Visible is an all-digital wireless carrier owned by Verizon, marketed to customers who want a more flexible phone plan that won’t break the bank. It was recently named the “Best Telecom Brand” by Adweek. Since the pandemic, the company has cultivated and expanded its younger, tech-savvy customer base thanks to the marketing leadership of Minjae Ormes, the former Visible CMO who is now at LinkedIn. In this edition of The Current podcast, Ormes reflects on how her company’s values of economic and racial equity were reaffirmed during a turbulent year, and why that is crucial to the brand’s identity.
Damian Fowler (00:00):
I'm Damien Fowler.
George Slefo (00:01):
And I'm George Slefo.
Damian Fowler (00:03):
And this is The Current.
George Slefo (00:09):
The Current is your deep dive into the future of TV, media, and data privacy. All explained in plain English.
Damian Fowler (00:16):
We talk to the biggest names in digital marketing.
George Slefo (00:19):
And today, we'll hear from Minjae Ormes. Minjae is the former chief marketing and growth officer at Visible. In the weeks after we recorded this interview, she left the company. Minjae is an absolute force, and seriously, one of my favorite people. While she was at Visible, the company was named the best telecom brand by Ad Week.
Damian Fowler (00:40):
And this is all for a company that's completely digital. We're talking no physical presence or storefronts at all. For a company that's practically invisible in the real world, I had to ask her the obvious. How do you make Visible, well visible?
Minjae Ormes (00:58):
We wanted to kind of follow the customer behaviors and the trends that are out there, of everybody pretty much buying a lot of stuff online. So our entire "storefront" is on visible.com. And then the fact that we are the newest guy on the very crowded market means, that we're kind of fighting our way to still establish ourselves when it comes to people knowing about who we are. But it's been a really fun journey being a brand new brand and a brand new product, utilizing ultimately what we can do with our name in itself to be able to play with that a little bit.
Damian Fowler (01:33):
Could you give some examples? What do you do? How do you use that name to generate buzz around the brand?
Minjae Ormes (01:40):
Yeah. So there are two things. When I think about brand, right? Brand ultimately is a set of values for you as a business to show up consistently inside and outside. So inside, that means our brand values help inform our culture and how we make business decisions, how we decide to build our funnel, which should be really seamless and easy. How we train our customer service agents and how they show up online through social channels and so forth. But the brand value also should be the aspiration for our business, in terms of where and how we choose to show up. So that's the channel and the media strategy, as well as the messaging and the creative with which we decide to show up.
Minjae Ormes (02:24):
So, before the pandemic, a really strong part of our strategy had been experiential actually. Because we decided that since we don't have that permanent evergreen presence out there through storefronts, we wanted to choose specific markets and test some ideas around, if we showed up physically, how would that grab people's attention and potentially introduce ourselves to new folks? So we decided to, at the time, wrap empty storefronts in nine cities in bright blue, which is our brand color, and it was very simple message of just the color and the wrapping itself being super visible. And then that eventually led to kind of going deeper into specific affinity type of things, like music as a great example of something that people already love. So can we actually partner with artists and platforms that already have those communities and big, big passion areas to introduce ourselves as a brand?
Minjae Ormes (03:24):
Now with the pandemic, of course, that all got interrupted, but actually one of the most proud work that we have done is Red Rocks, work that we did with our partnership here with Denver Arts. And, essentially it's a very iconic venue. It is just an iconic setting with like the red rocks of Colorado behind you as the amphitheater. But of course, folks here also have to figure out, how do we create experiences when we actually can't see each other?
Minjae Ormes (03:54):
So it ended up being a three-day virtual event. And they did everything from turning the stage actually around 180 degrees. So, what would be usually the seating became the stage from which the artists would perform and stream their performances. And then the red rocks behind them became the digital projection of the comments that were streaming online, as well as, generating some of the reactions. Like people could clap and people could kind of put their input as though the artist could feel the energy in the venue. So, I mean, it just kind of blew out of the water. We were hoping maybe a couple million people watched the performances over three days, and then we ended up attracting nine million new people to our business because of this event.
Minjae Ormes (04:44):
The other example I'll give you, Damien, as far as your question is, how do we bring out the voices, and perspectives, and communities who are often overlooked and sometimes commercialized only when it's convenient to the brands? So it's really about finding those people whose values are aligned with us as a business and really finding ways to build trust and relationships so that yes, obviously, there is a monetary part of how we partner with people or brands, but we want to work with people because they see our commitment and how we want to show up in the world. So I think we can earn our right to those communities instead of forcing our ways into it.
