Brand Insider

MediaPost
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  • Marketing
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MediaPost's Intimate marketing, advertising and strategy discussions with top brand marketers.

  1. 4d ago

    Ep. 223 with Craig Brommers, CMO, American Eagle

    My parents were strong believers in after-school jobs. If I wanted something, I was expected to earn it myself, not ask for it. I cleaned a fabric store, I scooped ice cream at Bruster’s, but my favorite job was working at American Eagle. Shout out to Store 885 at North Point Mall.  Sure, the $10 per hour was great, but what does a 16-year-old girl like more than money? Clothes. And the 40% employee discount paid dividends to me when I was in high school. So, for two years I paid my dues to the retail gods in sacrifice to fashion.  I folded (and refolded) graphic Ts. I worked overnight on floor sets, swapping out inventory when the season changed. I clocked in at 4 a.m. on Black Friday back when people still lined up outside malls. To this day, I still fold my jeans the American Eagle way. After I graduated, I left for college at University of Florida, but that first summer home I went right back to American Eagle. Sure, I needed some cash, but more importantly, I needed that 40% employee discount for my Rush outfits the following August. When I Rushed, RushTok wasn’t a thing. Hell, this was before TikTok and Instagram were a thing and when Facebook was still limited to .EDU email addresses. Our Rush dance routines looked like bad backup dancers in a Mandy Moore music video. RushTok, from where I sit now, is a genuinely terrifying place for a millennial. I do not recommend this for the faint of heart.  For American Eagle, showing up for Rush isn’t foreign territory. They belong there. They’re running sorority house takeovers, content studios and DIY denim drops, treating RushTok not as a moment to capitalize on but an economy to build. How do you take a viral, fast-moving moment like Rush and turn it into something durable? What does the creator economy unlock that a traditional media buy never could? And when dozens of brands are chasing the same audience, how do you make sure yours sticks out? We sat down with CMO Craig Brommers to find out.

    Ep. 223 with Craig Brommers, CMO, American Eagle

  2. Aug 20

    Ep. 222 with Dan Chodrow, Executive Creative Director, Goodles

    I'm Southern through and through, which means I take my comfort food seriously. Fried chicken. Cornbread. Sweet tea.  A simple mayo and tomato. And of course, mac and cheese. When I was a kid, homemade mac and cheese wasn’t always an option, so I found my way to the boxed variety. You know the one: blue box, orange cheese, one flavor. It was my go-to when I was on my own for dinner when my culinary skills consisted of boiling water and not burning the house down. My palate's grown up since then, and I’m pretty good in the kitchen, so most of the time, I make my own mac and cheese, but every once in a while, the old craving creeps back in. I need a specific nostalgia that only a powdered cheese packet can trigger. And when it does, what's in my cabinet these days isn't the mac and cheese of yore. It's Twist My Parm. It's Shella Good. It's Here Comes Truffle. When Goodles decided it was time to disrupt this Southern staple, they didn’t just update the box. They leaned in, hard. They called out the category for coasting on nostalgia instead of earning it. They realized they can’t out-spend the competition, so they wanted to out-weird, out-good and out-community them, turning these little acts of good into cultural moments. How do you convince consumers that a decades-old category needs disruption? How do you build a brand that wins over a four-year-old and her mom in the same bite? And what does it actually take to out-good instead of outspend?  We chatted with Executive Creative Director, Dan Chodrow, to find out.

