyze what’s trending on TikTok and social media trends and sort of seeing what are the types of stories that are this week. But you can’t, you kind of gotta hop on it now and it’s, this isn’t necessarily useful advice five years from now. Was it kind of like that type of thing?
Scott McDonald: One example I can think of from Vanity Fair was Heath Ledger. So it was like a year after he died. And they put him into the mix on a cover test. It wasn’t my idea, it was the editor’s idea, but it was against some other things that going into the test you plausibly would say, well these other ones have a pretty good chance as well. There’s no particular reason to think that people are still that interested in Heath Ledger. But they were, and it was quite evident. Now doing it a year later, it probably wouldn’t be the same. So these are kind of timestamped and the value of them is in being able to do that probe at the moment and fit it to a model where you’ve got other data on other covers and you’ve studied the competition and you know what their newsstand sales were. And so you can get that data back from the distributor. So you’re able to build a more sophisticated model because you’ve accumulated more data. And it was all great until the whole newsstand business collapsed in response to this more transformative launch of a smartphone and major change in consumer behavior. It’s part of what interests us right now on AI of course, and trying to get an early bead on this next transformative change.
Building Martha Stewart’s Brand with Consumer Research
Andrew Mitrak: I’m going to ask you about the smartphone and the internet and AI. I have one more magazine question before I do though. Because you mentioned Martha Stewart Living. And I think Martha Stewart might be one of the greatest marketers of all time. And I actually haven’t discussed her that much on this show yet. And just that there’s a magazine title with somebody’s name, Martha Stewart Living, there’s not that many of those. It’s not that, and to build a whole, and it seems like a unique thing at the moment to build a whole magazine around her brand. And do you have any stories of the creation of Martha Stewart Living or what was that about?
Scott McDonald: It was fun. The most fun part of it really was doing qualitative work, we did Focus groups with Martha in the back room. And it was of a genre of qualitative research where we decided that we really wanted to study the fans. So like this had worked very well for Warner Bros., so my confreres out at the Warner Bros. Studio, had this property Superman, that had been kind of damaged by this campy TV series in the 60s. And it wasn’t, they wanted to bring out a Superman movie that really worked, and they did it by studying the hardcore fans of the comic, of the original thing. So that was the approach with, and they managed to succeed in reviving the franchise for the movie.
That was our approach with Martha Stewart, we really tried to identify the people that just loved her. And that we studied what was authentic about Martha. So my favorite exercise from it was asking Martha to just from her, come from her house in Westport and bring us some stuff that’s in her house, that we mixed in with other things that were expensive, or utilitarian. I was like gardening gloves, or a little trowel, or just stuff that from her house, random stuff, compared to other stuff. And we threw it all on the table and asked people to pick out which things were Martha’s and why they thought that. And they could do it. They could do it. They understood her taste, some of which might be Shabby chic, but it was her taste and they were spot on. And it kind of helped the editors because here was a situation where Martha hadn’t made a magazine before, so she’s contracting with Time Inc. to boot up this magazine. And she’s got some professionals in magazine design and editors and things like that that she’s working with, but it’s a new venture. And that really helped to refine understanding of what the secret sauce was and this sort of passion for Martha. And I think it was a good example of, again trying to provide some information, but respectfully. I’m not a magazine editor, and you just set up the occasion as an opportunity to understand and refine the description of that brand and what’s the flavor of that magazine.
Andrew Mitrak: Right. Yeah, it seems like part of the core insight is really doubling down on the core fan base because if you’re making a magazine, you could sort of take it in different directions. And you can expand, if you have a lot of pages to fill, you could sort of dilute it and add a lot more stuff in. But instead, be like no, let’s really focus on what does this core group care about and try to get it to be the essence of Martha.
Scott McDonald: You know, and it’s interesting too because as we discussed before, the ads in a magazine are a pretty important signal of who’s in the room, who’s allowed into this club. So if you’ve got tasteless ads in a Martha Stewart Living or in any Condé Nast publication, you’ve got a problem. And it’s an editorial problem. I remember once at Condé Nast, the corporate sales department did a big deal with McDonald’s. And they ran McDonald’s in like all of the Condé Nast publications. And we got consumer complaints. “This doesn’t belong in my magazine. How dare you.” So there is an interesting balance that takes place that just has to do with the signaling about what’s appropriate for this particular environment.
The Early Days of the Internet
Andrew Mitrak: When did you first realize that the internet was going to be a big deal?
Scott McDonald: Right off the bat. The World Wide Web itself, which became I know was invented in 1989, but the first real operational browsers and effective implementation of the Web was in ‘95. And it immediately created a sensation, even though we were dealing with 300 baud modems and screeching sounds and all this stuff. Just the reality of having that amount of sort of global access to all these documents, was very bewildering. And for about four or five years, there was just a whole lot of experimenting taking place across all media.
Time Warner at that point had already been investing in Broadband and trying to pilot Video on demand. So they basically switched video systems, and it was they were too early. The technology was too expensive still, but I got to sort of play around with that. But there was recognition that something big was afoot, and people just didn’t know exactly what to do about that. And that was, that was a pretty fun ride.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I imagine. It’s quite a ride. And so as a publisher, as the internet comes along, you know it’ll be a big deal, how does that impact your role as a researcher?
Scott McDonald: In some ways it led to just some interesting new things I had to figure out how to do. So again, because I came out of academia, I would constantly look back to see how certain methods, for example, for doing analysis and or forecasts, might apply in this situation. So my job at Time Warner kind of morphed into trying to understand the internet and the effect it would have on businesses. And so part of what I was doing was studying like what there’s a lot of complexity and chaos and difficulty finding things, and there were no good Search engines. So you’d start studying how people were actually using the available tools, AltaVista for example. And so it introduced me a lot to usability testing, user interface diagnostics, because internally people were designing things like more complex remote controls for TV for cable systems. And for proliferating channels of content. You’d start studying the dynamics of search and what led to satisfaction with a search result or not.
Time Inc. was experimenting with a satellite model that said, okay, we’re going to provide simplification, kind of like what AOL was at the beginning, where it was simplified into some aggregate content areas and you relied upon AOL or Time Inc. to filter all this stuff and make it simpler to find things because you’d aggregated content into kind of a hub. And part of my frustration was I wasn’t able to effectively convince the management of Time Warner that that was a mistake, and that that wasn’t actually going to win. That people wanted, they liked the freedom of all of those of being able to pull in documents from everywhere, and they didn’t really place enough value in that filtering design and structure. So Google would win. And as soon as Google showed up, Google didn’t even have a business model yet, but it was clear from day one when you’re studying that space that this is a significantly better search result. And you could see immediately that this is where Time Warner should be focusing its attention and not Pathfinder or something like that that was. Or, and it was the AOL deal, when that was announced, the merger with AOL, that was when I decided I was going to leave Time Warner. Because it seemed to me to be completely contrary to what I’d been learning.
Andrew Mitrak: Seems to have been a prescient choice.
Scott McDonald: Yeah, personally it was fine. I had a lot of options that became very valuable in that transaction and I could exercise them and walk away a happy camper. But it seemed like a very bad business proposition.
From the Walled Garden to The Open Web
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, for sure. And it seems like the Time Warner AOL merger and sort of their Walled garden approach as opposed to sort of embracing the open Internet it seems like it also kind of ties back to their own business interests in being gatekeepers. And that if there weren’t gatekeepers that has sort of knock-on effects that might be bad for the publishing industry that sort of played out over the next couple decades.
Scott McDonald: It’s the Innovator’s dilemma.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, exactly. Did publishers start to see the writing on the wall there or when did that, when did because I’m sure there was a moment where the internet’s like, hey this is a huge opportunity, this is more, you know, free distribution, we don’t have to pay for paper, things like that. But then there seems to be like, oh but what if anybody can blog and what if people stop going through the gatekeepers? Like when did that turn or did you see that turn?
