[00:00:00] Donny: Many of the most memorable brand campaigns have been driven by cutting edge marketers who are driving innovation in massive growth for some of the most beloved brands. This season, we’re getting a fresh perspective and highlighting women, marketers who are making an impact in both crypto and mainstream brands as always we’ll discuss the most pressing challenges and opportunities facing our industry.

[00:00:25] While uncovering the brave marketing moments that have led these marketers to where they are today, hosted by brave software and me Donny Devor.

[00:00:37] You’re listening to a new episode of the brave marketer podcast. And this one features Maura Tuohy Di Muro who is the head of marketing at Twitter. Maura’s team scales go to market programs for safety, privacy, and information integrity. And prior to Twitter, Maura was a global marketing director at Mozilla.

[00:00:55] The nonprofit that makes the Firefox browser. probably a browser that you don’t wanna use. You wanna use the brave [00:01:00] browser? This is the brave marketing podcast. Maura is passionate about the intersection of technology and humanity and lives in San Francisco with her husband and two son.

[00:01:08] I think you’re really gonna like this episode because we discussed how Twitter is promoting safety on their platform and the unique ways they’re adding gamification to privacy, including a recently released video game experience they made for their users. We also discussed how web three can deliver on its promises of accessibility and inclusivity and how Twitter thinks about earning people’s trust.

[00:01:29] But before we hop in today’s episode, we wanna highlight our brave pick of the week. Every episode we choose a brand that has run an ad campaign with brave as our pick and this one we’re featuring ad week for the brand week event, that’s taking place in Miami. On September 12th through 16th, they ran a sponsored image on the brave ads platform to drive awareness for their metaverse day taking place on September 16th.

[00:01:50] In fact, Brave is presenting sponsor at the event. And we plan to have a team of representatives talking about brave ads. Plus a keynote talk. You’ll be tending come to say hi. And [00:02:00] now for this week’s episode of the brave marketer.

[00:02:02] Hi Mara. Welcome to the brave marketer podcast. How are you today?

[00:02:14] Maura: Hello?

[00:02:15] Hello. I’m well, thank you for having me. How are you? Yeah,

[00:02:19] Donny: I’m doing great. Thanks. It’s so good to have you here. So why don’t you just start by sharing with the audience? What’s the most exciting thing that you’re working on right now?

[00:02:28] Maura: Ooh, I love this question. So. Twitter is doing some really critical work around what we call civic integrity.

[00:02:36] The mission of our civic integrity work is really to protect the conversations that happen on Twitter during elections and, you know, during other civic processes. And our goal outside of this is really to protect. Freedom of expression globally and ensure that conversations that are happening on Twitter are reliable.

[00:02:59] And [00:03:00] safe. And so we do this by actively sort of elevating credible voices by promoting safety, by forging partnerships. And by trying to be as transparent as we can, along the way from a marketing perspective, our goal is really to help people understand. What Twitter is doing and sort of how they can stay safe during elections.

[00:03:22] A lot of important conversations, news breaks on Twitter during election cycles, you know, were sort of a place where a lot of these things happen first. And so we feel a strong sense of responsibility to getting this work right. And, you know, due to the global nature of elections, it’s sort of. Always an election year at Twitter, but our teams have been working really hard on Brazil and also the midterms happening in the us.

[00:03:49] And for me personally, like you cannot get more kind of purpose led than thinking about how to protect democracy. I find that hugely inspiring. [00:04:00] And the second thing is we have these incredible. Dedicated teams that are just like so passionate about this area. So getting to work with them is a pure delight, but yeah that’s,, a work that is, definitely keeping us busy right now.

[00:04:15] That’s

[00:04:15] Donny: amazing. Can you tell the audience about your brave marketing moment?

[00:04:19] Maura: Yes. so my brave marketing moment, I mean, I think this day and age, you know, sometimes for us, it’s. Putting on a pair of pants feels brave. I’m kidding. But you know, we are still living through interesting times. I think, in my line of work with the teams that we’re building, which is creating product narratives and go to market work for organizations that are trying to differentiate themselves through trust.

[00:04:44] All of our marketing has to be brave. And I say that. Effectively, you know, we’re working with product and policy and we’re representing the voice of the customer. And so in some cases, the bravery comes in a form of truly advocating for a pain [00:05:00] point or a need within product or policy. And in other points, the form of bravery is.

