This fourth episode of WARC’s “Marketing Truths” series explores how, where, and why brand campaigns appear in media channels to achieve optimal reach.
The first episode focused on the importance of effectiveness over efficiency; the second episode explored the greater marketing impact delivered by having a strong brand; and the third episode explored the cost of dull advertising and how creativity is a tool completely in a marketer’s control. In this episode, Ann Marie Kerwin is joined by Ilana Wiles, director of strategic media planning for Ally Financial.
Ann Marie Kerwin: Welcome to the WARC podcast. I'm Ann Marie Kerwin, America's editor. And today we'll be exploring why planning for reach is so important for marketing effectiveness. This is the fourth episode in our Marketing Truth series where we're talking with US marketers about how they are using the principles of marketing effectiveness in their work. Here at WARC, we've been advocates for marketing effectiveness for more than three decades. And what we found thanks to numerous research studies is there is a set of principles of marketing effectiveness that have been proven again and again to work.
Today we'll be talking about how the more people who see your messages, the more effective your campaign will be. But getting that media mix right is the tricky part, as we all know. My guest today is Ilana Wiles, Director of Strategic Media Planning for the digital financial services company, Ally Financial. Welcome Ilana!
Ilana Wiles: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.
Ann Marie: It's so great to have you here. So, tell us how you got started in media planning and what are you currently doing at Ally.
Ilana Wiles: I've been in media nearly my entire career. I just love the strategic planning process and what it's evolved into and, you know, how it is a mix of art and science. And I started my career at Zenith working on General Mills on Big G cereals and the Procter & Gamble account. CPG is just a great category to learn on, to give you those foundational skills that you need to determine how to do things like building campaigns for effective reach, determining the right levels for frequency, that ability to assess campaign impact over time, and using insights to make strategic optimizations. So, I'm really happy to have that background and that skill set and then to be able to apply it to my work at Ally and in the financial services category. And I've been at Ally for almost three years now and in my role, I oversee the end-to-end media strategy and the go-to-market implementation for all of our campaigns.
Ann Marie: What a great background to have this talk. So, reach is the foundation of media effectiveness and it remains important because growth tends to come from a large mass of light or infrequent buyers. So, reaching as broad a group of category buyers as possible is an important objective when planning media. How do you build that into your plan to reach all your potential buyers for Ally?
Ilana Wiles: I'd say that we build that into our plans through our targeting strategies. And those strategies and approaches are going to be nuanced depending on the objective. So, for example, when it comes to brand building and making people aware of Ally, that's really where we amplify our reach. We'll apply some filters to make sure that it matches our target audience, but we keep it intentionally broad because we want to reach as many qualified people as possible.
And then as we shift into media that's meant to move more mid-funnel metrics like consideration or favorability, that's where the context matters. So, we know that consumers are much more receptive to considering a new bank if they're going through certain life moments, whether you're thinking about it at the time or not, you're presented with these new financial challenges or opportunities. So, think about getting married, you're planning a big wedding, and you're about to merge your whole life with someone. Think about having your first child and preparing for everything that's gonna come with that journey. Moving into a new home or buying your first home ever. These are all key life moments where we can come in and we can be someone's financial ally. And I would say the same is true for passion points and things that you care about personally as well. So, through our sports sponsorship media, for example, we're an ally to the fans. So, we understand that if you are a passionate fan of that league or that team, doing that can cost a lot of money. So, we're there, we're in those key moments to connect and to get people to start thinking about their money differently.
Ann Marie: And so how are you thinking about expanding your reach to audiences that are newer to your consideration set?
Ilana Wiles: So, we've started to engage adult Gen Z a lot more in our media. So that's that audience where they're in their early 20s, they're stepping into adulthood, and they're stepping into their own when it comes to deciding if they're going to stick with the bank that their parents have always had, or if they're going to go out and they're going to start their own relationship with a financial institution.
We're all learning new things every day when it comes to Gen Z and their preferences, their media consumption, and their behaviors. But one thing that we do know about them is that they can be harder to reach through traditional media and they can be resistant to advertising as well. So, at Ally, we've developed a couple of strategies to reach Gen Z where they are and on their own terms.
Ann Marie: I know one of the areas that you guys have started using is gaming, which is such a huge interest to WARC subscribers.
