[00:00:00] Donny Dvorin: Yeah, No industry changes faster than modern marketing. Great marketers need an edge. Great marketers need to be brave. The brave marketer podcast provides an opportunity for each guest to share a story where they exhibited bravery by taking a risk. They made a dramatic impact in the market. Our guests are marketers from top brands and agencies who share the exact strategies and tactics they used in their brief marketing moment. We then dive deep into topics like ethical advertising, consumer privacy, crypto marketing, brand safety, and navigating a future without third party cookies, hosted by brave software and me Donny Dvorin . Head of sales outbreak together we’ll get a backstage view of the brave marketing moments and creative mindset work. that’s shaping today’s most influential brands. Yeah.

[00:00:58] Welcome back [00:01:00] to the brave marketer podcast and our first episode of season two, we’re really excited to be back in your ears. And we know you’re going to love the first episode that we picked to kick off the season, because this is. All about Disney plus, which if any of you have kids or any you’re into Marvel or anything like that you probably already have Disney plus and we interviewed, Andrea Cutright, who’s the VP global subscriber of marketing and insights for Disney streaming.

[00:01:30] And what I really liked about this episode is we kicked it off, not jumping right into the brave moments, but we really talked about the service itself. Why the growth, why was it the perfect timing? how they’ve gotten to 94 million subscribers. And then we got into the brave marketing moment, which was this key moment when they decided to launch, which is just really exciting.

[00:01:53] And, I won’t spoil it. So we’ll talk about the details. But before we hop into today’s episode, we want to highlight our brave pick of the week. [00:02:00] So every episode we choose a brand that has run an ad campaign with brief as our pick of the week. And this week we’re choosing Verizon and totally coincidental, we talked about on the episode, how a lot of my friends used Verizon to get a free year of Disney plus I actually missed that. So I am a paying subscriber two years in a row, but with Verizon and efforts to support small businesses nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic, they partnered with celebrities, such as Dave Matthews and Usher to launch the Verizon pay it forward life campaign, which consisted of weekly live stream events to drive awareness for viewers to support their local business in their communities. And Verizon used high impact, brave ad strategy that included our big sponsored image, which some people have called our homepage takeover as well as push notifications and social drivers to create awareness and get users to share their tune-in intent on Twitter.

[00:02:52] this resulted in 23.8 million brave ad views, a blended CTR of 8%. 1,100 [00:03:00] suites. And it was just great because it was all for a good cause. And you could find the case study in the show notes below, or just visit brave.com and go to the advertiser section. So now let’s get into this week’s episode.

[00:03:13] So you’re going to meet Andrea Cutright and again, she’s the VP of global subscriber and marketing insights for Disney streaming, including Disney plus, and Andrew is responsible for all subscriber marketing touchpoints, overseeing product engagement, marketing and subscriber insights prior to working at Disney plus she spent nearly three years as the co-founder of DONE a consumer insights company, working with companies such as Uber, Samsung, and Neela robotics.

[00:03:37] She was also the co-founder and CEO of Foodily, which was acquired by IAC in 2015. And with no further ado, here’s today’s episode of the brave marketer with Andrea Cutright.

[00:03:56] Andrea, welcome to the brave marketer podcast, how are you doing [00:04:00] today?.

[00:04:00] Andrea Cutright: I am excellent. I’ve been looking forward to this it’s by favorite way to spend 30 minutes is getting to talk about marketing.

[00:04:07] Donny Dvorin: That’s great that we’re excited to have you on. Speaking of excitement, why don’t you share with our listeners? What is the most exciting thing you’re working on right now?

[00:04:17] Andrea Cutright: Oh, there are a couple of great things, as you can imagine that the house of the mouse that always has something exciting going on, but. Two things that are really cool. One is that we’re starting to work on our launch plans for Asia Pacific. So that includes Taiwan, Japan, Southeast Asia. And just thinking about extending Disney plus to these new markets, new subscribers, new competitive marketplaces, just a lot of fun work and a lot of hard work for the team, but really exciting.

[00:04:50] Second thing that we’ve beenworking on and thinking about, and I know it seems crazy, but we’re already thinking about holidays and what’s going to happen at the end of the [00:05:00] year. And we’ll be two years old at that point. And I can’t even express how much change has gone on and since lunch to now, but just really fun to start looking at that second anniversary and all that, the new things coming forward, but also looking back.