[00:05:05] A creative message and, doing something interesting or outside of the box, that’s actually going to garner attention. So one example of pushing the envelope from a creative marketing standpoint is the work that my team recently did around relaunching our privacy policy. We knew that we wanted a site that was clear, compelling, and not written for academics or lawyers.

[00:05:30] In some cases, privacy policies can sort of be like love letters between lawyers and regulators instead of something. Compelling and understandable that a regular person might wanna read. And that’s sort of the paradox with privacy policies is every company has to have one, but nobody wants to read them.

[00:05:48] And so our sort of challenge creatively was. How do we create something that no one wants to read and turn it into something that people can’t stop sharing. We worked with [00:06:00] an agency YML who put us in touch with an independent game developer named Momo pixel, who is. Incredible encourage y’all to look her up on Twitter.

[00:06:10] And she concepted the, as far as I know, world’s first side scrolling pixel art video game to explain your privacy settings to you. And so we have this game, you can check it out. you know, it’s, still live now called, Twitter data dash. and effectively you follow this dog, your pup data who goes on all of these adventures and you learn about, you know, how to protect yourself, how to use your Twitter controls, how to think about your privacy in a way that is accessible.

[00:06:43] That’s understandable. That’s human. We launched this in, I think nine different languages have reached something like 200 million people and really started a conversation around. What people can expect from a platform, both in terms of their privacy settings, but also in [00:07:00] terms of how we’re gonna communicate with them.

[00:07:02] I think there’s a misconception that privacy work needs to be stoic or dull or academic because it’s complex, but it’s our job as marketers to make the work accessible.

[00:07:16] Donny: That’s awesome. How did you come up with that idea? That’s

[00:07:18] so.

[00:07:18] Maura: It was the brain child above a lot of different people working at Twitter.

[00:07:22] You know, we had this awesome agency, YML working with us. It sort of like each person kind of took it and built on the idea. Together. I mean, we, played around with a lot of other sort of alternatives, you know, what if we made it into like a, a song, you know, what if it became a catchy tune?

[00:07:40] And so there were other iterations that, you know, didn’t quite make it off of the cutting room floor, but ultimately the idea what the game was really about putting. The consumer in the driver’s seat, right. Them getting to go in and engage, interact, you know, pick a character. Each element of the game became a metaphor [00:08:00] for your privacy.

[00:08:01] And I mean, this is one of the most like beautiful things to watch our team. In concert with product policy that are legal or, you know, I mean, we had lawyers in our cross functional team meetings, brainstorming animation ideas for how we could really demonstrate what privacy meant in this world of data dash.

[00:08:24] And so you’re, taking, this dog data on, a walk and you wanna get to private city at the end of the. And there’s all of these perilous dangers that he has to avoid. So, you know, he jumps into the sea of DMS and he has to avoid the spammy ones at one point. And we had a lot of fun and we did it in a way that really brought to life, the Twitter voice and brand.

[00:08:46] That’s the sort of beautiful thing, right? we have this. Amazing brand. It was important for me as, a marketing leader to help my team kind of unlock that brand and be able to use it in our world [00:09:00] of, you know, safety. Privacy and information integrity. So,

[00:09:04] Donny: yeah, that’s great. I love that. I think it’s such a great idea.

[00:09:07] There’s so many studies about how long it takes to read all the privacy statements that you would come in contact with even just like in a given day. And it’s just, unfathomable. Like you just can’t, even do it. And people just check, click the check mark. They never look at it. It’s such just like a, a legal thing.

[00:09:22] So to make a game out of it is just, I think it’s ingenious and the amount of people, 200 million people like that you had interacted with it. Like so, so impressive.

[00:09:30] Maura: One of the cool things as well is that this game is going to live on, right? It’s at Twitter data dash.com. You can go there and play it.

[00:09:39] Now it’s on desktop and mobile and, you know, anytime we’re making updates to the privacy policy, this is an artifact that people can go and find and play. So, yeah, I think there’s just, there’s something nice about that kind of longevity.

[00:09:55] Donny: How did you end promoting it? Like whether did you run a media campaign against it?

[00:09:59] Like, what were the [00:10:00] strategies and tactics that you used?

[00:10:01] Maura: Yeah, so we sort of launched it like a video game. You know, we did a trailer, we kind of teased it, you know, as if it was, a normal game release. We worked with creators, we promoted it, of course, on Twitter, through our timelines, you know, we kind of chopped and changed different assets.

