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Takeaways from Marketing Brew’s “The Brief” Conference

Picture of Michelle Wiles By  Michelle Wiles  ·  1 minute read
Marketing Brew "The Brief" Conference
Measurement and user insights take center stage

Last week we had the pleasure to attend Marketing Brew’s The Brief conference. ☕ 🎪

Outside of the snacks (thank you Tony’s Chocolonely 🍫 and Dunkin’​ 🍩 ​) we took away 2 major themes:

Measuring marketing is a challenge that requires collecting data across multiple sources:

Ajay Kapoor, Director of Performance Marketing at General Motors has a 3 pillar approach to measurement:

    1. Deterministic Measurement (think first party data directly from channels like Google and Meta)

    2. Probabilistic measurement (marketing mix modeling to tackle multi-touch attribution of channels)

    3. Experimentation (pressure testing the coefficients coming out of 2)

“We’re not DTC, I do not have direct data of who is buying what. It’s opaque, so I need to triangulate.” — Ajay Kapoor
Katie Potochney, ECD and Head of Wink Creative at Intuit Mailchimp has a raft of measurements:
“We measure brand familiarity, consideration and so on. We have a brand index we check on quarterly. We also have social metrics — we look at first party data, like leads, and performance of our email.” — Katie Potochney

⚡ Quick plug: What if you could measure the brand lift of individual assets? Swayable measures the brand lift and purchase intent of your creative in 24 hours

Okay but the biggest theme?

The benefits of listening to your users. It’s common to feel like you need to have all the answers as a marketing exec. But great marketers showed that they start by listening:

🖼 Listening inspires campaigns:

“We use data as a source of inspiration to find out what our audience cares about, and use that inspiration to create campaigns. For example, we saw a spike in French lessons after Emily in Paris. So the next year, we collaborated with Netflix.” - Duolingo’s Emmanuel Orssaud

Graph showing how Duolingo leans into cultural trends to inspire campaigns.Duolingo leans into cultural trends to inspire campaigns. Source: Michelle Wiles
📱 Listening inspires product ideas:

“The flywheel for us has been actively listening to users, and using marketing to delight our users and let them know we are finally delivering on the things we said we would do.”
- Kickstarter’s Everette Taylor

🔄 Listening builds a flywheel of content and attention:

“We’re only as good as the restaurants on the platform… We started with editorial content of the restaurants. Restaurants then gain by feeling a sense of pride for being in our content. Then we gain SEO and traffic. Which brings in more restaurants…”
- Resy’s Hannah Kelly

⚡ Quick plug 2: Swayable can help you listen to your audience by generating quant + qual insight on your creative — segmented by demographics, psychographics — in 24 hours. ⚡

Were you there? What did you take away?