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 Hi Marketing Bestie, I got a bad cold this week and the one thing that brought me back is a Starbuck's medicine ball. Like peppermint tea. I do NOT feel skinnier after peppermint tea but I want to. Was this email forwarded to you? Sponsored by Digital Summit At the last 1 of these, Marketers cried happy tears. Do you know how Seen & Heard you have to be to cry happy tears in a hotel conference room? 🥹 As someone who's spoken at Digital Summit before, I can confirm: they're full of people who just Get It. There are only 3 more Digital Summits in 2026: Bring your team (more people, bigger savings) or just bring yourself. Either way, Marketing Besties save $100 with code MILLENNIAL100. SPARKNOTES FROM THE POD 5 WAYS TO BUILD BRAND CAMPAIGNS THAT ACTUALLY MOVE PEOPLEPeter Giorgi sent a fax to an agency after graduating with a double major in English and psychology, no marketing degree required because Canadian universities didn't really offer one. That internship turned into 25 years in the business, eventually landing him at Crispin Porter Bogusky Miami during its golden era. Now he's SVP of Brand Marketing, Partnerships, and Creative Excellence at Rocket. Three titles, one connected job: take a category everyone else reduces to rates and speed, and make people feel something about it instead. His biggest bet: flip the entire mortgage category from talking about rates to talking about the American dream of home ownership. It worked well enough that Rocket brought 80,000 people in a stadium to sing along with a Super Bowl commercial. Listen to the full episode here where Peter breaks down how he got an entire stadium singing during the Super Bowl, why he spent two full weeks on a single creative brief, and why no AI will ever replicate human creative risk-taking. 1️⃣. Find The Thing Your Entire Category Is Ignoring.Peter's Take: "Mortgage is one of those categories where I think we fool ourselves into believing all people care about is rates and terms and speed. The reality is your mortgage lender doesn't set the rates. If you asked me what my mortgage rate was, I'm not sure I could tell you. But if you asked me why I love this house, I could talk about that for an hour." Every brand in a commoditized category defaults to the same pitch. Faster. That's table stakes. Not a story. Peter looked at mortgages and saw the same trap Airbnb fell into early on, just "a cheap place to stay in a city." Functional. True. Completely forgettable. The deeper truth about home ownership isn't the interest rate. It's raising a kid in that house. Hosting Thanksgiving there. Building equity that becomes a form of stability nothing else replicates. That's what people actually care about, and the entire mortgage category had been ignoring it for decades. Takeaway: List the 3 things your category obsesses over competing on (speed, price, features). Then ask what your customer actually feels when they experience the real benefit, not the functional 1. If you sell software, it's probably not "saves time," it's what they do with that time back. Build your next campaign around that deeper meaning instead of the cost-of-entry stat everyone else is repeating. 2️⃣. Your Creative Problem Might Actually Be A Brief ProblemPeter's Take: "I really think the brief is probably the most important part of the process. If you don't have a point of view, if you don't have clarity on what you expect, what you're doing is putting the burden on the creatives to figure that out for you, which takes their time away from thinking creatively about the problem." Peter's team spent 2 full weeks on nothing but the Super Bowl brief. Flew to LA. Spent 2 days in person with the agency going through it line by line. The first full draft ran 11 pages. They cut it to 5, which meant making hard calls about what actually mattered and what didn't. A sloppy brief doesn't save time. It just transfers the thinking you skipped onto someone else's plate, usually at the exact moment they're supposed to be doing their best creative work. Peter's rule for his own team: write it so you'd actually want to read it. Takeaway: Before your next big creative brief goes out, block real time to refine it, not just draft it once and send it. Write a longer version first, then force yourself to cut it in half. That cutting process is where you figure out what's actually essential versus what you're including out of habit. A sharp short brief beats a bloated long 1 every time. 3️⃣. Don’t Kill The Idea Just Because You Don’t Know How To Do It YetPeter's Take: "Somebody said, well, you know, what if we came back to the game and people in the stadium were singing the song? And it's like, yeah, that'd be cool. And then you go on and think about other things because that sounds impossible. There's no operating model on how to pull that off." The idea that became Rocket's Super Bowl moment started as a throwaway line in an agency pitch. Cut back to the stadium, show people singing along to the commercial's song. Nobody had ever done it. Nobody knew how. There was no playbook to point to. Most ideas like that die in the room because they sound impossible and nobody wants to be the one who champions something that might fall flat on national television. Peter's team let it sit instead of killing it, then spent weeks figuring out logistics with Fox and the NFL to see if it could actually work. It did. Country Roads is apparently impossible to stop a stadium from singing. Takeaway: Next time an idea gets floated and immediately dismissed because "that sounds impossible," don't let it die in that same meeting. Write it down. Come back to it in a week. The ideas with no existing playbook are often the ones worth the extra effort to figure out, specifically because nobody else has done them yet. 4️⃣. The Best Partnership Ideas Fit In 1 SentencePeter's Take: "That's a really simple idea. Hey, what if we put the arena on Redfin? That's cool. And then it's the execution of it that takes all the effort. We had, I think, a wind expert on-site twenty-four hours a day because we had essentially a fifty-foot-tall flag sitting outside the arena and a tornado did come through." Rocket's partnership with the Cleveland Cavaliers didn't start as a complicated multi-channel activation plan. It started as one sentence: list the arena on Redfin. That simple premise then required rebuilding how Redfin's "request a showing" flow worked, since the platform wasn't built to sell basketball arenas. It required a 50-foot for-sale sign. It required an actual severe weather contingency plan. Then it kept growing: a garage sale that sold $67,000 of Cavs merchandise, creating layers of engagement nobody initially planned for. The core idea stayed simple enough to explain in one sentence. Everything hard happened in execution, not in brainstorming. Takeaway: Test your next partnership idea with this filter: can you say it in 1 sentence, and does that sentence make someone go "wait, how would that even work?" If yes, you might have something. If your idea needs a full paragraph just to explain the concept, it's probably not simple enough yet. Simple premise, complex execution, in that order. 5️⃣. Attention Is Not The Same Thing As ConnectionPeter's Take: "Humor is a great way to get somebody's attention, but it doesn't necessarily last as long. It doesn't always change the way you think about something. But emotional messages crafted the right way, they do have the capability of changing how you feel about a product." Peter points to Google's "Dear Sophie" ad as a favorite, a campaign for a product with practically complete market dominance. Google didn't need that ad to drive awareness. They needed it so the product ecosystem didn't become a pure utility, because utilities are easy to abandon the moment something marginally better shows up. Humor grabs attention in the moment. It doesn't necessarily stick. Emotional storytelling, done well, changes the actual relationship someone has with a brand, the same instinct that had humans painting stories on cave walls or singing around a campfire. Takeaway: Audit your last few campaigns: how many were built to get a laugh versus build genuine emotional connection? Both have a place, but if everything you're making leans on humor or a quick hook, you're optimizing for attention, not loyalty. Pick your next campaign brief and ask what you want people to genuinely feel about the brand afterward, not just what you want them to notice. Sponsored by Bitly You won the click. Then you sent them straight to a generic homepage. Bitly surveyed 1,500+ consumers, Marketers, and creators to figure out WHY...and the invisible problems it's causing for you: Inside the free Click Expectation Report: IS YOUR MARKETING TEAM... HAUNTED? 👻 If your source of truth lives in Slack, email, a drive, and 6 other tools, your workflow has a few ghosts. Launches slow down. Handoffs slip. Nobody can prove what's working. Now add AI & 2027 budget reviews to the mix. It's only getting spookier. So we’re picking up a flashlight and going on a live ghost hunt to find the 4 gaps slowing your team down & show you how to fix them. IN A MEME  OPEN TABS 🍏: This Marketing trends roundup, esp the 1st entry. 🎧: A guide to what’s working in podcasting right now* 🕺: I haven't watched any new SNL episodes. Send me your favorite sketches. 📢: Last day of Ad Week. Who went? Tell me your highlights? 🧈: Feels like brand mascots are making a comeback. *from Audacy What's your go-to thing when you are sick? Your friend, Daniel | ||||||||
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