[00:10:19] So we had different ways for people to. Almost get a sneak peek of the game trailer before they went in and experienced it themselves. So we had a lot of fun, not only with the game, but also the kind of marketing of the game sort of took on that personality as

[00:10:33] Donny: well. Got it. Are you thinking about web three at all?

[00:10:37] And how are you thinking about web

[00:10:38] Maura: three? Web three? Yeah, I, mean, listen, Personally, I see a lot of interesting things from, other organizations around web three and, and the metaverse, you know, I follow as someone called Zoe Gaman, who is a brilliant futurist and, runs her own agency out of London.

[00:10:58] And she has like [00:11:00] the best web three content for marketers. So I, I highly recommend checking her out. So, you know, I think high fashion brands, retail companies are all kind of finding a way to be a part of this world.

[00:11:11] Gucci’s accepting crypto payments, Gucci’s partnering with, roadblocks on, creating kind of an immersive metaverse world. The way I think about it as sort of an ethical technology marketer is really more at the sort of channel and policy level, which is. Are we doing enough?

[00:11:29] To actually, create web three as a place that is safe, accessible, and inclusive for everyone. I think there’s a huge promise of what we can do with web three. You know, you look at organizations like Robin hood who are trying to kind of democratize finance and you think about, you know, crypto and, web three and everything that comes along with it.

[00:11:54] I think in the very early days, and I’m speaking now more about, NFTs, but it felt really more like a [00:12:00] lot of this sort. Problematic hierarchies were being replicated in web three. Like we had kind of like forgotten everything we learned around inclusion and diversity, and we’re just like, Hey, it’s a popularity contest.

[00:12:13] Like, come be a part of this like niche thing. And you could only do it if you like have access and a bunch of time and all these internet connections and disposable income. And it’s. That to me felt, I think disappointing, you know, there weren’t a lot of women at the table there weren’t a lot of people of color.

[00:12:29] And I think that is changing slowly, but we still have a long way to go. You know, if the promise of kind of web three in the metaverse is this idea that I believe it should be around safety, inclusion, and creating more accessibility. Like have a long way to go as, an industry from that perspective.

[00:12:47] Donny: Have you been thinking a lot about kind of getting back into real life marketing now that you know, C’s not over but winding down in certain respects? Yeah.

[00:12:55] Maura: I mean, I think for us, you know, Twitter is a, global organization. [00:13:00] And so we’re always thinking about kind of the best way to interact and engage with, You know, whether that’s, in person event or, something that’s happening virtually. I think it’s been less of a sort of conscious like click. Now it’s time to do this, you know, and more of a natural evolution, it feels more palatable. It feels more possible to be bringing in real life events as a part of our total marketing mix.

[00:13:29] It’s not something expressly. You know, my team is, is looking after, but it is definitely something that I’m just in the industry seeing more and more of happening. Got it.

[00:13:39] Donny: So back to like more career stuff. So I’m sure you’ve mentored a lot of people, our own shes, that is on my team now. And what advice would you have for emerging marketers who are looking to be more brave and take more risks in their work?

[00:13:52] Maura: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s sort of like a, I have a little like playbook, I guess, if you will, of, things that I think about When I’m kind of sitting with, [00:14:00] my teams around bravery and around taking risks, I think the first is like, always start with your audience and think about how your. Can be culturally resonant.

[00:14:10] You know, we did some work at, Twitter early on in the year, partnering with John Cino when he was releasing the peacemaker series. And this was a real departure for us as an organization, you know, working with a celebrity with a personality and especially the personality of peacemaker, which is quite, you know, kind of crude and, Boisterous and for us, because we targeted that work directly to his fans and fans of peacemaker, it really paid off the audience was delighted.

[00:14:41] They learned something about Twitter and we were kind of bringing in a, a new group, but I think it’s just as easily, you know, brands have kind of gotten it wrong when they have not stayed close to the core audience that they’re trying to reach. So you look at. The Pepsis and the Kylie Jenners of the world, or you think [00:15:00] about Samsung recently had to pull an ad where they had a woman kind of running at night, you know, with her headphones on.