[00:05:14] Donny Dvorin: Yeah, I can’t believe two years is already past but I remember signing up when you launched, because I have three young children and it was just like the perfect thing to do during COVID when we just had so much time at home.

[00:05:29] I remember that there was a deal with Verizon that I did not use. And all my friends were like, oh, you got it for free. I was like, no, I didn’t do it for free. And then I couldn’t be bothered to figure out like how to get a refund or whatever. So I I’m a second year paying customer and the kids just absolutely loved Disney plus, it’s when I tell them about this interview, they’re going to be so stoked.

[00:05:52] So Andrea seems like you guys are on a tear. I read that Disney plus has hit 94.9 [00:06:00] billion subscribers. And you beat your four year goal and only 14 months. I know, like I just said, why are fairly subscribed, but why don’t you share what do you think is attributing to this surgeon subscribers and just,this quick product adoption.

[00:06:16] Andrea Cutright: Well I think, one of the thing that was a real benefit was to work on all of these upfront research, really talking to people in many countries about what it meant to be a subscriber of S VOD services and what it meant to be interested in different kinds of Disney plus content. Lots of people didn’t know. And maybe we’ve changed that over the last two yearsthat Disney is the home of Marvel and of star wars and national geographic.

[00:06:41] And the addition of some of our. assets acquired from 20th century Fox. So there’s a real breadth of content there that was exciting to see people really spark to while they know Disney content and Pixar content really well. These were new things. The second is that obviously [00:07:00] COVID happened. And I think while we had an amazing lunch, really surprising and shocking for those of us who had been working on planning the product.

[00:07:09] I think COVID and people’s kind of home life and change in the way that you entertain yourself. Especially at night really supported an increased interest in having a diversity of subscription services. And then I think third overall, the marketplace has just moving that way. Like I think some of our top performing or performing might not be the best word, but most read news stories about the launch of Disney plus really had to do with the fact that more and more services were marching toward S VOD toward paid streaming premium services. And this was a real shift in the marketplace and a trend that was going to continue for a few years.

[00:07:49] And we’ve certainly seen that to be true from AT and T his announcement last week. The launch of, discovery plus paramount plus, et cetera. I think we’re [00:08:00] riding a trend and got in there a little bit early, but the high quality of content, I think certainly helped move us in a direction, even worse, surprised to be dealing with this level of scale at this point of time in our life.

[00:08:15] Donny Dvorin: Yeah. I mean, I’ve been noticing the a LA carte trend for a while. we’ve been cord cutters for years. and obviously started with using Netflix but really what it comes down to is just to share one more family story is that I said to the kids, Hey, we’re going to cut cable.

[00:08:32] And we’re going to use all these other services. And the kids said, no, daddy, you can’t cut cable . You can’t cut cable. And then I said to them, guess what? Kids, we haven’t had cable for three weeks. They didn’t even know because we were using all these other services. So why don’t we start talking about tactics that you’ve used.

[00:08:53] So what specific marketing tactics did you use what worked? What didn’t work? What are you using now? [00:09:00]

[00:09:00] Andrea Cutright: I think first of all, like every good growth strategy starts with really understanding who your market is, and really spending a lot of time with that customer.

[00:09:09] And a lot of time in what I call the phase called kill your hypothesis. A lot of people do market research and almost act like pitchman, trying to sell their product or convince people that certain features that are important or not. One tactic that I really appreciate using. And I found a lot of value in is actually one where you go and say, why will this fail?

[00:09:29] Give me some ideas of what you would kill. Here’s an idea that we had, tell me what’s wrong with it in a way you get a lot more out of that. And I think for Disney plus in particular, that served us well. And people being able to talk about what did and didn’t work for them with other. S VOD services that they might’ve subscribed to and what didn’t resonate from a messaging standpoint.

[00:09:51] And a lot of when you do that, you get people’s own words that you can then repeat back or put into to our marketing campaign. So what we heard the most there [00:10:00] was. verbally people talking about the five brands or these five things that ended up playing out also in our product strategy where we actually have five tiles when you go into the product so that it’s very visible and very upfront about it.

[00:10:13] That’s a place where I’m really going to get value. And it helps me to see that every day from a marketing tactic standpoint. one of the benefits of know track record, a historical track record within the company of really launching films and gaining awareness very quickly over time with heavy marketing campaigns.

[00:10:32] That was certainly another strategy that we pursued that I think was really positive and more of that weight actually went digital than it did above the line. A third thing was like, we just talked about this trend, like being at the heart of some trends. That repeatability, if you’re a marketer, you really need to understand what story you’re telling in the marketplace.

[00:10:53] And one of the best stories we had leading into launch was that we were consolidating our content [00:11:00] onto one service. So taking things from what had been maybe licensed to a Netflix or another provider and pulling them in house, that story in and of itself really helped gain word of mouth and understand.

[00:11:13] This was going to be a dedicated home of content that you cared about. And in order to be able to see it, you needed to subscribe. So I think, the compilation of those pieces and I think just a very fun and interested group of marketers who would just try a bunch of things. we tested a lot of things out.

[00:11:31] Some things worked, some things didn’t but being able to really have a test mentality and see how those things performed was . probably the last piece of that puzzle is that we can put more weight into the things that we’re working

[00:11:43] Donny Dvorin: yeah. It’s a good segue into the brave marketing moment that we really like to focus on in these episodes. And, you had mentioned before the call that the decision to launch the Disney bundle just prior to launching Disney plus, so you mentioned it had all three elements of a disaster in the making. So will you talk [00:12:00] about those three things? Really, just talk about, why there was a risk, like how’d you put your name a little bit.

[00:12:05] Andrea Cutright: to set some context, we were literally 45, maybe 50 days from launching the biggest thing that the Walt Disney company had launched years. We’re launching Disney plus, but maybe if you know, not even two minutes in advance invent a new offer. Requires three organizations within the Walt Disney company umbrella to work together on that offer and make sure that it is an optimal user experience and complicate your marketing message all plenty of time to figure that stuff out.

[00:12:40] I think that, the disaster in the making always comes with when there’s partnerships. I think those have to be well-planned and to make sure that those go forward and whilewe all worked for the same company in the same way. Everybody else also had their own marketing plans, their own calendars, their own agendas that they’re working on a second is that we went forward with a price play.

[00:12:58] Here’s something where we were discounting [00:13:00] some of our services in order to get people to sign up for all three. And I think at the time launching something that you haven’t even launched your first product and you don’t know if pricing is quite right to launching a second product offer and thinking, oh, I hope that prices right as well.

[00:13:17] and then the last piece is really that you had to have faith that you’re, you were right already at the highest value, so Disney plus was already up highly valued product. We hadn’t even launched it yet, but we were going to make a bet that. There was an ability to add onto that and continue to add value to it.

[00:13:34] So those are pretty risky concepts. the timing just made it that much more insane. And one of the things I really loved about working at Disney streaming is making the impossible possible is just a group of people who really believe that if we all pull together, it can happen. Magic can happen.

[00:13:53] Donny Dvorin: Ah, just to use the Disney term. I got the goosebumps. That’s beautiful.

[00:13:56] Andrea Cutright: No, I’m so glad.

[00:13:59] Donny Dvorin: This is great. We’ve [00:14:00] spent a lot of good time talking about, Disney plus and the launch and your brave marketing moment. So now it’s just shifted up a level higher and just talk about, marketing in general.

[00:14:09] Like what are you seeing out there, Andrea specifically, why don’t we start with what’s the biggest threat or the biggest challenges facing the marketing industry, right now?

[00:14:19] Andrea Cutright: Yeah.obviously A pat answer would be the post COVID world as the doors to our homes, open up and the doors to restaurants and bars and everything else.

[00:14:28] I’m open to greet us, certainly in my business. We’re thinking about that a lot and thinking about the change in mindset. And I think that change in mindset is permanently altered in some ways from before COVID and we really need to think about. . How people react to the world today, what messages really resonate?

[00:14:48] How do people really feel on an ongoing basis? Because marketing is basically just matching up what conversation you want to have with the consumer, with the way that they’re currently operating and entering [00:15:00] in the world. So I do think that’s going to be a giant change for every business to think about.

[00:15:06] Because I do feel like people are permanently changed the way they think about things, whether that’s e-commerce, I don’t know how much you grocery shopped online before I did, but it’s amazing to me to see my mom and my dad doing it and thinking it’s quite normal.

[00:15:22] And I think we continue to see that and we’ll continue to see that moving forward, that the role of business and therefore really the role of marketing in the face of the business. Really needs to be part of the world, part of the community and react and respond

[00:15:38] second thing that I think is a giant for marketers today is that the change in public opinion towards.

