Terry Crews, Common and Top Execs on Advertising Industry Challenges

Oct 24, 2024

'Strictly Business' podcast features highlights from Variety's Ad Week studio presented by Canva

By Cynthia Littleton

Business Editor

What do consumers want? How is AI changing how business operates? When it comes to work habits — do you lean toward a whiteboard or mood board?

Those are among the lofty and light questions tackled by more than two dozen participants in the video studio that Variety hosted earlier this month in New York connection with Advertising Week. This week’s episode of Variety‘s “Strictly Business” weekly podcast features highlights from those conversations. We spoke with a mix of creative talent and blue-chip executives from companies ranging from Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal to Nvidia, CVS and Ford.

Here’s a sampling from the Variety Executive Interview Studio presented by Canva.

Terry Crews, on why he launched the creative advertising agency Super Serious:

“What inspired this was the fact that I love entertainment — period. And we found that people didn’t view commercials as entertaining — but we do. And my thing is, everything truly is entertainment. And when I hooked up with [Super Serious partner Matt O’Rourke] was years ago on the Old Spice campaign, and we really realized that it changed the game in so many ways. People were watching each commercial in a row on YouTube for like a half an hour, and we were like, wow, it changed the game in so many ways, we realize it is entertainment. And no matter where there’s a two-hour movie, a half-hour television show or a 30-second commercial, it has to be entertaining. …. I can’t tell you the number of campaigns I’ve turned down because they didn’t want me to serve the audience. I’d look at the brief, and I’m like, ‘Man, what are you talking about? There’s no serving anyone here. It’s just sell, sell, sell.'”

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Parbinder Dhariwal, VP and general manager of CVS’s Media Exchange advertising unit, on the rise of retail brands as media networks:

“The connectivity that retail media can bring to streaming TV — there’s a match made in heaven there and the way in which we can work. So, how do we layer on data and assets into streaming TV and addressable audiences to really drive more impact for advertising that can sit across that channel? And I see that continuing to grow. I’m sure we’ll announce some partnerships on that during over the course of the next 12 months.”

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Jennifer Storms, NBCUniversal’s chief marketing officer, entertainment and sports, on how NBCU works to connect viewers across linear, streaming and social media platforms:

“The opportunity there is very much around the infinity loop that we’ve created with linear and with streaming. That’s a superpower internally. We did it for the Olympics. We’re doing it for [new NBC drama] ‘Brilliant Minds,’ where you’re leveraging both NBC and then the next day on Peacock as this infinity loop to create a larger audience. … And when you look at something like Bravo — which we have next day on Peacock as well — over the past year, every single Bravo show has had increased its audience, and we attribute that very much to that infinity loop that we create as a company.”

Jamie Allan, Nvidia’s director of ad tech and digital marketing industries, on where he sees generative AI tools making the biggest impact in media and entertainment:

“The advertising industry is one of the biggest data flywheels of any sector, really. You can also look at financial services and healthcare as similar volumes of cyclical data information. As we increase the efficiency and the speed of processing data, you can create more intelligence from that data faster. And this is where we come into the world of generative AI and the tools that we’re building to enable enterprises both the end users of advertising, so the CMO groups in the industry, as well as the agencies and the ad tech companies to be able to derive huge amounts of value from that data faster. That will then enable the ability to create things like fine-tuned language models much, much quicker, with high levels of accuracy, that can then drive faster recommendation and really good consumer interaction.”

Cameron Curtis, executive VP of global digital marketing for Warner Bros., on the effectiveness of embracing fan-driven marketing via TikTok:

“On Tiktok, we worked with a new feature called their Spotlight unit. And essentially what that did was it took all of these assets that we were creating and put it into one location, so that when fans searched or wanted to learn more about ‘Dune 2,’ they found all of this incredible content. It also added attributes to all the user-generated content that was coming from the work we were doing. And what that did was, as you were searching, you were encountering people that were, you know, doing cosplay or reacting to trailers or celebrating the movie. And so when you think about, when you think about money can’t buy opportunities, when you think about real heat — a lot of times that shows up in with user generated content, and if you’re an audience member wondering about a movie, what better way than to find out more about it than to see creators and influencers and cast talking about it directly to you? … To me, the future of what we’re doing is making audiences the co-pilots of our campaigns, and not the passengers.”

(Pictured top, l. to r.: Terry Crews, Common, NBCUniversal’s Jennifer Storm)

“Strictly Business” is Variety’s weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. (Please click here to subscribe to our free newsletter.) New episodes debut every Wednesday and can be downloaded at Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and more.