You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio.
Welcome to Math and Magic. I'm Bob Pittman. Over the years, I've talked with dozens of guests, ranging from marketing executives to musicians to company founders. I've asked what inspired them in their childhoods, how they've reached and exceeded their career goals, and what tips and tricks they've learned along the way.
In today's bonus episode, I'm highlighting some of the most memorable marketing stories, the lessons our guests learned the hard way by trying and failing, by taking a big risk, or maybe by getting a piece of feedback that changed everything. Kellen Smith Kenney is the chief marketing and Growth Officer at AT and T, and that's not the only iconic brand she's helped innovate. On her resume, you'll find companies like Microsoft, Hilton Capital, I, and Uber.
I wanted to.
Know what experiences have helped her cultivate the power of a brand.
Gosh, I've had such incredible opportunities in my career. The thing I learned at Microsoft is that technology and technology alone is not going to be the reason why somebody adopts your product. I worked at Microsoft and the very first product I worked on was Windows Vista. It was one of the most highly anticipated technology products of its era. I think it was five years in the making, people everywhere or on the edge of their seats waiting to
see what Microsoft would release. You probably remember that when we released it into the marketplace, it landed like a nuclear thud bom bomb. It was a total bomb. And what we learned in that time was that we had fallen in love with the technology and we had forgotten about the most important person in the equation, and that was the end user we metis the consumerization of technology. We missed that the vast majority of our customers weren't using ninety nine percent of the features that we put
in that operating system. That ultimately bloaded the operating system, slowed it down and made it far less attractive. And so the incredible lesson learned from Microsoft is focus on the customer. I've seen at times in my career, whether it was teams I was on or competitors I was
facing off against. Is when you obsess over the competition instead of obsessing over the customer, you're going to get yourself into big trouble because if you're obsessing over the competition, all you can ever know is what they've already done. You can't drive a car ninety miles an hour down the road if you're looking in the rear view mirror, and when you're studying the competition, you can only be looking backwards.
It sounds like you probably did the same thing, yet, Gap one, Uber and Hilton too. A consumer focus seems to be your hallmark.
Thank you.
Yeah, I would say at Capital One, we were incredibly, incredibly scientific about how we went to market, and so we treated it as this just obsession with getting better and better. The other thing that was incredible about Capital One is that that company found religion about building a brand through all of the testing and learning that it did.
And so, years and years ago, when Capital One was one of the largest customers of the US Postal Service, they ran a test a blank envelope with no branding on it, and then an envelope that actually had the Capital One logo on the outer left hand corner. And what they originally found was that the blank envelope outperformed the branded envelope, and right then and there, Yeah, ouch, and right then and there, the founder and CEO of
Capital One, Rich Fairbank, said this is unacceptable. We have got to build this, and so that's when the company really leaned into building awareness, building consideration, building familiarity, and ultimately preference.
Kellen has learned to use challenges as stepping stones to new ideas, and one lesson that's been ingrained time and time again is listened to the customer. It's a centiment. Our next guest has also taken the heart. Academy Award winning actor Gwyneth Paltrow has a business born from passion. In two thousand and eight, she started a newsletter with personally curated recipes, travel tips, and more. It transformed into Goop lifestyle brand, now worth two hundred and fifty million dollars.
It was a consumer's feedback that helped Gwyneth realize how to monetize what she was building and to combine editorial and commerce. Let's hear what happened.
For so long, I was so allergic to being transactional in that sense, and I'll never forget. I published one issue of GUP. I published an article on the French pharmacy, which I'm sure you know. When you go to Paris or anywhere in France, the pharmacies there are so cool and they have like, you know, homeopathic things, and they have like all this special stuff. And so I wrote a piece saying, you know, this is this great you know, burn cream, and this these probatic tampons, and there's this
great lip bomb and all this stuff. And a woman stopped me and she said, oh my god, I loved that article on the French pharmacy. But it was so frustrating for me that I couldn't just click to buy everything. I was on Amazon dot fr trying to buy this and that and searching, and it was the first time that it occurred to me that transaction could actually be a service as well, and that you didn't have to
push product for revenue. If you made or curated things that you really believe in and thought were going to genuinely elevate someone's life in some way, that you could do what we then called contextual commerce. And we've always stayed true to those principles. You know, we're obsessed with clean beauty, and we have the highest clean beauty standards in the business, and so I think when people come to the website they understand that, and they understand that
there's a really strong point of view. You know, I have a very strong point of view around fashion. So even when we were just buying, like from a wholesale perspective and had a multi brand matrix, it was very specific when we started g label our clothing line is very very true to me. So I wouldn't have been able to sleep at night if I felt like I was pushing something on somebody.
