Marketing at 200 MPH: Sports sponsorship lessons from F1 & finance (podcast episode #125)

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Your first day at a new job. Sounds exciting, right?

Now imagine it's at a major bank in crisis, fresh off a £40 billion taxpayer bailout. Oh, and you're in charge of sports sponsorships – an easy target for public outrage.

That’s exactly where Louise Johnson found herself. What did she learn from that experience? 'You must be a master of yourself during uncertain times.'

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories from throughout her career, I talked to Louise Johnson, Global CEO, Fuse.

Fuse is part of Omnicom, which reported $14.7 billion in revenue in 2023. Johnson is a Board Director at Omnicom Media Group UK, and manages a team of 400 at Fuse.

Hear the full episode using this embedded player or by clicking through to your preferred audio streaming service using the links below it.

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Stories (with lessons) about what she made in marketing

Instill emotional discipline

Regularly challenge how you present yourself to the business. Optimism and emotional awareness are key factors in building a team.

In a world of continuous turbulence that impacts each individual in such different ways, it can be easy for businesses to get lost in the uncertainty. But business leaders are role models, so if your optimistic outlook is a little hazy, it may be time to try new ways to embrace the positive and project this onto the company with hyper-personalized strategies for all of your team members. Also, celebrate the wins, no matter how big or small. 

As an example, during lockdown Johnson’s team had weekly Board 121s with anyone who wanted to see them. This was a 30-minute Zoom or ‘walk and talk’ call where one of the team could ask Johnson anything professionally or personally. She would also ask what leadership could be doing more for them as an individual and for the agency. It was a great way to build personal relationships with the team and hear about any issues from the bottom up. It was very useful reverse mentoring for her, too.

You must be a master of yourself during uncertain times

Going through a crisis changes you. You must step into the fear and almost grieve the past, the good old days. This process makes you stronger, smarter and helps gain perspective on the things that really matter – you start taking the high ground more once you are through the crisis.

You must be a master of yourself during these times. Johnson found it useful to check and challenge herself with ‘how are you showing up’ to the agency, especially when so many people are looking at you in a crisis for direction and answers. To do this, it was important to make sure she was ‘feeding and watering’ herself properly – this involved getting regular exercise (boxing), eating well, and trying to get good quality sleep.

In 2008, she joined RBS Group from Vodafone to run their global sponsorship portfolio – the day she joined was literally the first day of the banking crisis.  When Johnson entered the RBS building in Bishopsgate London the TV screens in reception were showing the BBC News with headlines of ‘government bailing out RBS with £40B before the economy crashes.’  She questioned if she should turn around and walk out the door and never come back.

Johnson stayed. And rather than implementing a new future facing global partnership strategy, she had to unravel a legacy portfolio of sports properties costing millions of pounds to the taxpayer. There would be implications to the economy if RBS pulled out of certain UK-based sports partnerships, so she had to work closely with the government at No. 10 to de-risk as much as possible. It was high pressure but fascinating.

The first six months of the job, the bank and their team were in constant crisis management with the sports program featuring in the papers most days and every Sunday. You had to be on 24/7.  For Johnson, she was very new to the bank, so had no emotional or intellectual attachment to what had come before, making it easier for her to identify and execute the required plan.

However, for her colleagues who had been at the bank for 20 years plus, it was very hard for them to accept as they had grown up with the bank and seen its success from a small local Scottish bank to a global financial player.  And now it’s very public fall from grace. She learnt quickly. In Edinburgh, RBS’s HQ, Johnson adapted. More empathy, more face time, less haste. She had to educate, not just execute.

Johnson thinks she learnt more in her 18 months at RBS during this crisis on how to be a leader than anywhere else in her career.

Be restless and challenge the status quo

Being a female CEO in the sport industry, Johnson was so incredibly proud of the Lionesses soccer team in 2022, winning the Euros. What struck her was their sheer determination to be the best and do it their way. There was no legacy holding them back, no assumptions or entitlement around the players – they just wanted to work hard and have some fun along the way. This has inspired her that they must not settle for second best, be restless and challenge the status quo.

Through partnerships with influential figures like Stormzy, Johnson actively contributes to democratizing sports marketing, opening doors for talents from diverse backgrounds.

Lessons (with stories) from people she collaborated with

“You cannot fail unless you quit”

via Nancy Koehn

During the first lockdown, Johnson read Nancy Koehn’s ‘Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times.’ In the book, Koehn examines five masters of crisis: one being Abraham Lincoln and the quote – ‘you cannot fail, unless you quit’. And four years after navigating the first complete shutdown of sport since WW2, this still sticks with her. Her best piece of advice to other entrepreneurs is to step into the fear.

At the start of the pandemic in March 2020 when the news channels were reporting the closure of the Premier League, Champions League, and Formula 1, Johnson had her head in her hands thinking ‘what are we going to do.’ Unprompted, they put a plan together in 48 hours to take to their holding group to show how they could weather the storm and what levers they could pull upon. Immediately this gave them the confidence to move forward.

Ignore purpose at your peril

via David Pinnington

Purpose is key to your growth. It is well documented that purpose-driven businesses are more successful.

Johnson’s agency grew very quickly as a business in the early days.  At that time, it was all about the quality of the output and the mantra of ‘let the work do the talking’. However, as they grew as a business in size, they very much recognized that to be good leaders an organization needs a worthy purpose and a bigger ambition for their people and clients to get behind.

They created a North Star – to be the number one sport and entertainment agency in any holding group. Their proposition was to grow their client’s business through the power of sport and entertainment. How they got there was by being the most ‘recommended agency’ to their people, partners, and clients. And how they act is through strong values – which have been inspired by their late founder, David Pinnington – to be trusted, committed, collaborative and restless.

These values are crucial and are brought into the whole agency from employee of the month to the annual performance reviews and quarterly KPIs.

Similarly, Johnson admired Martha Stewart’s legendary ability to innovate and evolve with new technologies – when she spoke on a panel with Stewart at this year’s CES event in Las Vegas – a testament to the power of purpose-driven leadership.

Say it how it is from the very beginning

via Lewis Hamilton

Through collaborations with extraordinary talents like Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, Johnson further fueled her commitment to high-performance ideals necessary in competitive sports and marketing landscapes.

For example, in witnessing the early days of Hamilton's career, Johnson learned the profound impact of authenticity and integrity in both personal and professional spheres. While working with Hamilton during his debut in Formula One, she was struck by his genuine humility and determination. Despite being under the microscope as a rookie, Lewis displayed an unwavering confidence in doing what he believed was right, embodying a "say it how it is" philosophy that continued to guide his journey and success.