Ilana Wiles: Gaming is an interesting one, right? Because we see usage pop across multiple generations, I would say it’s especially true for Gen Z. So, in 2023, we launched the Ally Arena, which is our island in Fortnite Creative. And it's this immersive experience where gamers can come, they can compete in challenges, they can win rewards, and all at the same time, they get to become familiar with Ally, with our brand, what we do, and what we stand for. And what's great about that experience is that it's all happening on Gen Z's terms in a medium that they're using nearly every single day. I also feel like you can't talk about Gen Z without talking about TikTok. TikTok is an interesting one because not only do we see the usage pop for Gen Z, but financial content and financial influencers in particular on the platform has just this massive scale. Financial content on TikTok has its hashtag. Fun fact, of course, it does, right? It's called “FinTok.” And what we saw was that these creators were posting TikToks about personal finance and how to manage your money, and they were getting billions of views. So, we wanted to take advantage of this, and in 2022, we partnered with TikTok and we built this first-to-market program where we created our own customized roster of creators. But there were a couple of things with how we approached this strategically that I think we’re really on point. So, the first was that we didn't want to just have a one-time relationship with these creators where they would post about Ally and then they would disappear. It was important to us as we were building this program that we establish these longer-term relationships with the creators so that they could post about us consistently, and they could serve as an extension of our brand voice on the platform. So that's one. The second piece was that the credibility was important because we are posting about financial content. And it has to be truthful and it has to be authentic. So we went out and we said, we didn't want to just work with any creators. We specifically went out and partnered with ones that were already customers of Ally because we wanted that level of authenticity. We wanted them to be able to truthfully speak about being a customer of Ally, using our app, using our products, and connecting it back to their personal life moments. So I think those two things were key to that program's success and we've seen that it, you know, has consistently been a top driver for us for business growth. So great strategies, I think, to just extend our reach to new audiences but do it in a meaningful way.
Ann Marie: I know the “Whoever you're saving for” campaign leans into the emotional connection. It is recognizing that people's financial decisions are intricately linked to their personal relationships, and their goals, as you were talking about earlier. So marketers need to use channels that can deliver reach and emotional engagement.
Traditionally that's been seen as something that TV can do or anything that's sort of video-based and then more demand-driven media like search is used for activation. I feel that with digital media the line between what works for brand and what works for activation is getting blurrier. How is Ally approaching your media mix?
Ilana Wiles: I think that the more traditional way to think about it is exactly what you just said, right? We have our reach channels where we can build awareness. We have our depth channels where we can tell a deeper story of who we are and what we do. And then we have our conversion channels where we're going to go out and find someone in the market and we expect them to take action immediately. And I don't think that structure is necessarily broken. But to your point, the distinction is increasingly blurry these days because there are just so many touch points and there are so many ways for someone to experience your brand. So in 2022, Ally partnered with the Mobile Marketing Association, the MMA, because we wanted to be able to understand and quantify for our business the impacts that brand media and performance media and brand messaging and performance messaging have on each other. So we partnered with the MMA, and over six months, about 860,000 households were exposed and surveyed, they were split into different subgroups, and they were served different combinations of brand and performance messaging. And then over that same six-month period, we were also able to track any actions that they took with the bank, whether or not they opened up accounts. And what we saw was that the audience that had heavier exposure to our brand advertising had a much higher lift in favorability. That lift was really important because we determined through this study that making someone favorable to Ally unlocks a lot of the value that we see with performance media. In tracking these audiences over six months, we saw that the exposed audience that became favorable was then six times more likely to open an account with Ally. And we saw that it was 87% more efficient to convert someone to open an account if they were favorable to the brand.
Ann Marie: That's so important and it's such a difficult thing to track sometimes because often the brand-building activity doesn't show up the way performance metrics might. You can immediately see in a month or two what's happened with performance metrics, but if you look over a longer period of time, that's when you see that brand building kick in and make the performance so much more efficient.
Ilana Wiles: Absolutely. And I'll tell you, we see this play out in our campaigns all the time when we're planning. So when we set our media plans and our channel mixes for campaigns, we'll do different planning scenarios. And we'll usually do a top-down scenario where we look at different levels of reach and frequency. We'll do a bottoms-up analysis when we're looking at how each channel is going to contribute to our conversion goals. And what we see when we run those scenarios is that it's never black and white. So some of the channels that we use for awareness that are our biggest reach drivers, we see and we have the data to show that they can be some of the most cost-effective drivers for conversion. Same thing when we look at our reach. We see that our conversion channels have big contributions to our overall reach and frequency as well. So we know as marketers that the funnel is never linear and that there isn't a clear distinction between the two, brand and performance, but I think it's always fun and interesting when you actually have the data to prove that out.
