Coworking with Gabie Kur

Each Tuesday, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Gabie Kur is SVP at Codeword, a creative communications agency. She’s worked at companies including Outbrain and BAM Communications throughout her career.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? It’s difficult to pick a “favorite child,” especially having worked with close to 100 brands of all different sizes. But there’s something to be said about the longevity of a relationship, especially when you work in the volatile tech and startup industry. I’ve been working alongside Coway, a global leader in health-minded home appliances (particularly air purifiers), as their external comms lead for the better half of a decade. We started working together when they were first launching in the US almost 10 years ago, bringing one smart air purifier to the market when air quality was not à la mode as it is now in the post-pandemic era.

It’s been extremely rewarding seeing the evolution of the company and our press strategy go from a very aggressive grind to get into every gift guide that existed and convince reviewers that they should be reviewing air purifiers to being named the top air purifier brand across the board in almost every guide and review on the subject that exists on the Internet. As a PR person, you don’t always get to see the fruits of your labor develop in that way, and so it’s likely been the most gratifying program to grow alongside.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? I love Upwork’s #MotherhoodWorks campaign, which advocates for making the corporate environment more conducive to working moms, especially those looking to reenter the workforce. Becoming a working mom myself during the pandemic was an extremely eye-opening experience to the way that work environments in their current state do not serve us. It’s become a passion of mine as a leader to find ways to change that, both where I work, and in the broader community. Seeing a brand provide resources and use their platform for a public plea to the same effect really resonated with me.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? Earned media will out-earn paid media: Ad spend is continuing to reflect lighter wallets as more brands prepare for economic uncertainty. But just because budgets are tightening doesn’t mean brands want to go full dark mode. Since no capital is needed for earned media placement (just the specialized time of some smart PR people), the brands that invest in earned media will win when the tides turn. Plus, at a time when consumers (both B2B and B2C) may not have the funds to buy from brands, the next best thing is reading about your products and bookmarking the spend for later.

While I am guilty of falling down the doomscroll rabbit hole of short-form video content à la TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, I’m not convinced this is our generation’s strongest future of communication and storytelling. Plus, brands have a tendency to ruin most things. So, with brands starting to oversaturate platforms like TikTok, combined with consumers realizing junk-food consumption of small-bite content is not good for their brains, I’m expecting this craze to fizzle out.