For Johnson, this characteristic in Hamilton became a critical lesson about the importance of staying true to oneself, even amidst external pressures. She admired his ability to maintain a centered approach, focusing on honesty and integrity both on and off the track. This ethos not only fueled his career achievements but also highlighted a leadership quality that she has aspired to replicate – acting with sincerity and speaking directly, regardless of the situation.

Reflecting on Hamilton's approach, Johnson suggests that leaders can draw strength by embracing authenticity and confronting challenges with transparency. This perspective encourages leaders to navigate their own uncertainties with poise and authenticity, fostering trust and respect within their teams. Hamilton’s story serves as a reminder of how these core values can drive success and resilience, reinforcing the principle that clear, honest communication is indispensable in leadership.

Discussed in this episode

Authentic Brand Storytelling: Embed creative within your business model (podcast episode #105)

An Inspirational Guide for Uncertain Times: 7 ideas and resources for marketers and business leaders to help spark your next great success

Marketing Chart: How a customer experience #fail affects brands

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Transcript

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Louise Johnson: I was privileged enough to work for Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso in, This must be in 2007 when I joined Vodafone Global, and they were the two drivers for the cannabis aids team. It was such a brilliant time in F1, and it was Lewis's first season back then, and it was actually so we started formula one at the same time.

Obviously his career has done way back to like.

Daniel Burstein: He drives a little faster than you, I'm guessing.

Louise Johnson: Yeah, exactly. But, so we had the pleasure from his level prospects of being title partner, working with him just when he started the. He was incredible. You know, he was a young driver, but I always remember this humility that he had and this sort of real kind of say it how it is and be true to yourself.

Even back then, his confidence that he had within him to do the right thing and to say what he believed was a great thing.

Intro: Welcome to how I made it in marketing. From marketing Sherpa, we scour pitches from hundreds of creative leaders and uncover specific examples, not just trending ideas or buzzword laden schmaltz. Real world examples to help you transform yourself as a marketer. Now here's your host, the senior director of Content and Marketing at Marketing Sherpa, Daniel Bernstein, to tell you about today's guest and.

Daniel Burstein: Put yourself in these shoes for just a minute. You walk into your first day at a new job at a major bank. Pretty nice, But wait. There's more. It's during an economic crisis. Your bank just received a 40 billion pound bailout. And. Oh, yeah, you're in charge of sports sponsorships. Not seen as a necessity for all that funding now coming out of taxpayers pockets.

That's where my next guest found herself. And by surviving and even thriving through it, she told me she learned this lesson. You must be a master of yourself during uncertain times. Here to share a behind the scenes look at that lesson, along with many more lesson filled stories from throughout her career. Is Louise Johnson, the global CEO of fuze.

Thanks for joining me, Louise.

Louise Johnson: Hi Danielle. Thank you so much for having me.

Daniel Burstein: I want to tell our audience just a quick background about you so they know who we're listening to. Louise was in charge of global sponsorships, global sports sponsorships for Vodafone and Royal Bank of Scotland. For the past 15 years. She's been at Fuze Fuze as part of Omnicom, which reported $14.7 billion in revenue in 2023. And Louise is a board director at Omnicom Media Group UK and manages a team of 400 at fuze.

So, Louise, what is your day like as global CEO and board member?

Louise Johnson: So it can be very varied. We are in January at the moment, so we're in the process of our final plans. We submit our final plans for 2025. So a lot of commercial and business strategy combined with clients, clients, clients and spend a lot of time with clients, they are the most important people to us. And really, at this time of year, I spend a lot of time with them understanding their business strategies and needs for the year ahead.

What's keeping them up at night? How can we help? How we delivering on what we should be delivering on? But also how are we really looking ahead, on their business plans as well. But then of course, we work within the Omnicom world, so we get, invited to work on lots of different media accounts or creative accounts.

And, I recently was, invited to join a panel in case with my parent company, Omnicom Media Group, where we were talking about transformation, within content and gaming and sport. And I was, delighted to be on a panel with Martha Stewart. So completely varied. And then, you know, you can be going to talk to Rightsholders.

There we go to see UEFA regularly. I was in Paris recently to, to see a whole host of rights holders. And then yesterday I was hosting a book launch for our chairman. So it's really varied. But with all of the outwardly facing roles as a CEO requires, what's required to do? I do love spending time with my people and my employees, you know, and having that investment to inform them because, you know, you spend so much time with people you work with, they're like your family in the end.

So I get a huge amount of enjoyment with spending people that are in the office with me.

Daniel Burstein: Reverse mentoring is such a great term. So you went from I was just on the stage with Martha Stewart to I'm having these people mentor me and that's great. I think we're going to get to one of those lessons about reverse mentoring in here. But, let's start here with some of the lessons from some of the things you made.

Your first lesson you said is instill emotional discipline. So how did you learn this lesson?

Louise Johnson: So during the, pandemic. And I've actually had to kind of pivot through a couple of different crises over, over my career, including the financial crisis and then the pandemic. And I think, you're in unchartered waters with these different, with these different, crises. And I think it's really important as us to understand that, you know, it's not our fault we didn't do these crises.

So therefore, you need to have an element of emotional control and actually work out what you can control and what you can't control. And I think there's a it's actually called the locus of control. Embrace what you can control, understand that and communicate it to your people around you and start to really role model that. It's better to take a step forward in a time of crisis versus no step forward.

So I think it's really understanding your own emotions, putting it against actually what's happening with a larger economic and business environment and then really start to break it down. So I think that's one of the things around understanding to be more disciplined with your emotion, but also how you show up as well in front of your people. And I think, you know, during the pandemic, it was really important to communicate to all of your agency.

And one way that we really want to do that was spend more 1 to 1 time with the board, but also people of all different levels, because you're working at home, you just didn't have that. You could walk the halls anymore, you know? So actually being able to be in contact with your agency was so crucial for you to develop as a person and a leader during that time because you were hearing all of those challenges from, you know, the grassroots up, essentially.

So it was really important for us to spend that 1 to 1 time to understand, like, what are we doing? Well, what aren't we doing? Well, we've been doing more for for those people and for the agency, but also to to build up those connections and those friendships as well.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. So one of the things when we talk about this and still emotional discipline and part of that is kind of having a certain level of positivity and optimism, no matter what's going on. I wonder how do you also bring authenticity into that? Right. Because I ask because authenticity is a topic. It comes up time and again on how I made it.

Marketing, we use that term, but to me it's it's very general term. What does that even mean? And so I really like to unpack and get underneath it with people. For example, when I interview Diego Ossorio, the founder and chief creative officer at Lobos 1707 tequila on how I made it, marketing one of his lessons is authenticity should be at the core of a brand, right?

So but I want to talk about a tequila brand versus an agency brand. Right. Because it tequila brand, it made sense. They have a 400 year family history. That's there's some really clear authenticity there for an agency brand. The authenticity a lot of it is the people itself. Right. And when you talk about instilling emotional discipline in these difficult times as a CEO of an agency, I mean, frankly, sometimes it's just bad news, right?