[00:15:07] So I think for me, it’s like staying close to your audience and ensuring that whoever you’re speaking to creating work for that you actually have those people in your organization. Right. It kind of comes back to this idea. Diversity and inclusion, because if you don’t have those folks at the table, you’re gonna miss a trick and you might end up putting work out there that feels bold, but is kind of off tone.

[00:15:31] The second thing I would say. And this is something that I’ve learned over my career is like, you have to have trust in the organization, you know, whether that’s cross functionally outside of marketing, or even just across the marketing organization, building the trust with those teams, taking them on the journey, letting them to kind of see the creation process is so important because at the end of the day, they have to trust you for that work to.

[00:15:58] Get out the door to see [00:16:00] the light of day and then the last piece. and these are all kind of like reinforcing themes, but is really like a sort of test and learn mindset. So, you know, especially in today’s world where maybe budgets are smaller or there’s, , overall constraints, being able to experiment and launch kind of.

[00:16:19] MVP like the minimum viable, product marketing, you know, campaign, or, even if it’s a tweet, we do a lot of test and learn at Twitter, whether that’s with our research team beforehand, or even testing live and going out with, you know, multiple formats of something really critical to be able to kind of test your way into something.

[00:16:38] And then if it’s working, you can pour more fuel on it. That seems to be a way to. One kind of game trust of the people that you’re working with and also show proof of concept.

[00:16:52] Donny: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense when you do those, those tests and you’re multifaceted with multiple tactics, are you testing it in one market and [00:17:00] then expanding to other markets or just running it nationally and then not spending a lot of money and then running more of it.

[00:17:04] So how do you go about that?

[00:17:06] Maura: It kind of depends on the launch. So in some cases, from a product perspective, like Twitter will decide to launch in a smaller market first and sort of watch, you know, how is this gonna perform in say Canada or Australia? In other cases, you know, from a media perspective, you know, we’ll, we’ll target broadly the us, but we might have a bunch of different formats.

[00:17:27] And then we’re optimizing between them. Sort of live, you know, with the way that kind of paid media works today, it’s fairly easy to put some dollars in and get signal back quickly and then move out of those tactics that aren’t working as well. But yeah, you know, I’d say we do all of the above really, depending on what we wanna learn and kind of where we wanna learn it.

[00:17:49] Donny: From a marketing perspective, what are the biggest issues that are going on in our industry? I know a big one privacy, right?

[00:17:57] Maura: yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if we zoom [00:18:00] out, I feel like marketers right now are facing one of the most challenging macroeconomic environments kind of in, in our lifetime, there’s whispers of a recession, there’s a war going.

[00:18:11] Everyone’s still kind of figuring out how to work remote and collaborate effectively. And at the same time, Consumers are losing trust with media, with government. There’s a trust barometer report that Edelman produces every year. And the one that came out at the tail end of last year is, you know, shows that consumers are not only like distrusting organizations more.

[00:18:38] But they’re also demanding more of organizations and of brands. They want to follow brands that are aligned with their beliefs and they will vote with their clicks, you know, they’ll vote with their wallets. So for me, the way I’ve approached this is, is like, again, being laser focused on, like, who are you speaking to?

[00:18:56] And what can you learn about them knowing [00:19:00] insights about your consumer? Is going to ensure that you’re not wasting dollars on creative that is ineffective or messages or benefits that aren’t going to resonate. I think the other thing, and this is especially true, I think of, smaller organizations is it’s more important to, decide what you’re not going to do.

[00:19:19] Right? Like it’s not a strategy. If you’re doing everything, then you’re just doing everyth. Choosing the channels choosing where you’re going to focus and go. Can be way more impactful than just like trying to do everything. And, you know, we see this as well in that, like, we can’t speak to everyone. We can’t speak to every single audience.

[00:19:40] We have to be really purposeful when we’re thinking about the personas or the design targets that we’re speaking to. And sometimes you have to go small to go big. Right. You create something that is so interesting. So. culturally spot on that, that small passionate group of [00:20:00] people will make it go mainstream.

[00:20:02] They’ll talk about it. They’ll share it. They’ll build on top of it. Right. They’ll collaborate. So I, think that all of these things that are just kind of, in my opinion, good hygiene as a marketer are even more important today in the kind of environment that we’re operating in. And, you know, you mentioned privacy, right?

