Coworking with Michael Lamp

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

Michael Lamp is chief digital and social officer at the agency Hunter, where he has been for nearly two decades.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? I help brands figure out how to make their (often) old business models feel native to a digital audience, blending traditional methods with emerging technologies to meet people where they are online, engage them (first), and sell to them (second).

Favorite project you’ve worked on? The first project that pivoted my career from traditional PR to digital was back in 2009. I’d been with Hunter for one year and was an account executive on the food/bev team working on the Grey Poupon biz at Kraft. Fox News was making news out of President Obama’s burger order (adding Dijon mustard), calling him an elitist and not “of the people.” So we wrote an open letter, riffing on our brand heritage, urging Obama to “pardon” those who believe in free choice when choosing condiments. This was during the primitive days of social and digital, so we developed a microsite and pitched it to the media. The results were great and ranged from trade to consumer press.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? “There’s an app for that,” from the 3G rollout of Apple’s iPhone. I love anything that successfully blends utility with entertainment. This built off that tension perfectly, positioning these then-new devices as more than just phones but keys to solving daily problems and on-demand entertainment. The concept of time-shifted anything was still a very premium novelty (like TiVo!), so all of this in one’s pocket was game-changing. And apps propelled this further, showing how they’d easily sustain innovation over time.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: My first “internship” in college was actually the College Program at Walt Disney World. I was very good friends with Pluto and Eeyore (IYKYK), and that’s where I learned the art of IRL animation and honed my early presentation chops.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? Funny enough, both are tied to AI. I’m most optimistic about LLMs and their impact on communications, specifically our ability to drive better discovery of non-paid content (notably earned coverage and earned-on-owned social content). I’m least optimistic about where we are with the generative creative side of AI. The rapid innovation has not been dually met with rapid regulation, and I think creative is the longer-term threat to disinformation than the written word.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? Rachel Karten’s Link In Bio Substack—and her general social presence.