I mean, I've been laid off an agency. There's definitely a lot of employment flux because you're serving clients and they're, acquisitions. All sorts of things can happen. So I wonder how you balance that, you know, emotional discipline, that positivity, that optimism with that authenticity with your employees, who who are your brand when sometimes, I mean, it's just you just don't have good news to share with them.

Louise Johnson: Yeah, it's a really good question. And I think, you know, people talk about being an authentic leader a lot. And you thought, okay, well, what does that actually mean?

Daniel Burstein: Exactly?

Louise Johnson: Right. I mean, and I think for me, it goes back to, our late founder. So an amazing guy called David Pennington, he set up for who I work with in my previous company at Vodafone Global. He came over to set up, a sports division at Omnicom during the financial crisis, and no other agencies were putting media and, sports marketing together to create something really unique at that time.

And unfortunately, he passed away sort of, you know, when he was quite young, due to lung cancer. And, you know, an incredible man built that fantastic business. And we felt that when he passed away, we really had to continue to build his let's bring his legacy to life and those values from him that we have instilled in the leadership team and our agency are built around being trusted, trusted advisors, being restless, like, don't take a com paste for a client.

You've got to keep pushing and seeing what's next. Being collaborative because, you know, we have to be collaborative with our agency agencies and clients, but we work as part of a network. Great. You got to collaborate and committed like you've got to finish the job. And I think for simple, few simple values have been in the agency that we live and breathe for the last 15 years.

And those eight, those principles I actually sort of have in my personal life as well, because I think, you know, you can't be one thing at work and then one thing at home as well. So I think for me, that's being authentic. I'm not a different person, at work and at and at home. So I think that's the first I'm like, actually bring those to life, keep it simple and bring it to life.

I also think, you know, for me, it's just being me as well. I know what I'm good at. I know what I'm bad at, and I'm not pretending to be something that I'm bad at. And I will be really honest with people around that. I will say, this is what I'm good at. This is what I'm not good at.

And this is where I need you to come in and help and so be brilliant. So I think just being really honest with people and, telling them if you know something, what you can tell them and what you can't tell them, and again, going back to the pandemic, it was really difficult because you only knew a certain amount.

We were only allowed to share a certain amount from the broader business. But I think being able to tell your agency, this is what I know, this is what I don't know, and this is what might come. And I think that really resonated well with our teams. I remember lots of people coming up to me saying, thank you.

Thank you so much for either communicating. Even if you didn't have anything new to share, you would still telling us updates and timings. All my friends who work in different agencies have been kept in the dark for months. What's going on? We really appreciate you just telling us and being candid with what you know any day time. So I think it's small things like that that are being authentic, like treat people how you want to be treated.

And for me, I think that is the most important thing. You know, work hard, be nice to people. Simple.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. Well the what you know and what you don't know, that's a great kind of, I don't know. I don't have a good word thing to use because the what, you know, can be helpful sometimes because I know it's definitely, you see, like an, a bigger company employee, you're like, why the heck are they doing this or that?

And obviously you can't share everything. But when you can share what, you know, behind the scenes, like, okay, maybe that decision makes more sense. And the what you don't know too is I know definitely in difficult times. And Covid is something we frequently talk about lately. Right. But there's other difficult times. It's just a difficult time for your industry, your business, all these things, people do want to like grab on to something.

And sometimes you have to be honest of like, okay, this is what we don't know. Like you said, your locus of control. Let's focus on we can tell this is what we don't know. Honestly, we don't know what either. You don't know. We don't know it. But let's find a way to go for it. So I like that kind of two sides of a dyad maybe that you talked about.

So that was the that was a great agency example. But we have both agency and brand side marketers that listen, and this is a great example from the brand side of something you had to face. You must be a master of your self during uncertain times. So Covid is, a very interesting time you went through, but you also went through that economic crisis and you're at a brand at that time.

So can you tell us, walk us through how you did that?

Louise Johnson: Yes. Okay. So I, I left Vodafone, which was the creme de la creme export sponsorship at the time, in the noughties. And you know that that time brands and advertising agencies were really starting to take sports seriously as a, you know, a driver for grace. And, I got offered a bigger role to go over to Alps, which is was a very big banking group, in the center in London at the time.

And I literally walked in on day one and in the hallway of this huge building in the city, it had 80 billion pounds bailout on Sky news across all the TV screens. And I was like, oh my God, what do I do? 80 billion pound bailout of OBS bank. And I had my new boss calling me saying, don't worry, don't, don't, don't worry about the the TV screens in the news that you can read.

You still got a job. And I remember I had my brother at the same time phoning meeting walk out. Do not go on. And I was like, oh my God, I got a contract, signed a contract. What do I do now? Of course I, you know, I continued, I went up the, the, the lift and, and did that job and I did that job for 18 months.

And it was fascinating because, you know, OBS had just been like one of the main reasons why the financial crisis happened in the UK and then subsequent markets as well, and the sports sponsorship platform, I came in to be developing a new one. So we'd been in Formula One, we were going to go and do a title partnership with a new, team.

We were looking at new properties. Actually, the job that I was now doing was completely opposite. You know, the CMO said to me, right, okay, see what contract? So you can get out or reduce everything that you can sack all the agencies. Oh, and by the way, you're going to be working with Downing Street and the Prime Minister because the impact of coming out some of these properties could have an impact on the economy.

You're like, oh, okay, so no new contracts. And but actually in this situation, it was fascinating because, you know, you learn more in a crisis than you do anywhere. And I think actually this is such a pivotal time in my career. And I think the things that I took away from it and where you have to be as the master of your yourself on this, is that one.

You're having to show up in a different way in London versus the HQ of OBS, which was in Edinburgh, and you go up to Edinburgh once every two weeks and your team up there were part of the bank since it started 20 years ago. They had all their shares been, you know, bonuses put into shares. They'd lost all the lot, huge amount of money they'd lost, and they hadn't really kind of fathomed that this small business was gone global.

It's now completely collapsed. So you were going into a leadership position where you had to be incredibly empathetic, really, over communicating why that we were now completely changing the way that we were working, workshopping, taking you along on this journey. And then you come back to London and you were having to be right. No emotions. Go, go go.

Action, action, action. So very different leadership skill that you had to adopt. But also it's very high paced as well. And I think at that point I really realized that I need to take care of myself because it was so high paced and so, you know, so on. Again, I think I mentioned earlier uncharted waters because no one has ever been in there.

So you kind of go to work with a base plan, and I get completely knocked out about, you know, 1030 because, you know, some journalists have picked up something that we were now on the front cover on, you know, on the the times or the Ft. So I think for me, it was really important to understand how do I keep myself healthy and well and sort of fed and watered.

