Moderated by Variety editors, Thursday’s conversations included the Academy, Emmy, and Grammy-winning artist Common, Pinterest’s head of global brand experiences and programs Judy Lee, and T-Mobile’s consumer chief marketing officer Vinayak Hegde, among many others.
The topics discussed included brand creation, understanding the consumer, and following the fast-changing trends influencing Gen Z consumers in today’s markets.
Below are some of the major takeaways from the second day.
Canva and Pinterest: Redefining Experiential Marketing with Creativity and Connection
Judy Lee, head of global brand experiences and programs at Pinterest, and Jimmy Knowles, global head of experiential at Canva, sat down with Variety‘s Todd Spangler to talk about the rapidly expanding realm of experiential marketing.
Within the last two years, Knowles and his team noted the desire for “IRL [in real life] experiences” between customers and Canva “has never been more palpable.” Leading a relatively new team of experiential marketers, Knowles has succeeded in finding ways consumers can physically “see” and “feel” the brand.
“It’s been really rewarding. Unlike Pinterest, Canva is relatively new to experiential. We’re still building our team and still building that practice up,” Knowles said. “It’s been exciting to see how our community has responded and reacted to that. We’ve been able to take those learnings to help shape our experiential strategy and how that starts to come to life. It’s been an exhilarating process.”
For Lee and her team at Pinterest, their key to success is planning ahead. Her events calendar is already filled until January 2026 and carefully divided between business-to-business and business-to-consumer efforts.
“For business-to-consumer moments, we’re focused on Gen Z and millennials. Gen Z is still our fastest-growing and largest audience on Pinterest, which is really exciting,” Lee said. “On the B2B side, where we really work closely with our business marketing team, our whole strategy is to unboring business-to-business. It can become such a sea of sameness. So that is really one of our most important creative strategies.”
Global CMO of Mars Inc. Explains How Mars Uses AI to Sell You Snickers
Gülen Bengi, global CMO of Mars Inc. and chief growth officer of Mars Snacking, joined the Variety Ad Week Studio to discuss how the century-old brand continues to rule the snack industry in 2024.
Bengi emphasized that creating advertising experiences that are “personalized or customized” to every group of consumers is key to success in today’s market. Embracing this fact, Mars created a generative AI that embodied their famous Snickers slogan, “You’re not you when you’re hungry.”
“We worked with one of the most famous coaches in European Championship soccer, José Moreno, to use generative AI to help him provide some banter for the fans,” Bengi said. “As you know, Snickers stands for, ‘you’re not you when you’re hungry,’ and this was a whole campaign poking fun at the strange things or the mistakes we do when we are hungry.”
Common Explains Why T-Moblie Was His Perfect Home for an Advertising Campaign
Vinayak Hegde, consumer chief marketing officer at T-Mobile, Common, Academy Award, Emmy and Grammy-winning artist and Andrew Panay founder and chief executive officer of Panay Films joined the Variety Ad Week Studio to discuss their collaboration on the latest run of T-Moblie ads featuring the Chicago hip-hop legend.
Panay is always searching for talent with “authentic voices.” Having been a long-time fan of Common and his “incredible sense of humor,” it was a “no-brainer” to bring him on for a campaign with T-Moblie.
“He’s completely honest and comes across that way,” Panay said. “We love artists to be part of the conversation and part of the creative. So we have an incredible partnership.”
Common said when taking a job in advertising, the product “has to be something that I’m about in some way or another.” T-Mobile’s goal of connecting people through their products resonated with him, saying that as an artist, his goal is also to “connect with people.”
“If something doesn’t work, if it doesn’t align or feel right, I’m not going to be doing this product,” Common said. “That’s not what I’m really about. When you find that partnership that you can build on, that’s part of the criteria.”
Warner Brothers Discovery CRO Discusses Brand Revolution and Future of Global Content Business
Bruce Campbell, chief revenue and strategy officer at Warner Bros. Discovery, said he enjoys direct engagement with the operating arms such as the ad sales and distribution teams. He detailed the process of getting each of these units to work cohesively, citing opportunities for brands to engage with some of the company’s theatrical films such as “Wonka,” “Barbie” and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” as a means of revenue generation.
“We have to make sure we’re bringing to brands every asset we have to offer,” Campbell said. “There’s so much incredible innovation going on. And there are so many great products and technologies out there for creating more targeted products and, and reaching audiences in a much more focused way beyond just the traditional demographics.”
Campbell added that Warner Bros. Discovery’s relationship with Universal Studios allows the company to be competitive on a global scale when it comes to licensed experiences such as the Harry Potter theme park or Warner Bros. studio tours. He said Warner Bros. is currently in 65 countries globally and has teams that can identify local content, sell into local ad sales markets and facilitate international growth for the company.
On AI initiatives, Campbell said many executives are reviewing and implementing potential uses of technology into the company for marketing assets, enterprise efficiency and tracking client engagement.
“When we look at how we better utilize the data, we have to deliver more targeted products and segment our audiences better. There’s some great technologies out there for harnessing AI and machine learning to do that in a much more effective way,” Campbell said. “When it comes to generative AI, content creation is both an opportunity, but something we have to be extremely careful about.”
Sean Downey on YouTube Growth and the Transformational Power of Tech at Google
Sean Downey, president of America and global partner at Google, said Google has implemented AI into its advertising products for the past decade. He discussed business applications across the industry, such as transformation curves and modeling to predict audience behavior, building at scale, and identifying key insights from data.
“AI has the potential to be a real jet pack for people’s businesses,” Downey said. “We get the privilege of going into a marketer or a brand’s office and showcasing how they can use AI to boost their performance and have better business outcomes. We can show them how AI can eventually help them transform their operations to make them more effective.”
Downey said that AI is providing exponential growth opportunities for industry leaders. He explained technology is not necessarily going to replace jobs but rather empower people to do their jobs better. Downey added that humans will continue to do the strategic work at hand and build creative ideas but will likely do so using insights from AI that will enable growth.
“We spend a lot of time helping people understand foundations that must be true. How do they understand their data structures? How do they understand their campaign areas?” Downey said. “Most everyone’s using some AI tool in Google, whether it’s in Google Ads or in YouTube…using AI to power insights or power media, buying at scale or power, creativity in production.”
Downey shared his unique perspective on the growth of YouTube, as he was at Google only one year after the video platform was acquired. “It’s been a remarkable journey to see that become part of culture and media and become really a global phenomenon.” YouTube has gone on to spark a billion-dollar creator industry and even landed several Emmy nominations for its contributors.
Disney Advertising Leaders Discuss Client-Centric Strategies in Sports and Entertainment
Danielle Brown, SVP of sports brand solutions at Disney Advertising, and John Campbell, SVP of entertainment and streaming solutions at Disney Advertising, discussed the company’s partnerships and strategies in marketing across various brands.
Brown said she loves ESPN’s propensity to lean into market innovation regarding streaming, data and consumer relationships. Campbell added sponsorship opportunities and a new accelerator program for underrepresented small businesses called Project Elevate, which embodies the company’s entrepreneurial spirit.
Brown explained that cross-functional team meetings are prominent at Disney to ensure all the resources across the entire Disney advertising ecosystem are utilized effectively.
“There’s so much wealth of knowledge within the Walt Disney Company,” Brown said. “Tapping into those resources, I think helps us innovate… we streamline things for our advertisers and agencies. It really starts with the client’s KPI. What are the objectives they’re trying to accomplish? Are they a new brand? Are they an established brand? We work with Fortune 500 companies when it comes to integrations and making sure that they maintain that brand recognition.”
Brown added that Disney’s use of AI involves both technology and a human touch. She said Disney has an audit proprietary audience graph centered around 260 million devices across one hundred million homes. Machine learning and optimization through the consumer funnel also play a role, while the human component of Disney’s influence on brands and their desired goals remains prevalent.
“At Disney we have a major advantage with our audience graph,” Brown said. “We have a lot of rich data sets… the proprietary audience graph has also allowed us to build clean room technology that allows advertisers to plan, activate and measure against their campaigns all within the Disney Clean Room environment.”
Campbell detailed a key partnership with Hershey during the Halloween cycle pertaining to ownership and sponsorship rights, social execution, and more. The campaign resulted in 89% positive social sentiment, which Campbell contextualized as rare in today’s climate.
“It’s not just an integration within ‘Abbott Elementary’ on Hulu, but how do you find comedy fans throughout the ecosystem?” Campbell said. “It’s these layers that we’re able to expand our platforms for our partners… Disney Plus is going to be that immersive experience where consumers are gonna spend even more time.”