Scott McDonald: That was more in the 2000s. So it was really when I was at Condé Nast, and Condé Nast was wrestling with the same issues. In some ways it had a pretty big portfolio of brands, but it ended up pruning those to the most distinctive brands that could be defended and that could operate as digital properties on a global scale. So they kind of shifted scale and integrated their international, like they used to license Vogue (magazine) in a bunch of different countries, and they kind of consolidated and it became a global brand more. And would be sold, the advertising would be sold on a different basis thus. So there were different forms of adaptation, they all needed to figure out how to do what they were doing on a lower cost basis because the impressions became more commodified in that market. Particularly once Programmatic advertising took place.
And you know the, I mean the big change, the biggest change in my view was that advertising was severed from editorial content. Ads came from Ad serving. Advertisers bought an audience, they didn’t buy a placement inside a medium. And so the whole model and the kind of special relationship that I described where I’d be going over to L’Oréal and talking about our view of their customers, trying to share insights about customers that are gleaned from studying them in the context of Condé Nast magazines, was irrelevant because everything was much more commodified through that digital model of advertising insertions. The same issues are with us now with AI and you have different companies trying to decide do I license, do I make a deal with OpenAI right now or do I try and sue them, you know like The New York Times is doing, and require a different payment model for access to my content. And these are still commercial and legal questions that are not yet resolved but they feel familiar because they’re just a different iteration of the same business issues that developed in response to the Web.
Applying Lessons from the Internet to the AI Era
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah absolutely. Are there any other lessons that you’re drawing or thinking about from having navigated the internet’s disruption to the publishing industry and as we’re now entering or in the midst of this AI era, what that means for advertisers and marketers? Like are there any lessons that you’re thinking about that apply?
Scott McDonald: Yes and no. I mean I think the in some ways this feels somewhat different. And I don’t know, you know the question of whether AI dramatically changes the consumer the labor market, and the ability of people to earn incomes that supports the advertising system is a fair question. Even though the history of all these tech innovations is that they generate enough new jobs to replace the ones that have been rendered obsolete. But I don’t know at this point whether whether I believe that this time around. So that’s a fairly big unknown that would be different in terms of the consequences of the innovation.
If I was still working at a magazine publisher and or a publisher in general, it could be a TV channel that calls itself a publisher now, or any content engine, then I’d still be wary of how I monetize that content when it becomes Disintermediation. My advice still would be pay a lot of attention to trust and pay a lot of attention to the shifts in consumer behavior because advertisers always follow the consumer behavior. And consumers don’t always do what we as publishers want them to do. So you’ve got to be realistic about that and keep your eye on the consumer. That’s certainly a lesson I think from my Time Warner days where I don’t think they did that sufficiently. So.
Andrew Mitrak: I don’t know if this is a lesson, but something to draw from the golden era of publishing is editorial taste, that as a marketer that uses AI products, the AI products don’t always have good taste, right? Or they kind of have sort of a median internet quality taste and like, you know, obviously they’re very powerful and all that but like there is an element of if everything kind of looks the same, and you can’t differentiate your AI output from my AI output, somebody’s editorial taste on refining and coaching and directing it kind of becomes more important. And I wonder if there’s sort of people embracing their inner editor and developing taste to sort of know what’s good and not...
Scott McDonald: You know, this remains to be seen but it’s my observation that as AI improves, which it continues to do with breathtaking speed, it depends partly on you as the user to tell it what you want. It wants to please. So if you, so like in the context of say marketing applications or insight extraction, if you just ask a simple question, you’re going to get a pretty simple answer. If you actually feed it say peer-reviewed academic articles that you want a theoretical framework to be incorporated into the answer, you’ve raised the bar a lot. If you tell it that you want it to pretend that it’s a McKinsey & Company consultant, it’ll do it. It knows what you mean, and it will change the answers in response to your inputs. So I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t do that with regard to some matters of taste. If you could train your chatbot to be like those focus group respondents in the Martha Stewart Living example. And it seems in principle that you should be able to cultivate that.