So that was one thing like retaking a step back to look at self-care, because if I was turning up to work frazzled, that was not going to be the right attitude or, you know, showing up to the rest of the team in the right way. So I think for me it was like, how do I how do I manage my own internal crisis?

I need to, you know, I need to feel good, I need to sleep, I need to be exercising, and I need to be nourishing myself. So I think that was a really important piece. I can't go into flex my leadership skills to get the job done. If I am not, you know, looking after myself. So that's a really important thing.

And I still do that today. There are times where I can feel slightly burnt out or frazzled or, you know, I'm taking some a meeting that I'm getting annoyed in and you just have to sort of slightly to yourself back and go right, let's both get back to all the good principles of, you know, sleeping, eating, acupuncture, boxing, all the stuff that I love and gives me that energy.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah, that's that's true and good and bad times. I love that. But let me let me unpack. I think you did such a smart thing about understanding your audience, right? You talked about the audience in Edinburgh. You talked about the audience in London. You're talking about those, you know, internal employees. Understanding that audience as a as a good communicator should.

Let me ask you about the actual audience of the customer. Right. So you went from Vodafone, Vodafone, you went to RBS, did you. You got out of some sports sponsorships, but you still had some. Did you change the messaging in the sports sponsorships at all based on what was going on? And let me say, for example, during Covid, I wrote an article called An Inspiration Guide for Uncertain Times.

Right? Because again, it's uncertain, but come on, we can still do this. There's things you can do. One of the tips I talked about was consider the environment in which the customer experiences your message. Right. And so I'm so curious, Vodafone, before you said like these high sales days, there was a certain environment I'm sure certain message work.

Now you're coming to this rb's situation. Did you pivot the message in any way?

Louise Johnson: Yes, absolutely. And, you know, you had to it was such a different world. You know, people were attacking Rb's do spending now taxpayer money on sports sponsorships. So of course, you know, contracts are contracts and there was a certain amount that you could get out of and a certain amount that you couldn't. And also, you know, you had all these businesses that were reliant on partnership money.

And I think that's an important thing to note, that a huge amount of rights holders are dependent on commercial partnerships, money to keep going or to, provide routes to grass roots and sustainability. So it's it's really important that you can't, you know, just switch off something ASAP because that might impact a school or an NB, a rights holder.

But we did completely. We changed the branding. So within the group there was a huge amount of other brands. So we looked at kind of a portfolio of brands and actually the brands what might needed a boost through actually some of this fantastic portfolio that I had, the legacy portfolio. How could we use a different brand to tell a different message to drive their business forward?

That would ultimately then help pay back the taxpayer in the long run? So that was very much the sort of okay, where where could you rebrand using the existing portfolio? Step two was within that. What is that message? It's around community. It's around grassroots. It's around, you know, enabling a better way. And the third piece was what could you do for your employees?

Because as an IBS employee, of course, it was incredibly difficult to go to work every day. And actually, how do you do an inside out strategy that is building up that confidence again as an employee and coming to work with pride? So what we had left was, you know, a good way of really doing that, connecting with customers again, like connecting with your internal customer and audience again to really see how you can start building up confidence and a sense of a new community for a new banking era.

Daniel Burstein: So we talked about probably two of the most difficult times in my career and most careers people listening, right. The economic crisis with the banks, the Covid crisis. Let's talk about something kind of on a more positive level like this, this how the world has been changing over the past few decades, especially in your, industry. You say be restless and challenge the status quo.

I think it would be fair to say you are a pioneer in your industry. And so can you give us a sense of how stepping into your industry, how are you a restless child, just quo from when you were in there in the early days, as you know, one of the few women leaders to where things are today?

Louise Johnson: Yeah, sure. And thank you. So for a long time, I was one of the only female CEOs in Europe for sports marketing. It is it's predominantly a male dominated industry. Rightly or wrongly. I think I'm the only global CEO, female global CEO now in the sports industry. And with at that with that becomes lots of challenges but also lots of opportunities.

And I think what I have always tried to do and my female leadership team at feasible always tried to do is, is one making sure that we are not trying to copy, you know what, what we should be doing as men, but also making sure that we're opening up the pathways to the more females to get into sports marketing industry.

And I'm really proud that actually my board now is 66% female, the SLT is 60% female. And actually the overall, business is around just I think it's just almost 60 as well. So we've done a really good job in terms of moving that forward and increasing the numbers. To make it's actually over indexing now on, on female female equality, which is fantastic.

And I think also because it's been such an exciting time in women's sports over the last three years, 3 to 5 years, and you've seen this incredible rise. And I take a huge amount of inspiration from these amazing female athletes who are doing it in their own way. You know, they are challenging the status quo every day by getting on that page, scoring and winning.

And in the UK, the women's team, the Lionesses, they won the euros in 2022. It was just absolutely incredible. And everything they did, they just did it in their own way, the way they celebrated, the way that they, you know, spoke to their audiences on social media, the way that they challenge the government afterwards about how to get, you know, more girls playing football at school and stuff like that.

I think, again, it just really resonated with me, the fact that, you know, these women are incredible athletes who need to be celebrated in their own right and else's market here should be doing that. We should just be talking about a priority story, which is of course, very important. But actually using these amazing athletes and these sports as creative storytelling vehicles in their own right as well.

And we started to see that little bit and can last year when I was president of the sports, Gerry and we awarded lots of work, including the Grand Prix, to some fantastic work, around women's sport. But coming back to, I think, me and my team, what we try and do is really instill that within our agency. Don't try and be something you're not.

Really embrace the qualities that you have as a female and really lead on that. And I think women have got some fantastic qualities. As a female, we're much more empathetic than men. How do you lean into that? We might be seen as emotional, but that's actually not wrong. But we're not going to walk up to a meeting and cry.

That's just, you know, that's completely wrong and misrepresentation of what females are. But actually we're more emotionally keen and that, sure, you can be more in. So you can sort of tune into different people's emotions in a different way to use that to craft very collaborative strategies. So I think that's really the message. How do you lean into your own unique qualities or your superpowers?

As, as a female leader.

Daniel Burstein: So speaking into leaning into superpowers as a female leader, a superpower female leader is Martha Stewart, right? You just mentioned that you were on the stage with her at sea. Yes. And I wonder if there's anything you learned up close being there with Martha Stewart? Obviously just shared some great lessons. Very sports centric, but general lessons there, too.

I think Martha Stewart, maybe a more general business lesson. And one of the things that I've admired from Martha Stewart, I've followed her career very closely, honestly. But good thing that I have seen is, is she knows how to build and tap into an audience. And I love the term audience because I think as marketers, sometimes we talk too much about customers or I hate this word consumers, right?