George Slefo (05:30):
One of the things I'm wondering is, you touched on all this stuff about brand building, and building this visible brand. There's people out there who say that consumers view their cell phone service as a utility. It's they just want good reception and they want to get the lowest cost. They want to get the most bang for their buck. Can you explain why building brand value is important when an increasing number of consumers are starting to view their cell phone service as a utility?
Minjae Ormes (05:59):
Yeah. I think there's both the consumer perspective to this, as well as the business perspectives to this. So it's really about evolving ourselves to meet where the consumers are. And the business perspective, I strongly believe, is that building the brand value is the way to also build equity into ultimately your numbers, right? Like the operations, the infrastructure you're building. And even though people may say things like, "Brand value is very intangible and qualitative," and, "How do you measure success for that versus something like an acquisition marketing, or something like what you build in your product experience?" But we also, especially in the past 24 months, when you haven't built the foundation of who you are as a business, have a perspective around it, have shown up with it consistently, not only in just the moments that matter but every single day, it falls apart very quickly.
Minjae Ormes (07:02):
I mean, it would be just like in any kind of a personal or professional relationships where I expect you to have reasons to come to me in a non-transactional way. How would I do that if I haven't myself invested in that relationship in ways that are not transactional? Because we have also trained our consumers to be extremely sensitive to price, extremely sensitive to promotions. For us to be able to win in this business, we have to build the equity and the foundation that is every single day, as well as the competitiveness that we can bring to the price model because of our business model. But the price and promotions cannot be the only way that we incentivize people to switch around and expect them to stick around.
Damian Fowler (07:49):
This is so fascinating. It's a lot of the brand-building you talk about, implies that you really know your customers pretty well. I mean, you have a very strong idea of the marketplace. I mean, first off, how did you gather that sense of who you're marketing to, and do you know who your ideal customer is?
Minjae Ormes (08:06):
When we first started the business, there were kind of couple of hypotheses. Why do people want to save money, above and beyond simply slicing people into income categories? So, wanting to win the next generation of consumers, and wanting to understand why it is that people would want to save money, became the most important first part of our journey in terms of the research and the data that we gather. So doing that work taught us that there is actually very much, as suspected, an intersection between the motivation for saving money and particularly, so why is that true for the next-gen consumers? And I'm talking about broadly speaking, Gen Z, millennials.
Minjae Ormes (08:51):
And the reason being, we all, and I say, we, I'm not, I don't qualify as millennials, but we all lived through the 2008 financial crisis, particularly here in the US. And that disrupted a lot of wealth-creating, first step to your life moments. Graduating from high school, getting into college, graduating from college, maybe you got your first job, maybe you saw your parents lose their homes. So of course, it's at a generational level. Of course, it is life experience defined in which you are given no choice, but to kind of think about, "Well, what I thought mattered in my life, and what I thought are the things that I needed to do to create stability in my life actually didn't work the way that I expected, or my parents expected it." So understanding those things became our responsibility as a business to ultimately figure out. But the most important thing for us as a brand, therefore, was that we not make judgements about these choices that people are making on our messaging or the brand side.
George Slefo (10:03):
You guys are a fairly new brand, and during the early days of the pandemic, most advertisers paused their ad spend, and linear in particular was on the decline because there was no sports. But that's when Visible decided that it was going to run its first linear TV ad campaign on ... why? Can you walk us through that rationale?
Minjae Ormes (10:28):
We always see an opportunity when things seemed to be changing up. So this was earlier last year in 2020. And, up to that point, we had been largely building our mar-tech, our channels, and our growth strategy from bottoms up, including member marketing influence on our marketing, as well as your sort of traditional digital marketing. And that gave us a really solid foundation and the benchmark to think about, how do we start to optimize our cost of acquisition? What are the channels that actually bring us the reach and traffic, versus what are the channels that convert? And really thinking about the relationship between the different channels and places.
Minjae Ormes (11:14):
And so, we saw kind of that right moment of pause from a lot of brands, consumers, advertisers. We saw a little bit of a, it was almost like a dust was settling in, and it's kind of like, "Hmm, what does that mean for us?" So we decided that now was a time for us to tell more people about the fact that we exist and what we offer, but this introduction of our brand to new folks in linear, actually be very focused on the value prop in itself and nothing else.
George Slefo (11:46):
What was the response like, even if you could just share anecdotally? You guys ran this, you made a bet. I mean basically, you were ... You went against the grain at this particular moment. What was the result?