The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF)
Andrew Mitrak: So I want to ask you about the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). You’ve been president of the ARF for about ten years or so. What is the ARF for people who have are not familiar with it already and how has it evolved over the years?
Scott McDonald: Okay. So the ARF is the Advertising Research Foundation. It is celebrating its 90th birthday right now. It was founded in February of 1936. As at the behest of the two founding members, the Association of National Advertisers, the ANA, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies, otherwise known as the 4A’s. And it was set up from the beginning as an independent foundation dedicated to furthering through research the scientific practice of marketing and advertising.
So from the beginning days it wrestled with the kind of public facing questions of how advertising works. What’s the best way of measuring the audience of a Life (magazine), you know? Of not just the circulation but all the readers per copy and the people who look at it in barbershops and whatever, you know. What’s the best way of measuring the audience for a radio program? We know how many radio sets are in American households, but how many people actually heard a particular show? And then in terms of advertising, what makes some ads successful and others not? What’s the optimum frequency? How long does it take to burn in or to burn out? Those questions have been with us from the beginning, and they’re still with us today, it’s just a much more complex and fragmented media landscape.
And so to some extent you need to update that all the time. And that’s still the kind of role of the ARF. It’s the power according to its bylaws, the power over the organization is distributed among marketers, ad agencies, media companies, and service providers, which would include all the measurement companies and everybody from Nielsen Holdings to little Neuroscience consultancies or brand consultancies or attention measurement companies, any of those things. And so ARF is kind of the Switzerland in the middle of that ecosystem that conducts research on basic questions of how advertising and marketing work, trying to stay as close as possible to the values of scientific inquiry. And that means, that doesn’t mean anything goes. And you’re in an environment where people make a lot of claims. All these campaigns do really well. You go to a lot of conferences and they’re all just like success story after success story. And you know not everything works, you know? And so trying to separate wheat from chaff and kind of build a body of knowledge about how to think about these things is the mission. To try to improve practice through the application of scientific methods. So.
Andrew Mitrak: How do you, how do you deal with that at a conference or just in marketing in general? Because I think every marketer wants to say that they’re scientific. They want to say that they’re data-driven, but also every they want to say that their campaigns are working, right? They want to say yes and our campaign was great and there’s sort of a grading their own homework type thing. And there are ways where you can cherry pick your numbers, like “oh, our reach was great,” even if your conversion was bad. Or “conversion was great,” even though you paid too much. And I guess how do you sort out navigate that?
Scott McDonald: Yeah, it’s difficult. Partly because, you know, the association itself, it’s a membership organization. So you don’t really want to offend your members. But on the other hand, at some level you might have to because not everything can be equally true. So that’s why the north star remains. And you try and set up... I mean a classic ARF study, we just did it around different aspects of attention measurement. This is a growing field. And you have different approaches, some of which rely upon academic understandings of cognition and memory and things like that. And others that really kind of just follow the development of tools that might plausibly be used as proxies for attention. So eye fixations, because we have Eye tracking and good cameras on our digital devices, on our phones, on our laptops. You’ve got information that’s used for ad verification purposes that would indicate that yeah, there’s a human there. There’s a hand on the mouse. You know? So that’s a proxy for some level of attention that is a signal not very expensive to collect because you’re already doing all this ad verification work, but how closely can we establish that that relates to any sort of formal definition of what we mean by attention? And by that are we talking about, you know, just eye fixations and Saccades? Are we talking about evidence of memory and recall around an ad?
So there’s a lot of tests around that. And the ARF exists kind of to help sort out the quality of those. We have an academic journal. We connect to people who have, you know, where they’re peer reviews. There’s competition to get on the stage for our events. So people have to compete before a jury to even get a slot. And so it’s, it’s sort of through that process, which is similar to how it works in the other sciences. I mean, the best examples, if someone really wants to make a strong claim for their research, then they would, we’ll do an audit for them. We’ll run through and see whether we can replicate their numbers. We’ll see whether they did cherry pick. We will, and then we’ll take their data and host it on our website and make it available for anyone in the world who wants to have a go at it, to anonymize the data and, which is the same like if California Institute of Technology wants to make a big claim in the physical sciences, they got to make their data available to the team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build legitimacy around it. It’s a very similar concept. So that’s the space that we operate in. It’s geeky but it has some value in this ecosystem.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. If I was to draw an analogy back to earlier in this conversation of you and your publishing days recognizing “hey there’s truisms that JFK assassination and Princess Diana, that always sells magazines at newsstands.” But like the real insights are sort of the non-obvious things that are more unique or maybe more time-bound. Could you draw parallels and find like what are sort of the truisms that the ARF has helped establish or that you’ve sort of recognized over the years in your role there, versus some of the more unique, non-obvious things that research is uncovering?