Like there's just these human beings walking around. Their whole purpose in world is to consume, and we need to give them the thing to consume. But what Martha did, I think is truly is build first an audience, you know, through TV, print, different ways and then build products of value to sell to that audience. From what I could see externally, again, I don't really have any inside knowledge, but you just we're in a very unique place.

You were here in the States at CBS. You were on stage with Martha. So what did you learn, from just seeing her up close for that short amount of time?

Louise Johnson: Oh my gosh, she's a total legend. She's 83. Not only does she know she looks incredible, but the energy and aura around her was incredible when she was actually such a lovely, lovely lady to sort of connect with before before we did the panel. But on the panel it was really interesting because, you know, she's been going for such a long time and she is.

I've been billed as the original influencer, which, you know, she, she really embraces. And I think one thing she said that really resonated with me in audiences because a lot of us was around, I, you know, artificial intelligence was that, you know, the word digital. It was everything. And, she was saying that, you know, with technology, where they've been successful is that they've always embraced the new technology, whether we're her audiences.

So even if rightly or wrongly, they've got it wrong. They've always tried to trial new technology, whether that be back in the day, a new magazine format or a radio show, or now it's a podcast. She's on TikTok, she's on Instagram. And we were joking about actually, you know, in the next five years, but you had Martha Stewart as your personal digital assistant on your handset and telling you how to cook.

And, you know, I think she was like, use it or lose it. It's there to be used. And I think that's where she has been so successful over her, you know, 30, 40 year career is because she has embraced technology. She's embraced the fact that you need to go where your audiences are now going. And I think that's probably been of her, her some secret to her success.

Daniel Burstein: I think that's a great tip. Like have that value proposition to know what that value proposition is. That's one thing. But then the package you deliver in it can and should vary over time. So that's fantastic. We just talked about some lessons from some of the things that Louise built in. Just a moment we're going to talk about some lessons from some of the people that she was inspired by and built it with, because that's the great thing we get to do is marketers.

We build things and we build it with people before we get there, I should mention that the how I Made It in Marketing podcast is underwritten by Mic Labs. I, the parent organization of marketing Sherpa. Join us for our next free event. How to take a conversion marketing approach to a genetic AI and Rag with zero tech skills on February 12th at 2 p.m. Eastern Time, taught by our CEO Clint McLaughlin.

You can register for free at Mic labs ai.com/conversion. That's Mech Labs ai.com/conversion. Okay, so Louise, let's take a look at some of the people that have really you've collaborate with different inspired you throughout your career. You mentioned Martha for that that interaction recently had. But someone else that came up was Nancy Cohen. And you mentioned that you learned from Nancy was you cannot fail unless you quit.

So how'd you learn this lesson? How do you apply this lesson?

Louise Johnson: So I read the book Not by Nancy, Forged in Crisis. And, I actually was lucky enough to be taught by her at, Omnicom University. An amazing, course taught by Harvard Business School professors, which my parent company put me on a few years ago. Incredible professor. And she's right. She's had quite a few books around.

What does it mean to be a modern day leader? And Forged in Crisis is around these stories of the courageous leaders from, you know, Abraham Lincoln to various different people to Martin Luther King. And I think this quote was really from, Abraham Lincoln in her book. And it's it's huge. It's it's it's definitely not one to take with you on holiday to keep it by your bed kind of book, because it's very basic but brilliant.

And, and I just thought you know what? That's so true. You know, if you don't try, you're never going to know. How can you possibly fail unless you, you, you know, you try it. And I think during the pandemic, I read it and it was really useful because, again, no one's telling you what to do because no one's been here before.

And you have I'm a big believer of taking a step forward. The nice step forward. And I think reading that book just really assignments that, you know what I mean? Just go with your instincts, just take that step forward because unless you actually start, you know, you're never going to know. So for me, that was really, really important.

And especially when, you know, during that time you had sport clothes for the first time since World War two. You know, I remember just the news kind of coming in of a Champions League stopping Formula one, stopping, basketball stopping. And I had my head in my hands just going, oh my God, what are we going to do?

You know, it's just like, crap, this is awful. The whole business. We had 50 events that we were activating throughout the whole summer. All of that got scrapped. And actually you're like, okay, well, this isn't my fault. I haven't done this. How do we turn this into a positive? And, you know, actually, the client relationships that we had by helping him through this became so much stronger.

You know, you had so much research and development that we did that again. Our product line came out of it so much stronger. You really look at yourself when things aren't going well. You really look deep down to go, okay, why isn't something going well when you're successful? You know, you just kind of go, go, go, go, go and grow and you never really stop to think, oh, hang on a minute.

That sort of division over there, not actually sure is that's, that's as profitable as it should be. But when things aren't going well, when you on something like a pandemic or financial crisis, you do stop and you go, okay, let's let's look under the bonnet of everything. And again, I think for me that was really interesting because there were a few elements of the business that we now don't have because they weren't as strong as other parts.

So for me, it was another learning of, you know, you have to constantly evaluate yourself. You can't wait for a big crisis to go, oh, hang on a minute, that's not working. So how do you instill that culture of check in, challenging yourself even in the good times? And again, that's been quite a big move in terms of our culture and our behavior.

Tech and challenge check and challenge check and challenge. Because that's I think, what's going to keep you agile and interesting to clients and, you know, motivating through employees as well.

Daniel Burstein: Well, let's talk about that check and challenge. And you cannot fail unless you quit. So we've talked a lot about these kind of macro crises so far. And as you mentioned, like when the sports got shut down with Covid, that's not our fault. But do you have any specific examples of when a brand or agency or something that failed a customer and how you handled that?

Right. Because there in fairness, there are some fails that that are maybe not our individual faults, but our brand's fault and our agency's fault. And for example, we've, published data before about what happens when, you know, a brand fails a customer. And for the people that had the biggest average social network sizes. So that's you might call those influencers whatever you want to call them.

The number one thing they said was I actively tried to disparage the business that delivered a failed customer experience every chance I got through social media and other online publishing channels. Right. And this is not the everyone that was a bit the biggest group, said, and this is the thing we have to look out for. So I love that you cannot fail unless you quit because, okay, we start with a fail.

It's going to happen. Your brand, your agency, whoever is going to fail customers sometimes. But then I like the unless you quit part. So then what do you do? Take us. If you haven't. If you have an example you could share, take us. Okay. After that, fail. Now here's what I did to communicate, to make it clear, to make it right.

Whatever. Because we don't want influencers or any people spreading around these these negative experiences that they had with our brand. We want positive word of mouth.

Louise Johnson: Oh, that's a really good question. I'm trying to think of an example where we have failed like that.