Whyneth realized there's real value in her point of view and recommendations. By listening to her subscribers and to her own intuition, she closed a gap in the market that other people hadn't yet figured out how to bridge. Likewise,
Andrew Dureki's journey as an entrepreneur started with an unmet need. Today, he's a filmmaker behind incredible documentaries like Capturing the Freedman's which earned an Academy Award nomination, and of course, the Emmy Award winning HBO series The Jinks, The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. But before he moved to the creative side of the business, he made a fortune on an idea trying to solve a problem for himself and
moviefoone was born. Marketing this brand new concept was no easy feat though.
I was trying to go to the movies around nineteen eighty eight and I was calling my local theater, which he used to have to do because the New York Times didn't have all the show times in it. The theater phone lines were always busy because the theaters didn't understand that there were two thousand people trying to call in a twenty minute period for that night. And I got through at eight fifteen and the machine told me that the movie had started at eight o'clock. And I thought,
why did I? I just ruined my night, and this multi billion dollar movie industry doesn't get that I'm not able to go out and buy my seven dollars then movie ticket. So I thought, you know, voicemail was pretty advanced then, and I thought, well, don't we create a service that lets you push buttons. Maybe it's a free local service and you put in the first three letters of the movie title, put in your zip code, and it would spit out just the theater closest to you, just the
information that you needed. I thought that would be a cool thing for me to use. I didn't really think about it as a business at first, and then eventually, when we put it up on a bit of a lark, we started to see people calling and suddenly we were getting you have twenty seven calls this hour, and then later I would call it and say, you have one hundred and forty two thousand calls this hour. Like that started happening, and we were amazed by it.
And so that's the idea. You get it started. How did you know how to turn that into a business.
It's true, And you know, my I was very lucky because my dad is a very smart business person, and you know, he started out as a psychiatrist, but he always had a business bug. He was so smart about business. So I think I immediately thought, well, this thing that we just put together seems to be working for consumers. I wonder how much I can promote it. I wonder how I can promote it. I talked to my dad about it. I talked to other smart people that I knew.
It was pretty clear that all of our customers were walking through the doors of about five thousand cinemas in America. So if I could get the number seven seven seven film in front of people up on the screens and trailers before the movie. I also figured out everybody's motivations quickly. I went to a bunch of conventions, Show East and show West. I didn't know anybody, and I just walked
around talked to everybody. This is the movie business in the movie business, and I realized that nobody was talking to each other. They didn't understand that moviegoers were having trouble going to the movies. It was just a pain in the neck to do it. And the studios didn't
really control the theaters. The theaters didn't control the studio, and I thought, well, there's a window in here where I could make things easier for the consumer and also make something that would be very useful for the industry. So we just started to figure out where are the little pinch points and leverage points. So, for example, I knew that the theater owners had control over their movie screens. At the time, nobody was doing advertising on movie screens.
So I said to the theater owners, if I give you a thirty second ad for moviefone and it's entertaining, will you put it up on their screens. Knowing that they had a problem, which was that the newspapers were charging them a fortune to put their movie listings in the newspapers. The studios weren't helping them, so they said, well, if this guy's coming along, it is going.
To do it for free.
I'll give him thirty seconds of free time before the movie. So that was an example of some marketing thinking that helped us tremendously, and it was a very you know, what do they say, all marketing is local, you know, getting out into the movie theaters, handing out little cards to people, getting that message up on the screen. It's sort of flowed naturally.
Andrew went on to sell movie Phone to AOL for almost four hundred million dollars. He said it started on a lark, but soon enough he recognized that there was powerful potential in connecting and leveraging industry players. We'll be right back after a quick break. Welcome back to today's bonus episode of Math and Magic, where I'm sharing some of
my favorite marketing stories. John bon Jovi has sold one hundred and fifty million albums worldwide, and he's played nearly three thousand concerts for thirty five million fans.
Plus.
He's made waves as an entrepreneur and a philanthropist. When I sat down with him at the Possible conference in Miami, I wanted to know how he thinks about his brand and its impact.
Well, nothing would have happened if he didn't have a song. So the brand had to be built on a solid foundation, which was the song and being true to who and what I was in order for the collective we to then be true to who we were. And so that is the basis of all of it. Not to chase fads and fascis was also really important to me. Fads and fashions come and go, and the truth will always prevail.
Were you ever tempted with any of the fads or fashions, I don't think so.
I may have been a byproduct of the clothes you wore in the eighties or the haircut you had in it, but that's who and what you were in real time. And if the next fat and fashion came along, I e. In our business, boy bands and then grunge music and then wrap, you know, we were there the advent of rap and to start doing duets would not have seemed honest, you know, to certainly be with a boy band and or you know, none of that would have rung true. So I was smart enough to know not to get
a flannel shirt. When Seattle became popular, it was just stay the quarters.
Let's talk about intergenerational hits. My friend's daughter, it's twenty two. She was in a college bar, Living on a prayer comes on. The kids all start dancing on the tables. They weren't even born when the song came out. What is it about your music that connects with such a young generation even though it was made originally for a completely different generation.
