Our favorite quotes from The Brief

Marketing Brew held The Brief, our second-ever in-person summit, in New York City last week. We had cheese, wine, and nearly eight hours of the industry’s practitioners getting their hands in the metaphorical mud, breaking down the marketing magic they do day in and day out.

If you couldn’t make it, here are just a few of our favorite quotes from the event.

So, are clients still asking about the metaverse? “No, because they’re all talking about generative AI. They’re like, ‘Meta-what? What was that?’” Solange Claudio, president of creative agency Formerly Known As, joked. “I think it was just a little too early.”

But don’t close the book just yet—the metaverse might just need another couple of years in the oven, Greg Hahn, co-founder and CCO at Mischief @ No Fixed Address, explained.

“Everyone was so eager to jump on it, and we got a bad version of it,” he said. “I think in about six years, maybe, when the people who were born into it have gotten jobs, we’ll see a different metaverse.”

“Nice. New. Nonstop.” Those are the three words Breeze Airways used to introduce itself to travelers, no easy feat for a low-cost airline that didn’t start flying until the middle of a global pandemic.

Keeping messaging succinct is something Angela Vargo, Breeze Airways’s VP of marketing, communications, and product experience, imparted to marketers during a workshop.

“If you had to define your brand and company in three words and one image, what would that be? Because if you can’t, you might be a little bit too cluttered,” she said. “Every time you’re writing, every time you’re doing copy, anytime you’re communicating, if [you] can’t say it in three words or less, then maybe it’s just too much, because we have very short attention spans these days; everyone’s just scrolling and clicking and scrolling.”

Odd pairings: Fast food and fitness have more in common than you might think, Zipporah Allen, chief business officer at the fitness app Strava, who previously worked at Taco Bell as the brand’s chief digital officer, explained.

“There’s actually a lot of similarities. As marketers, what is really important is to tap into the emotion—you’ve got to hit people in the heart. We don’t make rational decisions as human beings; we make decisions with our heart most of the time, and with our gut and our emotion,” she said. “What’s similar about fast food and fitness is [that] food is very emotional. And I have a lot of memories about food growing up. And it turns out fitness and activity is maybe even more emotional, because it is tied to who you are as a person.”

It’s true, the decision to eat Taco Bell is definitely made with our hearts, usually around 3am.

From CMO to CEO: As CMO of digital art marketplace Artsy, Everette Taylor was direct about his career aspirations.“I went to my CEO early into my tenure and said, ‘I want your job,’” he said.

“I knew that I wanted to be CEO of Artsy or CEO in my next role, and so our one-on-ones weren’t the normal one-on-ones where we’re talking about [marketing],” Taylor said. “We’re going through P&L, we’re talking about finances, engineers, people, and culture—different parts of the business. I felt very fortunate that I was able to really get trained up by one of the best, Mike Steib at Artsy, to get a lot of those skills.”

Those skills seem to have been helpful: today, Taylor is the CEO of Kickstarter.

Tick, tick, tick on TikTok? The short-form video platform isn’t quite what it used to be, at least for marketers, Cody Plofker, CMO of Jones Road Beauty, said.

“A little bit over a year ago was probably the best time to be on TikTok,” Plofker said. “Brands were really flocking to it, and for good reason: The reach there was a lot stronger than anywhere else, but I think Meta is probably not getting enough credit for some of the changes that they’ve made,” he said, citing a figure shared by Meta that 40% of content shown on Instagram is coming from AI recommendations.

Attention from the government and other controversies have diminished user trust in TikTok, affecting advertisers’ ROI, he said. “People are thinking more about the platform that they’re buying on, so because trust is down on TikTok, you’re not going to see the same return on your ad spend.”