Daniel Burstein: Or even a brand you're working with. Because one thing I'll say also while you're thinking of that is, another thing we've researched is, what we call customer first marketing. And one thing we did is we took a set of 2400, customers here in the States, not in the UK, with with Nielsen. And we split into two groups of 1200.

Half of them. We said, tell us about a company that you had a positive experience with half of. We said, tell us about a company had a negative experience with. And we asked them a series of questions and we noticed one of the biggest differences was if they had a positive experience with a company or a negative experience with a company, that didn't matter as much.

It mattered if they thought the company was putting their interests first. Was that company customer first because if the company was customer first, there were a lot more forgiving. When the fails happened. Then if the company if the company was, you know, they felt like the company was out to get them, which we feel that way sometimes, right?

Yeah. And I like to use that example of like, you know, with my wife, like, if we're at a good place in our marriage, I don't take the garbage out. She's very forgiving. Oh, well, he's just probably busy at work meetings and stuff like that. Right. But we're in a bad place, and I didn't take the garbage out.

It's not the action, it's the motivations. And so that's where I think, too, as companies, what we do when we when we're more customer first with our marketing, their business, right then customers will be more forgiving. We see this, for example, very companies actually is very innovative, tech savvy companies like the Teslas and some of this stuff.

Right. That some things go wrong. But they've said, oh, well they're, they're really pushing the envelope. They're really trying to make something good for me versus like you mentioned, unfortunately, like sometimes the banking industry, insurance industry, some of these other industries, it feels like, oh, they're out to get me. So anytime something goes wrong, there must be a fault.

So that's kind of something I've known. I wonder if you have any experiences of, okay, like how a brand or an agency has to handle, a fail.

Louise Johnson: I think, it's not so much a fail. I think it's more of, a recognition and then evolving. So because when these started, it was like the wild, wild West back then, you know, it was a team of seven people. You were walking into a meeting and a client said, oh, you know, I love the energy from you guys.

Can you do this for me? I need walk out, I need something, say yes to the client and he will. County guy oh my God, I don't know if we can do this. How are we going to do this? Because you're in startup mode. But you said yes because you need to get some revenue in, and then you kind of somehow you work out, you know, and you go in and you deliver it and then you that kicks your agency on and your business model on that next step.

So we would like that for quite a long time. And then suddenly we were like, you know, 40 people. And you were like, oh my God, this is fantastic. Great. And then we were 80 and you kind of get to a hundred and you're like, oh, okay, hold on a minute. We need to put some processes in place here.

And actually we need a story. We need like where is everyone going? If you think about we have the red arrows and in the UK, you know, it's kind of like those red arrows of planes going in this direction. And what is that? Because people at that time, our employees felt that it was very like, you know, we're a bit sporadic going over the place is is just about making money.

And so we spent quite a lot of time doing that. We need like a unified purpose. Why were we all coming to work every day? You know, in the beginning it was great because we're taking on the industry. We were doing something different. We were, you know, being that challenge of brand, it was really exciting. And we were just like the new kids on the block.

As you get to 100 employees, you're actually, you know, you're you're one of the big boys, big girls. Now, and you need to start acting like it. So we put that when we put something that what our role is in the business, how we trying to enable clients to build their businesses through the power of sport and entertainment.

You know, our ambition is to be the number one global sport and entertainment agency. We put our values in place. We always talked about them, you know, and coming from David, but actually putting them in place and formalizing them and everything that we do, all of that was really, really important. And I don't think I actually recognized the importance of that as well, of what a new employee coming in, as we cannot exact a 24 what they needed at that time.

When you join a business of 100 people, because I had been there from the start, I've been on this incredibly exciting journey. I'm that way. Everyone knows what we do. So I think it's not necessarily a wrong, but I think it was definitely a wake up call to me to say, you know, what's going from, you know, from this point of success to this point of elevated success is not necessarily going to drive the next ten years of success.

So I think that was a really big learning for me and the the leadership team at the time, that you do need to listen to your employees or your customers or whatever you want to, to call them to really understand, like you're never, ever going to be in that one mode. You're constantly evolving and being, as I say, one of our values has being restless.

And you can't be restless for your clients if you're not being restless for your employees as well. So I think that was kind of one of the things that you've got to really stop and listen more than, you know, keep on going and going and going and expect everybody to be on that journey with you.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. I want to unpack that. All that word, use that word purpose. And I want to unpack that because like authentic, that's another word that keeps coming up. And what does it mean. And you know, so again, that's something which I do on how I mean, marketing podcast we challenges ideas. We hear not that doesn't necessarily disagree with any of them just to get underneath them.

So one of the things, lessons you mentioned was ignore purpose at your peril. You said you learned this from David Pennington. You mentioned earlier the founder refused, and I wanted to ask, what does purpose mean for an agency? Let me tell you why I asked this question. Right. You said like the purpose was to be the number one global sports agency in the world, which seems like a great goal.

But when we hear purpose, I mean like a purpose in life or sometimes, you know, we think of purpose as like, oh, there's a nonprofit that's saving the whales, like, that's that's a purpose, you know, you mean and it goes back, I dunno if you ever seen the show Silicon Valley on HBO. I don't know if you've seen that show.

Have you seen that? Right. So there's this great scene where they're at like a pitch off or something like that. And every like software company comes up and they're pitching how they're saving the world. And it's like, we're here to save the world and change the world through faster, more secure virtual servers. You know what I mean? And so it seems like it's become like authentic.

It's become this kind of trend over the past few decades of we've got a purpose. But that's where let me ask, and maybe you don't have the answer to this, but I want to ask like what? What is a purpose mean for an agency? Because when we think of purpose, I think a lot of times outside of the marketing world, we think of what is my purpose in life?

Or again, like a nonprofit's purpose, I'm going to save whales or whatever that is.

Louise Johnson: Really good question. Because you're right. Because I think purpose has been. Yes, so much like purpose marketing. What does that mean? Everybody's got to have a purpose. What's your purpose in your business? And I think, going back to simplicity, I think we know the reason that we go to work so busy to, you know, make generate revenue so that we can, you know, pay people and reward their careers, obviously, you know, allow, stakeholders and shareholders to, to reap that benefit.

That's obviously a commercial purpose of like, it's work. But then in terms of, you know, why would in the exact turn up to work, they want to see that they're part of something bigger. They want to see that, you know, the ambition is to be a great pioneering agency within sport and entertainment. And actually our purpose is to move that industry on each year.

And, you know, we're there to get our clients to be able to grow their business businesses through the power of sport and entertainment. How we do that is done in a very purposeful way. We don't necessarily have a purpose that our business is going to be to say, changing, saving whales, for example. But everything we do is very purposeful.

And with, employees, that's really important because we want to enable them to have the best careers possible, and that's allowing them to be the best marketeer in sport and entertainment, giving that flexibility for them to discover what that purposes. So, for example, you know, for me, my legacy or what I would like to do, aside from my business row, is to really look at how we are moving women's health on and how I can do that through the power of sport and entertainment.