Again, I think it comes down to truth. No matter what were collectively marketing and or you know the dirty word it's selling, it has to be based in truth because even if you pull the wool over someone's eyes once, it's not going to resonate the second time. Right, So when we wrote a song, if I was doing it from a place of honesty, that song resonated with me, and therefore I was confident it would probably resonate with
that audience. Songs like Living under Prayer, when we wrote them to be bluntly honest, I didn't REALI is what we had, but I felt that the character driven storyline was legit, and in doing so, you know, Obviously, that's one of the many that has stood the test of time that it's as simple as that, because it just it's everybody's story.
Jon bon Jovi has built a career in authenticity. It's by speaking his truth that he connects with others. Bobby Brown has also made a name for herself by sticking with her strengths even when others were saying that their makeup style would never catch on. Bobby's the founder of Bobby Brown Cosmetics, which she sold to Este Lauder in nineteen ninety five. She continued working for her namesake brand
until twenty sixteen. Since then, she's launched Jones Road Beauty, a direct to consumer cosmetic brand that has stayed true to the style that made her famous.
Right before nineteen ninety the whole scene in New York was a lot of parties, a lot of going out to the clubs. Women were doing makeup like multi colored eyes and overlined lips and all this crazy stuff. And when I came to New York, I got a job to do a cover of Cosmopolitan at Jerry Hall. I tried everything in my power to do her makeup grade and she was so kind and she said beautiful job, but can I have the mirror. I gave her the mirror and she said, can I just make a few touches?
She redid her whole face and I learned watching. I didn't feel bad. I really learned, but I realized I can't do that kind of makeup. So I started doing it my way, and it kind of slowly caught on.
So what was your inspiration for your way? Because this was not the way.
No, it was definitely not the way. When I was in middle school, I wanted to be pretty and I didn't think I was, and I would use my mom's makeup to make me look tan and pretty. I didn't want anyone to know I was wearing makeup. And then when I became a makeup artist, I started doing that to models. People told me I'd never work. If you want to work, you have to learn to do the other thing. But I just couldn't do it, and so I started doing it my way, and it slowly, slowly took on.
What big names adopted your style that sort of gave you cred and sort of pushed you over that tipping point for you.
I did a cover of Rolling Stone with Annie Leebowitz, and I made the guys look good, and Keith Richards's manager came over to me and said, oh my god.
Can we book you again?
And so I got a couple of times got hired to do it because I always made people look healthy.
Stones that's pretty good.
That was pretty good.
That's pretty good.
Some might have seen that moment when Jerry Hall redid her makeup as a failure, but Bobby was determined to keep doing things her way and it caught on. This was just a sign of the mini successes that followed by trusting her gut and staying true to herself. Olivia Francois is another math, the magic guest who was able to take an idea and tap into something bigger than himself. Olivier is now the CEO of Fiat. I asked him about what I think is one of the greatest lines
of all time, Imported from Detroit. This became part of the impactful Super Bowl commercial during his time as CMO of FII Chrysler. It all started when he was trying to introduce a new car at the LA Auto Show.
One thing I didn't know is that the LA Auto Show is really where you celebrate Japanese cars. German cars, maybe Italian cars by the way, but for sure not a Chrysler.
So too late.
I'm on stage presenting my new baby, and when I realized that La is home of the Impulse, I just instinctively pitched it.
I made this up on stage.
I say, hey, I know that you guys like Impulse and we are in La, so look at this car, like imported from Detroit.
It was just my ending.
And actually a couple of people came and said that would be a good line for ant and then I thought of it, you know, and I said, yeah, that's a good line for an.
Then clearly the soundtrack came.
I have four kids, two of which at the time were very much into hip hop and introduced me to Eminem, and obviously, when we started sinking of Detroit, obviously that tune came to mind. When you have one chance, one opportunity that totally connects together Chrysler, Detroit and all of America. So I was obsessed with securing that song, which ended up being an endeavor to say the least. Once I had the song, Eminem was so intwiged.
You know.
It was never scripted to be in the commercial. It was just kind of probably in twiged and at the same time it'd be a bit scared by rightfully, So you know, what are these advertisers.
Going to do with my song?
I promised him that would be probably more largely about Detroit than just about a car for sure, or even a brand.
But he came on set and then it just magic happened.
So I'm from six hundred cars per months to seek thousand after the commercial. That's a math aspect, and the magic is what happened in the whole country because obviously the commercial resonated with more.
Than just Detroit, with more than just car guys.
It donated as a message of pride for all of America.
Eminem ended up starring in the commercial and the final line of the screen reads Imported from Detroit. You may even remember it from the Super Bowl in twenty sixteen, or it's not too late to look it up as the perfect example of both math and magic. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening, and stay tuned for a brand new season of Math and Magic with a whole new batch of marketing stories coming to your ears soon.
That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeart Podcasts. The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sydney Rosenvelt for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent no small feat. The Math and Magic team is Jessica crimecicch, but Heid Fraser and Julia Weaver. Our executive producers are Ali Perry and nicky Etour Until next Time.