[00:20:19] I think marketers have realized that we don’t live in a world where just hoovering up people’s data is a good idea. You know, there are constraints around how, and when people should be sharing their data, there needs to be transparency. There needs to be consent. And I think marketers have to be a lot more sophisticated around the data they are leveraging and ensuring that they’re not part of this problem, right?

[00:20:46] Like. Foundationally the internet was built on this advertising model that is showing a lot of unintended consequences in terms of using people’s data in harmful ways. And that [00:21:00] is something that I think marketers, at least the marketers that I spend a lot of time talking to are realizing like, this is something that we, all have a responsibility

[00:21:07] Donny: towards.

[00:21:08] absolutely. What do you think it takes to be a bold marketer right now? Ooh.

[00:21:12] Maura: I think human insight, This is the one thing that I learned, not the one, but one of the strongest pieces of my own sort of marketing education, if you will, was learning how to find and craft a human insight.

[00:21:27] It is the thing that I go back. Time and time again, no matter what the exercise is, is starting with the consumer and starting with that human insight, if you can get to something true and raw and emotional that you can shape and leverage and connect your brand and product to that is going to serve you really well.

[00:21:50] I also think you. More and more this idea of like brand marketers on one side and product marketers. On the other side, those barriers are being broken down [00:22:00] and we are seeing. Organizations better integrate and leverage brand to explain product and also drive product roadmap in a way that ladders back up to the brand.

[00:22:14] So I feel like, and I’m biased of course, cuz this is what I’ve done. But having, spent time in, different parts of marketing organizations has. Hugely impactful. Right? Like I spent years as a brand strategist. I worked in social, I did integrated marketing and then now to have been in product marketing, I still bring all of those things with me.

[00:22:34] So I, I feel a little bit like an undercover, you know, brand marketer. Some days that’s getting really deep in with product or policy and weaving all of those things together because that’s what an organization needs. They don’t need 10 siloed marketing groups. Creating work that is disparate and non-connected, they need a single message.

[00:22:56] I think back to my earlier point around building trust across the [00:23:00] organization, a brave marketer has to bring people together and galvanize people around an idea because you can’t get something out the door that doesn’t serve everyone in the organization.

[00:23:12] Donny: Absolutely. That’s great. That’s really good stuff.

[00:23:16] Anything to add that you’d like to, discuss with the audience? Yeah.

[00:23:19] Maura: I think one thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about is how to help teams create their bravest work. and I think that I saw this, quote that creating is an act of vulnerability. And in order to be able to be vulnerable, we have to help our teams feel psychologically safe.

[00:23:40] And so I, I think there’s something really interesting in creating work, pushing boundaries, encouraging our teams to step outside of those boxes by. Being vulnerable, you know, showing them how to fail and showing them resilience in the face of failure and kind of how we can [00:24:00] all move forward and learn and grow together.

[00:24:02] You have to be able to be wrong. You know, like that’s one thing that I think I’ve really embraced as I’ve gotten older is, how to be. Wrong about things, how to test, how to push the boundaries, how to try out ideas in a place where you feel safe. And if you can model that you will get it back in spades, both from your teams and from the partners that you work with, whether that’s in the product side or in policy.

[00:24:25] Got it. Yeah. I think that’s really powerful.

[00:24:27] Donny: Good. Can you, uh, nominate another brave marketer to be

[00:24:31] Maura: on the show? You know, I have been thinking a lot about this one because there’s so many folks in my network who I think are brave marketers and who’s, I am inspired by Rashad Drakeford is someone that I met, when he was still over at Robin hood.

[00:24:44] And he, has a really incredible way of thinking about content marketing. And is just a, great collaborator, so I will nominate him.

[00:24:53] Donny: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. We love to have you

[00:24:56] Maura: on Maura. Thank you. This was great. This was a lot of fun. [00:25:00]

[00:25:01] Donny: Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the brave marketer podcast.

[00:25:05] Four quick things before you go. Number one, if you like what you’ve heard, it’d be really awesome. If you’d rate us or write us a review on your podcast player. And if you didn’t like what you’ve heard, then don’t worry about it. Number two, if you would like to advertise to Braves 60 million users. And have a budget of $10,000 or more simply email us at ad sales, brave.com that’s ad S a L E s@brave.com.

[00:25:32] And let us know you’re our podcast listener for a 25% discount. Number three musical credits. Go to my brother, a Devor, and finally, number four, go use brave@brave.com and we will see you next time on the brave marketer.