[00:15:48] I think really embracing and being respectful of cultural moments. Obviously I think if we all look back 10 years, lots of things happened in the world, but I [00:16:00] hadn’t seen necessarily businesses or industries react and respond in the way that people are today.

[00:16:07] I think social media has definitely helped that. I think, the feeling of closeness in the world and also the feeling of maybe responsibility of being a participant in the community and people’s lives.

[00:16:20] I think those are two really big things I think are just an interesting way to change your mind as a marketer. way more than cookies are going away and we can be rid of retargeting ads.

[00:16:31] Donny Dvorin: Speaking of cookies, I was thinking about like that Oreo moment on, in the Superbowl when the lights went on.

[00:16:36] and that was just like one of the best examples early on of, really connecting the marketing to what was happening in real time. And I think that’s probably one of the riskiest things too, because you can totally mess it up.

[00:16:50] it’s one of the reasons, one of the things I’ve been telling my team is that. the days are gone where you would hire someone to do some research and throw it over the fence to you.

[00:16:58] Andrea Cutright: So you could read a [00:17:00] report, think about people. Every person on my team needs to be talking with people every day. what are the moods, attitudes, behaviors, opinions that people are carrying around in their heads so that you could really use those and leverage those thematically as you move forward.

[00:17:16] The time of being divorced from your subscriber or downstream from their opinions and attitudes are just that time has gone because it’s going to take everyone collectively thinking about this is what I am hearing and understanding from different communities that I tap into and having that sort of agile course center.

[00:17:38] Like I talked about test and learn earlier in a way you’re going to have. Have some innate capabilities as a marketer to be able to respond and hit the right note.

[00:17:46] Donny Dvorin: And for years, social media and digital has changed that the, you know, the ability for users to go to Twitter and tag the company.

[00:17:54] Andthere’s so many social media listening tools, but to your point, it’s like, How do you [00:18:00] really use that data? Because otherwise it’s just like an ocean of data. How do you pick out the nuggets and then decide which of the good nuggets to use? Because and that one TV spot that you’re running or that one banner ad, like you can only choose one or two messages out of the thousands of things people had mentioned on social media.

[00:18:18] I think in my opinion, that’s one of the most challenging things, not just listening, but deciding which nugget is the best ones.

[00:18:25] . One thing that we had the opportunities to do early, almost pre-launch after we had done a bunch of research in different markets was we did just messaging quantitative research, which I hadn’t done before.

[00:18:37] Andrea Cutright: I’ve done things like it, but this was literally a dedicated study. That just tried to phrase things in different ways to get people, to react to certain features, to certain messages, to certain content promises. And it was so informative and telling of words that resonated and words that didn’t resonate.

[00:18:57] In fact, it’s something we’re thinking of repeating this [00:19:00] year, because obviously we’ve grown a lot and we’ve introduced a lot in the world has changed a lot. It is something where the choice of word really does matter in the long run.

[00:19:11] .so what are your hopes for the future of marketing?

[00:19:15] Donny Dvorin: What do you think are some of the biggest opportunities right now?

[00:19:18] Andrea Cutright: Some of the things that I’m spending time on are really, it will sound boring, but I’m spending a lot of time on our marketing technology stack. And I think that the opportunity there is that. True right. Message to the right person at the right time, in a way that, that phrases or statements been out there for quite a long time.

[00:19:39] But I haven’t ever really felt like it was true or there wasn’t anything really, to back that up, it was all BS at this moment. We have such amazing data lakes ability to do data science, modeling, all these different skills have really developed and come together that as a marketer, your job is [00:20:00] harness some of this science to make that statement come true. So I’m really interested in marketers thinking about a future in which you really understand data science, you really understand marketing technology and ways to integrate messaging into people’s lives and still have that natural creative kind of what to say when to say. core from understanding your consumer really deeply.

[00:20:26] I just think that is the future of marketing. I think it’s really interesting. I’m super curious how marketing technology is going to develop over the next five years. That’s accelerating a lot of the companies that have been performing. A lot of these tasks for us have been around a long time, but I actually think there’s going to be quite a new revolution of startups.

[00:20:50] Really cracking the nut on data science.

[00:20:52] Donny Dvorin: I don’t envy that role of trying to decide which MarTech stack or which players to use. We’ve all seen the Scott Brynn’s Brinker [00:21:00] landscape where, 5,000 is now something like seven or eight or 9,000. And then I have a side business. Call never stop marketing where we analyze the intersection of advertising and blockchain.