Ann Marie: A study conducted by the Advertising Research Foundation found that investing in cross-platform campaigns delivers a significantly higher ROI, and specifically going from one platform to two increases ROI by 19 percent, and then this growth pattern just continues. So three platforms deliver 23 percent higher ROI, four platforms 31 percent higher, and five platforms 35 percent higher, so you of just building and building. So how are you at Ally planning and balancing the number of media channels you're using?
Ilana Wiles: This is a really interesting question because I think that the media marketplace has just reached this extreme point of fragmentation that we've never seen before. There are so many touchpoints. And it's a real challenge for marketers, and especially for media planners because it's a challenge.
Ann Marie: Yeah, as you said, there's so many touchpoints.
Ilana Wiles: You want your brand to be in as many places as possible and all the time, but you just can't be everywhere all at once. So we have to take a thoughtful approach to this. And I'm a firm believer that reach will always be driven by things like channel diversification within your mix, dispersion of media to get the scale, and then committing to running that media, like you said, over longer periods and at steady and consistent levels. And we talk to, you know, as you can imagine, we talk to a lot of vendors on the sell side and a lot of the big players will try to sell you on the fact that they can reach every single adult in the entire United States. And you know, sometimes I believe it, but we know that our campaign reach will always be higher when we diversify our mix and add new channels and new partners to the plan. So when we're looking at our mix, you know, we're using a lot of the insights from our research team on what channels our target audience is consuming, when they're consuming, where they're going to be receptive to different types of messaging. And then, as I mentioned, we're doing a ton of scenario planning so that we can understand, you know, what the mix should look like at different reach and frequency levels. We're looking at, you know, how investment impacts those reach and frequency levels across the mix. And we use all of that information to back into how many channels we should be running at any given time. And then when we're decisioning the actual partners, there's a few things that standard we look for. So we want partners that have the scale. We want to make sure they have the audience that we're looking for and that we're going after. At Ally, we have a special sauce for how we like to go to market and how we like to show up. So we want to make sure they have the right capabilities and the right offerings that are going to be attractive to us. And then, you know, one very important thing, and I'd say is becoming increasingly important, is that we want to make sure that they can have the measurement in place that we need, right? So we're looking at whether or not they accept our standard forms of measurement. And if not, you know, are they willing to pull something custom together for us that we feel confident that we'll be able to use to measure our KPIs? I'd say that all of that is super important and then, you know, we get really smart about how we can use our programmatic investment as well so that, again, we can continue to scale our reach across a wider range of publishers and platforms.
Ann Marie: Measurement is getting to be so important, especially given the sheer number of touch points and every vendor has their way of measuring, so than trying to organize it all across, it's quite a challenge. But one of the things I love that Ally has done is this commitment to move all your sports sponsorship dollars to a 50-50 split between men's and women's sports. It's been shown that inclusive marketing has a real benefit to increase reach. Tell me about how that decision.
Ilana Wiles: Yeah, so if any of your listeners don't know about the pledge and why we started it, I'm happy to give that context. So even though we were seeing record-breaking viewership numbers in women's sports, I mean, look at earlier this month, the Women's March Madness Championship game, for example, and the viewership numbers for the entire tournament were just groundbreaking. But despite that fact, women's sports were still woefully underrepresented in the media. In fact, as of last year, women's sports accounted for less than 10% of media coverage. So in May of 2022, which was also the 50th anniversary of Title IX, we pledged to reach equal spending in our paid advertising across women's and men's sports programming. And that pledge is over the next five years. With our 50-50 pledge, we believe that we can use our media influence and our budget to help correct that imbalance and hopefully inspire other brands to join in on this mission as well. So we pledged in 2022 and 2023 was our first year fully living it in terms of our media strategy and our investment. So what we saw when we went to put this into the market, what we saw was that the audience was there. So we had the research that showed that millions and millions of US adults were identifying as being a fans of women's sports. So the audience was there, but the challenge was that we just didn't have enough places in media to reach them at scale. Again, because of that vicious cycle that we were seeing in women's sports and coverage. So that was the catalyst for our partnership with Disney. We sat down with them at the table and we said, okay, here's what we wanna do. Here's the impact, here's the scale we wanna make out in the marketplace. You guys are such big movers in this space. What can we do together? And we essentially created inventory where there wasn't any. So we did.
Ann Marie: I think that's so great. That's an amazing thing.