Scott McDonald: There are a lot of them, I would say. We codified some of them in our, so the ARF acquired the Marketing Science Institute, which is a more academically oriented entity. We did this a couple of years ago. And MSI has published something they call the Empirical Generalization series, which only will, so it will formulate like “X causes Y.” And here are the estimates of effects, within this range and these categories, you know that might be covariates. But it’s reduced down to things that we think there is compelling enough evidence. And their filter on it is wherever there’s been a meta-analysis in like the top three or four marketing journals. So very high level of peer review scrutiny. And only where there have been 60 or more studies confirming this generalization that would allow you to talk about say the if you’ve got like a budget to spend and you need to spend some of it on advertising and some of it on price promotion, for example, in-store promotion, like what are the trade-offs and how do we think about that?
So but I think for the ARF itself, probably the thing we’ve studied the most over the years, is anytime there’s a recession or a big disruption in the economy, the pandemic, September 11 attacks, any of these things that suddenly just have a big dramatic effect on markets and consumer behavior, there’s a tendency to cut marketing spend. Short-term marketing spend gets cut. So what’s the effect of that? Since we’ve studied it like from the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, any of these things that have these kinds of shock effects. And you’ve got a pretty good record of it. And the answer to it, I call it an empirical generalization, is that when you cut your share of voice, so you withdraw from the advertising market and don’t spend, so you’re not really getting a share of voice within a category, you lose share. And you lose it fairly quickly, and it takes about five years to recover, if you can recover. We have had whole brands that just kind of go away because they lost their position within a category.
That’s connected to another generalization and truism that I think is there and is likely to remain there for a long time, that being the dominant brand in a category, which usually involves at least 20% share of market, although in some cases it’s a lot more, leader in the category. That leads to all kinds of benefits. Any advertising that’s done for the brand leader in a category has stronger coefficients of impact, both short term and long term. And to the dismay of the second and third or fourth participants in a category, their advertising is probably going to actually benefit the category leader. It’s an unfair world, but people just mistake it. And a lot of, it’s another sort of truism that I think remains, a lot of creative ads that are so creative that they don’t tell you who the brand is, people love the ad and they assign credit for it to the wrong brand. Because that truism was ignored. It might have won an award somewhere in an ad creative competition, but it didn’t really work for the brand because they didn’t integrate the brand, make it clear enough to the consumer what brand was being advertised. So there are a lot of regularities and it’s hard to not be like a broken record sometimes when you’re responsible for the catalog of those things. But there are mistakes that we shouldn’t be making over and over again. And I think MSI in its most recent iteration of the Empirical Generalization series had like 175 things that rose to the level of, okay these are generalizations. There’s like enough evidence, there is consensus around it. And that’s kind of how in my view science works. It still doesn’t mean that those won’t change and evolve over time as other situations develop, but you build it on the back of a lot of evidence that’s been objectively evaluated and critically evaluated. So.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. That’s great. It’s great that your foundation is able to advocate for this research, make it available and share it. So let’s learn from science, let’s learn from history and not repeat the same mistakes over and over again. So Scott, I really enjoyed this conversation. For listeners who have enjoyed it as well, where would you point them to online so they could find out more about your work and more about the ARF?
Scott McDonald: thearf.org and msi.org.
Andrew Mitrak: Scott, thanks so much. It’s been a real pleasure.
Scott McDonald: Thanks Andrew.


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