[00:21:13] And so we took the Brinker landscape and we said let’s apply it to marketing and identify all the companies that are using blockchain technology. And when we first introduced that they were like a hundred companies on there. And that was like a few years ago. And the last one we introduced, they were like 450 companies.

[00:21:31] And so just that one little niche of using blockchain, that area has blown up. it’s it blew up and then it took a back seat during COVID. But I think that the strongest ones are going to come out. But anyway,

[00:21:42] Andrea Cutright: Oh, just wait until you do that in our section with NFTs or something like that.

[00:21:47] Be two now and by the end of next year. Yeah, exactly.

[00:21:51] Donny Dvorin: Exactly. there’s NFT marketplaces. You could do a whole report on all the brands that are using NFTs. and then [00:22:00] more and more I’m getting sent. People are sending me articles about the number of companies that are now, I have the ability to buy and sell cryptocurrency because before it was like, oh, PayPal.

[00:22:10] And that was the big news. And there was a news about visa and stuff, but like now it’s every other day. and you’re talking about. Big banks that have been around for hundreds of years, and now they’re getting into crypto. So the world is changing, but I think it’s changing faster on the financial side of the house versus the marketing side of the house.

[00:22:29] Andrea Cutright: it follows exactly.

[00:22:31] Donny Dvorin: Exactly. Because at the end of the day, it is a currency and it’s a smart contract. And anywaywe know why don’t we finalize with two last questions. So you wouldn’t be here today, if it weren’t for X or if you hadn’t started X.

[00:22:47] I wouldn’t

[00:22:48] Andrea Cutright: be here today.

[00:22:49] If I hadn’t. Moved from, I think, a generalized sales and marketing role with Yahoo in Europe to working [00:23:00] on the global Yahoo brand. And I think that gave me the opportunity to do two things. One is I worked on a brand in decline. It’s a lot more fun to work on a brand that’s on the rise, but working on a brand that’s in decline gives you permission to test certain things.

[00:23:15] And put different theories into place because what exists then or what the general practice isn’t necessarily working. So that really opened my eyes to approaching every project with an experimentation mentality, with putting the, what is the elephant in the middle of the room that we should really look at and maybe move aside or tackle.

[00:23:37] And I think anytime you have an opportunity to. frankly experiment to have permission to change things up. It’s a job you should take at some point in your career. Always being someone that optimizes on top of what’s working just doesn’t I think in the end, give you the chops to keep up with the [00:24:00] changes in the world.

[00:24:00] Keep up with the changes in the marketplace. And even as we enter a post COVID world to keep up with the changes in the way people think in their mentality.

[00:24:09] Donny Dvorin: And our last question, which we love to ask our guests is can you nominate another brave marketer that we should have on the show?

[00:24:15] Andrea Cutright: Yeah. And I don’t know if you’ve reached out to her before or not, but Bennett Porter is an interesting CMO who went from running marketing at survey monkey and working on Gallup type poll, polling, consensus things too booster fuels where she ran fleet and personal fueling systems. just someone who is brave by nature of the different jobs that she takes.

[00:24:43] Donny Dvorin: Yeah, those are very different. we’ve spent our time in, in marketing me on the sales side and you on the marketing side of the house. Well, Andrea. It was really a pleasure chatting with you today.

[00:24:54] thank you so much,

[00:24:55] Andrea Cutright: Thanks so much ,Donny.

[00:24:59] Donny Dvorin: Thanks for listening [00:25:00] to today’s episode on the brave marketer podcast. Hopefully you enjoyed listening to Andrea and talk about some of the risks that she had to endure when launching Disney. Plus, I thought it was really interesting when we were talking about. when she had to pick a different marketing stack and be choosing between all of the different vendors and really the theme to me was listening to the consumer and using the right technology to listen to them and then picking out the right messaging that you want to incorporate in your brand advertising. So I thought there was a lot of key insights that people may pull from this episode and really all about listening. So finally, if you have a brand or product or service that you’d like to get in front of Braves, 30 million users, please email us adsales@brave.com and let us know, you’re a podcast listener to unlock one of two perks.

[00:25:53] If your budget is under $10,000 a month, we’ll bump you up to the top of it. Waiting list. If your [00:26:00] budget is $10,000 or over a month, you qualify for a 25% podcast listener discount. I get email us at adsales@brave.com and finally music credit goes to my own brother Arielle Dvorin. . he did all the theme music and hopefully you’re enjoying it right now.