Pinterest's Andréa Mallard On The Marketing Value Of Marketers Undervaluing Their Work

Today's episode I'm speaking with Andrea Mallard. Andrea is the Global Chief Marketing Communications Officer at Pinterest, and she's got a wildly broad portfolio, in particular for CMOs, and a relatively unusual breadth of accountability, which we're going to talk about. Get ready. She oversees teams responsible for comms, marketing, and product functions, including all global brand, product, and performance marketing, internal and external communications, product design, and all go-to-market efforts for both consumers and advertisers. Before joining Pinterest, Dre was CMO of Athleta, the women's apparel brand, and of digital health pioneer Omada Health. Visited that. It's all right, just want to make sure I got that right. And she spent nearly eight years at IDEO. Full disclosure: Dre also helped me get a tattoo on something that she declined to join me in doing herself, which we may or may not get into. All right, Dre, thank you so much for being here. Such a pleasure.

All right, let's get into it. For those who have been listening to our first five episodes, we typically have done 10 questions in 5 minutes. I think we're going to do seven questions in as quickly as we can. We've cut down. We're learning as we go along. All right, you ready?

First question: marketing is... the very well-told story of your why. A brand is... the conversation at a very high level. So on an ordinary day, I could be talking about the ordinary least squares regression analysis we need to... I have no idea what any of that just meant. The model we use to determine incrementality of our efforts, and jump from that to a meeting about where we edit that particular piece of footage to make it funnier on a spot that we're working on. So the movement from science to art is absolutely enormous, and you need to be really good at everything in between. Antonio Lucio, who's now back as CMO of HP, said something to me a couple years ago. He said, and I may have mentioned this in an earlier episode, but... them. That's right. So what's the hardest part of being a CEO from your perspective as a CMO?

I'm wondering if you think, and I'm going to digress for a second, that a CMO is also faced with that same requirement to make decisions based on incomplete information.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you and I were talking... it's just the entire planet. So yeah. All right, so the biggest tension between a CMO and her C-suite colleagues is the result of what do you think? Recognizing that it varies, of course.

So I tend to think that your articulation there, that mismatch between expectations of when and where marketing plays a role, I mean it's central to why we created this podcast to begin with. This is why do you think that that's happened over time? Like why does today's CEO, CFOs, so many of them who don't have marketing backgrounds, think marketing is what happens at the end, to use your words?

One of the things I was interested in your bio, because you're such a brilliant marketer, was in the bio there's actually you call out brand and performance marketing as opposed to marketing, right? And if we think about performance marketing, and I know there are people in the audience saying I can't believe he's going to... everything. One of the things that I find is yeah, we can measure everything, but are we measuring the right things? And do the measurements actually matter, right? And I'm kind of getting ahead of how I was going to let this conversation flow, but this point ties back when I said I didn't understand a word you just said, talked about the incrementality, right? How you measure for it. How are you measuring for incrementality? Because that's what matters most, or among the things that matters most. How are you guys doing it?

By the way, I kind of feel... you know, this is for the rest of the C-suite feed. I think that's a very important lesson for our CMO colleagues who often, in my opinion and observation, confuse objectives with strategies with tactics, right? When I hear that somebody is talking about 'well, I'm really dedicated to building brand,' I'm like, sure, as long as you understand that brand is in service of growth. Brand is a strategy. That's right. It either differentiates and compels and sends, it's the greatest influencer to purchase, or it's not. That's right. And I feel like a lot don't get that.

It makes perfect sense to me. And I'm old enough that I have never understood the bifurcation, I don't know if those are all words, but the dis-integration of that experience and management and holistic perspective. And I was listening to an interview that Brian Chesky did with Neil Patel of the Virgin. He was talking... said, 'I reorganized from a divisional business to a functional business so that we are all recognizing where what we do contributes to the function.' That's right. And it's not siloed incentives. That's right. And I mean, there's countless examples of products and brands where they're just shipping their order chart over and over again, and you can feel it and you can see it. And the customer does not care that these are two different teams that live in two different buildings in two different cities. Doesn't care, doesn't know. And all they feel is a disjointed experience, right? And so really having that, it's such a cliché but it's true, that user centricity and just saying this is ridiculous, this decision is mostly about inertia, it's not really about doing the right thing for the business or the customer. It's... is really saying we're trying to honor this one user at all times and to keep our promise to that person, to not drop the ball in the handoffs to each other, which is what ordinarily happens very easily if you don't watch out for it.

Completely. So I want to talk about emotion for a second, because I get twice a day and it's a Pinterest product, right? 'How am I feeling?' Yes. Will you tell me what it's called? Just... 'How We Feel.' So for those who don't... you provide inputs into that. I never do because I'm a bad user. Well, no such thing, actually. But no, I'm a bad user. But I keep it because it reminds me twice a day to check in with myself and see how I'm feeling. That's right. Because most of the time we're unaware, we're just feeling, we're not aware of feeling. That's right. I'm wondering what you know about feeling and about the role of emotion from the perspective both in marketing to the consumer and the customer, both of whom have in common their humanity. What do you know about the role of emotion in leading to purchase, to the end result, to the... why I asked? Well, I say that to say, so 'How We Feel' is separate from Pinterest now and it's a nonprofit and it's run by our founder, this brilliant guy, Ben Silverman. That's right. I got a story about him. Okay, well let's make sure we get it on camera. But the germ of the idea was, we know a lot about what it feels like for users to use Pinterest and how quickly we can screw that up if we're not careful.