So that's my purpose. I want to use my business experience and my contacts and my, you know, my knowledge of sport and entertainment to help an area and women's fertility that is not being serviced yet. And that's my purpose. And allowing my business time to give me enough time to be able to do that. So, for example, my other colleague who is really, really involved in, female leadership and, you know, she's using all of her experience through fees and Omnicom to enable other female leaders in other businesses to really learn from what we're doing to accelerate more females in senior positions across different industries.

So I think that, for me is really important, being able to have a really clear ambition in the workplace commercially and for your clients and the product, but enabling people to have the confidence and flexibility to allow them to be purposeful in other parts of their life and giving them that little kind of time to do that as well, using the experience that they're building from their time at peace with us to go and do that.

Daniel Burstein: So that's that's really interesting. I want to ask you what that means at the agency level in a minute, but but at a personal level, like, is that a formalized process or system you have set up for your employees where they outline their purpose and one on ones or annual reviews or something? Because that's something really interesting. You mentioned, like, as marketers, we build these skill sets, these wonderful and powerful skill sets, which, you know, we often use to promote a brand, you know, through sports marketing or banks or whatever.

But those same skill sets are very helpful for, you know, helping with women's fertility or all these other issues that we talk about. I think a challenge often either in our careers within a company or just separately, our careers, is we don't often do a good job of articulating. Right. Like what? What to your point, what is our purpose?

What am I trying to do here on this mortal coil or whatever the term is? You know, in my life and with these skills. Yeah. Right. So is there any so like what you're talking about, is it something that you're generally trying to infuse in your agency, or have you formalized any processes for each employee to kind of outline, hey, here's here's a purpose I have and here's I'm trying to use these skill sets within and without a fuze to make that happen.

Louise Johnson: So two parts to that that that question. So the first part is that from an agency point of view, I mean, we, we all we have a very, strong, strategy about getting more people from different backgrounds into sport entertainment. So we'll work with different, partners to bring in people from different backgrounds into these different like partnerships and internships and things like that.

And we've also partnered with, I'm not sure if you've heard of the Stormzy, an artist who big, big kind of successful rapper in the UK is partnered up with Adidas, and he's done some amazing work with these creative houses across London where, you know, you can go in as somebody who may not have access to recording studios or how to edit, social content.

So we partnered with them. So we are labeling people who want to be part of Stormzy and ask his project to then come through to fuze as well. So that's a big overall collective of like, how do we get more people? Let's democratize a sports marketing industry. Let's get more people from different backgrounds into our business and help them have a different pathway into into our business, because the more people you have in different parts of life, you know, it's going to reflect the real Britain or the real Europe that we live in.

And that's gonna be better for our workforce, our business appliance business. So that's that's one part. The second part is that, like we're we're living in really different and changing times. And I think the younger generation are coming in and they've got really different expectations of what a job should be now. And they want to do more of their own projects.

So they want to have more of their own, you know, a legacy essentially. And I think we're just starting to trial some ideas of how that could work. And that's the point around my passion point. This is what I would like to do using my experience for preparing a project or my, you know, my cfo's experience in women's leadership and how she can help more people.

You know, how can we potentially formalize that? Not saying that we're going to 100% do that, but we all starting to trial with how can we retain great talent in the business by enabling them to feel like they have, you know, they're using their knowledge and experience and helping others. And I think it's really important. And it was Martin Luther King Day on Monday.

I think it was one of his quotes popped up, which really resonated with me. And he I think it's the most important thing that you need to do in the world is think about of how you think about how you're helping others. And it really resonated with me because, you know, not enough of that is being done. And I think if we can enable the work force and environment will we can foster that.

I think that's nothing that's only going to help us commercially. It's going to help our product. It's going to help our clients when it keeps a great people.

Daniel Burstein: That's great. And so talking about some of the people, so you talk about the clients you've worked with, the people you work with in your agencies. But some of the people you've been around in your career too, are some pretty famous athletes, right? You've been around them when they've been at the heights of fame. You've been around them in the early days.

And so I asked, do you have all those kind of famous athletes? I'm sure you've learned a lot from many of them. Is there anyone that really stands out? You have someone you learned something with and you mentioned that you knew Lewis Hamilton, early in his career. And what really stood out to you is how he would say, say it how it is from the very beginning.

So can you share kind of what you experience with Lewis Hamilton and kind of how that shaped your career?

Louise Johnson: Yes, absolutely. I just saw him amazing photographs. He's just joined, the Ferrari F1 team. And that was in on social yesterday. And so I was privileged enough to work with Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso back in. Goodness, it must be in 2007 when I joined Vodafone Global, and they were the two drivers for the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes team, and it was at such a brilliant time in F1, and it was Lewis's first season back then, and it was actually, you know, so we started formula one at the same time.

Obviously his career has done way better than mine.

Daniel Burstein: He drives a little faster than you, I'm guessing.

Louise Johnson: Yeah, exactly. But so we had the pleasure of him as a partner. Perspective being title partner, working with him just when he started. And he was incredible. You know, he was a young driver. But I always remember this humility that he had and this sort of real kind of say it how it is and be true to yourself.

Even back then, his confidence that he had within him to do the right thing and to say what he believed was the right thing. Even back then, when he was coming in as a rookie driver, he had the world's press over him and he just had this real sort of center within him. If I'm going to do the right thing.

And for me, I look at his career in the last 20 years or so, and he's always withheld that. And I think that's incredibly admirable. And I try and really instill that. There's, there's a, a cricket term which, people used back in the UK, and it's everything with a straight bat. And again, I think that's a nice expression to go.

Okay. I'm in a difficult situation. What do I do? And I always go, okay, you remember Lewis Hamilton or I remember that cricket term and you always get right. Okay. If you're honest, then you know you're doing the right thing.

Daniel Burstein: So let me unpack that too. Let me say this might be the hardest question to answer someone in charge of sponsorship. So save it for the very end. And it's about what happens when the sponsorships go wrong. Okay. Well, you mentioned seeing how this from the very beginning, and that's just a great reminder of these are human beings also that they're not brands.

They're not just brands. All these things are human beings who do want to say it how it is. And when they say it how it is, it might not be the message you want your brand to have out there in the world, even though you've started having this kind of partnership or they've been a spokesperson in certain ways.

And I think about you mentioned, just a few minutes ago about Adidas and, Stormzy, a rapper in the UK, which I'm not familiar with. But when you mention that Adidas, the rapper I thought about was Kanye West, right? And obviously, you know, Kanye West came out and said antisemitic things and then Adidas made a choice. And from what I can see, I'm not in the sponsorship industry that sports entertainment sponsorship industry, they gave up millions, hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars to step away from that Kanye West sponsorship because they didn't think it was the right thing for their brand in their company.