Minjae Ormes (11:59):
So since it was the first time we ran linear, I mean, I was looking for some of the KPIs that I had seen in my previous jobs, right? Kind of the evergreen question of, what happens to your performance and acquisition channels when you run some of these above-the-line channels and the investment in the message? And we absolutely saw the real-time KPIs around the traffic going up, the visit rates going up, the click-throughs going up. Some of the initial touchpoints of like, "Oh, more people are actually coming here." And more importantly, our share of voice in the category level, key search terms, as well as our brand keywords, we had a much bigger share during and after seeing the lasting impact of that investment.
Minjae Ormes (12:51):
So, I think what we learned are two things. One is, we did reap the benefits of, kind of running these spots and seeing our brand awareness go up, and our traffic rate go up. All of the top-line KPIs as well as the acquisition translating. But more importantly, it taught us something about, how does our media mix work in this kind of a context, and how do we potentially repeat the good things that happened here? Which then informed our strategy that we did in November with another video asset, with Dan levy. And then we did another one earlier this year. So it gives us a way to be really thoughtful about the investment level, because that was the other thing that was to our benefit during that first window, was the inventory was more affordable for us to be able to gain. So, it became really about the template and the benchmark for our business to be able to learn from that and repeat the successes over in a pulsing strategy, that happened three-ish times since then.
Damian Fowler (13:52):
In the middle of 2020, there was this huge racial reckoning that occurred throughout the country, and for the world, for that matter. So when a lot of companies shied away from this, Visible took a stand, and the values, they're right there on your about page. Many companies saw this as kind of risky. Why did you do that? And how does that fit into this larger context of branding that we're addressing right now?
Minjae Ormes (14:18):
Yeah, it comes back to ultimately what we as a team and a business set out to do, and the commitments that we are recommitting to every single day, which is to say, I think we would rather that we, as a business, be really clear about how we want to show up? What values do we believe in, and how that informs the way in which we build and operate our business. To be really clear, as you said, Damien, places like a lot about page when people search for us, that it be on our social channels. It's part of our content strategy. It's part of our reputation that is out there. And for that to be part of the consideration, ultimately of the consumers who find us, and decide to do business with us.
Minjae Ormes (15:07):
Because we believe, and this is a bet. And I think this is a bet that will pay off, which is to say it's again, when you're thinking about the next generation of consumers, not only about the tools and the channels with which you are gaining them, but it's about the how part. The purpose and the values, and what you believe and how you choose to show up. And hopefully, that will be as clear to them as it is to us living through it every single day. One of the things that I think about a lot as a leader in my organization is a lot of these issues are really overwhelming, right? How do you solve for racial inequity that has been, frankly, the founding truth of this country in America in ways that will be lasting, structurally different, and consistent institutionally in organizations, including many businesses and brands?
Minjae Ormes (16:04):
And, the truth is, these leadership roles do give us the responsibility, accountability, and the platform to be able to do our part, however small that may be in the moment. Because, I think it's got to come from inside, right? We can't just sit around in rooms being like, "Oh man, what are we going to do about this?" And, I'm encouraged that more of us are talking about some of the numbers and the data points around hiring attention, all of that more publicly, but frankly that's not even scratching the surface. How do you build an inclusive culture in which people of different experiences and backgrounds can actually thrive?
Minjae Ormes (16:53):
So, it can't be just about checking the boxes of like, "We increase the hiring of these types of people from X percentage to Y percentages, and we're going to be done with that." But you can't just bring people into a new environment that frankly hasn't even started to begin imagining the possibilities of having so many different perspectives reflected in the leadership rooms, the decision-making forums, where you have to actually change the organizational behavior around it. So it's about both the external commitment to our customers as to who we want to be as a brand, and for that to be the reason for them to be with us. As well as, the commitment to our own teams internally, so that we show up again, inside, outside in a consistent way. I mean, we still have a long way to go. And our commitments, the messages, all of that is just a starting point, but one that we didn't want to miss out on in terms of the window of opportunity this past year provided us.
George Slefo (17:57):
Thank you for sharing that, and you said some things that I would personally agree with. And a lot of times when a new hire is made or when I'm talking to executives off the record or something like that, and they talk about meeting these diversity goals or trying to bring a more diverse workforce at their company. And, one of the common things I hear is just like, "It's hard. There's really not that many qualified candidates out there. It's not like I can just find someone like that." What's your response to that? That, it's hard to find diverse candidates?