    Ep. 222 with Dan Chodrow, Executive Creative Director, Goodles

  3. Aug 13

    Ep. 221 with Tamika Young, CMO, Hinge

    In December 2014, I matched with a guy on Hinge that I had 19 mutual friends with. Back then, Hinge was built on matching you off of your Facebook network. They only matched you with friends of friends, so there was some built-in reassurance that whoever you were meeting wasn’t a total stranger. We got drinks, and we had a great time. We kissed, said our goodbyes, and went on our way. We tried to meet up again, but our schedules never lined up. There was an entire saga when he accused me of faking watching my friend’s 5-year-old to avoid seeing him, which for the record, I was not doing. A couple of weeks went by, and we just stopped trying.  Four months later, on a total whim, I texted him to see if that dinner offer still stood. Shockingly, he said yes. (Turns out we'd both still been seeing other people the night we met, so maybe some space is all you need.) I married that guy in 2019. We had our daughter in 2021. We laugh at it now, looking back, but if I’m being honest, somewhere in the middle of the silence, the vetting and the wrongful babysitting accusation, I was pretty skeptical it would go anywhere. That's the emotional territory Hinge is leaning into with its new campaign, "I Can't Believe We Met on Hinge." It's not the tidy, love-at-first-sight version of the story. It's the version where you’re tired from dating, you’re half-convinced to delete the app, but still, somehow, hold onto hope. It’s real couples, real footage, real names. It’s the truth of what dating actually feels like when it finally works out. In this week’s Brand Insider 1:1, we sat down with CMO Tamika Young to hear more.

    Ep. 221 with Tamika Young, CMO, Hinge

  4. Aug 5

    Ep. 220 with Natasha Madan, CMO, Credit Karma

    People don’t like talking about their finances. I’ve been with my husband for 11 years, and I still give him the side-eye when he asks how much is in my savings account. For many people, it’s uncomfortable talking about money because they don’t know what they’re doing. They were never taught how to manage their finances, the difference between saving and investing, Roth IRAs and 401(k)s, good debt and bad debt. I’m lucky to not be in that camp. My parents are annoyingly good with their money. Like retire-at-48 good with money. And outside of graduating college debt free, the best gift they’ve ever given me is financial literacy and financial freedom. Why wasn’t this taught in school? How could we have graduated high school with zero idea how to read a credit report, file taxes, or know what APR actually means? Isn’t managing your own finances the home economics course we all needed? It’s a gap everyone feels. In fact, a recent study found that 67% of Americans are more afraid of running out of money than they are of dying. It’s not that people don’t care about finances; people have real anxiety about it, and while there’s more information available, somehow there’s less confidence in what to actually do with it. That's not an information problem, that's a trust problem, and it's exactly the space our next guest is playing in. For years, Credit Karma has been known for one very specific thing: free credit scores. But a credit score doesn't tell you what to do next. How do you turn a number into guidance and guidance into a relationship people actually trust? In this week’s Brand Insider 1:1, we sat down with CMO Natasha Madan to find out.

    Ep. 220 with Natasha Madan, CMO, Credit Karma

  5. Jul 29

    Ep. 219 with Sravan Vadigepalli, Senior Director, AI, Lowe’s

    I honed my marketing chops at The Home Depot. I spent six years of my life in an orange apron. Six years reflighting media, plussing up paid search, and trying to predict the exact week spring will arrive so we can flip end caps from snow blowers to mulch.  If you've ever worked retail, you know brand loyalty doesn't end when you clock out for the last time. Brand loyalty like that is tattooed on you. So the fact that I'm sitting here, having a perfectly civilized conversation with today's guest, is honestly a small miracle. He's Lowe's. He’s my sworn enemy. He's the vest to my apron. The blue to my orange. And even though I’ve been out of the home improvement game for six years, I still feel like I’m going to get caught when I walk into that big blue box store. Old habits die hard. But here's the thing about rivalries: The good ones make you pay attention to the other side. And I have to hand it to Lowe's: what they're building right now, especially in AI, deserves respect.  Everyone is talking about AI. Every panel, every keynote, and every LinkedIn post has a suspiciously confident hot take. We're exhausted by it, but we can’t stop talking about it because there's just so much still unfolding, too many new use cases showing up every single week. And I hate to break it to you, but if you're still only using AI to make your mean email sound nice, you’re behind. Big time. The real conversation isn't about whether to use AI. It's about how to get started. Are no legacy systems weighing you down? Do you have decades of process and infrastructure you can’t just rip out and rebuild overnight? Or are you somewhere in the middle? How do you align strategy, product and partnerships while bringing a legacy organization along for the ride? We sat down with Lowe’s Senior Director of AI, Sravan Vadigepalli to find out.

