Percolate Transition Conference

2016 Notes
Conference Intro:
We are living in a world of constant transition. What it takes to build an inspired brand is
changing, with global trends giving marketers more influence and impact than ever before.
Transition brings together the brightest minds in marketing for two inspiring days of talks
and workshops on how to seize the biggest business opportunities of tomorrow.

Percolate helps over 800 brands with their core marketing requirements

Table of Contents:
1. Technology in Transition Tim Urban, Creator of Wait But Why
2. Species in Transition Charles C. Mann, Journalist and Author
3. Percolate Keynote VP Marketing, Marriott and WeWork
4. Story driven design James Buckhouse, Former Head of Content @ Twitter,
Cinematographer for Shrek and Madagascar
5. Unlocking Digitals True Potential: Sophisticated Mass Marketing Karl
Meinhardt, VP Marketing, Albertsons & Max Kalehoff, CMO, Social Code
6. Who Invented the Millennial Tim Hwang: Head of Policy and AI at Google
7. Marketing In Transition Keith Weed, CMO, Unilever
8. Building Brands that Last Jennifer Sey, CMO Levis, Joseph Puthussery, VP
Marketing, Cisco, Melissa Proctor, CMO, Atlanta Hawks

9. How to test and invest in new channels Marketing leaders from GE, Chobani
and ABN

Session Notes
Technology in Transition Tim Urban, Creator of Wait But Why

Human progress has accelerated

o If George Washington time travelled 250 years to now, he would die from all
the progress, but the same cant be said if Leo Da Vinci travelled to George
Washingtons time.
o The Dead Person Unit (DPU) will get shorter and shorter
o We are generally not going to recognize the future progress is compounded
Key trends in the future:
o Virtual Reality in virtual as well as physical (already partly here)
o Genetic engineering programming babies
o Nanotech it will be cheaper to make a diamond than a pencil
o Travelling and colonizing on other planets
o Artificial intelligence
Artificial Intelligence 3 levels:
o ANI: Weak specializes in one narrow area, ie. A calculator, cars, phones,
games, finance (currently we are in the ANI area, but not too far from AGI and
ASI, which will likely come in the next 20 years)
o AGI: Strong Do everything a human can do
o ASI: Stronger than humans exceeds human creativity, wisdom and social
AI will likely be the last things we invent, AGI and ASI will likely start inventing the
next chapter.

Species in Transition Charles C. Mann, Journalist and Author

o
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Most of the world is micro, we as humans are only a tiny part of the entire ecosystem
Look up Lynn Margulis and her evolution theory
Humans on earth are like a petri dish experiment, once all the microcosms reach the
edge of the petri dish, everything dies
o Human population has grown to the point where we would need to grow more
food in the next fifty years than we have in our entire existence
o The climate also cannot sustain this growth
o We are coming close to the edge of the petri dish, some drastic changes will
be needed

Percolate Keynote VP Marketing, Marriott and WeWork

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Hard to know where you are in the transition, but you should know, to grow the brand
Must answer:
o What?
o So What?
o Now What?

More SKUs, less market share for all therefore brands must find new markets

Theres more people to talk to and more people with disposable income

Job of marketing is to create demand; creating a great customer experience is not

marketing, thats just table steaks

A company like P&G works with 2500 agencies worldwide, complexity of marketing is
growing

o
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Global coordination means delivering whats applicable to the right market

Content needs to say the same thing in different ways for the specific market
Lack of visibility how consistent and on brand are we across all channels?

o
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What hasnt changes is that budgets havent grown with all the activities companies
need to do
It takes discipline to grow a brand: Ask yourself why you need a blog. Be ready to
step away if you dont have the resources.
Demand for marketing has been growing exponentially, content needs are doubling,
but budgets dont

Percolate builds a system of record for marketing because 90% of a marketers time
is in the planning stage, not the channel execution and analysis, agencies usually
provide that service

Percolate provides a system of record for marketing

Percolate system shows all the activities for the year, the budget and status in
calendar view

Also shows analytics for specific campaigns in the same place

Expand a certain campaign to see final assets developed, all assets are housed in a
cloud system that would be accessible to the entire team for reference and easily
shared.