Well, it's initially again it comes from talking to... an escape from the toxicity of what was becoming an increasingly awful experience in the category that we're often lumped in with, but we're quite different from, truthfully, quite purposefully, consciously, purposely you have to. And what we realized was, what might have started as accidentally true, if I'm being my most conservative about it, we needed to make deliberately true in the product and make a lot of design decisions.

So there were a lot of things I think that Pinterest could have done to increase engagement and retention that harnessed our most lizard brain to get people to stay on, to engage... down on that. It feels your current CEO feels exactly the same way. Everyone in this building feels the same way. And they said there is something really critical about a place for people to dream about their own lives without performing it for somebody else, without trying to figure out what the whole world likes about them. They have to figure out who you are and what you like about yourself. And there are certain things that cannot be part of that experience because they destroy it instantly. They destroy it instantly. And so as we got to, I mean we worked with UC Berkeley, we worked with actual experts and academics to say how do we protect the emotional well-being of our users for real, for real, for real? Not because it's a nice headline, not because it's a PR move, but... a lot of them on the surface look like they're antithetical to growth. We've proven they actually aren't, but on the surface they may seem that.

That's right. So we paid a lot of attention to the signals we were hearing out in the world, not just with our users but broadly in culture, and started to believe very... the building. And we also saw the effects it was having. There's all sorts of research and literature out there about the effects of too much time on your phone and too much time on social media on young people in particular. And so certainly on the marketing side, we started to really pay attention to Gen Z and really get to know them and really market towards them. And the net effect of that was that we are the only platform that is aging down. In other words, typically what happens with any app, any social media company, is they do really well with their initial cohort and then they just age up with them, and every subsequent cohort gets smaller. At Pinterest, it's exactly the reverse. So we started with, let's say, Gen X, the youngest Gen X that would be me, then it was the Millennials, and then it was Gen Z, but... opposite. We consciously built to do that. And what we said was, if we're going to really take seriously the emotional well-being of our users, and if we can speak to them about that, and if we can build something that's about honestly personal space... if you ask the average teenager, do they want personal space? Absolutely they do. And so I think that's actually a deeper need in a way than social validation, though everything has been tuned towards social validation because that's animal brain and that's an easy thing to trigger. It's harder to trigger the second thing, but once you're able to tap into it, I think it's much more durable, it's much more resilient. And that's what our numbers are reflecting. So we never stopped growing. We've consistently grown. I think we're their happy place. People come to us to feel better and to feel like they're investing in themselves and making plans for the future. Which by the way, making plans for the future is one of the most psychologically healthy things you can do for yourself. And so even that simple fact is, how do you make the process of making a plan for the future and imagining and dreaming feel more joyful and productive but still explorative as it really needs to be, especially when you're young? So we really tapped into a very deep human, healthy human need, as opposed to an unhealthy human instinct. And that has allowed us to build this kind of momentum that I think gave us the permission to say, hey, of course there's always short-term things you do for growth, that's fine, but as long as... instincts get in the way of needs and wants or the beneficial. That's right. Needs and wants. And so let me use that to get back to the original question, which I took us off topic on, which is what do you know about the architecture of the role of emotion in the picture of how people make decisions, whether it's to buy a pair of shoes or go on Pinterest or not go on Pinterest? That is important for our C-suite colleagues who may not understand, to understand.

How did those insights then translate in your role as... speaking to... wondering if it's working and what you should do. So the first thing I realized was, because people come to Pinterest to plan, right? You don't go to Pinterest to pin what you did yesterday. You save ideas that you're going to do. So we quite literally see the future first. We know what's going to happen before any other platform knows it's going to happen. Everyone else tends to be good at what's happening today. We are good at predicting what's going to happen. And so as soon as I realized that, we started to pull insights at a very deep level about predictive insights, trend data. So now that's called Pinterest Predicts and it's an annual event. But besides that, we also have trend tools that we want marketers, and we're trying to train advertisers to use more, to say you can use all of this data to see where your... line incrementality. You should be thinking about where things are going and making sure you're on the ground floor of that organic upswing. And here's how you should also understand the adjacency. So no one comes to Pinterest to just pin kitchen ideas. They do kitchen, then they do beauty, then they do fashion, then they do trips. And you start to see we can build a really interesting taste graph of what are the associations between these products, hundreds of products maybe. And the more we can give that back... I remember at Athleta, when we were looking at the Pinterest data, we found out that the best time to acquire an Athleta user was when they were pregnant. We saw that on Pinterest. And I remember thinking, and everyone had a good theory for why. And it was like, oh, because you want... saving athletic products under board names that said 'stretchy pants for big bellies.' That's what women were doing. So we had this really interesting qual-quant combination that was so beautiful on Pinterest that said, oh my gosh, now we can talk to them about health and all those things, but let's be clear about just the product that they love and why they like it at this moment, and make the right inference, not the wrong one, because we're not actually paying attention to both qual and quant.