Ilana Wiles: It was really fun to bring it to life too. I mean, we did a year-long multimillion-dollar partnership with them across digital, social, and television, and we put 90% of that investment into women's sports content and coverage. We even created, you know, talking about building this new inventory, we created our segment in Sports Center, a reoccurring segment called the “Ally Moment Worth Saving” and it highlighted that week's most badass moment in women's sports. We even took over episodes of Sports Center where we had an all-female crew and all-female anchors, we had special segments called “Flip the Script Starring Sue Bird,” and we were able through this program to not only raise awareness of Ally as a brand, right, and what we do, but we were also able to raise awareness against this larger audience of that vicious cycle in women's sports and those discrepancies that we were seeing. So we're proud of that work. And I'd say Disney continues to be great partners for us, especially in the space of women's sports. That program with Disney was integral to launching our partner media approach and our strategy. And since then, we've just been finding new ways to diversify our mix so that we can extend our reach. So we've been doing that through new sponsorships like within the WNBA, the Las Vegas Aces, reigning back-to-back champs, not too shabby.
We are also sponsoring the USGA, which is the governing body of amateur golf in the US. And then earlier this year in March, we also announced that we are the official sponsor of Wrexham’s AFC Women's US Summer Tour. So a lot of fun updates to come with that partnership and really with all of our sponsorships. And then another thing that we'll be doing this year, which we're excited about, is that we'll be participating in Group M's first-ever women's sports marketplace, which they're going to be doing for the 2024/2025 upfront year. So we're participating, other Group M advertisers are going to be participating as well, and across all of their brands, Group M is gonna be going in and essentially doubling the annual investment that they have in women's sports across the board for their clients. And the cool thing about this is that they're going to be working directly with the sell side on programs that are going to drive the discovery, the promotion, and the monetization of women's sports. And I think what's unique about this, which will help to extend our reach, is that broadcast networks are going to be participating in this marketplace, but that's not all. They're also going to be bringing in a range of publishers. There are going to be potential investments with athlete-owned production companies with the leagues themselves. So a really exciting opportunity not just for our brand from a media investment standpoint, but also a way that we can help to drive systemic change in the way that women's sports media is bought and sold.
Ann Marie: The decision to equally support women's sports aligns with Ally Financial's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. And this year we've seen Procter & Gamble's Mark Pritchard out making a lot of presentations at industry conferences to make the case that inclusive marketing is a growth engine. He advocates for marketers to undertake the work to truly understand consumers using their products, listen to their needs and then answer those needs, and then craft their campaigns to demonstrate that they've listened noted that these campaigns, which include multicultural insights, often perform better than general market ads. So have you found that multicultural marketing is helping to maximize your reach?
Ilana Wiles: Yes, there's reaching and engaging with multicultural. Let me start that again. Reaching and engaging with multicultural audiences is important to Ally, especially since we're a financial institution and there are barriers to overcome when it comes to multicultural audiences putting their trust in banks, especially black African-American consumers and Hispanic consumers. As borrowers, black communities are more likely to face challenges in accessing banking products, which can already be difficult to secure. What we also know is that there is a ton of growth potential for us with multicultural audiences. Our approach to ensuring that our media is inclusive while still maximizing our reach is to make sure that we represent this diverse audience in everything that we do. And then we also make sure that we have the right media elements, the right creative and messaging, and just the right approach overall when it comes to diverse media because we know that those niche channels are really important for multicultural audiences. We found that when they're spending time consuming diverse media, it's a different mindset, it's a different experience. And frankly, it's a different expectation that the consumer has from advertisers of how they'll show up.
The campaign that we ran last year with Univision is a great example of how we do it and how we bring our campaigns to life. So we wanted to take advantage of that mass reach moment, which was of course the Latin Grammys, but it wasn't enough for us to just run our spot in the awards show and get the brand exposure. We wanted to go deeper and we wanted to connect. So we partnered with Univision
And together we told the story of an up-and-coming Latina talent that we saw was just making a big impact in her community. Her name is Valentina Garcia. She's known as DJ Very Wavy. And together across social media, we told her money story. So we talked about how she's navigated the financial challenges that she's had in her career so far to her biggest money moment, which was walking the red carpet at the Latin Grammys. And yes, we've seen that it helps increase our business impact. Not only are we able to increase trust and ally among multicultural audiences, but we've seen from our historical campaigns that we're able to attract incremental customers to the bank that we would not have been able to attract if it hadn't been for us extending our reach with multicultural marketing.