Create templates through the systems as well to quickly develop new content

Brief is also done online and can be shared real time with key stakeholders for review
and edits real time

Approvers list

Information about each campaign is easy to pull up and access for reference at any
time for all teams in the company after the campaign

Three areas in which Percolate offers a cloud marketing solution

VP Marketing Marriot: If you take care of your associates, theyll take care of your
business and your customers will take care of your brand
o Know the why behind the content, if the campaign is for brand awareness, the same
sales metrics such as ROI and payback is not that relevant
o Brand awareness metrics:
o Content views
o # of likes
o length of views
o See two Bellman Video from Marriot and how that is tweaked for each market

Story driven design James Buckhouse, Former Head of Content @ Twitter,

Cinematographer for Shrek and Madagascar

o
o
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Marketers goal is to try and connect customers with their values

People dont care about your apps features. So you need to convince them by
changing their emotional state. If you can get people invested in your brands story,
youll have interested eyeballs regardless of how much money you have.
See: stories.twitter.com for how twitter created stories, facebook does the same and
many other brands are doing so as well

The stories focus on ordinary against extraordinary, ie. Kevin Durant tweeting
to play a flag football game and finding a neighborhood game to join

Typical story phases in most movies

Twitter created cheap magic mirror at awards shows, had celebrities tweet photos
from the mirror, which was just an ipad. Allowed twitter to create special content and
drive more traffic to its pages

o
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Another campaign that they did was to increase the interest in Soccer
They posed the right question, Do you love America?, obviously celebrities could
not say no to loving America. Twitter gave them custom shirts to pose with and got
all the endorsements for their campaign for free #onenationoneteam

Exception content should follow the above and the following:

o Express POV
o Get to work thinking about the story
o Prompt useful action
o Measure what matters
o Shareworthy
o Skim and tell
o Show, dont tell

Unlocking Digitals True Potential: Sophisticated Mass Marketing Karl

Meinhardt, VP Marketing, Albertsons & Max Kalehoff, CMO, Social Code

Dont focus on metrics like likes focus on the above instead, which actually helps
the bottom line

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Smart retailers are able to track shoppers back to their retail UserID and present
them with more relevant information later on
Facebook: only 1.5 seconds to capture attention
Relevancy is the new currency: must have huge content bank with great value to
draw from
Thumbstopping creative:
o Albertsons only uses video, carousel and canvas ads, static ads are less
effective
o Through the analytics from digital ads, they use that to inform other media
creative like TV or radio

Impossible to predict influence, but at the end of the day, media is better at
helping sustain growth

Likes dont matter, sales do: engagement should not be the goal

Who Invented the Millenial Tim Hwang: Head of Policy and AI at

Google

The Millennial Gen: You live, you belieb, you die

The Gen after the millennials is the Homeland Gen

Stereotypes around the millennials are actually not very accurate, it was a way for
someone in advertising to classify a group of people born between 1981-2005.

o
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First interview from the founder of Gawker after bankruptcy due to the Hulk Hogan
story. He says he is thankful for the lawsuit and how that ordeal actually made his life
story more interesting.
Gawker was the last media outlet that wasnt owned by a large media company
Nick will look for other ways to tell the story and keep it interesting

Marketing In Transition Keith Weed, CMO, Unilever

o
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Key trends everyone should keep an eye on (boo nest). All brands must have a point
of view about the future to success
Marketers need to stop selling a product, but more so focus on selling a service
Keith encourages brands to find ways to interact with people and meet them where
they are. Ie. 76% of people uses emojis everyday and found an insight that theres
curly hair discrimination, so they started the Curly Hair Emoji project for Dove to
represent women of all different ethnicities with curly hair.
Even though the project was simple, it recognized customers as unique individuals
while leveraging a social media phenomenon. The campaign got over one billion
impressions.

See Romeo Reboot Axe Campaign for how they had individual targeted creative

Unilevers Ben and Jerry climate change campaign allowed them to scale impact and
align with a good social cause
o Benandjerry.com/climate
Unilever also building up their corporate identity and not just the brands they own
with their viral video: Farewell to the forest

Building Brands that Last Jennifer Sey, CMO Levis, Joseph

Puthussery, VP Marketing, Cisco, Melissa Proctor, CMO, Atlanta
Hawks

Levis:
o No matter what you sell, you should create the conditions where people can form a
bond with your brand.
o Our mission is to capture these stories every day, and create the conditions where
fans can create new ones.

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Atlanta Hawks repositioned their outdated brand to resonate with the younger
generation
During that process, they came up with their 5 Bs to implement

Example of how the Hawks resonated with the younger gen. Instead of using a
regular season schedule, they depicted it with emojis because that works better with
their audience and through that they were able to stand out from the crowd

CISCO: How marketing has changed

Campaigns are real time, everyday standups are done at Cisco because things
change on the go

They use a single platform to connect all pillars

Ciscos VPs slide on future trends

How to test and invest in new channels Marketing leaders from

GE, Chobani and ABN

o
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GE uses snapchat to own the narrative with the next generation and tap into their
future customers
Ingrained in their company is to push the boundaries and be innovative, so their
marketing approach must follow the same philosophy

Their snapchats generate 60M impressions

o
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Example of a bad Instagram post

Diet Coke is shown 6 times, do not overbrand, keep it real on instragram

Chobanis success on Instagram

Chobanis 7 key principles for instagram

When it comes to new ideas, new channels just do it and do what you can to make
it successful, think through the fundamentals
To keep up, you need to be nimble and work quickly, not everything needs to go up
the flagpole