Leading the Change Day 2: Building Effective and Inclusive Creative Strategies

Key LTC Insights:

• The right strategy now helps define and solidify your future competitive advantage.
• Brands and marketers comfortable with change will persevere.
• In Hispanic marketing, lead with expertise, insights and belief

Day two of Leading the Change welcomed author Rishad Tobaccowala, Eli Lilly Chief Media Officer Lina Shields, Alma’s Co-President and COO Isaac Mizrahi, We Believers Co-Founder and President Marco Vega, and Bud Light VP of Marketing Andy Goeler to the virtual stage.

The afternoon focused on putting the Inclusivity Imperative into action with creative strategies that work. And, while creative is meant to influence your sales today or in the near future, it became clear that long-term success is at stake, too. As Shields put it: “My job is to prepare the organization for ten years from now.”

Use these tips when considering and building Hispanic creative to future-proof your brand.

Embrace Change

Discussion of change came in different shapes and sizes — from demographic shifts to the impact of COVID on consumer behavior. Most notably was the idea that you can’t let change happen to you.

“Change sucks, but irrelevance is even worse,” said Tobaccowala. He suggests constantly upgrading our mental operating systems using tactics like spending an hour a day learning and doing one new thing every day. Build the muscle and use it to get in — and stay in — the game.

For Eli Lilly, an organization with a limited approach to Hispanic marketing for years before diving in, getting in the game meant foregoing the traditional business case and letting population numbers do the convincing. “Once you have an executive sponsor and positive results, which we did, the conversation becomes much easier. We knew we had to answer the right question: not should we do Hispanic marketing, but how are we going to do it correctly?”

For Bud Light, the number one beer brand with a 38-year history, staying on top means offering a broad range of products, selling to the largest swath of consumers possible, and looking for new ways to storytell — whether it’s through Mexican soccer or culturally-embedded music activations. Its first-ever partnership with Premios Juventud and singer Natti Natasha provided a colorful and confident environment to launch Bud Light Seltzer during the summer season — and straight into the hearts and minds of young Latinos.

Lead with Insights and Expertise

While Goeler uses crossover Hispanic passion points like music and soccer as the starting point for campaign ideas, Shields shared that after the investment is secured, you need expertise and learnings rooted in business acumen. It was important for her to hire someone into her organization who knew how to move products off shelves and who had the expertise to tap into the right external partners, in order to leverage insights to drive results.

The evolution of creative for the Lilly brand Trulicity  showed how insights progressed their messaging: They first took a “use what we have” approach — same actors and video, different narration — to launch in market within a four-month window. The second iteration used a Hispanic actor speaking directly to camera within a culturally relevant framework of entrepreneurship and family.

“Moving forward, we will center the POV of the patient even more and address the tensions that Latinos are feeling head-on.”

Believe in Something Bigger

“At the end of the day, you want your brand to inspire something,” said Vega. “When you truly believe and create, great things happen and people follow.”

Hundreds of thousands of people followed when Bud Light Seltzer had the big idea of reuniting one of the most famous bachata groups ever, Aventura, for a two-hour COVID streaming session. Make it 482,000 concurrent views of the event — or six times the capacity of Metlife Stadiums — to be exact. The event became the #2 trending topic on Twitter in the U.S. and #5 worldwide.

Shields agrees that brand is bigger than product. Eli Lilly doesn’t sell medicine; it sells better lives. And one unexpected benefit of its Hispanic marketing journey is that its patient-centric approach is “helping us elevate marketing across the organization.”

For a recap of LTC day 3, click here.