Senior Vice President of Global Advertising Sales & Marketing - CNET Media Group, Paramount Global
Fifteen Seconds Festival 2016 – Keynote Katie Kulik, CBS Interactive
Don’t Compete Against the Web
Speaker:
Katie Kulik, Global SVP Ad Sales and Marketing, CBS Interactive
Mit 20 Jahren Branchenerfahrung leitet Katie von San Francisco aus ein Team von 170 Mitarbeitern, das die großen Multi-Channel-Kampagnen innerhalb der Markenfamilie von CBS produziert. Sie verantwortet 14 Marken in vier Business Units des US-amerikanischen News- und Entertainment-Riesen mit einem Gesamtreach von über 300 Millionen Usern im Monat und führt Studio 61, das Branded-Content-Studio von CBS.
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About Katie Kulik
At the Fifteen Seconds Festival in 2016, Katie Kulik, then Global SVP of Ad Sales and Marketing at CBS Interactive, delivered a keynote titled "Don’t Compete Against the Web." She discussed insights gained from her sales career and outlined five rules for marketing success, emphasizing the importance of creating a vertical with an endemic advertiser base and using simplicity to engage users. Kulik noted that "85 cents of every dollar of every new online ad was going to Google and Facebook, and all the other publishers were fighting for the rest," and referenced the acquisition of PC Tools by Symantec as an example of industry consolidation. Kulik, who led a team of 170 employees from San Francisco and oversaw 14 brands across four business units with a combined reach of over 300 million monthly users, also highlighted the growing variety of marketing channels, from site roadblocks to Snapchat video. She predicted that publishers and platforms would succeed by offering unexpected, clever content that appeals to diverse audiences, citing the popularity of unboxing videos on YouTube as an example.
Transcript (12 segments)
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Katie Kulik0:21
Hi, so when you spend most of your career in sales like I have, you see things from this really interesting vantage point. And if you're good at sales, you do a lot more listening and a lot less talking. And on the surface, you're trying to understand and listen to people's business challenges and see which of your assets you can use to help solve these challenges. But if you dig a little deeper and listen a little harder, you'll find that with all this listening and learning, you're seeing these really interesting insights and you're able to predict trends in your vertical before they become mainstream. And you're able to also see who will win and who will falter.
Later this summer, Weinstein Partners is releasing a movie called The Founder. It's the story of Ray Kroc. Now, Ray Kroc was a milkshake salesman—that's a tongue twister—in the 1950s. He would drive all around the United States to burger joints and try to sell them milkshake machines. At this one burger joint in Southern California, he saw a setup that he had never seen anywhere. It was the most efficient and innovative way to make burgers quickly that you could even imagine. He went in to sell them a milkshake machine and he came out partnering with them and is one of the founders of the McDonald's franchise that we know today. So when you think about this innovation and the insights that you're able to gather from sales, it's a really interesting fact. And when you're in sales during a period of industrial advancement like Ray Kroc was, or like we've been for the last 20 years from what was the beginning of digital media, it's exhilarating. So I've seen a lot of different businesses use the online medium to grow and it's an exciting place to be.
Back in 1995, I was living in Boston with some of my close friends. One of my roommate's brothers came to visit from Washington DC. We went out to dinner and then he proceeded to spend the entire night in our hallway with his heavy laptop plugged in, typing all night long. And the next morning I asked him what he was typing and he said, 'Well, I've started this online investment and personal finance chat room on AOL and all these people are asking me investment-oriented questions: what stocks to pick, what savings plan should I use, and I want to answer all the questions.' And the more he answered the questions, the more they started coming in. Soon enough, this AOL chat room became The Motley Fool. And I saw firsthand what Tom Gardner and his brother David were so passionate about building. Today, The Motley Fool is still one of the most prolific and well-respected personal finance and investment sites online.
And it wasn't too long after that I left one of the largest private banks in the United States and joined the newest trend in the world, which at the time in the 90s was the internet. Now at The Motley Fool, we were selling online banner ads, fool.com, and the site was mostly male, high household income, and investment-oriented decision makers. And I remember thinking, you know, I bet golf brands would be really interesting advertisers in this environment. So I cold-called every golf brand you can imagine and it turned out this was a very difficult sell. Prince was just launching a set of golf clubs and they suggested that we do a barter deal. So they gave us 10 clubs that we gave away at the holiday party and in exchange they got online banner ads. You could definitely say that golf brands were not an endemic advertiser for The Motley Fool. But when I called Fidelity, E*TRADE, Charles Schwab, Vanguard, it was a very different conversation. Those brands understood very quickly that the users on The Motley Fool were about to make an investment decision and a purchase. They were an endemic audience for them and when they marketed to them, they saw success quickly.
The Gardners found and realized early on in the web how to run a profitable business by sticking to their core and not straying too far from it. And if you go to their site today, you will still see these same brands sponsoring their content. Now at CBS, we own 25 websites. One of our largest from a traffic standpoint is CNET. And at CNET, users come because they have a technology issue, problem, or interest. They may be wanting to buy a new mobile phone or a TV, or understand what virtual reality is, or even something as simple as protecting their tech from antivirus.
Back in 2003, I worked very closely with a startup in the antivirus space called PC Tools. Now PC Tools provided antivirus protection to consumers and it was a very, and still is, a very competitive space. And they had a product that was really similar to all their competitors, but they found a way to market it in an innovative way with us at CNET. And as time went on, they, together, they and I helped drive millions of downloads of the antivirus product from PC Tools to protect millions of consumers. So many millions that in 2008, my friend, the co-founder, Peter sailed off into the sun literally in his brand new yacht when Symantec acquired PC Tools for almost $300 million. So this is obviously a very, very clear example of a brand using a medium to help users and consumers. Some examples may not be as clear, but the principles are the same. You need to find a medium where you can market your product and then do it in a way that capitalizes beyond what anybody else has been able to do in that medium. Or if you see a competitor doing something great, find a way to do it better.
Now when we think about what to do online and how the choices are growing and growing and growing, there's lots of different ways that marketers can market their product. And one thing I know for sure is marketers will always find the most innovative places to acquire new customers, whether that's on a front door roadblock on a site like CNET or GoDaddy branding a blimp or a six-second ad on or video on Snapchat. The choices are at this point almost even limitless. The continuum for where to market is vast and getting vaster. It's hard to even know whose story to listen to or to believe when you're being pitched an idea if you're a brand. But what I do know with certainty is that if you follow five simple rules and speak to your core and find a group of people who have a similar problem and you're able to solve that problem, you will win. The five rules are as follows:
Create a vertical that has an endemic advertiser base. It sounds very simple and straightforward and actually obvious, but you'd be really surprised about how many startups we consult with that actually don't even have this as a tenet in their business plan. And it's a key factor to succeeding online. A few months ago in the US, the New York Times released an article around what's going on in media today and it caused a big stir and a lot of buzz. Basically what this article said was that 85 cents of every new online ad, 85 cents of every dollar for every new online ad was going to Google and Facebook and all the other publishers were fighting for the rest. The opening line of the article even said something along the lines of, 'What was simmering concern is now complete panic.' So obviously it's very dramatic, but there are real elements of truth to this. If you are in a space creating content that's commoditized, undifferentiated, and expensive to produce, you will have problems. But if you can find this base of endemic advertisers and users who you're truly creating value for, you're starting to get to the right place.
The next thing you need is to create a place that is a purchase funnel where users are going fairly far down to the bottom of it. Now creating a commerce engine is not an easy feat by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a key essential element to publishers surviving in the digital media landscape. Whether that's buying a game, buying a video, or even the user who at 9:00 at night is surfing trying to find what show to watch, if you can intercept that user, that is gold. The third rule is that brand matters. Users have to trust your brand or you have nothing. At CBS, one of our biggest heritages and something that we're so proud of is this super premium content that we've been creating for years. Our content allows us to take bets because we've had success in the past. We're very excited this January to launch a slate of new original programs on the CBS All Access product and the first one is a brand that we all know and love, which is Star Trek.
Now the next rule is that scale also matters and is equally as important to brand. As I mentioned, we own 25 websites. Our lens is always how can we scale this. When we're looking to acquire a new site, the first thing we think about is could this site be number one in its vertical or is it number two with the real ability to get to number one. And if it isn't, we move on. And the last is focus on the core. If you were to tell me 10 years ago that CNET would be reviewing refrigerators, I would have thought you were crazy at the time. And actually even five years ago at CNET, we made most all of our money from five categories: laptops, desktops, cameras, phones, and TVs. But instead of just focusing on the success of the here and now, we placed some strategic bets and we built labs to review products for the smart home, technology for wearables, coffee makers, refrigerators, appliances big and small. And now we're in a place where we make our revenue from 12 different tech categories. We're much more diversified and are really in a much stronger position. So focusing on the core has paid off.
One of my favorite words is the word 'clever' and I love this word because it applies to everything and you know it when you see it. Recently we were at a friend's house for dinner and the 16-year-old son was leaving to go into the city to a party. After he left, I asked his mother what guidance or advice she gives in situations like this. In her beautiful Indian accent, she said, 'I tell him to be clever.' So we all know what can happen at an unchaperoned high school party, but instead of the normal rhetoric that parents say to their kids and it goes in one ear and out the other, she wasn't saying partake in bad behavior, but she was saying observe the situation and then handle it in a clever way. Sometimes even using the right word can make you visualize the outcome that you're looking for. And this is how it will be in the future. We all, people, marketers, publishers, platforms, we need to be more clever to survive and thrive in this digital media landscape. And simplicity will reign supreme.
You, me, all of us, we're so deep in our own individual worlds that we live in, in our business life and our personal life, sometimes we lose sight of the fact that even the simplest things can provide such delight and interest to so many different users. And simplicity is where it will go. Now I have two daughters who are six and eight and if I let them, they would spend hours if not days watching anonymous hands open Shopkins blind bags and baskets, which by the way, who even knew what that was a year ago on YouTube? Who would have also ever thought this was clever? But something about it is so unbelievably clever, I find myself watching it. And this is where it will be. These things that are so unexpected that all different sorts of people will see through different lights will be how all different publishers and platforms will succeed in the future. Thank you very much for your time and enjoy your lunch.