YouSaid · the spoken record

Melissa Grady

lines on the record: 62
first: 2020-12-15
most recent: 2020-12-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That are repeated in this. I like earthy, I like spicy, sometimes a little leather. I don't know actually what any of those things need. But I know that I like them because I've seen the frequency of them. So that's how my brain works. Let me just like pull it down. So when we look at any decision that I'm making on a regular day, the first thing I want to know is who's the customer, who's it going to impact, what's important to them, or how do they see things. And then I will, you know, ask all of my direct reports. Tell me what you think about this. I gather the information. My brain parses it out. And then I'm like, okay, here I go. This is what I want.”
2020-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the @!#$ does advertising work, with Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think probably not surprising. It's very heavily reliant on data. And so when I look at things and the way that I make decisions is I like to have a lot of data. And I think my brain almost starts to categorize things like if you think about I like statistics and that works for me. So I tend to almost plot things out. I can give you a very random example that has nothing to do with cars or my career, but will explain how I start to make decisions and understand things. I take things apart and then I put them back together. Now a good example of this is I really like wine and there are some wines that I like better than others and I don't know how to describe them. So I started asking when I would like a wine I would have the somalier or someone who understands wine describe it to me. And what I understood and what I started to see was there's certain words”
2020-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the @!#$ does advertising work, with Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ask everybody for their decision making framework, how they think about making decisions. You've worked in a bunch of different industries, data-driven advertising and targeting is a new way of thinking about it. What is your framework? How has it evolved?”
2020-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the @!#$ does advertising work, with Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's again like it's across the board. It really touches everything. And I think anything that touches the customer is something that marketing is either putting input into or making decisions on. So again, when we look at what is the customer experience of the future, how are people going to seamlessly shop? What are our digital experiences? What commercial's going to be on TV? Who's going to be the lead in the commercial? All of those things. And I think it's broader than I would have thought it was going to be.”
2020-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the @!#$ does advertising work, with Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really funny because I get asked this question a lot. I cannot tell you a general day. And I think it's interesting because you move through so many different things, like just today I was in some future product meetings and we're talking about the future of supercruise and EV vehicles. We had a holiday luncheon. I played some trivia. That was a fun little aside. I'm sitting here doing a podcast with you, which is something I think I hadn't really thought a lot about when I was thinking about what being a CMO would be. There is this side of, you know, doing different presentations, you know, almost being on a stage sometimes that I think was an interesting aspect. I hadn't thought as much about. And then obviously a ton of time on brand campaigns, on targeting strategies, you know, just those kind of things that we think about when we think about marketing.”
2020-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the @!#$ does advertising work, with Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think as far as CMOs go, I'm more of an interesting story because I really grew up in data-driven marketing, and that has been my passion since I was in college. I am weirdly passionate about statistics, but also I think why I'm in marketing and not doing something else is I love the combination of right brain and left brain thinking. So how do you take data and drive insight, which then drives really great, creative, really great planning? And all of those things is so important. And, you know, it's obvious because you can have the best data analysis in the world, but we use blank ads for control groups, right? Like we're able to now do control groups when we do advertising.”
2020-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the @!#$ does advertising work, with Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am very excited to talk to you. I feel like so much of the culture of the internet and really the world runs on advertising and it's not really explored outside of ad world. So I'm excited for you to help me understand it. You have a CMO Cadillac that stands for Chief Marketing Officer. You've had that job for a little bit over a year.”
2020-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the @!#$ does advertising work, with Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For a TV ad, we actually will do studies with panels of people and ask them, do you remember seeing any of these ads? What did you like? Whatever, then we measure it that way. For digital or addressable, we will hold out our control groups. We also have like an overall model that we do that will tell us multi-line advertising works better than this. If you do this, so like there's that. So there's just a lot of different ways that you experiment. And then, you know, sometimes you're looking at what percent of people engaged with the ad or things like that, which is, you know, they were given the opportunity to, did they or not?”
2020-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the @!#$ does advertising work, with Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I also asked Melissa to explain how she knows whether her ads are successful or not. After all, her goal is to sell more cars, but how can she know if a website banner ad is helping her more than a TV ad during an NFL game? It turns out that big advertisers will actually buy ad spots and then use them for things like public service announcements, showing them to a small group of people so they can create a control group, a base case to see if people that saw the real ads actually reacted to them.”
2020-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the @!#$ does advertising work, with Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Usually impressions, sometimes engagements, sometimes views, so on YouTube, we won't buy impressions, we'll buy views because too many people are skipping, right? So if you were supposed to get X and Y is bigger, then everybody is happy, we're all smiling, we're all nodding, here's how we'll do it again. And if Y was less than X, then we get what's called a make good or an ADU and we go back and we say, okay, now because I said you were going to get a million and you got $700,000, I'm going to give you these $300 or $400,000 in these places. Sports have been interesting lately because coming back into sports, I thought, I think we all thought that sports were going to be through the roof. But the truth is people haven't been buying sports. So we bought some spots, like in the NBA Finals, and then got extra because not enough people had watched.”
2020-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the @!#$ does advertising work, with Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because actually, it's funny that you say that I did that because I was thinking about how not automated that is too much of the time. But yeah, so then you go, and then your ad runs, and then people come back and they say you were supposed to get X. You actually got Y.”
2020-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the @!#$ does advertising work, with Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How you buy an ad, it's very interesting, and it goes back to you figure out who your target is. You figure out where they are, and then you have an IO, which is an insertion order, and you fill it out, and you say, I want to”
2020-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the @!#$ does advertising work, with Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT