This Future of Marketing Briefing covers the latest in marketing for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Friday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →This week’s second-quarter earnings calls featured several big brand bosses pointing to their companies’ ability not just to spend advertising dollars, but spend them well.
Starbucks chief Brian Nicol, for example, devoted time during the coffee chain’s earnings call to praise his CMO Tressie Lieberman for her marshalling of its $190 million budget.
“I love the way they’re using the dollars. The budget will obviously continue to grow with the business as we grow,” he said. “The team and [Lieberman] are doing a great job of making sure that we’re investing in the places where we believe we can drive transactions, drive the brand, build that loyalty and love, and make sure people understand what Starbucks stands for.”
There was a similar story during Procter & Gamble’s earnings call. “We’ve gotten much better in our learnings over the past 12 months on what is the right mix of spending across these different investment buckets to get the biggest lift on the business,” said president and CEO Shailesh Jejurikar. His CFO Andre Schulten made the point even clearer. “I firmly believe we have a big opportunity to increase the effectiveness of our media spend … I don’t think we’re at 100% effectiveness potential, and that’s the investment we’re making in media capabilities,” said Schulten.