    Ep. 219 with Sravan Vadigepalli, Senior Director, AI, Lowe’s

  6. Jul 22

    Ep. 218 with Katie Babineau, CMO, Beyond Yoga

    There is something truly therapeutic about sweating it out, but my fellow yogis out there know that after a couple of big sweats, those leggings are never quite the same. No amount of laundry detergent can restore them. Which is exactly why I have two separate legging categories in my closet – yoga leggings and lounge leggings – and never the twain shall cross. I can't subject my lounge leggings to the torture I put my yoga leggings through, and I can’t depend on my yoga leggings to be as comfortable as my lounge leggings. Lounge leggings matter more than you think. After 3 years of working from home, I genuinely don't know if I could go back to wearing real pants. I'll forever be business on top, casual on the bottom. In my 15 years of doing yoga, I’ve tried a lot of leggings. I was never loyal to one brand because it’s a hard balance to find: the performance I need when I’m putting in the work, the comfort I want when I’m laying on the couch, and the flexibility I need chasing my four-year-old around the playground. Can one athleisure brand actually do it all? Beyond Yoga is trying to do just that. The brand has taken its 20-year foundation and pushed it somewhere new: a modernized platform, IRL activations, and a full expansion into outerwear, lifestyle and dresses. It's a brand betting that progress over perfection and community-led product decisions can stretch a beloved name without breaking what made people love it in the first place. In this week’s Brand Insider 1:1, we sat down with CMO Katie Babineau to find out how they’re doing it.

    Ep. 218 with Katie Babineau, CMO, Beyond Yoga

  7. Jul 15

    Ep. 217 with Nancy Mammana, CMO, New York City Tourism + Conventions

    The World Cup Finals are this Sunday in New York. The 5-week saga that has taken over North America is coming to end this Sunday. There’s been something genuinely electric about watching this tournament unfold. Entire neighborhoods turn out in jerseys, half-a-dozen languages are heard at any given restaurant, and strangers hug over penalty kicks. It’s been a real reminder of what a shared obsession can do to a city.  This summer, New York has opened her arms to millions of people who’d never set foot in it before. It's one thing to host a World Cup; it's another to make eight million people and a few million strangers feel like they all belong to the same city, if only for a summer. No one has had a closer seat to that balancing act than my guest today. We sat down with Nancy Mammana, CMO at New York City Tourism + Conventions to hear how they pulled it off.

    Ep. 217 with Nancy Mammana, CMO, New York City Tourism + Conventions

  8. Jul 8

    Ep. 216 with Valerie Marks, Marketing Director, The Macallan

    Some drinks are symbols of celebration and reflection, handed down from one generation to another. Drinks when someone decides you are worth the good stuff. The Macallan has built an entire campaign around. It started with a social listening insight: People are often introduced to The Macallan by someone older — a parent, an uncle, a mentor — to mark an occasion, like a first house, a birthday, or a difficult life decision. A moment that deserved something more than whatever was in the cabinet. Rather than manufacture that story, they found someone living it: James Marsden and his son, Jack, a real generational handoff. At a moment when the alcohol category is navigating genuine headwinds and every brand is trying to figure out how to talk to a generation that's drinking more intentionally and spending more carefully, The Macallan made a bet on something timeless. The most powerful marketing isn't a campaign; it's a memory someone didn't know they were making.  We sat down with Valerie Marks, Marketing Director for The Macallan at Edrington to hear how they did it.

    Ep. 216 with Valerie Marks, Marketing Director, The Macallan
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About

MediaPost's Intimate marketing, advertising and strategy discussions with top brand marketers.

Information

  • Creator
    MediaPost
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    221
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © MediaPost
  • Show Website
    Brand Insider

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