Ann Marie: I see sort of a theme running through the examples of the campaigns that you've done, which is understanding what the message is going to be at the moment that the consumer is consuming the media. And increasingly, I'm hearing from marketers that there's this desire to break down the silos between creative and media teams, that when the creative and media are in sync, the messaging is more effective. Have you been working with both creative and media teams to align?
Ilana Wiles: Yes, at Ally we agree that the two need to be in sync. You know, the reality is you can buy all the media in the world, but if your creativity doesn't break through, it's just going to be a wasted impression. I'd say that one thing that I love about my role and how it is a more centralized function is that my team and I get to work closely with our creative owners, not only across the brand but across our product lines as well. And we get to partner with them every day to build great campaigns.
So to ensure that we're always thinking about media and messaging in sync, we've refined all of our brief templates so that, you know, we used to have a separate brief for media, a separate brief for creative, and a separate brief for PR. Now we've streamlined all of that into one holistic campaign brief that all the cross-functional teams can use to plan the campaign together. And then as campaigns are in development, we try to maintain that approach. So if we are reviewing the media strategy, we always want to make sure that we're reviewing the messaging strategy at the same time so that we can make sure that the two are going to work together. Same thing, you know, as we've built a final plan and we have a final, final tactical media plan, we're looking at all the final creative elements as well and we're, you know, visualizing how they're going to look in these different environments so that we can make sure that everything is in sync, so that we can make sure that everything is optimal.
Ann Marie: So we're heading into May pretty soon, and that's always the TV upfront. Linear TV has always been the traditional channel for delivering big brand-building messaging to make that emotional connection. But today we also have a slew of streaming platforms. How are you planning for campaigns that appear on TV screens this day?
Ilana Wiles: So if you think back to 2022, that was a really important year because that was the year when viewership and streaming officially surpassed linear. But I think what's important to remember is that a lot of the viewership on streaming at that time was still happening in ad-free environments. And you know, you mentioned May and the upfront season coming up. I think something that is a really big turning point for this upcoming upfront year is that this year 2024/2025 is projected to be the first year where streaming ad supply is going to surpass linear ad supply which is a really big deal Allyally was an early adopter of CTV and streaming but now based off of where the eyeballs have shifted and you know the marketplace dynamics it's essential to our TV strategy. So we have a healthy mix now at this point across linear and streaming, and I'm anticipating that next year we'll follow a similar pattern. So when we think about planning the two together, we must look at our region and our frequency holistically across linear and streaming.
Ann Marie: Karen Nelson Field, who's amplified intelligence, founder, and CEO, has found that strong creativity can improve campaign performance. So a high-emotion ad will only garner 3% more attention seconds on low-attention media, but a high-emotion ad on a high-attention platform will draw 18% more attention seconds. What has been your experience when you have a high-emotion ad? Have you noticed a difference in performance based on what media you're using? Is there any media investment that you're finding works better because it does marry that attention with the high-emotion ad?
Ilana Wiles: One channel that we've been building up over the last year is our brand integrations and our product placement mix because we know that attention is going to be higher when someone is watching the actual content itself instead of the commercial break and It's also important to us when we think about how our brand can break through and add free environments as well So this year we were able to bring to fruition something that had been in development for some time, which is you know producing a series of our own. So this year we produced a series in partnership with Hello Sunshine called “Side Hustlers.” It premiered in early March of this year. It's a Roku original, so you can watch it on the Roku channel. And it's a docu-series about a group of female entrepreneurs that, you know, they all have nine to five regular jobs, but they also have a side hustle. And they wanna make that side hustle their reality. So they're mentored through the season by two investors, Emma Greed and Ashley Graham. And these entrepreneurs are mentored on how to pursue their dream careers full-time. And we felt like it was a story and a concept that perfectly aligned with our values to be your financial ally. We were able to integrate the brand into the content in an authentic way where the messaging, just felt natural.
Ann Marie: So often the difficulty about any branded content like this branded entertainment is figuring out how to measure it. How are you measuring the program?
Ilana Wiles: It's such a new space and we're still learning as we go, but we think about it really in two parts. We think about measuring the delivery of the program and then we think about measuring the impact. So, looking at the first one, the delivery, it's only going to make an impact if enough people see it. So, I think that goes back to really how we built the promotional elements with Roku as well because we had to make sure that we were going to get enough viewers to tune in. So we worked with them to make sure that we had all the promotional elements just right. We worked with Roku and we leveraged their ACR technology to make sure that we were going after people who already had a propensity to watch similar types of shows so that we could get in front of them and tell them about side hustlers. We worked with them on the ad formats for the promotional elements. We had to make sure everything was really visible on your Roku device. And all of that worked to help increase the delivery of the show. And I can share that it was the highest-rated premiere weekend for any Roku original program ever. On our side, we saw that search demand for Ally Bank was up 19% that opening weekend versus the weekend prior, which is a huge indicator for us that not only are people watching the show, but that it's driving a lot of interest for the brand as well.
And the fact that our brand integrations live within the content too, just gives us that additional lifetime media value that we can't get within the traditional ad stream. So the delivery of the program is really important. We have worked with our agencies to create our methodology for how we're going to determine the media value and the delivery for a lot of these programs because they're not bought and sold on CPM models like a lot of other traditional media are. So we work with our agencies and we've been developing these benchmarks for what we expect to hit in terms of delivery. And then as campaigns are running, we're gathering whatever we can to understand, okay, are we hitting our goal? Are we tracking ahead? Are we tracking behind? And then the second piece that I mentioned is the impact. So it's really important from a measurement perspective that we understand whether or not we're hitting our brand KPIs. So things like awareness of the bank, affinity, consideration, and favorability. And in that space, that's really where our amazing research team comes in. So we pull them in and we make sure that we pull them in early too. And we partner with the vendor and we'll work together to build a custom study so that we can understand if we're moving the needle. And typically that looks like a brand lift study, though I think that could potentially change in the future. But we'll work with the research team, we'll work with the vendor, and we'll understand okay what's going to be the right methodology to approach this? Is it a pre versus post? Is it a forced exposure? Are we able to do a control versus expose? Whatever that is, we work together and we figure out the best solution.
Ann Marie: That's great. I'll be interested to see what happens as it goes on, as you know that you've got a custom research piece in place to see what happens.
Ilana Wiles: Yes. And I can tell you that, you know, “Side Hustlers” had such a successful opening weekend and it's been doing, you know, performance has been so great so far. It's already been renewed for a second season. So we are excited about that one. And again, like I mentioned, just building up, you know, this piece of our channel mix even more as we move forward.
Ann Marie: Yes, well this has been such a great conversation. I just wanted to end and see if you have any advice for marketers who want to make sure that they have a very effective media strategy.
Ilana Wiles: Yes, sadly I don't have all the answers, but I do have some advice that I've used in my career. So I like to read and reread some of those, foundational marketing books on best practices and strategic principles to just kind of ground myself. I think as marketers and especially as media planners, you know, there's just so much data at our fingertips right now that we can get analysis paralysis. But, you know, if you just bring yourself back to the fundamentals, sometimes that can help. So one of my favorites is “How Brands Grow” by Byron Sharp. But, you know, I think everyone should read WARC’s “Anatomy of Effectiveness” as well. And then I would say, you know, don't be afraid of change.
You've got to stick with things long enough so that you can get meaningful results and determine what's working and what's not. But if you see that something is not working, you know, don't be afraid to pivot. I think the only constant in our industry at this point is change. There's always going to be, you know, updates to the media landscape. I think fragmentation is going to keep happening. There's going to be more mergers, more acquisitions, more new channels. But I think that you know, those strategic planning fundamentals are always going to remain. So, think about things like balancing effectiveness with efficiency, right? You want to have your key visibility premium moments break through, but then you have to lean on your efficiency drivers to help you build that scale, help with the continuity, and round out your mix. I think it's important to balance your long-term brand-building efforts with your short-term performance needs, but...you know, as we saw with the MMA Brandis performance study, you have to be mindful that the two are going to be forever intertwined. Right. And you have to take that into account when you're building your mix and your, and your strategies. And then of course, like we've been talking about this, this whole time you've got to expand your reach to as many qualified people as possible.
Ann Marie: That's great. And you guys have come up with some great ways to do that. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Ilana. This has been a great conversation.
Ilana Wiles: Thank you so much for having me. This has been so much fun.
Ann Marie: So up next in May, we'll be talking about our final marketing truth, which is building brands is much bigger than advertising. And for those listening, if you have examples of US companies that are doing great effective marketing and want to highlight that, or if you have an opinion on what works or doesn't work, we at Warwick are eager to hear from you. I'm Ann Marie Kerwin, America's editor. The WARC podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.