Minjae Ormes (18:40):
The podcast-safe version? No, I'm just kidding. My response would be that you're not looking hard enough. The reason inclusion and diversity isn't going fast enough, and it's incremental right now, and it's not a step-change is because as human beings, we do tend to look for comfort zones. We do tend to look for similarities. We do tend to look for shared experiences when we meet somebody, whether it is in a hiring situation or you're making a friend. So if that is the natural inclination as leaders, especially, you have to absolutely step outside of your comfort zone to meet new people who may not necessarily naturally, easily, comfortably fall into your sphere of communities, and friends, and network. I've had people in my professional network who have introduced me to people that I would've never had a chance meeting otherwise, because they're in a different zone, different level, whatever you name it.
Minjae Ormes (19:50):
But, these people in my professional network who also right now tends to be a lot of people of color and women, they have taken it on themselves to say, "If I don't introduce the people in my network to these other people who have no connection naturally to this world, then this is never going to happen in the pipeline, and the process." So, I think that's why you see a lot of momentum also picking up on, especially in the marketing community, folks who do have the platform, who do have the voice, who do have the network to really champion other people who may not have been naturally part of those conversations, and network doing that. And that I think ultimately, will get us faster to having more people in the seats of decision making and be able to fundamentally, structurally, institutionally change things from inside out.
Damian Fowler (20:45):
Do you think that that acceleration that we saw last year is here to stay?
Minjae Ormes (20:49):
Yeah. I mean, I think there are kind of two truths to this, which frankly I think have always been true, but it's been adapted and adopted by all of us who are part of this context to be true, right? Because a lot of these types of things are ultimately a social construct. So the more people actually acknowledge and live by those things, it actually becomes one of the truths and frameworks of by which you behave, and make decisions, and live together as a society. So that in itself, I think is ultimately what's behind the acceleration. And so when we think about brands operating in the consumers' world, and the context, that has always been true, for example, right? It's just that whose truth and context have we accounted for in our brand reality? Whose context and realities have we overlooked when we think about product development, or design, or marketing?
Minjae Ormes (21:53):
And so that part of it, I am hopeful that again, as we make an effort as a society and businesses to be able to bring more people whose perspectives haven't been taken into account, and build an inclusive culture, that it's the way in which we would operate inside the business that is more reflective of what is going on out there. And I think, the other thing is as I shared earlier, this is hard, right? This is really uncomfortable and it's a lot of work. And I hope, in kind of the next generation of business leaders, leadership styles, and leadership profiles that this type of conversation and the commitment be also rewarded in how we think about who are really great leaders. And what are the kinds of impact that they've been able to drive for the business, and their communities, and the society above and beyond the numbers? How do you show up that is above and beyond just the transaction that happens in the thing I'm buying?
Minjae Ormes (23:01):
And, so I think as I get more, hopefully, experienced than wiser in my own career and life, I believe in the role, for example, of marketers, more and more deeply in needing to continue to be the guardian of consumer insights and truth. And more importantly, bringing that back to the product development cycles and the business operations. People shouldn't have to walk into an airport bathroom and put their hand under a soap dispenser, and not get soap out of it because of the color of their skin. It's not like the soap dispenser designer meant to be racist, right? But the idea of someone's reality, I'm thinking about, what is "normal skin color" is limited by that person's experience, or perspective, or who's in the room or not.
Minjae Ormes (23:56):
And seatbelt designs back in the day that, that used to be molded to men's bodies, which is why even for the same driver experience, same kinds of cars, women tend to suffer higher levels of injuries and would die more frequently from the same kinds of highway accidents. Because the protection mechanism that was built in cars were not built with their bodies in mind. And I could go on and go on, right? Like their pink taxes and just ways in which all of these experiences in the product, and their interactions with people already have bias built into it. And so, it's almost too late, by the time you get to marketing processes and talking about what you're going to say to people out there. So in a lot of ways as marketers, we have to actually look just as much inside and do hard work in there, for us to make sure that the brand values and the truth that we want to say out there, are realized and delivered in the product experience that we're delivering as a business.
Damian Fowler (24:59):
And that's it for The Current.
George Slefo (25:01):
The Current is produced by James T. Green and Kiara Powell. Greta Cohen is our executive producer. Rick Kwan is our mix engineer. Our theme is by Loving Caliber. The Trade Desk team includes Cassie Crosby, Ivan Sikic, and Kat Vesce. The Current is a production of Transmitter Media. And, remember ...
Minjae Ormes (25:20):
You're not looking hard enough.
Damian Fowler (25:22):
I'm Damien.
George Slefo (25:23):
And I'm George.
Damian Fowler (25:24):
And we'll see you next season with more insights from industry leaders.
George Slefo (25:27):
Thanks for listening. And we hope you enjoyed our show.