So when it comes to this, say it how it is. Do you have any if you have an example you can mention, that's great. I know that might be hard because I don't want to put you on the spot to say something negative, but do you have any any final advice for brands marketers listening about, okay, we we set up the sponsorship with a sports or entertainment professional.

Obviously we're trying to get a certain thing out of it. We're trying to get, you know, some of their sunshine sounding on our brand. So people buy stuff, but say it how it is. They're human beings too, and may say things that, that we disagree with from our brand. What do you do from that point on?

Louise Johnson: Yeah, really good question. I mean, I can't necessarily think of that's a situation where that's happened to us or one of our clients. I think maybe we could rethink a briefing and selection of ambassadors.

Daniel Burstein: On.

Louise Johnson: Like, I think, you know, humans are humans. There's always going to be times when there's human error or bad judgment. That's just nature, isn't it? I think that's why you have incredibly strong contracts. I think as you go through negotiation and contracting of some of these ambassadors, that this is where the criteria selection becomes so important because of the way that we consume information.

Now, through of, you know, so many different forms of social media, things happened so quickly. So I think we have to be really robust in that selection criteria. We work very closely with, you know, lawyers to understand, like what we need and what we don't need. And I think, you know, seeing how it is, is having a perspective on the world for me.

You know, it's kind of I think with Lewis Hamilton, he he's very passionate about his mission 40 for charity. You know, he's incredibly passionate around, you know, equality in the world, getting more equality into sports. And for me that's the important side with someone like County. Of course, you know, being saying some awful, awful things that is not okay.

And that should be, you know, you should assess disassociate yourself with something like that. But I think it is doing your due diligence right from the, from what do these people really stand for? How does that actually match with your brand criteria is really, really important. I think the more homework that you can do upfront, then you will have a proper partnership with that celebrity ambassador who really understands brands needs as well.

And I think that's the really important piece of having three collaboration so they understand what you are trying to get to, where they're trying to get to, and how you can, you know, have the one plus one equals three factor and create some really great, impact with that partnership and investment.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. I'm not told. That's great not to overlook the partnership and collaboration part. You're not just looking for a big megaphone, right? You're looking for that right voice for your brand.

Louise Johnson: Yeah. And I think that's more and more what's happening because you've got, you know, all of these athletes or influencers and creatives are becoming more like producers now. And you know that that they want to do more. They're very selective with who they partner now as well. They're not just taking money as a great that's money for the bank that they're very protective on who they are partnering with.

And it's got to be something that really resonates with their issues that they're trying to change as well. So I think that's a big change recently. It's it's not it's not transactional. It's you know, they want to do something that's complementary to where they're trying to get to.

Daniel Burstein: I mean, let me actually ask you, I thought it was a final question. One more then we'll we'll get into a wrap up question. But but also like has has this change you've doing doing this for decades. Has this changed in your career too? Because one thing I've noticed, we're talking about rappers. I mentioned, there's a great Jay-Z quote I love.

He said, I'm not a businessman, I'm a business man. And one thing I've noticed, not just at the biggest star level, like the Lewis Hamilton level, but even for all these influencers right now, everyone looks at their personal image as a business and they manage it differently, right? Like it was fairly novel. Michael Jordan and, you know, some Joe Namath, some other athletes back in the day, they were athletes.

I mean, primarily, I think maybe Jordan somewhat changed that with Air Jordan and stuff moving with Nike. But they were athletes and oh, hey, I'm, I'm drinking the soda, remembering these shoes or whatever. But fast forward to where we are now, decades later, not only at the at the big level, Lewis Hamilton level, someone with maybe a thousand followers on TikTok, like they look at themselves now as a businessman.

I'm a business is I'm this is my business. Yeah. And so they're making a partnership with another business. So I just wondered, I don't know if I have any good way to articulate that question, but have you noticed this transformation over the decades you've been in, in this industry?

Louise Johnson: Oh, yeah, definitely. And you can understand why everybody's been in uproar about TikTok closing in the US, because you know, that they, these influencers, that's one of the biggest channels for their business as their personality. So you can understand why there is this backlash of trying to stop Tik Tok, operating in the US. Yeah, definitely. I think it helps because there is this huge trend where clients, consumers, customers, whatever you want to call them, people are all fans.

Let's just go back to fans. They are interested in multiple all cultures kind of crossing over, bleeding into each other. So if you look at how, you know, gaming is now taking inspiration from movies, movies is taking inspiration from games you've got. It's not just I'm not just a soccer fan, I am a soccer and music and myself, the NBA do it fantastically is how cross culture piece they have done for years in terms of, you know, music and fashion.

So I think a brand, sorry, an athlete comes in and he's like, oh my God. There's an audience of I'm a soccer fan and I can I can commercialize my fan base of just, you know, soccer fans. But actually because I'm wearing the latest Louis guitar and, oh, I can tap into that passionate audience as well. That's another whole lot of fans I can commercialize.

So I think they're really clever. They're really astute. They are, you know, they're looking at this brand extensions. Okay, how can I expand my audience? How can I make more money out of meeting and more genres? And actually that's what people are wanting. They want to see this cross culture coming through.

Daniel Burstein: All right. Well, let me ask you the final question. So we talked a lot about them, these big athletes and and and that people can sponsor. Let's talk about us now when it comes down to it, through all your stories or been a lot of things that come out through all the difficult macro and micro times it can go through.

You had to break it down, though. What are the key qualities of an effective marketer?

Louise Johnson: So I think the key qualities of being an effective marketer is being empathetic. It's being really curious around your audiences and what the future this audiences is going to that like being really committed to having the best, best, best campaigns. And I think as well, just just having a sort of real kind of, you know, committed spirit as well.

I think too many marketers try things or do too many quick tests and learn and throw out the water. I think sort of being committed to, you know, to doing things really well. And I think that's what you're starting to see, actually some big brand campaigns coming back into sports marketing. That's really exciting. So I think those are the kind of the qualities that I would be looking for.

For great marketers.

Daniel Burstein: I like that I've asked this question many times. It's plugged in. A lot of these podcasts committed spirit. That's the first one I feel like we've we see we hear a lot of things repeat committed spirit is brand new one. So thank you very much. Please. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for sharing all your stories today.

I've learned so much from you.

Louise Johnson: Thank you so much for having me. It really enjoyed the show.

Daniel Burstein: And thanks to everyone for listening.

Outro: Thank you for joining us for how I made it and marketing with Daniel Burstein. Now that you've got an inspiration for transforming yourself as a marketer, get some ideas for your next marketing campaign. From Marketing Sherpas extensive library of free case studies at Marketing sherpa.com. That's marketing rpa.com and.